June is upon us

[sholio]

... and it arrived with a light frost that took out most of my herbs. Alaska, I love you, but we might have to see other people if this keeps up.

I (a fool) decided to kick off June by signing up for tasty-looking bingo cards I probably will end up not writing anything for. I have requested two of them, first of all for July Break Bingo (instructions at the link), which looks really fun and features a wide variety of prompt types and customization options, and the other for scaldinghotcibingo (dubcon/noncon prompts) - I'm genuinely unsure how many of these will be relevant to my interests, but since some of them definitely are and there's nothing to lose, I thought it'd be fun to give it a spin.

A poll:

Poll #28984

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 71

Thoughts on whether I should go back to cross-posting my fic here in full, as well as at AO3? (Check all that apply.)

It would be useful to me because I prefer commenting here
2 (2.8%)

It increases the chances I would read it
9 (12.7%)

I like it because I enjoy seeing more fic content on DW even if it's not my fandom
28 (39.4%)

I think it's a good idea to have your fic in more than one place
44 (62.0%)

I prefer if you don't because it clutters up my reading page
1 (1.4%)

I prefer if you don't because I like having just one place to comment
1 (1.4%)

The extra effort of formatting for two different sites probably isn't worth it
4 (5.6%)

I feel it's entirely up to you
51 (71.8%)

My opinions cannot be contained in a mere poll!
2 (2.8%)

I just want to see the results
4 (5.6%)

Comments

[philomytha]

I tend to crosspost most fic to DW, I guess out of habit and because there are always a few people I think who read here and not there, and I’m using the html interface for both so there’s very little extra formatting needed.

[sholio]

I really like that you do that! It's nice having the option of either reading on AO3 or just expanding the cut tag and reading here. :D I mostly stopped out of laziness, I think - that, and being into a fandom for a while that was highly unpopular with some DW people - but I might start again.

[philomytha]

Yeah, the only catch is that you end up with conversations in multiple places instead of all in one place. But I like the sense of DW being a bit more chatty/informal than AO3, and I know that people who wouldn't necessarily go and look at the fandom tag on AO3 do pick up my fic here :-D

[trobadora]

I stopped crossposting fic a while ago, but I've decided to back up everything on DW again. Keeping stuff in more than one place is never a bad idea! (Tbh I'm still annoyed that LJ broke crossposting and so my DW isn't backed up on LJ. *g*)

[sholio]

Yeah, I don't even feel *that* much concern about backups - at least in the sense of losing anything permanently - since my fic is already backed up on every hard drive backup I've ever done, but at the same time, I don't think AO3 was ever meant to be the only place fic was posted anyway, I just got lazy about it because so much of the audience was there. But it's nice to have it in more than one place!

[trobadora]

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly me. I'm not really worried about AO3 disappearing, but also, I have file backups (so many), but also also, backups are always good and hurt no one.

(Honestly, I love that we're apparently reinventing personal fic websites and webrings now!)

[sholio]

WEBRINGS.

I actually still have my old fic website with the circa-mid-2000s hand-coded CSS ... last updated 13 years ago ....

[trobadora]

Oh, awesome! Wow, that takes me back. :D

[sheron]

I remember finding that website when searching for SGA fic and going *_*
Since DW has a character limit (I think?) a website might better for cross-posting.

[sholio]

You found me via that website? I didn't know that! :D

[sheron]

IDK if I was aware of your LJ before it! I might have been but I definitely remember the OMG of finding so much long fic. Over 100k words! Immediate follow. What a treasure trove ♥

[sholio]

♥ ♥ ♥

Tragically that does appear to be the last fandom I wrote 100K+ fic in, though I guess I transitioned to putting all those words into novels instead.

Watch me write a 100K Biggles fic one of these days...

[sheron]

100k Biggles fic...

[sholio]

I just checked, and the longest fic in the entire Biggles tag is 44K and it drops off pretty fast after that ....

[sheron]

I know T.T

[lannamichaels]

DW has a character limit but it's pretty big. I've never hit it, and even without writing much longfic, I hit LJ's a few times.

[sovay]

... and it arrived with a light frost that took out most of my herbs.

I'm so sorry!

[sholio]

My basil (or the ghosts of my basil) appreciate the sympathy. <3

[lunabee34]

Oh man, that sucks about your herbs. Boo and hiss.

[sholio]

My poor herbs. ;___;

[ellenmillion]

Nooooooooo! Now I'm especially glad I didn't try planting before I left.

[snickfic]

My opinion cannot be contained in a poll. :D I would say if you're worried about spamming, you can always use a specific fic tag and then people with paid accounts can filter that tag out.

[sophia_sol]

oh noooo, I'm sorry about your herbs! usually in my climate zone the standard idea is that it's safe to start planting outside after the victoria day weekend (almost 2 weeks ago now) but sometimes a late frost will come. A June frost just feels unfair though!

I'm also starting to think about fic crossposting again as well, so that AO3 isn't the only place hosting my fanworks. A few people I know are setting up neocities webpages for themselves to be personal archives, and I think I'm going to follow that example, instead of returning to cross-posting to DW myself, but DW also makes a great deal of sense as an option.

[black_bentley]

I quite like seeing fic cross-posted on here, there tends to be more discussion in the comments (and although I don't always join in, I do read comments on other people's fic).

With my own, I tend to crosspost - on longer fics I just link to AO3 in my DW post, with shorter ones/ficlets I stick them under a cut.

I made the mistake of looking at some of the dubcon/noncon bingo cards and oh no I can feel plot bunnies approaching.

[lannamichaels]

regarding if it's extra formatting:

I post to both DW and AO3 and the only place I need to futz with the formatting is AO3, not DW. I write all my fic in a text editor, and do the html tags by hand. I paste it into DW and into AO3. AO3 likes to strip out line breaks around horizontal rules and blockquotes, so every time I have those, I have to fight ao3. On Dreamwidth, it Just Works.

[sholio]

YMMV, obviously, but I find it extra work to post at DW personally because of the header info. I used to post in both places but eventually stopped doing it at DW because of needing to write out and hand-code the headers, links, etc - with AO3 it's just a matter of ticking boxes and pasting in the text. (I don't usually do anything complicated with the HTML, so I've rarely had to fight with it too much.) I mean, it's kind of like ... yes, it's not that much extra work. But it *is* extra work, and some days for me handcoding all the formatting/link tags on the header is just that little extra thing I don't want to do.

[lannamichaels]

I'm not sure what kind of formatting/linking you're doing in the headers, but if you'd like to post to DW and think my header template are what you'd like to use, I can send you the txt file I keep with it formatted.

[sholio]

No thank you, I can make my own if I want to do that. (Edit: What I normally do is copy from an older post and change all the info to the current version.) But I appreciate the offer!

[sholio]

I mean, I appreciate that you're trying to make this easier for me, but it's not that I don't have a system that I use, it's that doing it *at all* is the part that adds an extra burden of work: the process of finding the text I need, checking the word count, getting the AO3 link, remembering what tags in my labyrinthine tagging system I use for this, etc. If the text I'm altering and formatting is text from an email or text I copied out of a previous post, that part doesn't make a lot of difference to me - if that makes any sense.

(Though, to be entirely fair, I could probably streamline this process a lot by just c&p'ing the auto-generated AO3 share code, but I hate the way it looks. xD)

[aelfgyfu_mead]

It's no doubt irrational, but I still worry that AO3 could disappear, and I'd hate to lose your fic! Also, when you crosspost, I'm even less likely to miss your fics. I already subscribe, so I shouldn't miss them because I get emails, and yet. . . .

[sushiflop]

Re: crossposting fic, I have a little comm made just for my writing, which might be an option if you don't want to put a lot of longfics on people's friends lists. It's nice as well for organizational purposes imo!