sholio | Good heavens

Good heavens

I've got 522 SGA stories saved to my hard drive. I've never had this happen before, but I think I'm actually going to need to go through and do more organizing than just shoving them into a folder labeled SGA, which is all I've ever done when saving fanfic in the past. It's not necessarily that I haven't read this prolifically in a fandom before; it's just that I don't think I've ever a) encountered a fandom with this many good stories and b) found so many that I wanted to save for re-reading.

The question is, how to organize them? My usual method is to tag the filenames with little notes to give me some vague indication of the content of the file (e.g. labels like "aww" or "slash" or "funny" or "vignette"). There's no real system to it, though -- it's just whatever aspect of the story predominated in my head, so I might have two very similar stories where one is tagged "cute" and the other is tagged "funny" or "nice" or one of the many other highly subjective tags that I use. I guess it would probably be a good idea to separate out the slash from the gen ... and the ones I really liked from the ones that had good parts but weren't that great overall ... hmm.

For those of you who either save stories to your hard drive, or bookmark the ones you liked, what sort of organization do you use? How well does it work for you?

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ha! no organization at all! and wow - I don't think I've saved near that many...hhhmmm must look hearder! :)

*laughs* It is a lot! I notice that I'll go through phases where I'll be saving just EVERYTHING I'm reading if I even think there's a chance I'd want to reread it. I got in that habit in fandoms that had very little good fic, where if I found something that was even remotely good, I'd glom onto it. There is so much good SGA fic that I go kind of nuts at times, and seem to want to save everything under the sun.

I have folders in my SGA folder labeled by Author. that seems to work the best. Any author wiht more than 3 stories gets their own folder. Of course depending on how you saved them it may take some time figuring out who wrote what...

Of course depending on how you saved them it may take some time figuring out who wrote what...

*laughs* Yeah, I think that would be the big problem ...

I might end up giving some of the more oft-read authors their own folder, though. Not a bad idea.

That's what I do with the stories I save. When I was in Lotrips, I just saved by pairing, and everything's such a muddle. Now, I have a folder for each pairing, and in each pairing folder I save the stories by author. It makes life much easier for me.

p.s. the author method seems to work best for me...but then again I have over 2k stories in my SGA folder. :( When I got into Supernatural I didn't wait 5 months before I started author folders. and it's been much easier to track the stuff. I also use my LJ to keep track of stories I liked and categorize them by het/slash/gen...

Yeah, it's definitely easier to do it from the beginning than to go back and do it later!

I don't have quite as many stories as you do (at least I hope not). I've saved them by the title in WORD docs, then started subdividing them (only lately) by episode (as many can be tags, etc.). I actually started up a WORD document today where I list title, author and description, so if I want (somewhere down the road) I can look up the stories a lot easier.

Somehow I don't really foresee myself EVER being organized enough to do something like that ... I might start it, but I just wouldn't keep at it.

The idea of having separate folders for episode tags is a good one, though ... hmm.

I've actually subdivided into DONE and IN PROGRESS stories too as otherwise I can't remember which stories I'm following aren't done. Sad thing is there are some gems that still aren't finished :(

Now, see, I don't usually save WIPs to my hard drive until they're done, unless they're absolutely brilliant and I know I'll want them. Unfortunately this has occasionally resulted in me just being too lazy to go ahead and collect 30+ chapters of one story afterwards, so some of my favorite stories remain unsaved.

Which is actually the main reason why I went and put my long stories all on one page on my own fanfic site. I really *wish* that I could just click one button and save some of the long stories I've read!

Hi! I've been lurking for a while because I absolutely love your SGA stories, but I've never gotten up the nerve to leave a comment before. However, I've run into the same problem with organizing SGA stories. My solution so far has been to divide them into three main folders labeled "One-star stories," "Two-star stories," etc.

I file them immediately after reading. At a later date, I usually go back and reread them. If a story doesn't strike me as appropriately filed at that point, I'll refile it. If it's really terrific (as most three-star stories are), I'll import it into Word, run a macro on it to clean up the formatting and make it appropriate for reading in a printed version, and then print it and put it in a binder of "greatest hits" (organized by season). Your stories have all been three-star ones!

This system works OK, but I'm hoping to get some ideas for refining it from other comments here.

Hi! :) I'm glad you finally did leave a comment -- and thanks!

Hmm ... actually, the idea of organizing stories by quality is a good one, because the whole reason why I use the tagging system is to help me remember which ones are good for re-reading ... so maybe some version of that would be the way to go. *ponders*

I'd alpha them by title with a tag that is key to that particular story, the thing that drew you to it in the first place, just a few words. Not "Cute" or "funny", but things like "shark" "monster" "rodney head injury" "shep blows up Radek's fruitcake", something like that.

Kam :)

"shep blows up Radek's fruitcake"

If that is a euphemism... I don't wanna know.

If that is a euphemism... I don't wanna know.

ROTLMAO ...

Hmm ... the *only* problem with this is that I'm kind of limited on how long my file names can be -- which was why I originally started using the "cute", "funny", etc. tags. However, maybe folders for different *kinds* of stories -- the long angsty epics, the short silly ones, episode tags, hmm ... I kind of like that idea!

I use the WTHIT / WTHITDT system.

I bookmark things as I find them and apply no organization to them at all. Then, while searching for something else, I'll come across these random bookmarks and say, "What the hell is this?" Later, while searching for that same bookmark, I'll be unable to find it, and will then say, "Where the hell IS the damned thing?"

Of course, this system may not work for everyone.

*laughs* See, that's the time-honored system I use with ALL my bookmarks. It did kind of help a lot when ff.net started including file names in its page titles -- it used to be I'd just end up with about 400 identical ff.net links. Very sad.

I have my sub-categories (sub-folders) organized by author (Sholio, Tipperfic, Koschka, cybersyd, nottasha, etc, with the random oneshots just listed by title. Now, that's hardly going to help if I can't remember who wrote, say for instance, that incredible story about McKay in the nursing home after the Wraith attack, but I'm pretty good at remembering my favorites. Of course, if I can't, looking can be a great deal of fun!

I just recently went through all my "Real Ghostbuster" saved stories (an amazing number of good tales there, too) and grouped them by author, only to discover that all but a handful were by the same 9 or 10 people! It works for me...

*laughs* if you're into slash/smarm RGB then yeah, I think there were only ever about a dozen of us writing in those genres at all ^^

I save by author and title and usually that's enough to remind me, but I tend not save all that many stories...which habit I probably should change; have gotten back into a fandom after some years out of it and discovered a few authors I like have pulled all their work offline. Dangit! oughta be a law >_>

See, that's what originally started me doing it ... and especially during the years when I was into a lot of odd fandoms with very small sets of good fic -- I'd spend all that time tracking down stories I liked, and then be unable to find them again ... darn it!

I've been in so many fandoms that it's kind of fun looking back through my saved stories folders, because it's like a year-by-year tour of all the many fannish twists and turns that I've been through -- including a few that I don't remember being fannish about at all. And then there's my "misc" folder, which has some *darned* weird stuff in it. (Hitchiker's Guide slash? wtf?)

I'm starting to think it *might* make sense to put my favorite authors in folders, because most of the stories by the same person tend to be relatively similar (at least in the sense of ... if I want dark angsty stuff, I'll look for one author; another one might write fluffy happy stories, or long plotty ones ... etc.)

So many good ideas here!

After having a lot of SG1's I decided to first sort SGA into episodes, then seasons and then other. It ended up being easier that way. Mind you when my computer crashed a while ago I didn't update the list and now I reluctantly have to sort through them - big job.

It's actually turning out to be really fascinating to me just to see how other people do it! Because there are so many different systems -- as with website bookmarks, which also have about as many different ways to organize them as there are people.

I read other peoples systems after I posted. I do have a favourites list for those that don't fit anywhere as well as an author one.

As long as the system works for you :)

I used sort fanfic in fandom then author folders, which has only a few problems (like where to put xovers and collaborations or series with multiple authors), but often I don't remember the author of a story that I want to reread so I searched the folders by keywords. More recently with the social bookmark/tagging systems I switched to tagging all stories I read, so I can find them again by keywords and pairings. I still save my favorite stories (or just comment to get a copy sent to me when it's in just one LJ post, which avoids saving LJ pages with all the formatting and comments just for a story) because sometimes authors vanish and pull their stuff, and I've regretted not saving too many times in the past, but it's easier to find stuff via tags than on my hard drive.

You know, that's something I hadn't even *thought* about doing. I've never actually used one of those online tagging sites myself. Honestly they confuse and scare me, little Luddite that I am...

I have a huge fic library of many different fandoms. They are soe=rted into fandoms and either gen or slash and then under author's names/ I can't see much point in categorizing them in genres - cute, funny, h/c etc as a lot of authors write in myriad genres. I find this system works pretty well for me.

Based on the various answers I'm getting, it sounds like quite a lot of people use authors as their content management strategy.

I've always tended to think of stories more in terms of their individual content than who wrote them, because usually when I go back and re-read, my thought process is more like, "I want to read something cute and fluffy and fun" rather than "I want to read something by Skoosiepants." So the natural way that came to my mind for grouping stuff was by content rather than author. But author would probably be a whole lot easier, come to think of it.

Quite a fascinating discussion!

I also have a Library catalogue thing that I use for categorizing fave fics. It's just a Word doc table, one for each fandom that I read. When I find a fic I particularly like I put it in under whatever fandom. When I'm looking for something good to read I just got skim those. It is a fascinating discussion though. We all have different reasons for what we think is a good fic, partly depending on what we're looking for at the time, so I see your point about wanting to classify under h/c; fun etc. But, yep, as far as easy accessiblity goes, author's names is definitely the way I'd go. And my fic library is around 40 Megs *bg* I'm somewhat of an addictive reader *g*

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Organization

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