Good heavens

[sholio]

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?

Comments

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

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.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

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.

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

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 :(

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

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!