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

Organization

[b7-kerravon.livejournal.com]

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...

Re: Organization

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

*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 >_>

Re: Organization

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

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?)

Re: Organization

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

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!