AO3, old fandoms and such

[sholio]

Yesterday I finally got the rest of my older fanfic uploaded to my AO3 account. Since very little of the SGA stuff is on there right now (and it's a pretty low priority for me right now, given that my SGA stories have their own site) it gives a somewhat skewed impression of which fandoms I'm active in ...

It was kind of fascinating to go back through those old stories. I made myself adhere to a strict policy of "no rewriting and no warnings for crappy writing/fangirl Japanese/blatant POV errors" because otherwise it's a slippery slope that leads to madness. *g* Still, even though some of them are a bit wince-inducing to me now (and angsty, oh my god, the ANGST; wee!friendshipper was such an emo little thing) there's also quite a bit in there that I'm awfully proud of. Sand and Light, the first novel-length fic I ever wrote (in Trigun fandom, ten years ago), is still one of my favorites of everything I've written. I kept getting sucked into re-reading chapters as I uploaded them. Sure, there are things I'd do differently now -- lots of things. But I'm still happy with that story. (And I ran across a rec for it not more than a year ago, so people still read it. *bounces*)

Also, trying to figure out how to apply the warnings system in some fandoms is hilariously difficult. Do you use death warnings if you're writing for a series in which characters die constantly in canon, there are about a half-dozen loopholes to bring them back, and one of the main settings for the series is the afterlife?

ANYWAY. The main reason why I did this (so that I didn't have to do it later and annoy people) is that AO3 finally has Subscriptions, like ff.net's Author Alerts! You can click on the "Subscribe" button on an AO3 author's homepage and get email alerts when they post something new. *bounces* Right now, I don't think there are any authors I'm interested in that I'm not following on LJ or DW (I'm hardly reading any fic right now, to be honest) but I expect I will be getting lots of use out of this in the future. :D

Comments

[rheanna]

*g* Yep, that would be why I woke up to *56* subscription notification emails ("Sholio has posted...") this morning.

:-)

[sholio]

... oops. XD I was trying to get it done before anyone had a chance to subscribe to me. Uh, I meant well? *g*

[terajk]

I too am excited about the Subscribe feature. Yay!

Do you use death warnings if you're writing for a series in which characters die constantly in canon, there are about a half-dozen loopholes to bring them back, and one of the main settings for the series is the afterlife?

I recently wrote something for a series where canon does something a little similar. I did end up warning for major character death--not least of all, because someone ended up dying multiple times.

[sholio]

Yeah ... I ended up falling back on "choose not to warn" in a lot of cases, just so that I didn't have to decide!

I'm looking forward to getting back into reading fanfic -- I really haven't been reading it the last few months -- and I think that I'll probably use the Subscribe feature quite a lot. :)

[jalendavi_lady]

I've used death warnings on fics where no one actually died - but did get close enough that one fewer cosmic loophole would have meant death, and the almost-death was a cliffhanger.

That and the Star Wars fic where I finally got fed up with people begging me not to kill a character, so I Clued the ending. The real ending, none of the good guys died. The two fake out endings? One was pretty much Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies and the other had a single death played out for as much drama as plausible. No one actually dead at the end, but there was no way I could not put the death warning on it without saying I didn't choose to warn at all.

...

Have you heard about the April Showers Challenge on AO3? They're trying to get people to upload their personal slice of fandom history, backdated to when it was originally put online/printed offline and tagged "April Showers Challenge". April 1 was supposed to be focused on Star Wars, but I've not heard fandoms for the days since (and it was open to all fandoms anyway). At the end of the month, they're going to run stats on the tag to see how much wach fandom participated.

I feel weird uploading stuff for it - one extreme AU, one prompt-series I'm not quite sure how to handle - but it's an interesting drive to migrate and preserve fanfics. All my ATLA stuff was already crossposted except maybe Kiriti's Truce, but it's reminded me to get my other stuff uploaded - most of my SW stuff is on a soon-to-upgrade forum that has a slight chance of losing data in the move.

[sholio]

I've actually fallen back on "choose not to warn" in a number of cases, since I really couldn't figure out if the story deserved a death warning or not. Usually I warn all over the place for anything I think might be an issue, but in most of these cases, it's not that I don't want to warn, it's that I don't want to mislead readers by warning for the wrong thing. I'd hate to scare people off with a death warning when the whole story is actually about the character hanging out with their friends in the afterlife, for example, but technically it is a deathfic ...

The Clue ending ... ha, that made me grin. :D Yeah, it's kind of funny how readers begging for a particular outcome just makes you not want to do it. I miss writing WIPs! If I stick with this Highlander story I'm working on, I might post it to AO3 as my inaugural WIP at that site. It's been a long time since I've posted anything in installments -- several years, I think.

Have you heard about the April Showers Challenge on AO3? They're trying to get people to upload their personal slice of fandom history, backdated to when it was originally put online/printed offline and tagged "April Showers Challenge". April 1 was supposed to be focused on Star Wars, but I've not heard fandoms for the days since (and it was open to all fandoms anyway).

Oh, is that what the April Showers thing is all about? I'd sort of vaguely heard of it. I guess that is exactly what I did this weekend, except without tagging for it. (I was uploading fic going all the way back to 2000 -- or maybe that should be "all" the way, since it's not actually that long ago, but it's a geological age in Internet time!)

One of the reasons why I've been dragging my feet on doing this is that, frankly, a lot of my old fic (like everyone else's old fic) is not very good! But obviously people liked it at the time -- I got kind reviews and such. It was actually very interesting going through my old archive and seeing how much my writing style has changed.

[jalendavi_lady]

I think one of the reasons I'm doing the crossposting is the Download button.

Except for what I have up on ffnet, nothing not on AO3 of mine is in download-friendly format. And just about none of my stuff is on ffnet.

So now my not-likely-to-be-finished forum-posted Star Wars AU-backstory fic started back in 2004 is downloadable. The first fic I ever dared post online. (And I'm thinking of all the things I really wanted to do with the rest of it.)

And I had been posting some of the HP fic I wrote back in the months after Deathly Hallows came out the first time, and actually bothering to use the Inspirational Works button to link back to the fanarts that gave me the ideas for some of them. I probably need to find the rest of those files...

One of the issues I have with WIPs is having ideas for a few chapters down the line, but not the next one. I need to just give up on getting the next Kiriti chapter done, and just post the Shyu reunion piece already - it's only been sitting on my hard drive a few months now, with some finishing paragraphs needed.