sholio: sun on winter trees (SGA-watch2)
Sholio ([personal profile] sholio) wrote2006-12-30 06:32 pm

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?
ext_2160: SGA John & Rodney (Default)

[identity profile] winter-elf.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 04:00 am (UTC)(link)
ha! no organization at all! and wow - I don't think I've saved near that many...hhhmmm must look hearder! :)
amalthia: (Default)

[personal profile] amalthia 2006-12-31 04:32 am (UTC)(link)
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...

[identity profile] bibliotech.livejournal.com 2007-01-02 12:49 am (UTC)(link)
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.
amalthia: (Default)

[personal profile] amalthia 2006-12-31 04:35 am (UTC)(link)
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...

[identity profile] wraithfodder.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 04:56 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] wraithfodder.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 06:37 pm (UTC)(link)
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 :(

[identity profile] elynittria.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 05:24 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] leenys.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 05:30 am (UTC)(link)
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 :)

[identity profile] blade-girl.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 05:59 am (UTC)(link)
"shep blows up Radek's fruitcake"

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

[identity profile] blade-girl.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 05:58 am (UTC)(link)
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.

Organization

[identity profile] b7-kerravon.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 06:17 am (UTC)(link)
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...
ext_3572: (Default)

Re: Organization

[identity profile] xparrot.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 07:51 am (UTC)(link)
*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 >_>

[identity profile] angw.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 08:06 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] angw.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 08:27 am (UTC)(link)
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 :)
ratcreature: The lurkers support me in email. (lurkers)

[personal profile] ratcreature 2006-12-31 09:53 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] annieb1955.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 11:41 am (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] annieb1955.livejournal.com 2006-12-31 09:24 pm (UTC)(link)
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*