Four Things (one rec, one announcement, and two complaints)

[jain]

1) For anyone who hasn't been following this year's apocalyptothon and/or hasn't read the story Aqua et Ignis (Dresden Files TV) that was written for me, you should really consider doing so. It's plotty and involving and has an appropriately frightening apocalypse, an awesome Harry voice, and the best Harry/Morgan relationship I've ever seen. (Okay, it's also the only Harry/Morgan slash story I've ever seen, but even if there were hundreds out there, this one would still be awesome.)

2) I now have a clever plan (for some value of the word "clever") for how and where to post my fic. According to my poll of several weeks ago, there's about a half-and-half split between people who only like to read fic on a journaling site and people who like to read fic on the AO3. Meanwhile, I prefer to have my fic in as few places as possible, because then whenever I notice that I've made a typo or have a continuity error or written something inadvertently offensive in my story, I can correct my mistake a lot more easily and quickly. (Which, alas, I find myself doing with a sad regularity.)

Accordingly, the plan is to post fic initially to DW/LJ and to the AO3 (and theoretically to my personal website, as well, though I'm terribly lazy about that), and then after some time has elapsed--say, two to four weeks, or, you know, whenever I get around to it--to replace the fic posts on DW/LJ with links to the AO3 versions of my stories. I'm also going to be going back through my past entries and doing the same for them.

3) I've been getting the urge to write meta lately (topics I've considered: whether a character exists separate from his or her depiction in the source material; when "she's too good for him" really means "she's too good for the way he treats her"; why some het ships garner widespread approval in [slash] fandom and others don't; why certain Arthur/Gwen shippers annoy me; navelgazing about my own shift from being a slasher to being a ficcer who mostly writes slash), only to get blocked after a couple of lines and have to put it away. It's like being subject to all of my usual anxiety about posting/commenting/communicating-in-general times ten. Sometimes I really hate my brain.

4) One of the worst things about having been involved in online fandom for over a decade is the huge amount of fic that I read and loved years ago and that has since disappeared off the face of the internets. This announcement brought to you by my recent desire to read Horatio Hornblower fic and Amber's popslash stories.

Comments

[jeeps]

my kingdom for a time machine i could use to go back and tell myself to save amber's popslash while i still can. god.

[jain]

Yes, this exactly! I've been particularly missing the ones where Chris was a nouveau riche gambler and the one where JC was a geisha and the dystopian one where Chris and Justin were moving men and JC left his government job for Joey, but they were all so good.

(The absolutely worst thing ever: I once printed out the gambler AU--I can't remember if it was just the first story or the entire trilogy that I printed--for my mom to read, and she tried it and didn't care for it, and then I threw the story away because why would I read it on paper when it was right there on the internet? FML.)

[jeeps]

i never even read the gambler AU! but the one i miss the absolute most is creation myth where, iirc, jc is a werewolf? i can barely remember the details, but man, she changed the way i read and write (along with others; i will forever remember popslash as the fandom that BLEW MY MIND).

why would I read it on paper when it was right there on the internet?

this is a lesson all of us must learn in our fannish career. sob.

[jain]

I don't remember "Creation Myth." (Or, rather, I get a strange buzz of recognition concerning it, but absolutely nothing tangible.) Popslash really was incredible at taking strange premises (as well as not-so-strange premises) and making them work; there was so much creativity and so many talented writers in the fandom during its heyday.

[dine]

first - thanks for the rec for the Dresden story - that absolutely rocks!

This announcement brought to you by my recent desire to read Horatio Hornblower fic and Amber's popslash stories.

I emphatically endorse this! I crave the JC is a geisha story SO DAMN MUCH - why oh why didn't I save it (and her other wonderful stuff) when I first read and fell in love with them? answer: because I iz dum.

[jain]

I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I was pretty much beside myself with glee when I received it. (And it was a pinch-hit, too. I can't believe Gehayi turned out a story that awesome in just a few days.)

Re: Amber's fic. It really is horrible to look back and think how easy it would've been to simply save a few stories and be able to read them forever. On the other hand, at this point I've probably read...I can't even imagine. 15,000 fics? 30,000? More than that? And I imagine that most people who've been in fandom for a decade could say the same. There's just no way to save all the fic one enjoys--at least, not unless the person in question is a hell of a lot more organized than I'll ever manage to be. It still sucks when the inevitable happens, though. :(

[alexandriabrown.livejournal.com]

One of the worst things about having been involved in online fandom for over a decade is the huge amount of fic that I read and loved years ago and that has since disappeared off the face of the internets.

Oh, I understand that. I'm on a tremendous Duncan/Methos kick at the moment and I was beyond excited to find old old stuff still out there.

This is going to sound terribly vain but one of the reasons I keep my website up is because I know there are still people out there who read my Buffy stuff and I know how upset I get when stuff I like just goes poof. The minimal yearly cost to keep it up so that, hell, I can find it again is worth it.

when "she's too good for him" really means "she's too good for the way he treats her";

Ohhh that's really really interesting. I'm going to have to think about that a lot because I think a great take on it. Plus it works both ways.

[jain]

I don't think that sounds vain at all; I think it's very considerate and generous of you to keep your stories available to readers. Doing your bit to prevent someone's experiencing that awful, sinking feeling one gets when looking for a story and discovering that it's just gone is a very good thing.

"She's too good for the way he treats her" grew out of my dissatisfaction with a few posts that argued that "she's too good for him" is a backhanded compliment that makes it easy for slashers to dismiss the canonical heterosexual love interest. Which I do agree is what's happening in a lot of cases! But then there are other cases (Jane/Lisbon from The Mentalist is the most obvious example) where I think the issue is more that the male half of the pairing acts like a jerk towards the female half, in a way that he doesn't necessarily act towards other characters. So pairing one or the other of them with a different character isn't (or, at least, doesn't have to be) a sign of misogyny on the part of the writer, but rather an acknowledgment that the pairing's canonical relationship is unhealthy.

[ilanala]

I know what you mean about disappearing fic. Some things I'm glad are gone, but it makes me sad when I want to go back and read a fic I bookmarked or saved in my memories and it's gone with no way to find it again. I understand why some people delete their fic (or just don't bother keeping it up), but it seems like such a waste.

[jain]

Yeah, I actually have one story that I'm waffling over myself; I wrote it eight or so years ago, and it's just...utter crackfic, and I still can't tell if it's funny or just ridiculous. I used to have it on my geocities site, but of course that's gone now, and I simply can't make myself decide what to do with it, whether I should post it as my own story, or whether I should post it to the AO3 and orphan it so that it'll be available but not attached to my name, or what. (It's technically accessible now through the Wayback Machine, but that's not the same. On the other hand, I think maybe a dozen people read it ever, so I'm not too worried that anyone's missing it while I'm still figuring out what I want to do.)

So, I do understand how people can feel so conflicted over their work--or have other reasons for needing to take it down, as in the case of Australian citizens whose fic involves underage characters--that they remove it or allow it to fade away. But it really is a horrible feeling as a reader to follow a link and hit a dead end like that.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Too old for web archive? :(

[jain]

Some of the Horatio Hornblower stories are available through the Wayback Machine, but the fandom wasn't very centralized, and it was long enough ago that I last read fic in the fandom that I don't remember what stories I'd seen where, so trying to follow the trail of broken links is proving incredibly difficult.

And Amber took down all her fanfic when she decided to pursue pro writing, and she also submitted a do-not-archive request to the Wayback Machine. Her stuff is just gone. :-(

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

D: If it's a specific author, someone might have kept copies of her work...

[jain]

No one that I'm aware of, unfortunately. Her stuff was taken down around 2002 or 2003, if I'm remembering correctly. I don't think most people back then realized how fragile and impermanent fic on the internet could be. (I certainly didn't.)

[gwynevere1.livejournal.com]

Hi. I was just poking around your journal, because I've read and liked some of your fanfic. I found this comment really interesting:

when "she's too good for him" really means "she's too good for the way he treats her"

For what it's worth, I would *love* to see you write meta on that topic, because it captures why I have a big problem with a number of canon het ships.