Meta (Again?)
2008-10-26 02:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoLately I have been unable to find any new fics I want to read. So I decided to look up all the fics I stored on my computer before I could spend all my time online. They are mostly from 2004 and before, and my archive is in pretty bad shape. I'm trying to make them look presentable, but it takes ages *sigh*.
I'm currently working on a fic that was never finished, written for a source text nobody but me seems to remember and there were only ever a handful of fics online when I looked for them. Said source text is The Heroic Legend of Arislan, and as it happens it was the first source ever that I watched in English, back when my English was very bad. I think it was when I was in 9th grade, back when there were only four current manga series being published in Germany, and they were mainly for an adult audience. I don't know why I got the idea to import the three videos, but I did. And I fell in love with the series. I actually own a manga (number four) and the first of the novels now, and I'm thinking about translating the novel if I ever find the time. Anybody interested?
The fanfic I'm talking about is called Coronation by Sahari, a really popular writer back in the day. I think she had to stop publishing and to take down her site because of a stalker who claimed Sahari's fics had ruined her daughter's morals. Or something. I wasn't very involved in English fandom back then and much less interested in anything but the fic reading part of fandom. Anyway, her's wasn't the only fic I recently researched. It's the third I am working on. The first one is another WIP that has been abandoned, even though the author still writes. She's just interested in other stuff now, which is sad, because I still think that the abandoned story is her best. The next story has been abandoned as well, and even though it's still online, the writer seems to have disappeared (animexx.de automatically deletes your account if you haven't been logged in for half a year), the story is orphaned. And I think this might be true for most of my archive, at least for those fics I started reading before I stuck to completed stories. Most of my personal archive (about 75%, I'd guess) consists of abandoned WIPs.
I also tried to find new fics to read via rec-lists, and more often than not I ended up following a dead link. Websites vanish or aren't updated, and that makes me feel as if fandom is like Venice with its dead-ends and canals and narrow streets. Just without the signs that make Venice less of a maze.
And while I think that the abundance of WIPs is sad because many of these stories were awesome, many of them are at least still online, possibly because the authors never bothered to delete anything. The case of Sahari is a different one. Her site disappeared, even though a lot of people liked it. It's a great loss, in my opinion, because said website was part of our collective history. And that is what bugs me about authors taking down their works because they don't want to be associated with them any longer. I understand that, but I would really love it if it was still possible for others to distribute the works they love so much without fear. I'd love it if there was some place where authors could leave these works online. A place for these stories to become sort of the fanfic equivalent of a public domain (in this case: stories without authors attached to them), because in my mind, these stories belong to us in a way, they shaped fandom as we know it and thus are a part of it.
But this might just be the tired me speaking who would love not to have to keep a personal archive of fics. Most of them are internet formatted and look just awful in any other context. Lately, there have been a few authors who put their finished works up as a PDF, something that is very convenient for the readers. I really think this is a great idea and want to encourage others to do the same. It saves me hours of work trying to fix the screwed up format, at least.
I'm currently working on a fic that was never finished, written for a source text nobody but me seems to remember and there were only ever a handful of fics online when I looked for them. Said source text is The Heroic Legend of Arislan, and as it happens it was the first source ever that I watched in English, back when my English was very bad. I think it was when I was in 9th grade, back when there were only four current manga series being published in Germany, and they were mainly for an adult audience. I don't know why I got the idea to import the three videos, but I did. And I fell in love with the series. I actually own a manga (number four) and the first of the novels now, and I'm thinking about translating the novel if I ever find the time. Anybody interested?
The fanfic I'm talking about is called Coronation by Sahari, a really popular writer back in the day. I think she had to stop publishing and to take down her site because of a stalker who claimed Sahari's fics had ruined her daughter's morals. Or something. I wasn't very involved in English fandom back then and much less interested in anything but the fic reading part of fandom. Anyway, her's wasn't the only fic I recently researched. It's the third I am working on. The first one is another WIP that has been abandoned, even though the author still writes. She's just interested in other stuff now, which is sad, because I still think that the abandoned story is her best. The next story has been abandoned as well, and even though it's still online, the writer seems to have disappeared (animexx.de automatically deletes your account if you haven't been logged in for half a year), the story is orphaned. And I think this might be true for most of my archive, at least for those fics I started reading before I stuck to completed stories. Most of my personal archive (about 75%, I'd guess) consists of abandoned WIPs.
I also tried to find new fics to read via rec-lists, and more often than not I ended up following a dead link. Websites vanish or aren't updated, and that makes me feel as if fandom is like Venice with its dead-ends and canals and narrow streets. Just without the signs that make Venice less of a maze.
And while I think that the abundance of WIPs is sad because many of these stories were awesome, many of them are at least still online, possibly because the authors never bothered to delete anything. The case of Sahari is a different one. Her site disappeared, even though a lot of people liked it. It's a great loss, in my opinion, because said website was part of our collective history. And that is what bugs me about authors taking down their works because they don't want to be associated with them any longer. I understand that, but I would really love it if it was still possible for others to distribute the works they love so much without fear. I'd love it if there was some place where authors could leave these works online. A place for these stories to become sort of the fanfic equivalent of a public domain (in this case: stories without authors attached to them), because in my mind, these stories belong to us in a way, they shaped fandom as we know it and thus are a part of it.
But this might just be the tired me speaking who would love not to have to keep a personal archive of fics. Most of them are internet formatted and look just awful in any other context. Lately, there have been a few authors who put their finished works up as a PDF, something that is very convenient for the readers. I really think this is a great idea and want to encourage others to do the same. It saves me hours of work trying to fix the screwed up format, at least.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-31 11:06 am (UTC)I had just mused about this on my IJ the other day and I knew moving from FFN to LJ to IJ that my feedback number would drop like crazy. I'm okay with that. It was my choice to choose x reasons over feedback for my moves. That's one of the reasons I post from my site because I see the view count day to day and over time. Sure, I don't know if they're reading the fic per se, but considering I post oddities like femslash in Supernatural fandom, if they're clicking, they had a reason to. Feedback is just icing on the cake for me at that point.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-31 11:48 am (UTC)I tried doing that when I was still on LJ, but found that it still didn't work as far as getting people to leave feedback went.
And you know, I write stories for the main reason that I want to write them. Flashfic is the only kind of story I write really for the feedback - and even then I wouldn't do it if it wasn't fun. Writing is fun in itself.
But sharing the stories online on a website is work, not fun. if people want to read them, sure, that website gives them the means to do so. But if no one's interested - if people just appear not to be reading or enjoying - why bother doing the work? It's worth writing the story for itself: it's not worth sharing the story if no one seems to want to read it.