Something that's been confusing me about 'recent' changes in fandom:
fandom seems to have moved to livejournal almost completely, even for those things that aren't necessarily best served by LJ. In fact, very little except the pure socialising part of fandom - which is, of course, an important part, no contest about that! - is *really* best served by LJ. Forums are better suited for discussion, since they allow
( Read more... )
Well, being as I'm a person who's incredibly *obsessed* with archiving and making my work accessible, I probably can't be very helpful. *g* But I do solely archive on LJ (well, I had a brief stint on FF.net, but eventually I gave up on that account).
I think the thing with LJ isn't that people don't *want* their work to be accessible; it's just that it's more work. It's day-to-day maintenance. There's no automated way to have your posts organized, which doesn't work well for people who just aren't organizationally-minded.
But I'm in the process of devising an almost frighteningly comprehensive tag list for my fic, in addition to memorying all of it, AND I'll be bookmarking it all on del.icio.us and do extensive tagging there, as well. And I'm sure there are other authors out there that would like to make their stuff more accessible but just don't have the time/energy/etc. to put into setting up an infrastructure.
God, I just wish more people would do fic indices/tagging/memorying. Even just one of the three (though preferably not solely tagging if any category goes over 100 entries). There are so many communities and personal fic journals that would be about 1,000,000% more useful if they did this.
Although, I have to say another reason I don't post to archives is not because of feedback, at all. In fact, to my numbers-hungry mind, it's MORE satisfying for me to post to an archive that tracks stats and tells me how many views I get per story. But the reason I like and continue posting to LJ is because of the friends network; fanfiction, in many ways, is how I interact and dialogue with people about the characters. I like chatting about my fandoms; coming up with crack plot bunnies; or just the general silliness that can happen in comment threads. It makes posting fic a more social experience, which keeps me coming back to LJ and forgetting about archives.
I do really, really feel you on the frenetic pace of things on LJ. It's really not my typical modus operandi and frustrates me a lot, because I can never keep up. For instance--people apologizing because they comment on a fic a week after it's posted. Um. Hello, feedback is *always* appreciated! And a lot of people are surprised when I comment on their old fic, but I'm one of those people who *will* look back through memories and tags to check out other stuff an author's done if I like them.
I wish more communities on LJ would use the sidebar links feature to link to current discussions (the page summary thing would also be a lot nicer if it were placed at the top of the page like a navigation bar). Or that there was a *way* to keep these discussions more in people's eyes even after they aren't on the most recent entries page. LJ has a transient nature that makes it very difficult to me to feel like I'm ever getting a full comprehensive picture of what's going on.
Reply
It's just not the best place for keeping our creative output. And I just don't understand the 'either or' mentality regarding LJ and other places for posting fic. I mean, why not post first to LJ (for the instant feedback, for the great discussion and interaction etc.) and then post to a couple of archives, too? (Rhetorical question for fandom-at-large, not addressed to you specifically, because you do seem to understand where I'm coming from.)
And, using tags and memories intelligenly, a reasonably useful archive could even be hosted on LJ, as a community - it's not so much the independent website format that I'm after here, but the idea of an easily searchable, central place for all or at least most of the fic in a fandom.
Reply
Definitely agreed.
Ahhh, yes, the searching problem. LJ irritates me to no end with that. But if fanarchive ever does get off the ground and will let users post simultaneously to the archive and LJ at the same time, I would definitely go for that. I just have problems posting to more than one place at once (like, when I was on a forum everyday--I'd sometimes post drabbles there and only think about re-posting to LJ months later). I need something that will let me archive multiple places with one entry field, otherwise, I'll never keep up.
Reply
Leave a comment