(no subject)
So, long time no post! I posted the sixth chapter of my novel-length Founders story on LiveJournal, Skyhawke, FF.N, and the Archive of Our Own, which is now in Open Beta, and which, strictly as a user and not getting into fannish politics or whatever? I fucking love how it's set up. There are a few flaws, but overall it's a really nice way to upload.
Firstly, the features I like:
Tagging. AO3 allows you to tag fic in several categories, including rating, several warning options, fandoms, shipping category (gen, f/f, m/f, m/m, other, or multiple relationships), pairings, characters, and a general tag section. The general tag section is great, because it lets me warn for, say, minor violence even though graphic violence doesn't really apply, or it lets me indicate that a fic takes place during the Marauder era or pre-canon or that it's about kids, or that it contains some trope I think people should know about. (I am the only person so far using the tags Biting Pear or Mad Science, and also the only person so far who has posted Girl Genius fic. Hopefully soon that will no longer be true, although possibly Ursula Vernon and I are the only people weird enough to independently come up with biting pears. It made sense! I like pears, and Helga's plants bite! But Ms Vernon probably has the prior claim, and I would feel odd issuing some kind of fanfic challenge to get people to make my weird fic less lonely.)
Serieses. OMG I LOVE THIS. Okay, there are some flaws. This is how a series looks on AO3. You can theoretically reorder the series as often as you like, although for some reason it refuses to let me put the incomplete novel-length anywhere but the very end. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature; it might be either, since fandom seems to really dislike WIPs at the moment. To me it's a bug, but I won't bitch. Anyway, if you look at the page with all my serieses, it has one big clump of tags that apply to the whole series, and you can say to yourself "oh, well, I don't want to read anything with a major character death, so I'll skip her Founders series, especially since it's like 35k words, but the Millicent series at the bottom is only 3k words total and has some pairings I haven't read before." You can also tag something as belonging to several different series, which is something I will probably do when I write the Rowena Ravenclaw/Cassandra Vablatsky fic(s) set in the Department of Mysteries during WWII. Any fic listed in one series has links to the series page as a whole, the next fic in the series, and the previous fic in a series, so it navigates like chapters.
Copy and paste from Word. Kitty and I were talking last night about how this is LIKE MAGIC. Seriously, in order of difficulty from highest to lowest, posting the sixth chapter of my fic last night went Skyhawke > FF.N > LJ > AO3. Skyhawke has this frankly stupid setup where you can either c/p HTML or upload a Word document and NOT EDIT IT. FF.N's is similar, although you can edit Word docs, they just may or may not look the way you hoped, depending on how they've changed their weird-ass policies. For LJ/IJ/JF posts I use the Semagic client, which is kind of time-consuming because I have to C/P the raw text from Notepad, and then semi-hand-code all the formatting from the Word reference. And on AO3, if you've written a document in Word, you can just click the little "Copy and paste from MS Word" button, a window with a text box pops up, and you copy and paste your fic from Word. And that's it. You can edit it however you like, either in Rich Text or HTML -- both work on their own, you don't need Word -- but if you C/P from Word there's no nonsense about having the font set to 11 or 10 or 12 or double spacing or your default font; it strips away that formatting and leaves only the stuff you added -- the bold and the center and all that. I write in Word because it's the word processor I learned on and it's easier for Kitty and I to manage beta commentary and correction, but I've always hated having to clean up Word documents for web posting, so I really like this.
Things I think other people would like but that I haven't used:
Pseudonyms. Say you've changed your screenname three times and written fic under each screenname, and you still like the fic, but for whatever reason want to associate older fic with the name you wrote it under, or you want people who read you under your old username to be able to find your new work. You only get one official screenname at AO3, but you can have different pseudonyms associated with that name. I'm not really sure how it all works, but I know there are people who would find it useful.
Orphaning works. Say you wrote this EPIC EPIC Draco/Hermione fic or something when you were thirteen, and it had a lot of badly-written romance and a nonsensical sex scene and, I don't know, some Ron-bashing, and now you're in some other, very mature fandom, and you cringe every time you think of HP because you had all these fans and they loved this fic and you can't stand to look at it anymore. You don't want to just take it off the internets forever because, well, you know how Harry Potter fandom can get, but you also don't want to be reminded of its existence ever again. You can post it on AO3 and orphan it, so that you aren't listed as the author anymore but people can still find it and read it.
Coauthors. I imagine it's irritating to have to either post a co-authored fic on one account and keep reiterating that the other author(s) also participated, or to keep a coauthors account just for fic written by one pair/group/set of people. I'm not entirely sure how the coauthors feature works, but I think I've seen round-robins posted on AO3 with each author credited by chapter.
Fannish next-of-kin. If you die in real life, you die in fandom! Who will control your fics? Technically, I will probably take advantage of this once thinkatory gets an account and this feature is active, because these are the kinds of things that keep me up at night worrying, but right now I don't think this feature is up and running, and hopefully it will be before anything horrible happens to me. Basically, if your designated fannish next-of-kin finds out that you have died or are comatose, they can email the Archive to gain control over your fics. Obviously, this is open to abuse if you designate someone who turns out not to be trustworthy, but if you're not dead you can email them and tell them you aten't dead.
Issues I've had:
Heavy load blues. The archive runs slowly sometimes. I'm honestly not surprised. But at least it's consistent; you will get to the page you were going to, generally, unlike JournalFen's occasional bouts of server robustness, where reloading is kind of like an exciting game of chance, only without being exciting, or a game.
How do I know when people bookmark my fic? I do not. Someone has bookmarked one of my fics, actually, and I found out completely by accident as I was clicking on tags and being all "hey, I wonder if anyone has recs for this trope?" Technically there are three kinds of bookmarks: private bookmarks, public bookmarks, and fic recs, and this was a public bookmark, not a rec. So I suppose an author could be notified of fic recs. I just don't know. I'm also not sure how they handle reviews.
Uploading from existing URLs. I tried uploading a bunch of fics at once, from my Google site and from tamarindchutney, to no avail; oh sure, I managed to edit one of them into a decent-looking fic, thought I posted it, and alas, it disappeared into the ether. So I reposted it in the copy-and-pasty way and went on my merry way, only to find the old copy still in the ether. I keep finding the rest, floating about, poorly-formatted and badly-tagged and with my name on them. I think I finally got rid of the last one. In conclusion: upload from existing URLs at your hazard. It is still in beta.
Word count. Seriously, what is with the word count? It's within the ballpark, but I am baffled as to why the archive thinks this 100-word drabble is 90 words. I just checked in Word, which says it's 100, and there are no hyphenations or anything that might cause errors.
Anyway, my stories uploaded there are all at this link.
And in honor of the actual chapter posted, some music from YouTube:
"I Hate Everyone" by Get Set Go.
I think I included this in my mad science playlist. I link to it now in honor of Godric, who is especially cranky in this chapter, but is generally mildly cranky in every chapter because that's just who he is. He's very introverted and does not like socializing with people he doesn't know or people he knows well enough to dislike, but he's really scary-looking so he tries to act nice because he doesn't want anyone to decide he's dangerous! And sometimes his brain just overloads from the dealing-with-assholes. So this song is really cheerful and happy and irate. (I should note that this is the sweary version, which has better lyrics.)
"Story of Isaac" by Leonard Cohen.
This one is for Rowena, who is a cynic about religion, family, and societal expectations in general. Her mother keeps trying to marry her off for political reasons, and having been there, done that, and got the kid and the PTSD to prove it, she's sick to death of saying no. I don't think her mother has yet invoked specifically religious reasons for this, but the Middle Ages was really not a good time to be an atheist. (The world I have built for my Founders isn't the real Middle Ages, of course; about half of the wizarding aristocracy within the geographical area encompassing "Christendom" is not actually Christian, or is Christian AND something else, but they pretty much all at least pay lip service to a religion, and there's not much freedom to convert -- if you're born New Reformed Hellenic, by gods, you're not converting to Veela Syncretic Heathenry, they probably won't have you anyway and you'll get glared at during family reunions and blots.)
"Came Ye From Newcastle" as sung by Maddy Prior.
This one's for Helga, specifically Helga and Basil. Helga gets a lot of crap for marrying a werewolf, and probably got a lot of crap before he was bitten for marrying someone who had less money than her. So I like this song because while Helga generally tries to remain cheerful in the face of asshaberdashery, she also refuses to acknowledge any nonsense she gets about how she "could do better." This particular song doesn't really suit Helga for this chapter; I tend to associate it with the time before they were married when Basil was a hunter and was sometimes off travelling for days or weeks through dangerous areas.
"Wonderful" from Wicked.
This is my favorite song in the musical, and while the first part, about how the Wizard is a fraud, doesn't really suit Salazar, everything from "Elphaba, where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it 'history,'" suits him well. Salazar is set up as the good to Lady Aeaeae's evil, but he's really the lesser of two evils -- it is politics, after all. He doesn't kill people just for irritating him, like Lady Aeaeae, but he doesn't not kill people, he's just more predictable about his reasoning and methods.
Firstly, the features I like:
Tagging. AO3 allows you to tag fic in several categories, including rating, several warning options, fandoms, shipping category (gen, f/f, m/f, m/m, other, or multiple relationships), pairings, characters, and a general tag section. The general tag section is great, because it lets me warn for, say, minor violence even though graphic violence doesn't really apply, or it lets me indicate that a fic takes place during the Marauder era or pre-canon or that it's about kids, or that it contains some trope I think people should know about. (I am the only person so far using the tags Biting Pear or Mad Science, and also the only person so far who has posted Girl Genius fic. Hopefully soon that will no longer be true, although possibly Ursula Vernon and I are the only people weird enough to independently come up with biting pears. It made sense! I like pears, and Helga's plants bite! But Ms Vernon probably has the prior claim, and I would feel odd issuing some kind of fanfic challenge to get people to make my weird fic less lonely.)
Serieses. OMG I LOVE THIS. Okay, there are some flaws. This is how a series looks on AO3. You can theoretically reorder the series as often as you like, although for some reason it refuses to let me put the incomplete novel-length anywhere but the very end. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature; it might be either, since fandom seems to really dislike WIPs at the moment. To me it's a bug, but I won't bitch. Anyway, if you look at the page with all my serieses, it has one big clump of tags that apply to the whole series, and you can say to yourself "oh, well, I don't want to read anything with a major character death, so I'll skip her Founders series, especially since it's like 35k words, but the Millicent series at the bottom is only 3k words total and has some pairings I haven't read before." You can also tag something as belonging to several different series, which is something I will probably do when I write the Rowena Ravenclaw/Cassandra Vablatsky fic(s) set in the Department of Mysteries during WWII. Any fic listed in one series has links to the series page as a whole, the next fic in the series, and the previous fic in a series, so it navigates like chapters.
Copy and paste from Word. Kitty and I were talking last night about how this is LIKE MAGIC. Seriously, in order of difficulty from highest to lowest, posting the sixth chapter of my fic last night went Skyhawke > FF.N > LJ > AO3. Skyhawke has this frankly stupid setup where you can either c/p HTML or upload a Word document and NOT EDIT IT. FF.N's is similar, although you can edit Word docs, they just may or may not look the way you hoped, depending on how they've changed their weird-ass policies. For LJ/IJ/JF posts I use the Semagic client, which is kind of time-consuming because I have to C/P the raw text from Notepad, and then semi-hand-code all the formatting from the Word reference. And on AO3, if you've written a document in Word, you can just click the little "Copy and paste from MS Word" button, a window with a text box pops up, and you copy and paste your fic from Word. And that's it. You can edit it however you like, either in Rich Text or HTML -- both work on their own, you don't need Word -- but if you C/P from Word there's no nonsense about having the font set to 11 or 10 or 12 or double spacing or your default font; it strips away that formatting and leaves only the stuff you added -- the bold and the center and all that. I write in Word because it's the word processor I learned on and it's easier for Kitty and I to manage beta commentary and correction, but I've always hated having to clean up Word documents for web posting, so I really like this.
Things I think other people would like but that I haven't used:
Pseudonyms. Say you've changed your screenname three times and written fic under each screenname, and you still like the fic, but for whatever reason want to associate older fic with the name you wrote it under, or you want people who read you under your old username to be able to find your new work. You only get one official screenname at AO3, but you can have different pseudonyms associated with that name. I'm not really sure how it all works, but I know there are people who would find it useful.
Orphaning works. Say you wrote this EPIC EPIC Draco/Hermione fic or something when you were thirteen, and it had a lot of badly-written romance and a nonsensical sex scene and, I don't know, some Ron-bashing, and now you're in some other, very mature fandom, and you cringe every time you think of HP because you had all these fans and they loved this fic and you can't stand to look at it anymore. You don't want to just take it off the internets forever because, well, you know how Harry Potter fandom can get, but you also don't want to be reminded of its existence ever again. You can post it on AO3 and orphan it, so that you aren't listed as the author anymore but people can still find it and read it.
Coauthors. I imagine it's irritating to have to either post a co-authored fic on one account and keep reiterating that the other author(s) also participated, or to keep a coauthors account just for fic written by one pair/group/set of people. I'm not entirely sure how the coauthors feature works, but I think I've seen round-robins posted on AO3 with each author credited by chapter.
Fannish next-of-kin. If you die in real life, you die in fandom! Who will control your fics? Technically, I will probably take advantage of this once thinkatory gets an account and this feature is active, because these are the kinds of things that keep me up at night worrying, but right now I don't think this feature is up and running, and hopefully it will be before anything horrible happens to me. Basically, if your designated fannish next-of-kin finds out that you have died or are comatose, they can email the Archive to gain control over your fics. Obviously, this is open to abuse if you designate someone who turns out not to be trustworthy, but if you're not dead you can email them and tell them you aten't dead.
Issues I've had:
Heavy load blues. The archive runs slowly sometimes. I'm honestly not surprised. But at least it's consistent; you will get to the page you were going to, generally, unlike JournalFen's occasional bouts of server robustness, where reloading is kind of like an exciting game of chance, only without being exciting, or a game.
How do I know when people bookmark my fic? I do not. Someone has bookmarked one of my fics, actually, and I found out completely by accident as I was clicking on tags and being all "hey, I wonder if anyone has recs for this trope?" Technically there are three kinds of bookmarks: private bookmarks, public bookmarks, and fic recs, and this was a public bookmark, not a rec. So I suppose an author could be notified of fic recs. I just don't know. I'm also not sure how they handle reviews.
Uploading from existing URLs. I tried uploading a bunch of fics at once, from my Google site and from tamarindchutney, to no avail; oh sure, I managed to edit one of them into a decent-looking fic, thought I posted it, and alas, it disappeared into the ether. So I reposted it in the copy-and-pasty way and went on my merry way, only to find the old copy still in the ether. I keep finding the rest, floating about, poorly-formatted and badly-tagged and with my name on them. I think I finally got rid of the last one. In conclusion: upload from existing URLs at your hazard. It is still in beta.
Word count. Seriously, what is with the word count? It's within the ballpark, but I am baffled as to why the archive thinks this 100-word drabble is 90 words. I just checked in Word, which says it's 100, and there are no hyphenations or anything that might cause errors.
Anyway, my stories uploaded there are all at this link.
And in honor of the actual chapter posted, some music from YouTube:
"I Hate Everyone" by Get Set Go.
I think I included this in my mad science playlist. I link to it now in honor of Godric, who is especially cranky in this chapter, but is generally mildly cranky in every chapter because that's just who he is. He's very introverted and does not like socializing with people he doesn't know or people he knows well enough to dislike, but he's really scary-looking so he tries to act nice because he doesn't want anyone to decide he's dangerous! And sometimes his brain just overloads from the dealing-with-assholes. So this song is really cheerful and happy and irate. (I should note that this is the sweary version, which has better lyrics.)
"Story of Isaac" by Leonard Cohen.
This one is for Rowena, who is a cynic about religion, family, and societal expectations in general. Her mother keeps trying to marry her off for political reasons, and having been there, done that, and got the kid and the PTSD to prove it, she's sick to death of saying no. I don't think her mother has yet invoked specifically religious reasons for this, but the Middle Ages was really not a good time to be an atheist. (The world I have built for my Founders isn't the real Middle Ages, of course; about half of the wizarding aristocracy within the geographical area encompassing "Christendom" is not actually Christian, or is Christian AND something else, but they pretty much all at least pay lip service to a religion, and there's not much freedom to convert -- if you're born New Reformed Hellenic, by gods, you're not converting to Veela Syncretic Heathenry, they probably won't have you anyway and you'll get glared at during family reunions and blots.)
"Came Ye From Newcastle" as sung by Maddy Prior.
This one's for Helga, specifically Helga and Basil. Helga gets a lot of crap for marrying a werewolf, and probably got a lot of crap before he was bitten for marrying someone who had less money than her. So I like this song because while Helga generally tries to remain cheerful in the face of asshaberdashery, she also refuses to acknowledge any nonsense she gets about how she "could do better." This particular song doesn't really suit Helga for this chapter; I tend to associate it with the time before they were married when Basil was a hunter and was sometimes off travelling for days or weeks through dangerous areas.
"Wonderful" from Wicked.
This is my favorite song in the musical, and while the first part, about how the Wizard is a fraud, doesn't really suit Salazar, everything from "Elphaba, where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it 'history,'" suits him well. Salazar is set up as the good to Lady Aeaeae's evil, but he's really the lesser of two evils -- it is politics, after all. He doesn't kill people just for irritating him, like Lady Aeaeae, but he doesn't not kill people, he's just more predictable about his reasoning and methods.