wherein Liz thinks about AO3 crossposting

[edenfalling]

I am, very slowly and fitfully, trying to get most of my old fanfiction crossposted to AO3. I am not sure I want to put everything up there -- there are some works that are more in the nature of random finger-twiddling than something I particularly want to share with the entire world -- but aside from the more fragmentary stuff, it would be nice to have my work available in a more public forum (and one with a less demanding feedback mechanism, aka the kudos button).

But I'm not sure how to organize everything.

An awful lot of my older work is tiny 15-minute ficlets, and those can clog up an archive really damn fast. But I don't know that I want to jam them into story collections either, because those gum up search parameters -- they give back positive results for every random character, ship, and tag attached to them, even if that element appears only glancingly in one component "chapter" out of a dozen. Which is annoying to readers.

I suspect I'm going to end up posting everything individually, with a few things organized into series (because goddamn, I love the AO3 series function), but that won't stop me from fretting in the meantime. *sigh* I am especially unsure about my Narnia fanfiction, since most of those stories are part of a single coherent timeline and thus ought to be part of a series, but I do not want the headache of trying to arrange them in chronological order. Maybe I should just post my timeline as a "fic" and put a link to it in the notes for each fic? That might work...

(This ramble is brought to you by the four old HP fics I crossposted tonight. They all contain Petunia Evans Dursley, though one of them is really a Harry fic that happens to include a peripheral Petunia cameo. Slowly my AO3 stats are becoming less wildly unrepresentative of my actual writing history, though Homestuck is still massively over-weighted in comparison to HP, Naruto, and Narnia, to say nothing of Angel Sanctuary.)

Comments

[heliopausa.livejournal.com]

Ah... the series option! I forgot that! I was posting on the very quiet NFFR site (http://www.narniafanfiction.net/forums/index.php) about the some of the pros and cons of AO3 and ffnet - the mechanics, not the cultures.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, you got caught in the spam filter because of the link -- I have it set fairly wide, IIRC, which means it catches some perfectly innocent comments that I then have to manually declare okay. (I think this is a fair trade for keeping almost all obvious spam off my journal.)

I also like being forced to manually code my italics, since I tend to go overboard on them and the pause and labor involved in typing [em] and so on around each instance definitely makes me rethink a bunch of them. And I LOVE the series function, because ff.net is so impossible in that regard.

I should visit the NFFR site more often. I just don't habitually have it open in a tab, and then I just sort of... forget. :-(