wherein Liz moves her old fanfiction to AO3, inch by tortuous inch

[edenfalling]

If you have subscribed to me on AO3, I would like to apologize for the stream of backdated stories I've been posting for the past week or so.

I am not the world's most organized person, so it takes me a while to pull together and format each fic. The summaries always exist, but they may not be attached to the story files on my computer. The author's notes may have to be written from scratch, or at least heavily modified in the transition from informal chatting on my journal to formal metadata on an archive site. I have to check the files to make sure all the italics tags are where they should be -- I may have yanked them out, you see, if I posted the fic in question to ff.net, which forces people to use their own rich text editor and also eats formatting in general. I have to open the story on my journal to check the original posting date. And then I have to think of appropriate and informative tags.

It's not a difficult process, but it's tedious and a bit mind-numbing, so I deal with the stories one at a time as I have the time and mental energy.

I will keep doing this until I've crossposted the majority of my fic backlog, or until I run out of spoons. I have been writing fanfiction since 2002. I have a LOT of old stories to crosspost.

So if you are subscribed to me, consider this your fair warning: you are going to keep getting "Elizabeth Culmer posted a backdated story!" spam for a good long while.

---------------

ETA: All my MN-era Narnia fics are now up on AO3! Tomorrow I think I will tackle the Problem of Susan fics, since they form another sort of easily-grasped unit.

Comments

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, how do you backdate on AO3? I've been thinking about crossposting my fics, but I don't want to give the impression that they're new when most of them aren't.

[edenfalling]

When you are on the page for posting a new work, there is a section called "Associations" -- it's between the "Preface" section (for summary and notes) and the "Privacy" section. This is where you can add a story to a collection, or mark that it has multiple chapters, or choose the language, and so on. One of the tickyboxes is labeled "Set a different publication date." Click on that and it will open a new subsection of the form for you to choose the day, month, and year that will be listed as the publication date in the story's metadata. And voila, a backdated story!

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks!

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

*g* Glad you're making the move.

I'm moving things over a fic a day - my backlog would kill most people and earn me enemies. It's kind of nice- that gives people a chance to review old favorites. However, I might not be all over until 2016 at this rate...

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

On rereading this, try the import function. It works smoothly for LJ content - it only takes me about two minutes a fic (and that includes writing summaries and some header formatting - no changes to the text needed).

[edenfalling]

I may try that when I get to my old HP fic -- at least the ones that haven't been posted anywhere except my journal. But for anything that's been crossposted somewhere already, the journal version is the old draft and the work has very likely been revised. (I don't really want to import from ff.net; that site does strange things to formatting.)

There's also the problem of how to treat mini-ficlets that I posted to my journal as part of a collection -- you know, three to ten ficlets all in the same post, just with different cut-tag numbers. A lot of my remaining Narnia fic falls into that category.

And then I like the chance to bring the files on my computer up to date with summaries and notes and so-on, so I have a good copy for myself in case AO3 ever vanishes.

But like I said, I may try that for some of my old HP 15-minute fics, and see how it goes from there. :-)

[aishuu.livejournal.com]

Try it and see. It automatically backdates the work from LJ. I was impressed with how well it worked.