Otter's Rock

( Top Tens )

So, oddly enough, it's the list ordered by # of bookmarks that gets closest to what my top ten list of my own fics would be.  As everyone has noted, Yuletide skews everything.

Hey, guys, if you use AO3 you should really be checking out their blog regularly.  (There is a DW feed, if that helps.)  They have been talking a lot lately about what they are doing to fix the performance issues (caching some pages, recoding some things to make them less of a drag on resources, buying more servers, temporarily turning off a few bells and whistles to make things run more smoothly while they recode them and get more servers, etc.)

I don't know what the internal culture is like since the election, but they do seem to be a little more focused on letting us know what's going on than they used to.

OTW is the group that runs (among other things) AO3 and Fanlore, and it has serious problems.  Over the last few weeks of election campaigns, a lot of dirty laundry has come out.  If OTW and its projects are to be sustainable, there needs to be serious changes made in the way it handles internal conflict, mentors its volunteers, and implements code.

If Naomi Novik (i.e. one of the founders, who got the ball rolling but also was a major influence in setting up the screwy system they've got now) is re-elected, I do not believe such major changes will be made, and in that case I do not believe the OTW and its projects will last very long at the rate they're burning out volunteers.  PLEASE DO NOT VOTE FOR NAOMI NOVIK.

Example of shenanigans within OTW: "The chair of the board has been told by someone/s to stop working on a strategic plan for the organisation because she doesn't have the authority to do so. "  And the president's post on OTW.

A helpful collection of links if you haven't been following things.

I will be voting for the following:

1. Jenny Scott-Thompson
2. Julia Beck
3. Betsy Rosenblatt
4. Nikisha Sanders

My top ten most-read stories on AO3 are:

( AO3 Hits )

If I were going to say what my top ten favorite stories of my own I've written are, they would be (in no particular order):
( Personal Favorites (at the moment) )

What's interesting to me is how many of the stories I picked just now as personal favorites weren't marked as such when I added them to my master list.

Yuletide nominations are open!

If you've got a book/movie/tv show/commercial/poem/whatever that you love, and would like fic of, but there exists little/none anywhere on the web?  Yuletide is the ficathon for you!  It's all about sharing the love for the fandoms that get lost in the shuffle.  It's also a lot of awesome fun.

Me, I'm excited because they've dropped the rule that small subfandoms of major fandoms are ineligible.  So, for example, in the past Birds of Prey and Batman Beyond were ineligible because they were part of the larger Batman fandom, even though neither Birds of Prey nor BB gets hardly any fic at all, and there's very little character/situation overlap.  And now they're eligible again!  Yay!

So, Batman Beyond, definitely going to nominate it.  And I usually don't bother to nominate, because usually I look at the list of fandoms once it's compiled and then have problems narrowing down what I want to request.  However, this year I already have two desires that struck me out of the blue: one is 16th Century Protestant Reformation RPF, and one is for Donovan's Reef, a cheesy John Wayne 1960s romantic comedy ... that also has some quite pointed things to say about prejudice and racism (okay, there's still a lot of fail, but when you remember that it was the 1960's, it's amazing).

And someone has, predictably, nominated Harry Potter.  Which is idiotic, because if you want HP fic you can go anywhere, and the mods weed out fandoms which are too big and while somethings that are borderline might slip through, I can guarantee you that Harry Potter ain't gonna be one of them.

Also, Yuletide is being run through the AO3 archive again, of course (hardly surprising as the deterioration of the old Yuletide archive was one of the main driving forces behind the shaping of AO3 and the timing of its debut).  If you would like an AO3 invite, I have a couple; just let me know.  I love AO3; I have such fun tag-surfing.  In the mood for new mpreg stories?  I can search by tag!  (Which I may or may not have been doing this evening before choir.)

I've been in fandom long enough to know the pain when central archives go down and classic authors gafiate and stories disappear from the web.  It's horrible.  It's one of the reasons I upload all my fic to multiple archives, so if I gafiate and some archives go down, my stuff will still be available if people want to read them.

Ten years ago, Macedon was an awesome Trek writer.  He gafiated.  He left his fic up on AOL's free web hosting thing, which has sense gone the way of the dodo bird.  They're still up on trekiverse.org (the old archive for the a.s.c. stories), but that's dang near impossible to navigate if you don't already know what you're looking for.  I'm in the process of figuring out how to get it put on AO3 so it'll be publicly available and easily findable.  My service to the fannish community, as these really are classics.

... okay, hradzka, I never noticed that until you pointed it out, and now it won't get out of my head.  Darn you!

At any rate, I now have an account at An Archive Of Our Own, (also known as AOOO or AO3)and am slowly but surely loading my fic onto it.

But that's a lot of work, so why do it, you may ask?

First, because fandom owns the servers.  That means if people send nasty letters to try and get things removed (either for copyright or because they can't tell the difference between fanfic and someone going up to kids in parks and asking if they want candy), we don't have to depend on the goodwill of non-fans.  Now, because of my general style and subject choice I probably wouldn't have to worry about the latter scenario, but all fen who write should be at least a little wary of the first, which makes AO3 A Good Idea.

Second, because I believe that all fan authors should have a website or multifandom archive where they place all of their stuff, everything easily findable, preferably something that's not dependent on their staying active in fandom or their fandom staying active.  I hate, hate, hate it when I fall in love with a story and want to read more of that author's works (or rec them) and have to chase them over all creation.  (Some people have reasons not to want their stuff easily findable, but for most authors it's more a matter of chance and fandom migration patterns.)  FF.net has always been the biggie; I don't read fic on the Pit of Voles unless it's been recced to me, but I upload all my fics there because it's large, it's persistent, it's easily findable.  Unlike other archives, it's not going to disappear into the wind any time soon.  I'll still upload new fics there, because backups are good, but now it's a secondary backup, not the main thing.

Third, AO3 has some cool features.  Like being able to add character tags if the character you want isn't a character already.  Like having a wide-ranging and flexible tag system where you add the tags you want to your fic, and if there's a tag out there that means the same thing the people behind the scenes will match the two up so that someone who reads your fic, decides they want to read more fics like it, can click the tag and the results for both will come up.  And the ability to "orphan" your work if you want to dissociate yourself from a story but don't want to delete it.