Coming Soon to an AO3 Near You: Macedon's Fic

[beatrice_otter]

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.

Comments

[katherine]

That would be a wonderful thing. Macedon's stories remain some of my absolute favourites.

[beatrice_otter]

I actually managed to find a current e-mail for Peg (Macedon's co-author on the Talking Stick/Circle series), and she says it's fine with her, and she can contact Macedon to ask him. AO3 says, pending their lawyers' advice, I could put them up as the Macedon's Taberna" collection, since the fics were purposely left online in an archivist's care when the two gafiated, and they're only down now because the archivist has since gafiated as well, leaving them to the vagaries of teh intarwebs. Since they were clearly meant to stay available, there shouldn't be a problem with uploading them even without their authors' permission. (Which I now have anyway, at least part of it, so.)

[katherine]

Very very exciting. Thank you for going to the work of finding out the contacts and all.

I am smiling to see Distributed Proofreaders in your Links, by the way! Etexts and preservation being the theme of things.

[lilacsigil]

This is very cool! I think that in 10 years or so, many of the people who currently don't see the need for AO3 are going to be changing their minds as they look for that one awesome story they loved... I wish it had been around 16 years ago when I started in fandom! So much is lost!

[beatrice_otter]

I know! (This is also why I upload everything to ff.net, because it ain't going down any time soon. Multifandom adds stability.) If you know of any great stories where the author gafiated and the stories were taken down by something like the geocities closure, where the story was obviously left up for public viewing, it might be worth asking AO3 if those stories are uploadable. I mean, in Macedon and Peg's case, they or their archivist left notes that they were leaving fandom but keeping their stories up, which most people don't.

[francescacoppa]

Just to say, yes, the author's note helped a lot in terms of establishing the author's intent there. However, if there is something important a fan wants to make a rescue effort to save, they should definitely contact Open Doors and we may be able to figure out some way of helping them do it!