Hello lazyweb!

[melannen]

I have two questions for which I desire input from the collective wisdom of Dreamwidth. Can you help?

1. When I uploaded all my fanfic back catalog to AO3, lo these many years ago, I only included stuff that was at least a thousand words and a "real" story. Since then I have generated more short bits (some of them on Tumblr, and therefore even more impossible to find.) At this point I would like to get them all compiled together on AO3 with my other stuff. What is your favorite method (As a reader and/or writer) for putting a ton of tiny bits of fic on AO3?

The options I have seen are:
1. Post them the same way as any other fic
2. Post them as individual fics, but in a ficlet collection or series
3. Post them as chapters in one work, which you then tag with everything
4. Post them as chapters of various works separated by fandom/pairing (i.e., an "HP drabble challenges" work, a "les mis injokes" work, a "misc. poetry filk" work, etc.)
5. Post them as chapters of one work but don't tag everything (so they would be on AO3 to link to, but nobody could find them via tags)

These all have things I really don't like but I don't know of any method I actually do like. (My kingdom for a "scrapbooks" option on AO3!) What do y'all think of them? Any other ideas?


2. So when I resolved to read one complete recent fiction magazine or equivalent a month, I thought my library got some and I could just read them through it, but it turns out they stopped getting them early last year.

Does anyone have recs for currently publishing, pro-paid, online original fiction magazines/equivalent (any genre, really), preferably ones that would not require giving anyone my credit card number in order to read the most recent issue?

(I know, paying people for their work is important, but I really want to know how badly it's going to suck before I commit. And given my last few attempts at reading pro-published fiction short stories... >_< The most recent issue of Analog my library carries had two stories about how heroic and tragic it was to be an elderly white dude with no friends. And I don't mean the elderly white dude did anything special, getting old while a lonely white dude was apparently sufficiently heroic to require two stories lauding and rewarding them for for being so brave as to be elderly and so annoying their family won't talk to them anymore. I guess that's what Analog's demographic needs, idek.)

Comments

[alasse_irena]

I would be inclined to post them as I would any other fic, or possibly as members of a collection, if you want it to be easy to find them all at once. Putting them as chapters of a work seems kind of...unnecessary? They are short individual fics, after all.

[melannen]

Hmm, yeah, I just dislike that when they're posted as individual fics, they can drown out longer stuff. Both as a reader and in terms of what it would do to my works stats. (I have literally hundreds of Harry Potter drabbles tucked away somewhere, for example.)

I guess one compromise would be to take the stuff I have lots of (like Harry Potter drabbles, crossover notfic and Les Mis fandom injokes) and post them as chapters in themed works, and then let the rest stand on their own.

[naraht]

Personally I would go for 1 or 2. There's nothing worse than thinking you've found a long fic in a rare fandom and then it turns out to be 100 words in a 100k collection. It also annoys me when I'm sorting by hit counts in a fandom, to have one outlier like that.

[snickfic]

1, all the way. If you're worried about clogging up the tags with short things, you could backdate them. But putting them up as a chaptered work means no one will ever look at them (except possibly to shake their fist at you as they try and fail to find the particular kink or pairing they want).

I haven't been reading much SFF for a while, but when I was, Lightspeed was the new kid on the block, Strange Horizons was the venerable oldster on the block (pretty much guaranteed not to tell you stories about the tragic lives of white men), and Clarkesworld always had solid work, although mostly shorter. Oh, and there's Beneath Ceaseless Skies, too, which is secondary world fantasy only and a little less inventive than the others, I feel? But, definitely plenty of secondary world fantasy.

[melannen]

Yeah, but on the other hand, I would say that it's almost worse to think you've found a treasure trove of dozens of fics in a rare fandom/pairing and it turns out to be all drabbles. By the same person.

They're both annoying! Which is why I haven't done it yet.

But on the other hand it's also annoying to look for that one really neat drabble you remember from lj but it's not on AO3 because a lot of people don't put drabbles on Ao3.

Dilemma!

[naraht]

I don't know, if they're drabbles it's obvious that they're drabbles. (Or you can search for fic over a certain length if you want.)

Whereas with fic in a chaptered collection I can never find the chapter I'm looking for.

I don't know, it may just be a personal thing but chaptered collections really annoy me.

[melannen]

I don't actually know if I care if anybody will ever read them, as long as I can find them (or point specific people toward them) There's a reason I don't consider 'em "real" stories. And even backdating will clog the tags if it's not a very busy tag. And it will my works page so messy :/ So far that does seem to be the preponderance of opinion, though.

And thank you! Those all look really neat.

[melannen]

Eh, chaptered collections really annoy me too (I don't get bothered by trying to find the right chapter because I never bother to try; it's usually really easy to tell when you've found one and then I just skip it) but I also do a lot of digging around by clicking on freeform tags and rarepair tags in large fandoms and reading through entire fest collections and so on, and you end up with about equal numbers of "pointless drabbles" and "useless chaptered collections" that way.

[alasse_irena]

Good point - I am very attached to my stats. =P The only difficulty is that tagging that anthology of Harry Potter drabbles with everything it involves gets a bit lengthy, but not tagging it means people can't find it? I don't know...

[lannamichaels]

1. Post them the same way as any other fic

This one. Last time I was doing backlog stuff, I tried to post them all as quickly together as I could, so they'd all go out in as few e-mails as possible so I didn't spam my subscribers. But as someone who gets the e-mails, I'm totally fine with getting a lot, I just hit the archive button and go "yep, that person is uploading their backlog, I emphasize".


. (My kingdom for a "scrapbooks" option on AO3!) What do y'all think of them? Any other ideas?

Make a collection? I do those for my drabbles and for things that are thematically similar but aren't serieses.

[melannen]

It's also a lot faster & easier to add chapters to one work that to create hundreds of individual works..

IDK, I could just tag it super-generic stuff that applies to most of the contents and leave off the stuff that's just one or two drabbles? So people looking for Petunia/Peter won't necessarily be able to find it, but would people looking for a particular paring/theme really be that interested in one fifteen-year-old drabble anyway?

[lannamichaels]

Posting them as one fic does skew your stats in another way. Several of my "longest fics" are actually a ton of RP logs all put together. A bit further down, around #10 by length, is the time I posted a series of 3 fics as one fic, so I could do a front page and have warnings in one place.

[melannen]

Hmm, yeah, but if I separate them by fandom I don't know if anything would be long enough to mess that up. (Well, the drabbles would be my longest HP fic probably, but the drabble communities were my longest sustained effort in HP fandom.)

IDK I'm more worried about it skewing my fandom stats - there's some fandoms I have a lot more not-real-fic, and it would push the fandoms I'm actually into off my 'top fandoms' stats.

[melannen]

Collection was one of the options I listed. I'm not really sure what use that is, though, unless they really are significantly thematically similar - really the only functional use of collections is if people want more of the same, and you can do that with tags, too, if they're not in a particular order.

[lannamichaels]

I really wish AO3 had a way to control your top fandoms above the fold.

[melannen]

Yeah. I mean, I only got my current ones there via creative use of fandom metatags as it is.

[isis]

I have the same issue as you (all my HP drabbles omg) and am interested to see these opinions!

[melannen]

I am glad you are interested but that does not help me decide! :P

[isis]

If I had an opinion, I would already have done it.

[melannen]

*Sigh* I think explaining to everybody about why I really don't want to do Option 1 is making me more certain that I'm not doing that one, at least... :P

[stellar_dust]

1 and/or 2 (if you do 1, you might as well do 2).

Or 4, which is basically what I did with my XF drabbles. But, like, I had a whole series of drabbles that if you read them in the right order become a halfway decent MSR-getting-together fic, so it kind of worked? And I had a few quasi-stories that I could build that way? Don't do it if your category is just "here are all my HP drabbles," then it might as well just be 3. (I'm not sure if mine are chaptered; someday I will make sure.)

But if you really only just want them as a linkable archive that no one will ever randomly find, then do 5, and leave off ALL the tags. except "drabble collection" i guess.

Or you could put them in a series instead of a collection or chaptered work i guess.

Or some combination of 4 and 5.

But whatever you do, do NOT do 3.

[alexseanchai]

IIRC Lightspeed (of Women/Queers Destroy Science Fiction) is free online except for most recent issue.

[stellar_dust]

... actually I think if it's a rarepair (is petunia/peter a rarepair? surely it must be?) then yes, people will want to read a 15 year old drabble, and you should break it out and post it alone as a real story instead of burying it in a massive tagless drabblefic.

[melannen]

Yeah, I'm thinking a combo of 4 and 5. What I have learned from all this good advice is that I really really don't want to do 1. :P

[melannen]

Thank you! That will definitely go on my list.