two-penny spells

Like everyone else, the recent ao3 outage and the reactions to it have got me thinking a lot about fandom.

There's been a lot of posts on my tumblr dash both during and before the outage about how the habits of readers have changed: Many people saying that the rush to upload fanfics to public google drives, or even other websites, or feeding them into AIs, shows a complete lack of fandom etiquette and massive entitlement on the part of readers, and that's why community is dying. (And, I mean. I agree, a little bit.)

But it also made me think about how the habits of us writers have changed. I feel as if, on one level, ao3 may have worked a little too well?

When I joined fandom, and for a while after, people still mostly shared their works on their personal journals or in fandom communities and ao3 was more like a crossposting place. But ao3 is so robust and so well protected, and so easy to use (and has integrated commenting!), and of course around 2010-11 the mass migration away from lj/dw happened, and tumblr was never as suited to sharing written works. So now we all just post directly to ao3 and maybe don't even crosspost anywhere.

I think that circumstance -- the fact that fanfic doesn't live on the writers' personal journals or in communities anymore, but on this huge, professional-looking, open and public website, with fairly minimal author profile pages -- is definitely contributing to fandom community taking a hit. (This is probably old hat to most people on here, but the tumblr posts I saw focused pretty exclusively on reader attitudes, and it got me reminiscing.)

Personally I've realised that I'm not sure if I have final, fully formatted versions of my fics stored locally on my device (or even in a cloud) anymore. I don't think I do! If someone were to approach me in a spirit of old-fashioned community and ask to get copies directly from me, I might not be able to help them. And that's unnerving for me as well! If ao3 ever crashes, all my eggs are still in one basket.

My conclusion, also common to many!, is that I think I want to start being a little bit more conscious about cross-posting my fic. Not because I think I'm going to get a huge amount of engagement on here, or because I think there's going to be some kind of DW revival, but because I miss it, and it's one thing I can do instead of just complaining about readers. Plus, on the practical side: it's undeniably a little more in the spirit of using ao3 as an archive -- maybe it'll force me to keep finished copies in several places. 🙈

• bbtp_challenge -- Bring Back The Porn Challenge, to create or rec something nsfw on September 1st
• beagoldfish -- Multifandom summer shortfic (or other small creative effort) challenge, with optional prompts 

the irregularly scheduled dropping off the face of dreamwidth got me again, although this time at least i had a pretty good excuse.

life exploded in ways which weren't much fun, so between work, classes and generalised stress i feel like i haven't had time to do anything in my spare time except listen desperately to audiobooks for distraction for the past month and a half. 

that said, my reading stats for this year are on track to be much better than last year. :'D

i read Heated Rivalry back in feb, alternating between audiobook and physical copy, mostly because i was curious and i can get books for cheap through work. the TL;DR of my thoughts on it is that its origins as a fanfic are very noticeable, and in some ways this is a positive, but overall it made it a little lackluster, imo.

then, for some mysterious reason known only to itself, my brain finally decided it was time i started reading Discworld properly, so i've spent march more or less marathoning the Watch novels from Men at Arms through Night Watch and now i'm giving Guards Guards a quick reread before i move onto Thud.

i'm trying to pace myself a smidgen now that i only have two books left; i'm not ready for the Watch series to be over!!