Archive of Our Own

[igenlode]

Contrary to my expectations, I *did* manage to get an AO3 membership request and creation working this time round: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Igenlode
And I managed to upload a trial chapter; one of the problems with not having access to my original home page is that I don't actually have a record of when the various works were initially written (as versus when the file on my hard disc was last saved, which can often be years later -- as in this case!) So I can't backdate them so that they don't show up as brand-new works, even if I wanted to.

I have to say I'm immediately reminded of just why I find AO3 so difficult to navigate -- because of the 'everyone tags everything' ethos, it's not practical to do a quick skim through ignoring every story with an explicit Erik/Christine tag [†], because it's all hidden within a massive list of characters and potential relationships. And of course almost all of them *are* Erik/Christine stories, because that's where the fandom demand is...

But it did work. Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!), but at least they do allow the option to do it manually. Uploading a single chapter is very laborious, and I think I need to deploy one of the various form-filler apps if I'm going to do multiple chapters/stories, but to be fair it is actually *more* accessible than FFnet's approach, where I used not to be able to get past the fandom selection popup, and had to reselect the characters listed from the start for each story if anything else went wrong with the submission.

† Actually, you can -- the various filter links don't do anything, but if you type the text strings into the 'other tags to exclude' writable icon, that has the same effect, e.g. Exclude: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, M/M
On the whole I'm happier with the approach that displays everything and lets you 'filter' it visually according to the clues given and your own judgement -- that search link would exclude "Fraternité", for example -- but the option to do it via manual override is there. Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...

Comments

[erimia]

Ooh, excellent! I hope it will work. I love this website and would love to see your works posted there.

I'm not sure if backdating would be that necessary anyway - the stories showing up as new works are much more likely to get the attention of potential readers.

[betweensunandmoon]

That's great news. :D Good luck!

(I'm WonderAndDoubt on there, if you want to find me...)

[pedanther]

I'm (perhaps rather selfishly, since it's where I am) glad you're on AO3, and I hope it works out for you.


Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!)

One thing about AO3 is that because of the way the tags are curated you don't have to type the full exact official tag with all the accents if it's too much work: you can type "Phantom of the Opera - Leroux" and it will behave in all practical respects as if you'd entered the full thing.

(This works more conveniently with aliases that already exist -- you can find a tag's existing aliases on the tag's landing page, under the heading "Tags with the same meaning" -- because it will start working immediately. But fundamentally you can put in the fandom name however you like and as long as it's clear which fandom you meant it will sooner or later be hooked up to the rest of the fandom.)


Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...

According to the Dreamwidth faq, this ought to work: https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/tag/fic-meta,swedish?mode=and

[cosette_giry]

(I'm still around and kicking, I just come back and forth whenever I feel like it :P)

So, I finally managed to log back into my Fanfiction.net account - after months and MONTHS of trying to log in, being able to see my account page while FF.net somehow indicating me that I wasn't logged in, which led me to not being able to do anything, so it seems like I wasn't the only person having problems, judging by your other posts :P

Regarding the massive list of tags for AO3 stories, I'll admit you'll mostly see them on stories rated as Explicit or those dealing with heavier themes, as a warning for the reader - I kind of understand why it's there and that dynamics with fanfic are different, but that does make me wonder at times how these people approach reading a book they'll grab at a bookstore and that they've (presumably) not read any spoilers about beforehand...

I'll also say that I wasn't too enthusiastic a few years ago (3-4 years from now) about publishing Phantom of the Opera fanfic on AO3, since there were only a few hundred posted and not a lot of variety, and the bulk of it was still mostly on FF.net. It didn't really surprise me since the last "big cultural event" for POTO was the 25th anniversary concert, which is turning 10 years old this year (HOW?!), so obviously, people are less interested now and moved on to other stuff. It does seem like it increased exponentially since, but given the current atmosphere in media consumption as of now (namely, that anything that can be viewed as slightly "problematic" gets stomped on by thinkpieces until it dies, which I've been guilty of but I've hopefully grown up since :P), I honestly didn't think there would be that much Erik/Christine fic and kind of expected a lot more Erik/Daroga... but guess I was wrong XD