AO3 Mirroring Complete

[brightknightie]

I recently mirrored my last existing fanfiction (stories and poems) from my own fansite to my AO3 account, and wound them all back to their original dates.  (This has been my main fanfic activity for months! Little reading and less writing, just archiving.)  Now comes the task of mirroring in reverse, because of course I edited as I went.  (I tinker whenever snags reveal themselves.)  It turns out that I have 76 total works from April 1996 to the present, 60 of those in FK and 7 in HL.

Merfilly recently posted her thousandth work to the AO3.  We usually play in different sandboxes, but that gulf did strike me.  I'm not as productive as most people.  (What makes for high-quality prolificity?)

I wonder whether I should tag my '96-'99 pieces "juvenilia."  Someone remarked recently that her early works embarrassed her, which made me wonder whether mine should embarrass me.  Some are indeed green!  (If you do tag for "juvenilia," where do you draw your line, and why?)

The last item I loaded happened to be "Nice to Remember" (PG, ~4K, 2006).  I wrote it for TV-Elf's birthday years ago; it caps this project in her birthday month now.  (It's not one of my best, but TV-Elf said it amused her, so it wins.)  Coincidentally, that story attempted Schanke and Janette interaction, as does my (rather better, I suspect) most recent FK story, "Malicious Mischief" (PG, ~9K, 2011).

Even with all the reverse mirroring to be done, it's time and past for me to be on to new things — in fanfic, and elsewhere.

Comments

[sholio]

I struggled with the temptation to be embarrassed by my older stories when I went and uploaded them to AO3, but you know ... I'm not. I've mostly resisted the urge to re-read them, because I know I'd probably find a million things I want to fix, or maybe even take them down completely if I got to dwelling on their flaws. But, honestly, I think the hand-wringing that some writers do (pro writers, too) about how embarrassing and awful their early work is -- it's a form of ego, really. It's shamelessly self-indulgent. And it's rather rude to all the people who really liked those stories at the time, and didn't consider them poorly-written or juvenile.

I did the best I could at the time, and even though I write much better now, and often my ambitions outstripped my abilities, I'm still proud of me for trying. Ten years from now, I'm sure that I'll be writing much better stories than I'm capable of now, but that doesn't make the stories I'm currently writing bad stories, even if they make my future-self wince a little bit.

[rhi]

Yeah. This. Thank you.

chronology of writing

[brightknightie]

Thank you very much for the anecdote and reflections.

My instinct was that dating stories accurately should be all the explanation needed, but there are other angles, as well (and of course many people choose not to accurately date old stories when archiving; perhaps they don't all notice the re-dating option?). We should all write better today than we did yesterday. And if we have a fallow period or golden age, it's fair to let chronology reveal that.

I hazard a guess that the AO3 search functions may specifically worry some people, however. When just one of an author's stories turns up in a search, and it happens to be Mary Sue nonsense she wrote twenty years ago... it's different from a reader looking at a list of all her works, and seeing the evolution over time.

>"And it's rather rude to all the people who really liked those stories at the time, and didn't consider them poorly-written or juvenile. "

That's a telling point. I ask a lot of people whether I may recommend their FK stories in my recs project; most people are wonderfully kind, whether or not they agree to let me rec, but over all the years, I can think of a couple of times that... I could identify with the reader in that scenario.