I woke up a few weeks ago to a series of really lovely comments from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ymas00 on some of my old Top Gear fanfiction, hidden away in a locked LJ community, which concluded with 'I found you on AO3 but didn't find this or any other TG-fic.' That, plus the fact that at the time I was rereading Vargas, an older fic I'd be devastated not to have access to, got me thinking about archiving to AO3.
My main AO3 account is Riona, but I actually have a second account, rionaleonhart, specifically for archiving my older fanfiction. A lot of my stuff still wasn't up there, though; I hadn't posted anything I was embarrassed by, and I hadn't had the nerve to put up any of my old RPF.
Maybe it's not my place to decide what's worth putting up, though. If I post something to AO3 and even one person reads it and enjoys it, or even looks fondly back on it and goes 'wow, this is terrible, but I remember liking it when I was younger', isn't that better than letting it languish where no one can find it? Isn't that potential enjoyment worth a bit of embarrassment?
(This is a conclusion I've reached solely for myself, by the way; I'm not trying to pass any sort of judgement on what other people 'should' be doing! Your fanfiction is yours, and you're free to display it in public or bury it at the bottom of a quarry as you choose.)
So I decided to try to stop asking 'am I happy with this?' and start asking 'is this finished and at least a thousand words long?' when posting backdated fanfiction, unless I really couldn't face posting a specific piece. (I needed some criteria; posting all the tiny ficlets I wrote as a teenager would take forever!)
Anyway, what I'm saying is that a lot of my old fanfiction of WILDLY VARIABLE QUALITY is now up on AO3 under the name rionaleonhart! I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it, but it's there. (Most of the RPF is archive-locked, so you'll only see it if you're logged in.) My main account is still Riona, and that's where I've been posting my writing since 2013.
(SPEAKING OF VARGAS:zarla updated it yesterday, for the first time in five years, with three enormous chapters, and I'm so pleased. This fic isn't just up my street; it built and paved my street. During my archiving, there were multiple points where I paused and went 'hang on, I can definitely see the influence of Vargas in this fic.' Goodness knows how different my overall fic output would look if I hadn't discovered this fic in a fandom I'm not even in when I was fifteen. I've read nearly 500,000 words in this intense, hideous universe over the last six weeks, and somehow I'm still itching for more.
I'm sure Scriabin would suggest that I solve this problem by writing more fanfiction about him. Quiet, Scriabin.)
ymas00 on some of my old Top Gear fanfiction, hidden away in a locked LJ community, which concluded with 'I found you on AO3 but didn't find this or any other TG-fic.' That, plus the fact that at the time I was rereading Vargas, an older fic I'd be devastated not to have access to, got me thinking about archiving to AO3.My main AO3 account is Riona, but I actually have a second account, rionaleonhart, specifically for archiving my older fanfiction. A lot of my stuff still wasn't up there, though; I hadn't posted anything I was embarrassed by, and I hadn't had the nerve to put up any of my old RPF.
Maybe it's not my place to decide what's worth putting up, though. If I post something to AO3 and even one person reads it and enjoys it, or even looks fondly back on it and goes 'wow, this is terrible, but I remember liking it when I was younger', isn't that better than letting it languish where no one can find it? Isn't that potential enjoyment worth a bit of embarrassment?
(This is a conclusion I've reached solely for myself, by the way; I'm not trying to pass any sort of judgement on what other people 'should' be doing! Your fanfiction is yours, and you're free to display it in public or bury it at the bottom of a quarry as you choose.)
So I decided to try to stop asking 'am I happy with this?' and start asking 'is this finished and at least a thousand words long?' when posting backdated fanfiction, unless I really couldn't face posting a specific piece. (I needed some criteria; posting all the tiny ficlets I wrote as a teenager would take forever!)
Anyway, what I'm saying is that a lot of my old fanfiction of WILDLY VARIABLE QUALITY is now up on AO3 under the name rionaleonhart! I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it, but it's there. (Most of the RPF is archive-locked, so you'll only see it if you're logged in.) My main account is still Riona, and that's where I've been posting my writing since 2013.
(SPEAKING OF VARGAS:
zarla updated it yesterday, for the first time in five years, with three enormous chapters, and I'm so pleased. This fic isn't just up my street; it built and paved my street. During my archiving, there were multiple points where I paused and went 'hang on, I can definitely see the influence of Vargas in this fic.' Goodness knows how different my overall fic output would look if I hadn't discovered this fic in a fandom I'm not even in when I was fifteen. I've read nearly 500,000 words in this intense, hideous universe over the last six weeks, and somehow I'm still itching for more.I'm sure Scriabin would suggest that I solve this problem by writing more fanfiction about him. Quiet, Scriabin.)
