Scales and Tales

This week and last I've been working on a fannish project of sorts that's strictly personal, which is tidying up my AO3 Subscriptions and 'Marked for Later' list.

After deleting a lot of completed works, fics that had been orphaned still incomplete, and many works and series that hadn't been updated since 2016 or earlier, authors who haven't posted in a fandom I recognise for years, my Subscription list is now down to 5 pages! I did leave a few probably-abandoned things in there for sentimental reasons, but it's so much more coherent and useful now.

Similarly, I cleared out page after page of things marked for later! Gone are the fics I had actually already read (sometimes I mark for later if I intend to come back and comment), and works that are probably abandoned (I often mark for later if a WIP has an interesting premise but only 1-2 chapters, as an easy way to figure out if it's going to continue and be worth reading), and things I've lost interest in for one reason or another (mostly long-running series or WIPs that had lost focus and turned into endless non-plot, or fics that now include a pairing I dislike). I'm left with a much more reasonable 7 pages of marked works, and I'm trying to read at least once a week in order to keep whittling it down.

My next project will be another round of bookmark edits, I suspect.



So.... How many subscriptions or marked-for-later works do you have?

This year I've made a number of nebulous resolutions, primarily for my real life but also in the fannish sphere. (Some of the former may interfere with the some of the latter, and some of which might aid it; we'll see.)

Mostly I want to comment more - I used to be a person who commented! Reliably, and even frequently! I miss that. Especially with the general slow decline of other forms of fannish conversation. Practically speaking, I left a comment the other day somewhere, and it felt good; I want that feeling again!

I also want to write more; every year I look at my AO3 stats and (usually) blush at the small output that 365 days has amounted to, but this year was a new low. Yes, I've learnt that WIP stories are Not For Me, but the price of that knowledge comes rather high, which is to say that realising I've only managed three-tenths of a single story in a year is depressing.

The last one is a growing need to personalise and expound upon my AO3 bookmarks. A list isn't nearly as helpful as a rec list; I need to be noting why I bookmarked a story and what other people might get out of it, not just saving a pile of titles. If I wanted only that, I can tap CTRL+B and start scrolling, no login needed! (Also because I've been reading back through them lately and I'm disturbed by the number of deleted works that have cropped up! Without any kind of note-to-self on those works, I don't know what they were, and there's no way to find out where those fics went...)

Has anyone else made fandom-specific resolutions so far this year?

Whoa!

Poking around my AO3 page on my leisurely way to seeing how much stuff I have "Marked for Later", I noticed a link called "Statistics", and clicked on it out of idle curiosity.

There were graphs! Hit counts! Gross word counts! Subscription counts, which I'd been wondering about yesterday! Seven different sorting methods!

Almost as amazing as the total word count feature (where has this been all my life, it is awesome!) is the fact that I have 11 bookmarkers! I thought I had one; seeing "11" in that field rather boggled me. o.O

While I'm sure most of my reading list is unimpressed by 11 as a bookmark count (fair; I've got fics bookmarked that have twice as many bookmarkers!), I am going to carry on feeling delighted regardless. It was "1" for so long that I forgot to notice the word, so this barrelled me over.

(Tomorrow: check out the one or two people who have bookmarked two of my fics, because given my stuff's almost-total tiny-fandom sources, they must be awesome people and might lead me to more fic in underappreciated fandoms!

Funniest of all, though, is that I have absolutely no memory of ever having seen the "Statistics" tab before. Did they just put that up? How long have I been oblivious?



Editing to add:

I keep staring at my word count and feeling a slow tidal rise of glee. Look at this:

Word Count 15886

That makes me feel so much more productive, I can't even express it. 15,000 words! That is a respectable heap of words, even if it boils down to a handful of sonnets and some ficlets whose largest members top out around 2,000 words each.

15,000!

...Help, I'm suddenly starting to consider unwisely ambitious goals for the rest of 2012...

It is a moral imperative to slash a novel (co)written by John Ringo, yes/yes?

Except that would involve his showing up on my "fandoms" list on AO3, and I'm not sure I'm willing to be that intrinsically linked with Ringo. *ponders* I mean, I'm not even that intrinsically linked to a lot of authors I like and respect!

On the other hand, I could tag it with "take that john ringo's id"...

Via what seems like half my reading list, I give you: my top ten three stories according to their hits on the AO3 Archive. Shortened to three because I only have 7 works up anyway, and four of them are sonnets in an old, old fandom, which means they never get hits. :D


( One, Two, Three! )