banana mango hiiiigh school

[allchildren]

I have an H/C Bingo card!

muscle strains and spasms	slaves (regular)	vampires: sun burn or poisoning	fear of flying	plane crash
asphyxiation	heat stroke	eating disorders	fallen angels	mutation
amnesia	hunger / starvation	WILD CARD	surprise sexswap	post-apocalypse
septicemia/infected wounds	spinal injury	undercover: having to participate in illegal / hurtful activity	aliens made us do it	insomnia
Stockholm syndrome	grief	exhaustion	isolation / accidentally locked in	minor illness (cold, allergies)

I'm pretty much all about the first column on the left, and the bottom and middle rows across are intriguing as well. Also, I was watching Fringe last week with Carrie (her first time through), and The X-Files this week with Rawles and Tropie (a childhood text for us all), and when I saw the list of hurt/comfort cliches (zeroing in on "experimented on by evil scientists"!!) so much suddenly became clear.

Also, if you are the sort of person who might read my fic: where would you like to read it? I'm pretty much over hosting it on LJ @ trisfic, and am putting all my new stuff and gradually the old stuff too up at AO3 (where you do not need an acct to comment) but I'm torn. And want to make it easier for my potential constituency, so to speak. Here, have a poll.

Poll #3395 where does the fic go?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11

View Respondents

assuming you are a potential reader/commenter, how would you like it?

View Answers

post fic in allchildren, which crossposts to sainfoin-fields, + AO3
6 (54.5%)

post fic in dedicated DW comm for my fic + AO3
0 (0.0%)

post only in AO3 but announce fic @ allchildren/sainfoin-fields
3 (27.3%)

other, which i will comment to explain
2 (18.2%)

All these sites! I just don't knoooow.

Comments

[liminalliz]

I find the reviewing mechanism in AO3 to not be as fun as on dw or lj.

[allchildren]

FAIR ENOUGH.

[jlh]

I like giving people billions of options, because AO3 and DW are so weirdly political in some people's minds. So I post on my LJ, my DW fic journal, and AO3. Then I make a header-only post, with links to all three, and I post that on my DW and any comms I crosspost to. Pretty simple really.

I will say that in the months that I've been posting to my DW fic journal, I have received exactly one comment on it. Part of that, though, may be that I don't know of any DW comms for fic crossposting in my fandoms, and because most of my pals are not on DW (as I learned when I made a post about crossposting recently). I get comments on AO3 but that's not why I post there; I just like having that archive.

[allchildren]

Haha, your simple is my "five times too much work." I think not writing much fic probably helps with that attitude. Do you have people watching your DW fic journal that don't watch your regular journal? I made a comm for my fic here on DW, but when I thought about it I realized that those people-who-like-my-fic-but-aren't-friends-with-me are on LJ and I have no idea if they have DWs, so it's kind of silly for me to be trying to cater to them on the wrong site.

I originally started my fic journal on LJ because I felt that having a dedicated audience who had actually signed up to see my fic only would lessen my anxiety about readers going "UGH, HER 400 WORD PLOTLESS GEN ABOUT LADIES/HET WITH NO ACTUAL PORN AGAIN" every time I posted. Which it did! But I soon learned that having to log in and out for that journal was a pain, and because I almost never announced it in my regular journal people tended not to know I had a fic journal at all, and I was never sure where to put in-betweeny sort of stuff. But, to be navelgazey about it, I spent a couple of years very anxious about posting on LJ in general. Moving HQ to DW and making some decisions about what content I care about has freed me up a lot from that, so now I think it's really just a matter of squaring with myself whether or not the fic is content I think belongs here. hmm.

[jlh]

Well, to be honest, the only steps there that are more than anything I ever did before is to post to DW and post to AO3, and I'll post to AO3 anyway. Crossposting to comms is something I've always done, because I follow comms but I very rarely friend people's fic journals. Do you mean that you post fic to your fic journal on LJ, and then don't crosspost it anyplace? You mention not crossposting even to your regular LJ. I guess, I wouldn't expect anyone to friend or follow my writing DW or LJ.

At one point I made a poll asking if I should make a fic LJ and the dominant response was, "no, you don't write enough fic, no one would friend it." So for me, making a separate journal for fic makes me much more, hrm, self-conscious, as if to say: My fic is so awesome you're going to want to follow it on its own! (I mean, I don't follow people's journals for the fic; I follow because I find them interesting.) I post fic to my journal because I want to maintain control of it. But only the crossposts to fic comms are the ones where I really think I'm reaching people who want to read the fic.

I posted a fic a week last year; it was a goal for 2009, and I reached it. But they're just headers with a cut, and I reckon people can scroll past that just as much as I can scroll past the many Thu night/Fri morning reactions to SPN on my flist.

And in that manner, I get the feeling very anxious about posting on LJ. There's a loud sameness to what people post on LJ, and the comments so often act as rewards for that. I get very self-conscious when I post something on LJ and there are no comments on the entry. I've stopped writing particularly thoughtful essays on LJ for that reason—it just isn't worth it. The place that I have gotten away from it, personally, is on tumblr, because my tumblr is so all over the place that it borders on incoherence. But it's me actually following things that I just personally like, and I'm more able to do that outside of the geek space. That said, being in a new fandom, and honestly posting on DW and being more involved in DW, is helping that a lot.

(I do have people following my DW that aren't following my LJ, certainly.)

I think if you want your fic to be separate, that's a great decision, but I would include a mechanism to find it that isn't, "friend my fic journal."

[allchildren]

Ah, but the question isn't do you have people who read your DW who don't read your LJ -- I have many -- but do you have people who read your fic DW that don't read your regular journal (assuming your DW/LJ are basically interchangeable).

My fic has been housed solely in my fic journal for two years now, with very little crossposting to either my journal or relevant comms. The isolation of it has not been my problem -- it's just the actual hassle of knowing where things go, switching to a different site, and getting everything in its right place that is problematic to me. If I could replicate my isolated fic LJ on DW and thought it would actually reach the right audience, ie people who want to read my fic, I probably would. But a) I don't want my fic to live mainly on LJ anymore; b) I don't want to have to log in and out of multiple journals EVER; c) I don't believe it's possible to post to a comm on DW (which is how I'd house my fic separately, having learned the logging-out lessonn) and have it auto-crosspost to an individual LJ. And, since I have changed my approach to journaling in general* and am in something of an organizational sea change, now is a good time to reevaluate whether I need to keep my fic in isolation anymore.

Obviously our thought processes/neuroses/issues as to ficposting differ in the details, but that's why anxiety is such a ball! It makes no sense and is utterly unpredictable. G-good stuff?


*And the other thing, to unload some history and issues on you:

I do feel like there are very different moods on LJ and DW, both in terms of how people talk and how people interact, although I'm not sure I could pinpoint the difference now. I used to post multiple times a day, which could be rants, episode reactions, memes, long fiction-processing rambles, fic, or anything else. Eventually I just started getting really burnt out on the assholes of fandom, not to mention anxiety + the wages of having drawn negative attention, and had to scale way back in my volume of posting, did a couple of massive friendscuts, went friends-only for a while, not to mention checking out of LJ entirely for two different months-long hiatuses. Starting a much smaller-scale LJ and separating out my fic helped (that way the people who wanted to read my fic could, the people who wanted to read my whatever posts could, and it wasn't too much of a hardship to friend both if you liked both), but by then I had internalized a lot of uncomfortable thoughts about ~blogging as something done basically for the entertainment of others, which... was really stifling, even without me having legit anxiety & energy issues that made it super difficult for me to write something I felt was reasonably intelligent and interesting. And comments got to be a huge issue, which is why I felt better putting my fic where fewer people would see it (therefore fewer people could actively choose to not comment on it) and why I eventually also started doing all my recs on Delicious rather than spending a lot of time putting posts together which nobody responded to.

I decided this winter that I needed to put self-expression and openness, rather than pretenses of being interesting to others, back at the forefront of my journaling -- so I set my uncomfortable-making LJ to autoflocked crossposts from DW and have been doing a lot better getting words out publicly on DW where I feel less pressure to ~perform. Now my DW is mainly focused on processing fiction & my relationship to it, and you know, I think I get a better response to that than my attempts at being entertaining anyway.

I keep Tumblr my shiny happy visual space.

I subscribe to a bazillion feminism/race/social justice blogs, and pop culture news, on Google Reader, so while I don't necessarily feel the need to discuss that stuff with others, I get the expression I currently need over there.

So, yeah, separation is key for me, and why the fic placement is a bit of a Decision. And... I realize that's a buttload of information you didn't ask for which would probably be better off in a post of its own, so I apologize. Processing! Always with the processing, self, shut up.

[jlh]

Please, I'm excited that you wanted to engage with my comment!

No—I think what I meant to say is, I never friend fic journals, and so I don't really expect other people to do so. I think of them more as a repository for fic, and maybe a separate space to put fic. I have one on DW mostly because I don't trust LJ. I never made one on LJ and it feels like it's too late to do it now; also, after that poll, it feels, I don't know, kind of egotistical? Anyway, it's just a destination; I don't expect people to follow me or my fic journal for fic. I expect them to follow the comms, and then click on my link if they want to read it. I reckon that's because that's what I do.

As for logging in and out of journals, I post through clients, so it's very easy and transparent. I hate coding by hand! There is a client that will post to DW from a mac, so I use that to post fic to the DW fic journal, and to the LJ. Since you can't crosspost, I actually write my entries in a client and then copy-pasta into the online interface. I don't like writing in it. Perhaps once they've finished working on the changes they're making to it I'll like it better? But I really can't remember how to hand-code image codes or centering or whatever, and I hate posting something and the coding is a mess, etc. So for me, posting to a bunch of journals is pretty simple. But if you're posting in the web interface I can see how logging in and out is a giant pain. (Though it mostly makes me think, haha, you were probably never in an LJ RPG!)

Do you mean isolation from everything, or just isolation from your regular DW? Do you have a policy of not crossposting to relevant comms, and as you don't crosspost do you do anything to help people find your fic?

I totally understand the problem of LJ as theater, and I think that happens much more on LJ than on DW. I think part of that is that right now, the masses of fangirls that feed into and off on that LJ-as-theater aren't on DW, and I don't think they'd come over here anyway.

I don't know what you've heard about my background—or more likely Ali's—but when I was first on LJ I came in through HP fandom and was good friends with some people who not only were giant BNFs, but also very much saw the entire point of LJ to be entertainment and theater. They self-consciously blogged as a character, and that was the tone that was set not only in that fandom but in a more general way. I've never been good at that—though that experience did mean that I tend to not pay attention to who is friending me, or do vaguely assume that people are friending me for reasons that have nothing to do with the content of my actual blog but with who I know, as during that time I had Cassandra Claire fangirls constantly churning in and out of my friend-of list. They'd friend me when she mentioned me, find that I was dead boring, and then defriend me. So my default feeling about my LJ/DW is that it is tedious and full of tl;dr.

I'm lucky that I didn't directly get any negative attention, because that's pretty sucky. What I got was much more lack of attention, intentional ignoring, and feeling strangely close to craziness (bad penny, msscribe) without it actually hitting me. That should have been a good feeling, but instead it tends to make me feel very guilty, and my assumption is that I haven't received the negative attention that people I know have received mostly because I'm not important enough. Which is my general working theory about wank—it might be slightly about how you behave, but it's infinitely more about whether someone else can gain social capital by talking smack about you.

I am definitely finding an ability to express things on tumblr and read various things on my google reader to be a great outlet for me. I think I probably blogged regularly about television for the last time yesterday. I still have to work out how to manage twitter, where good friends were live hate blogging shows I liked and definitely made me feel badly, but that's part of an overall feeling I have about geek culture that it's basic role in my life is to constantly try to get me to watch or read things I don't like and dismiss things I do like.

I think we're all just trying to process how to manage our lives online so that they work for us, and in my case anyway, cause the least upset to the people around me. I don't want to be wanky, I don't want drama, but I think my need for that has probably outweighed my expression. I've gone through a rather long period of feeling that I needed to be silent about a lot of things. We'll see if I decide to speak more in the future.

[logicandlove]

i don't mean to cut into an obviously thoughtful conversation with something so trivial, but i thought it might be helpful enough to be worthwhile -- are you familiar with LJLogin? it's a quite handy add-on that means you never have to login or out of an lj or dw account; you just click on the username you'd like to be logged into on your status bar, and it does all the work for you.

[allchildren]

I am familiar with it, but it doesn't serve all my needs.

[littledust]

Interesting that you should post this, because I am also struggling to solve the dilemma of Where The Heck To Post Fic. I have a separate LJ for fic, and I'm trying to decide whether I want to mirror it at DW or just crosspost everything to my main LJ and my main DW. (While I appreciate the AO3 archive and have an account, I don't really use it.)

My sticking point is that stuff posted to LJ generally gets more comments. Me/comments = OTP. On the other hand, I also don't feel so comfortable leaving my content on LJ.

In short, I have no answers, but I can at least sympathize!

[allchildren]

Yeah, I've pretty much reached the point where I don't want LJ to have my content at all. And yet :/