AO3 Experts... assemble?

[magibrain]

[EDIT: I have a braintics pseud now! Now we'll see how utterly ridiculous it gets. (For example: do I want to put the 10K RP fanfic tic up there? I... I might.) ]


H'okai so.

I have a crapton of scribbledy braintics, written out to varying degrees of incompleteness, which for one reason or another (vastly unconquerable scope, logical/logistical/self-indulgent problems inherent in the premise, loss of interest halfway through, etc.) will never actually turn into complete fics. They generally exist as patchy bits and bobs (and artefact of my nonlinear writing process) which I occasionally compare to ancient, fractured stone tablets from which you have to reconstruct the full story. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Or something.

For the most part, these languish in the depths of my Scrivener files or Gmail, and I occasionally share snippets. But it seems like a lot of them are in the most complete form they're likely to get into, and it seems like a shame that all that work results in nothing sharable – I mean, they routinely get up to many thousands of works. (Something like 30K for the ridiculous Sam Carter And Her Goa'uld Conquer the Galaxy thing; over 7k for the Angsty Neal Caffrey Almost Gets Eaten By Peter's Invisible Secret Dragon Friend thing.) And I imagine that they might tickle someone, so I've been tossing around the idea of archiving them somewhere. AO3 seems like the natural choice.

Thing is, I don't really want these mingling with the rest of my fiction; I'd like to offer the stuff that's actually a complete story on my profile, and have all of this ridiculousness somewhere partitioned off from it. A click away, p'raps. And I haven't used all of AO3's various features enough to know how to do that sort of thing. So.

How would I go about that? Would a pseud do what I'd want it to? Would I need a second account? Collections and the like would still show up in my main list of works, if I'm not mistaken – am I? Or am I just thinking of series, and confusing myself?

Elp?

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I would like to read some of these, and if it were me I would post them under my main account name, and tag them as WIP Amnesty. Because they so count.

[magibrain]

Hah! I've just recently come around to the idea of posting them for public consumption at all; giving them the same status as my completed works may take a few more years of working toward accepting them. :P

(I have spent perhaps too much time thinking about what it means when I write things down for my own amusement or to chronicle the random stories I tell myself to go to sleep, versus what it means when I'm actually writing with an eye for stories that people can read. I may have an overdeveloped sense of propriety there.)

[princessofgeeks]

This is why I think the Wip Amnesty tag would be good.

But of course you will have to do what you think is best.

[sholio]

I think making a pseud would probably do what you want. I don't have any myself, but I read a few writers who use pseuds, and it looks like the fics posted under each pseud show up on the pseud's Works page but not on their other pseuds. So it would probably be ideal for what you're looking to do. (With the caveat that I haven't done it myself, so I'm not entirely sure what it looks like on the user end.)

(also, hi! :D)

[magibrain]

That would be quite convenient! Possibly something to experiment with, then.

(Hello! My life is still unnecessarily hectic, how about yours?)

[sholio]

Hectic as well! Though it'll calm down at the end of this month (if all goes well) and I should be able to go back to being a nesting introvert. I hope you'll get some peace and calm soon. ♥

ETA: Also, I'm finding your linked comment thread on ficcish scraps very interesting reading! Somehow I seem to have missed this the first time around ... and I like the analogy about the table -- that fits really well.

(Also, I'm glad I'm not the only person who tells myself happy fan stories in my head to fall asleep ...)

[magibrain]

(The fan stories I tell myself to go to sleep mostly involve horrible angst, suffering, death, and betrayal. I don't know why. Though this may be where all my hideously angsty stuff goes rather than getting written up and posted as real stories; maybe I'll work up the courage to post the 110% angst SG1 tic in which Sam is J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jack is unhappily Leslie Groves, Teal'c is inexplicably nonexistent, half the team dies and the Earth explodes. I dunno; for some reason I just find it easier to get to sleep under a warm blanket of crushing despair.)

I have a lot of mental wooden boards and tablecloths around. A lot.

Here's to (relative) peace and calm on the horizon!

[sholio]

Well, this IS where about 90% of my incredibly depressing White Collar headcanon comes from, so maybe "happy" is not quite the right word to use. I suppose mine are about 50% completely self-indulgent h/c that's WAY too sappy to claim in public, and 50% massively depressing scenarios in which everyone ends up hating each other and dies.

[magibrain]

High-five for the best horrible bedtime stories! \o/

Clearly you should make a braintics pseud for your sappy H/C and join me in embarrassing ourselves on the internet.

[adraekh]

I would use a pseud if you want them sort-of-but-not-quite associated with your username under AO3. When you post works on AO3 under pseuds, they will show up as: "pseud (magistrate)." So the works will be recognizable as yours, but readers will know you've separated the fic off for some reason.

(Here is an example of someone I follow who uses pseuds, if you wanna browse to see how it shows up.)

Otherwise, my general method is to post them quietly under lock on a private journal, but you seem to be a tad more confident in your own writing. ^^

[magibrain]

Well, confident or reckless. :P They'll probably all be heavily disclaimed.

But this looks pretty much perfect! I can just make a "braintics" pseud and, well, hopefully that'll be more or less self-explanatory. Plus a note at the top, plus tagging as wip_amnesty, I'll have all the semantic distinction I need.

Thank you!