zvi | Entries tagged with otw

An assortment of links which are potentially interesting to readers of this journal:

Mobipocket support is going away at Allromance/Omnilit. This may affect other ebook retailers; I don't know which organizes Overdrive is the back-end for.

cathy reminds you to write meaningful link text, not click here and its elaborations.

rachelmanija is offering psychological diagnoses of fictional characters I find this illuminating and sometimes amusing.

brownbetty is crossmixing characters from canon with apocalypses from another and summarizing the results.

I'm not sure what I think of this checklist of good management. I suppose the problem is that either it isn't necessary for people in support functions to know where the overall company is going, or I've never been in a well-managed situation. Both, of course, might be true.

Megan Garber at Nieman Labs suggests that the future is now, and that we are in the process of seeing serious ideas freed from books, or books serving as a single stop in the public development of public ideas.

The OTW election is SOON.

Cathy has a compilation ofpublic statements by the candidates.

I am sort of confused about what to think of it and how to think about it. The problem I am having is this, I think: I tend to think of the OTW as an appendage to the Archive of Our Own. This is not accurate, but it is how the organization as a whole often plays out in public fandom. (In the wider world of ideas, I would guess that Friend of the Court briefs and comments to the Copyright Commissioner in the US, and helping other people make analogous arguments in other countries, would be their widest impact.) But in my day to day fannish life, it's the Archive that is what I care about. ( My thoughts on the candidates )

Other people have thoughts, too.

via-ostiense's otw election post
facetofcathy's otw collection post
hl's otw election post
elz's otw election post

Contested Board Election this year.

You have until October 24 to donate no less than $10 in order to be eligible to vote.

Okay, so everyone is excited that the Archive of Our Own is moving to Open Beta in about 13 hours. You know how people found out about Open Beta? By subscribing to

otw_news. That's the news blog for the Organization for Transformative Works, which is the non-profit organization which sponsors the archive, the Journal of Transformative Works and Culture, the Fanlore wiki, and is filing amicus briefs and public comments on legal issues of concern to fans, around the issues of fair use and free speech.

Another great fannish comm is

as_others_see_us. This is a weekly post of references to fanfiction and media fandom in the media, along with the occasional discussion.

Last but not least is the

geekfeminism_feed. The Geek Feminism blog is not about media fandom, but it is about geek culture and women, so the areas of interest overlap.

P.S. ~~I have one Archive invite available. First person to private message me for it, gets it.~~ Mischief managed

Treasure, Leverage, Sophie Deveraux vignette: It's clear what the most important thing to her is.
$ Universe, Leverage (These two stories don't really form a series, but they are the same story universe. There might be more some day. And there might not.)
1. Strength Parker loves money.
2. &hearts;? Alec/Parker, Parker gave up on normal human relations a long time ago. But maybe all is not lost.
Matrilineal Dissent, A Merlin Tryptich
1. The Missing Piece "Do you not know your ancestry, milady?"
2. For the Miracles and the Consolations Ygraine the Golden was normally a happy woman, sweet and blonde, smarter than her husband and more compassionate, too. She was nearly the perfect Queen of Camelot. And she was in tears.
3. Heliotrope Her father took her to the castle. He didn't say anything about what was happening or why.

As you may or may not have noticed, for the past several months, when I post fanfiction, I've posted it to the Archive of Our Own. AO3 is the major initiative of the Organization for Transformative Works, which is currently having a membership/fundraising drive. Membership buys you the right to vote in a Board election (provided that more than two eligible people run for election.)

Your membership dollars allow the OTW to buy dedicated server hosting and, soon, actual servers and colocation. (

synecdochic has a vulgar explanation of the different kinds of hosting you can get, once you get beyond the webhosting most of us use for an individual page or two.)^*

Since the OTW is not ad-supported, it can only pay for AO3 with donations and membership fees. I think there are excellent ideological reasons to sign up for OTW, but, if you're interested in that sort of thing, I suspect that you've already made up your mind about the OTW one way or another in that direction.

I want to tell you that the Archive is already freaking awesome, and it's only halfway through its roadmap. Let me tell you four of the things I really like about the archive.

Chapter handling
I hate the way e-fiction handles chapters. I usually wind up reading stories in the print view, because I'd rather get all 320k of words spread about before me in one long file than having to keep switching from chapter to chapter. Obviously there are people who disagree with me on this, some of them for technical reasons. (Something about it's easier to read smaller files on your phone/palm/whatever?) AO3 accommodates us both. See, for example, my my 8k, 11 chapter story as one long flat file. And then view just the first chapter of my 50k, 45 chapter NaNoWrimo novel. (NB. view it, don't read it. This is your only warning about the writing quality.)
Consolidation
If you have different pseudonyms for different occasions, you can host everything together at AO3. For myself, the 18 stories attributed to WitchQueen are, uh, not up to my current standards for the work I produce. But anyone who liked those stories I wrote, can also find the 92 stories I'm still happy to claim. Likewise, if you wrote as SmileyHeartsJulie in DS9 and MrsHarkness in Torchwood, or if your sad fiction is written as SmileTurnedUpsideDown but your porn is written as SizzleNotSteak, you can keep all of those identities on one account, but give different author names. The same mechanism allows those of you pseuding as Willow or something else common to sign all of your fiction as by your shared pseudonym, while, on the back end, separating That Willow Over There from This Willow Over Here. Scarce account names are no longer destiny!

I also like, very much, that the content restrictions are minimal. The (extremely abbreviated) version of the content policy: no selling; no plagiarism (transformative works don't count as plagiarism); no child porn (i.e. naked pictures of actual children); no non-fanwork. All of my fanfiction can go there. No one's original fiction belongs! Yay! (I have ... issues with original slash, I really, really do.)
Warnings/Ratings
The archive explicitly supports !rating, !warning, so that anyone who wants to be warned knows the difference between "There are no warnings because none of the things for which warnings are required in this story appear" and "There are no warnings because I don't want to spoil the giant twist gang rape and murder of an eight year old at the end of my story." (NB: none of my stories to date contain the gang rape or murder of anyone or sexual depiction of an eight year old.) There are actually relatively few unwarned stories. (At this moment, the ratio of All Works:Choose Not To Warn:Choose Not To Warn for Some Content = 3080:591:63. I have Chosen Not To Warn for 82 stories. Not rated is 176, of which 86 are mine. I mostly rate PWPs and fluff, and those are the vast majority of the stories I put warnings on as well.)
Although actual practice on the closed beta of AO3 appears to show that those people who want warnings/ratings have won the debate, I really love that the archive has come up with an elegant way to let people maintain their own standards in what is a longstanding, bitter, and protracted discussion.
Bookmarks
Somebody publicly bookmarks my story on AO3, there is a notation on the story listing that there are bookmarks and comments for it. Once the archive is open to the public, I can stop vanity surfing delicious for my fic to see what people are saying about it! I just have to scroll through my own listed stories every so often. Yay!

So, like they say on US public radio stations, if you've enjoyed (or are looking forward to enjoying) the Archive of Our Own, a free service of the Organization for Transformative Works, please show your support by becoming a member.

P.S. Bonus Explainer -- IME, if you want to join the closed beta of some nifty service in closed beta, the best way to do that is send lots of detailed feedback as an outside user of the service. I'm not making any promises, but I am just sayin'.

^*I use vulgar here in the sense of 'for the general public' or "layman's version." Layman is sexist, layperson is awkward, and I just like vulgar and wish more people would use it, okay? return to text

So, the next new feature noticeable to users that the Archive has is the ability to adjust dates, for which I say, thank fucking god. I had some embarrassing shit that was coming up first on my profile, because I had uploaded it last. Now you can tell that my last completely shitty story was from 2005.

Hilariously (well, okay, probably not that funny, more mildly amusing), while I was scrolling back through my LJ and stuff to get the best dates I could for all of this fiction, I found another seven stories to add to my account. A couple of them are questionable on the 'story' front ... more like writing exercises that contain a very good idea, but some of them were legit stories that I just never del.icio.us'd, and since I was using del.icio.us to get the list of stories to upload, well….

Heads up to those who previously uploaded fic: the archive will now, under some circumstances, treat a single hard-return as a linebreak, even if you have <p> tags. This unfortunately means that some stories uploaded in the initial rush have really weird formatting. The fix (ETA if you have your paragraphs surrounded by <p> </p>) is very simple: edit the story, and click the rich text editor. Then preview/save. Extraneous line breaks should be removed.

Anyway, the archive is very cool and getting even better. So please donate to the Organization, because it's your donations that keep the servers running.

And if you don't have cash, but you do have time, volunteer for a committee. Systems especially is looking for people, and Content is shaping archive policy. Communications is a new committee, so you would be able to help shape how that committee is going to work with others.

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Entries tagged with otw

Links and OTW Elections

A new step for the OTW

Follow Friday: Fandom

Six Stories From Purim Gifts, plus a PSA

An Archive of Our Own