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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1p82bC8:
I totally understand why some authors really aren’t happy to talk about abandoned old WIPS and long-ago works, but I haven’t been active in fandom all that long so it’s not that long ago for me. And I write in such non-linear ways, often, that there’s still a lot of material from those stories that I never got around to using. I still harbor a hope I’ll be able to get back to them and work out some of the tangles and post that stuff, because it was really heartfelt.
I’ve always worked non-linearly with this stuff, before; I’ve never abandoned things and said “I will never come back to this”. In my original works I always set them aside deliberately to come back to later. So I never declare anything dead, usually, unless something horrible happened– if I had a falling-out with a collaborator or something. But even that has never been bad enough. There’s only stuff I’ve forgotten too much of to want to revisit.
I can’t even begin to imagine when I’ll get to it, but that doesn’t mean never, I’m not just dangling that to give people hope.
I also have the advantage, I think, of having been very active in fandom before. I cut my teeth and got my really embarrassing shit done in, uh, the 90s. By the time the AO3 existed, I knew better. I feel terrible for some of the kids out there today making all their mistakes in the digital age. My super-non-self-aware, I-have-no-idea-how-the-world-works stuff was all pencil and paper and nobody read it. I had classes, and critiques from professional authors, before I ever published anything online. So anything that’s still live and linked-to on the Internet is by most standards, pretty polished, adult work.
If you want me to dig deep enough to find something I’d be embarrassed by, we’d be going back to obsolete file formats. So I have an advantage over many of the other authors I know, who don’t like to talk about their old stuff. For me, it’s not all that old, and I knew what I was doing when I wrote it, mostly. (Well. Nobody ever knows what they’re doing. There’s no actual end to “it”.)
Though one thing I am realizing, I have learned a ton about organization in the time since I started TBP, because holy shit, I can’t find anything in the mess that document is. Yiiiikes.
I totally understand why some authors really aren’t happy to talk about abandoned old WIPS and long-ago works, but I haven’t been active in fandom all that long so it’s not that long ago for me. And I write in such non-linear ways, often, that there’s still a lot of material from those stories that I never got around to using. I still harbor a hope I’ll be able to get back to them and work out some of the tangles and post that stuff, because it was really heartfelt.
I’ve always worked non-linearly with this stuff, before; I’ve never abandoned things and said “I will never come back to this”. In my original works I always set them aside deliberately to come back to later. So I never declare anything dead, usually, unless something horrible happened– if I had a falling-out with a collaborator or something. But even that has never been bad enough. There’s only stuff I’ve forgotten too much of to want to revisit.
I can’t even begin to imagine when I’ll get to it, but that doesn’t mean never, I’m not just dangling that to give people hope.
I also have the advantage, I think, of having been very active in fandom before. I cut my teeth and got my really embarrassing shit done in, uh, the 90s. By the time the AO3 existed, I knew better. I feel terrible for some of the kids out there today making all their mistakes in the digital age. My super-non-self-aware, I-have-no-idea-how-the-world-works stuff was all pencil and paper and nobody read it. I had classes, and critiques from professional authors, before I ever published anything online. So anything that’s still live and linked-to on the Internet is by most standards, pretty polished, adult work.
If you want me to dig deep enough to find something I’d be embarrassed by, we’d be going back to obsolete file formats. So I have an advantage over many of the other authors I know, who don’t like to talk about their old stuff. For me, it’s not all that old, and I knew what I was doing when I wrote it, mostly. (Well. Nobody ever knows what they’re doing. There’s no actual end to “it”.)
Though one thing I am realizing, I have learned a ton about organization in the time since I started TBP, because holy shit, I can’t find anything in the mess that document is. Yiiiikes.
