More and more people are marking their fics as completed when they're abandoned and it's so frustrat

[dragonlady7]

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I have to admit that I mark my fics complete when I know that I won’t be adding onto them. however, when I do that I also edit the summary to clearly say in all caps that the fic is abandoned/incomplete. I also tend to tag it that way. I don’t want anyone entering the story under the false impression that they’re getting a finished story - even if I’m done working on it.

I think the idea of bullying probably comes down to the way they’re being approached? I’ve received comments in my day that were really aggressively phrased. That’s something you’ll want to avoid. But asking if they’d be willing to update their summary or tags or if they could move the author’s note to the start of the fic rather than to the end? Both of those would feel totally reasonable to me, if I got them as comments.

I don’t think authors will stop marking their incomplete works as complete. Like I said, I’ve done it myself and it feels like the right way to organize my own little section of the archive. What authors *can *do, however, is make it perfectly clear from the outside of the fic that “complete” in this case doesn’t mean the full story is there. It just means that the work has finished.

It’s our responsibility as authors who are sharing our works to make sure those works reach the right audience as best we can. This is part of that.