Ravings of an emotionally unstable fan.

[merricatk]

So, I heard it through the grapevine that all of the yuletide stories are being moved to A3O. I don't move in that circle, so everything I know comes secondhand. I've only ever written one story that's on the yuletide website, a NYR story. It was a whim, and I was still thinking that fandom might work for me.

This was several years ago. There was nothing bad about the experience.

Since then I've come to a few realizations about myself. One of them is, I was born, and will probably die, an outsider. I don't fit. Sometimes, for short periods, with certain groups, I can be part of the in-crowd. But I always ask the wrong questions, the ones nobody else thinks of. I always cause trouble, and I need way too much down time from people, and I'm way, way too needy.

The movers and shakers of fandom don't want to answer my questions, they don't want to be bothered with my moodiness, and they certainly don't want to cater to my needs, which are emotional in nature.

They do want my stories. I've had more than one offer to archive my stories, and I've said yes more than once because of my neediness. I thought the offer to "work with me" on putting my stories online meant they wanted to spend some time with me. What I found out was that except of approving a layout and emailing the stories, I was now extraneous to the whole process. So I've put my stories back in my pocket and am (slowly) posting them on my LJ.

Now the yuletide stories are being moved to what I, in my infinite ignorance, consider to be a potentially more public venue, which I'm not comfortable with. (Why do I see it as being more public? Because it's supposed to be easier to find things there, because it has been so publicized and so has yuletide. Am I wrong about this? Everyone says so.)

It's also being run by movers and shakers--things always are; they're the ones who run things, they have the temperament for it, it's nothing against them. But I'm not comfortable with them. And I'm in a position of either letting them take my story and be quiet while put it wherever they want it--without, so far, them saying a word to me about it; or taking my story back and have people call me names.

Or I can orphan my story by taking my name off of it.

I wish they weren't using the word orphan. It's too poetic, it puts to sharp a point on the abandonment, it makes me feel terrible. I have abandonment issues. Call me a thief for taking my story back and I can deal with it. Say I'm making my story an orphan, I'll cry.

And I wish they weren't telling me again that I can go--just leave the story. Because I already know I'm extraneous, except for the stories.

I'm perfectly aware that I'm completely wrong about all of this, but being told how wrong I am is only going to push me harder into putting this story in my pocket, too. I'm perfectly aware that my feelings--and all this is nothing but my feelings--are indefensible. But I don't like it when the powerful people come and tell me how unreasonable I am not to want to do things their way. Not ask, just tell.

I can live with being disliked, considered a screwball, or an angry, shitty, classless, selfish jerkass, and I can live with people believing the lie that I'm doing this because I hate OTW and/or A3O. I can live with the whole rest of the world considering me irrational.

Comments

(frozen)

[franzeska]

You know, for what it's worth, I don't think that deleting a NYR story is classless or much of anything else. The main yuletide exchange is about agreeing to give a particular person a present and agreeing that it can't be deleted later. (I have no strong opinion on people deleting their fic in general or keeping it private or whatever else. This is a common topic of flamewars, but it is not why some of us are annoyed about people deleting yuletide fics in particular.) I think it's tacky and disrespectful to take advantage of a technicality* in the rules to delete those stories, but NYR stories aren't written in the same context and don't have that same understanding attached to them. I certainly hope people will choose to leave theirs up (with their original names, with sanitized pseudonyms that can't be traced back to their normal ones, anonymously, etc.), but I don't view it as a faux pas to take those down.

I'm sorry about the 'orphaning' term. I don't think it occurred to any of us that it would upset people, and it never came up in the public discussions of the ToS. (Which is not to say that it never bothered anyone else, just that they never mentioned it if it did.) It's used instead of 'anonymous'/'anonymity'/etc. because those are reserved on the AO3 for situations where a creator's name is temporarily obscured (like it would be for yuletide).

(Uh, and I hope it goes without saying that I speak for myself, not for the OTW/AO3 unless I'm saying something like "Here's the link to the ToS" or stating what official policy is. The official policy on yuletide stories is that you'll be allowed to delete once the move happens. My views on ettiquette really don't enter into it.)

* If the yuletide mods had decided to somehow fix the archive infrastructure and not move the exchange, no one would be allowed to delete at all, but their fics would still be quite public and would be getting moreso year by year. It's only because of the move that the option for deletion has come up at all. Hence my view that it's a technicality.