Beat your breasts, maidens, and rend your tunics.
There once was an archive for Yuletide
and when it died every other fool cried
stop thief
in erroneous belief
that their fics were about to go worldwide


Background:

Yuletide archived their 2009 fics at the OTW's new "archive of our own" (A3O or AO3). The old Yuletide archive is falling apart and to preserve the stories there the worker bees are planning to bring the old stories over and upload them to the new archive. They haven't done it yet because Yuletide just finished, family likes to see one during the holidays, and exhaustion has set in. Word from on high is that AO3 will do their best to track down authors and let them know about the move and give them the option to have their name removed from the story (orphaning it) or to have the story removed. Removing stories is considered uncool. The Yuletide entry rules explain that the stories submitted are there to be preserved for everyone's enjoyment and ask that you orphan a story instead of having it taken down from the archive.


Set up:

redbrunja doesn't understand why asking about OTW and AO3 on the Yuletide discussion boards is off topic. She fails to understand no matter how carefully it is explained to her that there other places she can discuss AO3 or OTW. She still thinks it should be considered on topic, because she would consider it on topic if she were a mod. This is like a beautiful marriage of a strawman and a slippery slope.

"You know, I am really not pleased about the Yuletide mods' policy of silence about the move to the A03. Especially since they have a policy of silence about their policy of silence."

eta: dammit redbrunja disabled comments, but galateus to the rescue with a screencap here.

franzeska tries to explain the history of wanky issues related to OTW. redbrunja doesn't agree. Whatever. Differing opinions and all is well and good. On we march.

Until merricatk shows up to tell everyone they don't like her and she knows she is basically just dirt under their shoes. I debated about whether or not this was funny. It could go either way. I see her behaviour as monumentally passive aggressive, but ymmv. She posts a hand wringer in her own LJ about how she is always marginalized in every group she ever joins and they just want her stories and never want to be her friends. O_O

merricatk: "I don't care about OTW one way or the other. What I feel strongly about is having my story moved to what seems to be a more public place without my even being informed about it.

I'm trying to limit my fannish activity and make my fiction less public. This move seems to be the antithesis of that.

If looking after my best interests instead of hoping someone else will do it for me makes me a classless jerkass, that's fine with me. I don't see it as anything to be embarrassed about.

wordsofastory: The reason no one has contacted you is because it has not begun. Yuletide 2009 just happened, the mods are still dealing with/recovering from that; there is no current activity going on with the older stories. The movement of old Yuletide stories to the new AO3 archive is a future plan. When it happens, every effort will be made to contact not just you, but all the authors involved.

You're not being left out, because nothing has happened yet. That would be obvious if.


But no one can seem to make merricatk happy about her story being moved to the Yultide comm at AO3. She wants to take it down and doesn't seem to think the rules for the exchange should apply to her now that the archive is changing from one website to another one.

merrycatk wrote one NYR story 5 years ago and that's what she is concerned about. She posts in her lj.

"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."

Most of her friend commiserate. And here is where it gets juicy.

: "I think AO3 defenders are bizarre. They are basically getting behind a group of people who want to academicize and homogenize fanfic. To put it plainly: OTW is a bunch of people who couldn't cut it as 18th century literature junior faculty, so they're basically trying to invent this new "transformative works" field on which to hang their academic ambitions. I firmly believe that these people are trying to use fans to get ahead (a la their rival Laura Hale). They might put a nicer spin on it--protecting fandom, preserving works, creating some big monumental archive that will legitimize fanfiction--but what they're doing is just another example of career-jockeying. Sure, they're not profiting off of AO3--not monetarily. But there are other ways of profiting. So I sort of can't believe that anyone would voluntarily hand over their stuff to AO3. I mean, you're basically saying, "Yes, make me your dissertation project."

tzikeh responds: I could understand if you didn't like, or want to participate in OTW, if your own personal philosophy conflicts with the OTW's philosophy, but you are astoundingly uninformed--and willfully ignorant.

Have you bothered read the Who We Are section of the OTW site? That's a rhetorical question, since the answer is clear. The board is made up of WILDLY successful people--a Professor of Law at Georgetown who clerked for the Supreme Court; a Director of Film Studies and Professor of English at Muhlenberg; an MBA and CPA who worked for the U.S. Senate; and the woman who wrote the open-source code that has been the base for nearly every fannish archive that was created after she wrote it--oh, and a little something called the New York Times best-selling Temeraire series.

Yeah, they're all clearly people who couldn't cut it as 18th-century literature junior faculty."

salvidar_as says "Yes, I've read the OTW site. I'm aware of the resumes of these so-called academics. I'm aware that they haven't produced academically sound or particularly rigorous work (I've read it). I've also read the academic journal. And it's bad. I am not willfully ignorant; these people are hacks."

tzikeh calls SOCKPUPPET!

salvidar_as "What a bizarre little post. I don't really owe you anything--no explanation, no social security number or CV. I don't need a biography to qualify my point of view. I don't think that one post in a person's personal journal qualifies as a "teabagging" movement--did you check your IQ at the door?

What's clear to me--and what's becoming increasingly clear to me--is that you AO3 people are absolutely insane. Everyone is apparently required to get on board the OTW train, and anyone who questions the academic merit of such a project (and yes, there are questions of merit--large ones) is a teabagger or a bully or a sockpuppet. Good job furthering the negative perceptions of the OTW fear-mongering machine. You're making Laura Hale look sane and lucid, and I didn't think that was possible.

I could write a lengthy response as to why OTW's academic journal is, well, kind of a joke (and OTW is regarded as a joke in most academic circles--you probably don't need me to tell you that ... or maybe you do), but I don't think that merritcatk actually intended this post for such purposes. If you want to defend OTW's academic purpose (ha), you have your choice of wank threads already in full swing.

Obviously, if OTW's reputation as a serious academic venture were truly unassailable, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because you wouldn't have to defend the organization against an insignificant, anonymous teabagger like me with my big lies and misinformation. But what I said must have hit a note. Oh my."

tzikeh: I still say sockpuppet is you.

salvidar_as "Okay, good luck defending the organization of scooby doo studies. Bye."


This end does not satisfying tzikeh so she makes a post in her lj. "because she has fucking had it" and the discussion is just about clarifying and not very wanky--although possibly interesting when liviapenn shows up and clarifies a few issues.

OH ETA: melodyclark is here to show us all that even older women like to wank like horny thirteen year olds, but if she doesn't give it a rest I'm worried she's going to go blind, develop hairy palms, AND come down with a raging case of carpal tunnel syndrome.

thanks to inquisition for the heads up.

eta 3.1415 The abyss is looking into us... and it's fucking stupid. :D

bonus lulz: tzikeh point out to me that melodyclark tried to edit her fanlore page.



On January 8, 2010 she edited her page to read:

"Melody does not exist. She is a figment of your imagination. So long and thanks for all the fiche."

It used to say:

"Melody wrote her first fan story in 1978, and started participating fannishly online in the early 90's, as an early member of Virgule. She is still in fandom and her fan fic site is at http://melodyclark.net and also on FanFiction.net[1]. However, in 2009 she announced she would no longer be publishing her fan fiction on the Internet for free, choosing instead to work with print fanzines exclusively. This came after a fan offered a not-completely positive review of her Holmes/Watson story "Akin to Love" which had appeared twenty years before in the print zine No Holds Barred #1.[2] [3] She made a similar online exit in 2007. [4]
Her zines

Melody Clark's Blake's 7 and Wiseguy novels are now published by Mysti Frank (agentwithstyle.com). Judith Proctor publishes the Blake's 7 novels that Judith herself reedited and republished as the initial published version was fraught with errors. Kathy Resch publishes Melody's Dark Shadows Grayson Hall zine as well as the award-winning Fire and Ice issue #1 which Melody co-edited with Kathy. Melody now writes in various other fandoms. In the early 2000s she briefly published fanzines under the name The M Press and distributed them via Mysti Frank. In 2009 she created the Media Fen website with the goal of offering fanzine publishers a location to advertise their zines.[5] "

Amazing someone can flounce over and over and not get it--like a sad rat in a maze who keeps zapping herself instead of avoiding the electrified cheese. Cheese is delicious though.