ugghhhhhhhh

[human_veil]

all this crossposting recently has once again brought up the question of what the hell do you do with fic that no longer sparks joy? deleting feels like a waste but orphaning gives up too much control. i have, like, 150 fics published on anon right now but even then, that doesn't feel right, either? i tried making a secondary account once just for stuff i no longer vibed with but ended up transferring everything back.

i've been writing fic since i was 10? 11? and the things written from roughly age 14 onwards exist somewhere on ao3. i'll be the first to admit that a lot of it is Not Good, but a lot of it means something to me in one way or another, so the idea of getting rid of it makes me feel :/ despite the fact that i can't really look at it without cringing. some of it got really popular, too, and to this day i still receive kind comments on some of the x-men stuff, so it's one of those things where it's like, i want it to exist so they can enjoy it? but also oh god don't make me look at it. i don't know!

Comments

[fiachairecht]

ughhhhhh if you figure it out let me know!!! i have in true kimara fashion been putting off all crossposting til i can decide (lmao) and it is unfortunately rapidly getting to the point where not crossposting is making me feel worse than making a choice.

i think at the very least i'll turn off comments on them (whether on ao3 or dw) so people can still read them but i don't get the reminderTM that people are reading them.

[kat_lair]

The above suggestion about turning comments off for the ones you don't want to think about anymore is probably the best option. My view is... I've put the fic out to the world. It sparked joy when I wrote it and I hope it continues to spark joy to readers for years to come, beyond that I don't need to worry about it. Writing is a skill that improves, regardless of what age you were when you wrote your first thing, the next thing will be better, and the next still, and the next... I guess, I'm not that worried about it still being out there. Comments and kudos are nice but at the end of the day I'm not writing fic for judgement of others, I'm writing it for my own enjoyment and maybe for a couple of close friends. This is probably supremely unhelpful but my advice is simple either orphan it, or just let it be, don't look at it, turn comments off so you don't have to interact with anyone about them and let them be. <3

[maraudersaffair]

For my older stuff, I just think about how there are prob ppl out there who still read it/enjoy it, even if I don't appreciate it anymore, but it's all up to you <3

[out_there]

I'm a big believer in leaving it up. You never know which not-great-story-that-I-could-write-better-now is actually someone's secret guilty indulgence or the story that really spoke to them at a particular time.

If it's the kudos/comments notifications, I'd set up a rule in your email to send them all to a folder and mark as read. Then you don't have to *see* them but if you ever do want the ego boost of replying to comments left on older things, you can always go through the folder and see them then.

[sarken]

I did two things with my older stuff. The less-old fic that I can actually stand to look at I put on my main AO3 account and tagged "Juvenilia," and some (but not all) of the really old stuff put it on a separate AO3 account, with comments turned off.

However, I'm not sure the oldest fic I archived really means anything to me, which probably makes the secondary account approach easier. I treated it as an exercise in preservation -- I even kept the old school disclaimers and absolutely cringe-worthy notes as a record of how we used to do things, because a lot from that era (Tripod, Yahoo! Groups, Usenet) is lost.