New HP fic

[pauraque_bk]

Two Februaries (1328 words) by pauraque
Rating: General Audiences
Relationships: Cho Chang/Harry Potter
Summary: The second time Harry and Cho sit down together on Valentine's Day is twenty-five years after the first.

Hey, look, it's my first HP fic in a couple of years[1]! When thimble_kiss mentioned she liked Harry/Cho, I had a vague idea of writing some for her, and when I saw on the Lexicon that JKR had mentioned Cho married a Muggle, this all popped into my head fully-formed.

How do you guys feel about links to AO3? Do you click on them, or are you more likely to read something if it's here (DW/LJ)? I know for me, for a while I didn't really know what AO3 was and when I clicked on links I was like, wait, where are you taking me, I don't want to go to some other site, backbutton! But maybe it was just me. I see people doing different things in terms of where they're posting, so I'm not sure what the typical way is these days.


[1] Strictly speaking, there was my wizard_love fic before this, but I can't show you that yet. wizard_love's started posting, by the way!

This entry was originally posted at http://pauraque.dreamwidth.org/18824.html. Comment here or there.

Comments

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I'm more likely to read things on LJ if they're one-shots. If it's a chaptered fic or is longer than 8K words, I'm more likely to read on AO3 just because there aren't multiple posts involved. Also, it's easy to DL a long fic from AO3 as a mobi file and put it on my kindle for very portable reading. I tend to read longs fic on my Kindle these days.

AO3 seems to be the norm in some fandoms and not so much in others. My HP fics don't get a lot of hits over there, but with the Sherlock stuff it's just the opposite.

[pauraque]

Thank makes sense. I hadn't even thought about people downloading to Kindle. I've noticed a tendency for newer fandoms to adopt newer methods of fanwork-dissemination, just like HP adopted LJ when they were both new (rather than mailing lists, which were the style at the time for older fandoms).

[leni-jess.livejournal.com]

Longer stuff is much easier on AO3.

But if fic'll fit in an LJ post, I don't much care where people put it. Given a choice (as a lot of people do with their fics now)... depends how I feel on the day.

I'm cautious of strange destinations too, but I've learned to trust AO3 over the last few years (the first, when yuletide and smutty_claus collided, it was a test of stamina to get in, but it's pretty smooth now). As EG says, AO3 makes downloading for portables very easy these days. Though I still do a primitive C&P to a Word doc!

[pauraque]

I wasn't thinking about the convenience of not breaking up a long fic, probably because I've never written a piece of fanfiction that couldn't fit in an LJ post! It makes sense.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

♥

I'm not really reluctant to follow AO3 links any longer, if it's something I otherwise love to read, but I am probably still more likely to click on something that's posted on LJ. Then again, I'd probably pick AO3 over DW.

There's no good reason except that HP fandom on LJ still feels more homey; I know the majority of the names I see around even though I may never have had any interactions with them, and I'm familiar and comfortable with the commenting culture here. I'm definitely more likely to leave a comment on LJ, whereas on AO3 or DW I still feel shy.

The AO3 interface is quite good, but I do need to find a skin with wider margins around the text on the actual fic page. I can't read wide columns of text very easily, so that's one reason I prefer LJ where I can easily use style=mine on anything lengthy I want to read.

[pauraque]

I didn't warm up to AO3 until I was forced to use it for Yuletide, which I assume was their evil plan. :P But the fact is it's a pretty cool site with a lot of useful features, and not 'just another archive', so any resentment at the obvious manipulation was hard to maintain!

For me DW seems just like LJ, because a lot of the same people are there, though I have met new people there too. AO3 is understandably less social because it's primarily an archive, but I have met a few people by reading their fic and seeing if they were on LJ, where I might not have found them through LJ alone. A lot of people have complained about there not being as much of a culture of feedback on AO3, many people reading passively, but I always see that kind of complaint as a challenge... I try to comment instead of kudos, it feels more personal to me. And if people leave me a comment or kudos, I go to their page and see what they've written.

I think there's a way to make your own skins for reading AO3, but I don't know how to do it yet. For me the margins are fine, but I don't like the default font they've got.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

I do like the concept of a large, flexible, multi-fandom archive run by fans with a focus on long-term stability. That is an awesome idea. So I really do want to make use of AO3, and I figure I'll warm up to the social side of it by and by.

It just doesn't seem to me that the corner of HP fandom I hang out in — trio-generation rarepairs, mostly — is very willing to make use of DW, so it feels pretty lonesome over there. Whenever LJ does something that has the site in uproar, what I read on my friends page tends to be 'I like it here, I'm not moving'. But I could no doubt be a lot more proactive about DW friending and commenting, in order to liven things up on my reading page.

[pauraque]

It might be that the people I know in HP are more resentful of LJ because they tend to be slashers, and the kind of slashers who were members/readers of pornish_pixies, so strikethrough affected them more directly and felt like a bigger attack. As it happens, I was not using LJ at all at the time that stuff happened, so I didn't feel the full impact of those events myself. But for a lot of people I know, all their trust in LJ was broken then, so that might be why they're more eager to jump ship.

I guess the question I still have about DW is not whether it's a good site, but whether the time for LJ-like platforms has simply passed. Fandom seems to be congregating on Tumblr now, which is a site I truly can't stand, so I'm in no danger of leaving to go there, but it makes me wonder. LJ-based fandom is clearly not what it once was, and DW, as far as I know, gets most of its customer base from people fleeing LJ, so at some point that potential pool of customers will run out. Are there any people who are *new* to fandom who are just starting out on LJ or DW?