Et in Arcadia ego

[wombat1138]

I'm vaguely thinking about poking at "Arcadia" again. (For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's a bit of SW prequel fanfic I started a long, long time ago....) Every so often I feel guilty about blithely skipping away from her, but then I consider that I felt almost equally guilty about gearing up to start chapter 9 (esp. since the assorted draft bits were making it increasingly clear that it was not going to be the last chapter after all), and that I regarded it as some sort of Sign when fanfix.com (and my ficwriting laptop, for that matter) died shortly after I uploaded chapter 8.

In a way, I suppose I do share Jasper Fforde's view of fictional characters, wherein they possess an odd sort of immortality/limbo within the bounds of their narrative frame. If I turn my mind's eye in a certain direction, I can "see" her waiting for the fate to which she's resigned herself, not yet knowing about the headlong rush of Other Characters toward her or about the final duel which I wrote first, and is now older than some of the people I've been interacting with online.

Hell, I have Usenet posts older than some of the people I've been interacting with online. Maybe this is a Sign that I need to find a different set of interactions.

Does anyone have fic-archive suggestions of where to put "Arcadia"? I'm no longer in contact with most of the people who have her on their sites (assuming that they ever contacted me in the first place), my old homepage belongs to an ISP whose account we dropped about five years ago, and ff.n continues to suggest the alternate punctuation ff'n, and frankly I'm tempted to park her here within some LJ cuts if I can figure out how to keep her in chronological order. And pry her out of the Word files I managed to salvage, since I still haven't picked up a copy of Word for the replacement laptop.

Comments

[duncatra.livejournal.com]

Well... With fanfix gone, the major archive is at theforce.net. It doesn't take everything (no NC-17 or slash) but that doesn't affect Arcadia, from what I recall. It's also an acceptance-only archive, so they might try to beta you if they reject the story, which might be more trouble than it's worth. I'm not really sure what their standards are, honestly. I rarely go to the archive because there's a lot of bad fan art and it scares me. They only accept completed fics.

Almost all of the fanfic there seem to start as postings in the message boards, and you can gain quite a following. But they expect frequent updates.

There are several smaller sites built on the ffn template, mostly run by people pissed that they banned NC-17, but no real standouts for SW fandom.

Actually, doing it here on Livejournal might be the best idea... You'll have complete control, a minimum of MORE MORE MORE NOW NOW NOW posts, and the links stay stable. Even if you end up abandoning LJ, it's probably not gonna vanish anytime soon unless you go in and delete it.

That said, if you don't mind it residing among a ton of Luke/Mara crap, I can post it on Club Jade. I need to get back to work on the fanfic section (what I have so far), but I do plan to have an area for highlighted stories that aren't necessarily pairing or member stuff. We're the oldest archive now, scary as that may be.

[eeedge.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the bits of Arcadia that I read. I'd love to see you post it on-line where I can find it. I know a number of people also start special blogs for their fiction.

I've been trying to wrap my brain around the Fforde concept of characters. It always seems to make sense while I'm reading the books, but when I finish, I'm trying to get timelines and movements within the books straight.

Plus, I really really really hate the way Next doesn't fight against some of the publicists in her life.

Okay, it's been almost a month.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

We tap our toes in impatience. :-)