Satisfy my curiosity

[salinea]

So am I the only one who, when someone casually mentions deleting their old fics or making them unaccessible in any other way has this reaction in her mind :

OH MY GOD YOU EVIL BOOK-BURNING PERSON !!!


I mean, obviously, I doesn't make much sense : we're talking about the authors of those fics. If they're the intellectual owner of that work, they should be perfectly morally allowed to make it unaccessible.

However there's still that thing in the back of my brain that insists : IT'S LIKE BURNING BOOKS ! EVIL ! EVIL ! EVIL !

Am I the only one ?

Comments

[indigestible.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, I don't know if you are the only one, but given that I do that all the time, I obviously don't feel the same way. It's more like throwing out yesterday's paper to me, you know? That's over and done with and I don't need it around anymore, so good-bye!

[xochiquetzl]

I don't know about that, but I don't delete my old fic. I would feel like I was erasing my own history, or something.

Some people email archives and ask for all their fic to be removed when they leave the fandom. That's just wrong, IMHO. Your old fic is a gift to the fandom; it's part of their history, too.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeah I remember it was with you I first encountered that feeling

- "say where's that lovely Subaru and Hokuto masturbating ficlet you wrote two monthes ago ?"
- "Oh, I deleted it."
- "YOU WHAT ?" *sound of jaw hitting the floor*

I guess I might be compulsive about keeping everything. I keep very ugly old drawings I was doing when I was 14, for exemple >_>; I'd feel bad about throwing them away... like I would loose a part of myself that I could never find otherwise.

[rainmage.livejournal.com]

Not when the thing I deleted was a Mary Sue story from 2001. *shudders*

But apart from that... agreed.

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Well, I do have to say I don't get it. I've saved everything I've ever written (fiction, I mean), even if it was crap, because I put time and effort into it. It may be hiding out in a file at the bottom of a box stuffed in my storage locker where no one will see it ever, but I can't just throw it away!

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's close to my feeling.

There's this whole idea that once you published a fanfic on the web, it's not yours to touch anymore. If you're the only one who's ever seen what you wrote, it doesn't shock me if you delete your own work. But once it's published, it's done. It's out there. Free for all. It feels unfair to take it back.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

But it's cheating to delete it, isn't it ? Like lying : Oh, now I never wrote such a thing, lets hide all the evidences of guilt ;)

[stoicstella.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I have the same compulsion as you, but I don't understand deleting your old fiction. I have taken some of my old stuff down from archives in hopes of reworking it, and left it on my computer because I didn't feel it was worth sharing anymore, but I kept it. I still have a drawer full of the writing I did in junior high. They are reminders of how I have grown as a writer, even if I would die of embarrassment if anyone ever read them.

[xochiquetzl]

Well, I have removed things from archives that did things I didn't like. But I don't go back and rewrite my old fic to make it better; that feels like a lie. I released the story the other way. Nor do I pull it.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

*nods* that's the "part of my history" feeling xochiqutzl mentionned. I do the same, really.

[rainmage.livejournal.com]

Well, not really, because I only published it in one place. :P

But it was a story it shouldn't have gotten out of my head. I didn't know that at the moment, though.

[indigestible.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right, but that's exactly why I throw away old things: I want to get rid of that old self. I mean, I burn old journals after I fill them. Not because I'm scared of other people finding them, but because they're done and I want to distance myself from them.

I think we have very different, er, approaches to life? XD

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Have you gone back and read some of it, like, the stuff you wrote when you were 14? I wrote some silly RPF when I was that age. And I won't tell you how long ago that was!

; )

[bronze-ribbons.livejournal.com]

To me, it cuts two ways: on the one hand, I feel a writer can edit/delete at will whatever they put on the net. If they feel they've outgrown a work or that it no longer represents how they want to be seen/the impression they want to give new readers, that's their prerogative.

On the other hand, any writer who believes they have full control over their work once it's posted is deluding themselves. For instance, I've deleted hundreds of online diary entries over the years (some because they were unkind to other people, others because they linked to expired memes, and many just because I figured, better to winnow the thing down to 300-odd entries that represent the best of me than leaving 1000+ no one's ever going to wade completely through, much less discover the best ones on their own).

Some people have called that dishonest, but screw that: I believe in editing and finetuning and revision, and I don't pretend that I don't do it. (One reason I'm soooo behind on archiving my fics to Moonshadow and Skyehawke is that I want to be sure I've got the "final" wording correct.)

That said, I know of at least one mirror site, and of people saving stuff to hard drives/printing it out, and LJ quotes entries in comment-notifications, so are there tons of Peg-wordage out there that I have no control over whatsoever? Of course, and that's as it should be. Writers can't control *how* readers interpret their work once it's out there, and those who try to prevent republication/circulation of older stuff (beyond making their opinions known) are to be pitied.

But getting back to fandom: one can't save *everything* to disk, but one sometimes makes a point of it for fics or RP episodes one really loves. Because, aside from authors disavowing earlier work and other emotional/intellectual mayhem, who knows when a server might go kablooey or someone fail to renew a domain or whatever? :-/

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

ah, youthful mistakes ^_^

I'm so happy I didn't know about fanfics at the time when I had all those Mary Sues running around in my head. Them and their multi-coloured eyes and super-powered magicks. *nostalgic*

[theladyfeylene.livejournal.com]

No, I'm the same way. Which is why, even though a lot of my old fics are pure crap, I don't delete them off the net. The only one I've ever taken off line is one that had an extremely original premise that I decided I wanted to use for an original novella.

[lefcadio.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it's hard. On the one hand... I don't like the idea of other people doing it - because if I've read a fic and liked it, and then it suddenly disappears, I feel cheated! :p
But... on the other hand, I do understand because I've done it myself. There have been things I wrote a long time ago, and when I looked back on them... they were awful. They really were. So, I deleted them, because I honestly couldn't see that they had enough merit to be worth keeping.
I think I've reached a point now, though, where I wouldn't delete anything - since I don't think my writing is currently so hideously bad I'd look back on it and want to get rid of it.

But... in general, I don't like the thought of getting rid of things - it can be fun to look back on old fics just as a matter of interest! :) I only did it to my own because it was things I wrote when I was quite young, and the childishness of it was quite far removed from the point I'm at now.

...or something. :p

[xochiquetzl]

I think of it as being like a Gnu Public License, in a way. You can save it to your hard drive. You can send your friend the link, and she can save it to her hard drive. I don't want people to sell it. I don't want people to put it on their website and say they wrote it. I don't want people to archive it without asking, because I think that archiving is, in a sense, an endorsement. But I think that's common; people pull their fic from archives if the archive makes a policy change they don't like. At the very least, my giving an archive my fic means that I trust them to not disappear or strip my name off and sell it.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I guess so XD

I see the self like an onion. You build on old fundations, you cover it up, but it's still there, underneath it.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

From times to times... *cringes* yet at the same time I can't fully hate it.

I can be very narcissic ;)

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Yeap, you can't stop the signal ^^

My problem is I never save those kind of stuff. I always trust whatever website exists to stay there forever. I save links, and links to page that archive links. But not the stuff itself. How very naice of me ;_;

Thank God for Mirror Site. They're like the advanced alien civilization that records everything on the planet Earth and saves it for historical purpose.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah I can understand in this case.

[masqthephlsphr.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose if I were able to "fully hate" mine, I'd toss it, huh?

Truthfully, though, I have a small tender spot for my younger self. It's like throwing away something your kid wrote. I just can't do it.

; )

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

errors of youth, again ^^ There's things we definitly don't want our name to be attached to XD

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

I had lots of poetries from when I was in highschool on my computer, and then a virus totally wiped it away... I grieve that awfully, even if they were terrible and I'd never have shown them to anyone.