And note that I mark only *exceptionally* well-written - emphasis on the exceptionally. So much of whether a fic is written well (besides the obvious SPAG quality) slots under YMMV, so I couldn't get more granular than "these fics have an extra wow factor in the way they're written, to me". Many of the other fics are quite well-written, they just didn't have the wow factor. So I just figure people will have to read and decide what they think is well-written or not, but there is a minimum personal tolerance of writing quality, as I put it, lol. Below that I don't bother to save a fic. (The other reason some fics aren't saved has to do with ships or themes present in them, but I've rejected far more fics for my database due to poor writing quality than for ships or themes I don't care for. That might change with some fandoms, though! I don't always like the most popular ship.)
I gave up on AO3 a long time ago because I had so many fics from so many places - LJ, Tumblr, old sites that may or may not exist only in the Wayback Machine, lol, etc. - and I didn't see an easy way to organize all the fics in one spot. Not only that, but the other sites generally have poor to nonexistent tagging systems (ff.n's is anemic compared to AO3, and that's the best of the others that I can think of). And even the fic on AO3 has very inconsistent tagging because everyone's tagging methods are idiosyncratic. Someone might mark Choose Not to Warn for a major character death and yet *I* want to have that noted in my organization!
So the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed my own database to make things easy to find and more consistently tagged. (I was having the trouble of "what was that one where X happens" and an author/title organizational system does NOT help with finding fics like that!) So I taught myself how to build a database (with lots of help from volunteers on the OpenOffice forums) and built one. It's only been in the past year or two that I've been experimenting with creating recs posts from it, and have some awesome SQL queries that will pull fics with all manner of combinations of restrictions on fandoms, major ships, characters, themes, etc. Currently I've got over 1700 fics in the database and that's only the beginning - there are soooo many larger fandoms I want to add eventually, like the LOTR and Narnia and L&C and SV fics I have saved. (Another bonus is I can put in the link to the saved fic on my hard drive so I can launch a fic from the database itself.) I'd be farther except the Yahoo Groups project's been sucking up all my free time. *sigh*
Yeah, organizing by time works for several of the fandom posts I have up (so I'm posting new posts that will give readers the option of "how do I want to browse the fics"), but I realized for Fried Green Tomatoes, it didn't make much sense, so I won't be posting that fandom by time/length as well. I'll play it by ear, I guess. For longer fics where I put them tends to be the jumping off point - a lot of them diverge from canon then - and *how* I categorize time depends on the fandom as well. For a TV show like FBI, for instance, I generally have fics by episode, a general S1, a post-S1, etc., an AU category (for fics that diverge before the show begins in some way), and so on. And I always have an "indeterminate" one for fics that aren't necessarily located in a specific time, and "multi" for ones that span multiple times (ficlet collections or "five times this happened" fit into that). It tends to work out pretty well. But for something like LOTR (which I have not added to the db yet except for a tiny handful of crossovers), I'd group things more like First Age, Second Age, Third Age pre-Ring War, Third Age during Ring War, Third Age post-Ring War, Fourth Age & beyond, etc. With Push (a sci-fi film) I set the time categories as pre-film, during film, post-film (within the first year after), future (several years or more after the film), and of course the AU and multi and indeterminate that I end up using for just about every fandom. I generally don't have much trouble with finding a spot for each fic.
no subject
I gave up on AO3 a long time ago because I had so many fics from so many places - LJ, Tumblr, old sites that may or may not exist only in the Wayback Machine, lol, etc. - and I didn't see an easy way to organize all the fics in one spot. Not only that, but the other sites generally have poor to nonexistent tagging systems (ff.n's is anemic compared to AO3, and that's the best of the others that I can think of). And even the fic on AO3 has very inconsistent tagging because everyone's tagging methods are idiosyncratic. Someone might mark Choose Not to Warn for a major character death and yet *I* want to have that noted in my organization!
So the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed my own database to make things easy to find and more consistently tagged. (I was having the trouble of "what was that one where X happens" and an author/title organizational system does NOT help with finding fics like that!) So I taught myself how to build a database (with lots of help from volunteers on the OpenOffice forums) and built one. It's only been in the past year or two that I've been experimenting with creating recs posts from it, and have some awesome SQL queries that will pull fics with all manner of combinations of restrictions on fandoms, major ships, characters, themes, etc. Currently I've got over 1700 fics in the database and that's only the beginning - there are soooo many larger fandoms I want to add eventually, like the LOTR and Narnia and L&C and SV fics I have saved. (Another bonus is I can put in the link to the saved fic on my hard drive so I can launch a fic from the database itself.) I'd be farther except the Yahoo Groups project's been sucking up all my free time. *sigh*
Yeah, organizing by time works for several of the fandom posts I have up (so I'm posting new posts that will give readers the option of "how do I want to browse the fics"), but I realized for Fried Green Tomatoes, it didn't make much sense, so I won't be posting that fandom by time/length as well. I'll play it by ear, I guess. For longer fics where I put them tends to be the jumping off point - a lot of them diverge from canon then - and *how* I categorize time depends on the fandom as well. For a TV show like FBI, for instance, I generally have fics by episode, a general S1, a post-S1, etc., an AU category (for fics that diverge before the show begins in some way), and so on. And I always have an "indeterminate" one for fics that aren't necessarily located in a specific time, and "multi" for ones that span multiple times (ficlet collections or "five times this happened" fit into that). It tends to work out pretty well. But for something like LOTR (which I have not added to the db yet except for a tiny handful of crossovers), I'd group things more like First Age, Second Age, Third Age pre-Ring War, Third Age during Ring War, Third Age post-Ring War, Fourth Age & beyond, etc. With Push (a sci-fi film) I set the time categories as pre-film, during film, post-film (within the first year after), future (several years or more after the film), and of course the AU and multi and indeterminate that I end up using for just about every fandom. I generally don't have much trouble with finding a spot for each fic.