Open to the floor - Headers/tagging
Jun. 28th, 2009 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wilderthanSeveral new things I want to do with my ficjournal! This is probably boring and so on but I'm in hope of making my fic more accessible and more accurately labelled, so it'll help you in the end, I promise! The first two sections explain what I've done and why; if you're not interested, skip to the poll section where I'll link some examples of the new headers and you can tell me how you feel about it.
Header
First, I'm rolling out a new header. So far, it's only been put on fics that I can edit on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal at the same time, on the first page of my Dreamwidth journal. Eventually it'll get to all of the nearly three thousand fics I have written. So far, I'm just trying to figure out what exactly is best to cover all newsletter requirements, and provide accurate information to everyone. To that end, I've added two "character" sections -- "main characters" and "referenced characters", so now I can make it absolutely clear who is involved in a fic.
I was also contemplating changing my method of warnings slightly, after I read this post on Dreamwidth, which says, among other things:
Which bothers me. That isn't my motive in putting kink under "warnings" at all. My actual feeling is more along the lines of, "Some people don't like this stuff, so I'm going to warn them in advance that it's present in my fic." This might be fairly clear to some people, maybe only a couple of people actually think this is an issue, but I'm going to put a poll in at the end of this post, to see what you think. One idea would be to still have warnings, which would be stuff like angst, death, incest, noncon, sap, smut: the big general warnings. Then I'd have a "kinks" section -- maybe not called that -- with stuff like BDSM, breathplay, knifeplay.
The trouble is deciding what I'm going to call that section, and what would fall into it. For example, where would "AU" fall? Some people don't feel that's something that should be warned for, others do. "Genderswitch"? Some people would call that a kink, others would say it needs to be warned for.
There's obviously a third option, and that's changing "warnings" to something less loaded. "What to expect", maybe. I feel kind of biased towards this kind of solution, partly because of how much reworking of old headers is going to be involved. For now, this is what I've done. There is an issue then of what I write when there are no warnings, etc. For now I'm going with "n/a", but if you have a better suggestion...
Tagging
In my previous tagging system, my fics were tagged by pairing or character. I've decided I would prefer it if fics were tagged by pairing and character, and there's no better time to do this than when I'm already editing my whole journal. The characters in the tags will be the "main characters" from the header, not "referenced characters".
Then, of course, I worry about the fate of anyone trying to search my journal for non-pairing fic. An answer occurs! I will now also tag fics with no pairing in them with "no pairing". That doesn't help them incredibly if they're searching for non-pairing fic in a certain fandom, but it would still narrow things down for them.
I am also thinking about an overhaul of my tagging for arcs and multi-chapters. Eventually, I'm going to hit the tag limit, and this makes it that much more likely. I think it will be better if I make index posts of the chapters, and link to it in each chapter -- as I did with arcs in the first place. Also, I am not overly sure what real difference I intended to make between arcs and multi-chapters, but it hasn't really happened, so all things will be tagged with the same thing. The chapters/parts will all be tagged with "multi-chapter", the indices will be tagged with "index" and "multi-chapter".
I also want to do something about my "very vague smut" and "smut" tags. I might rename it to "sex" and let the rating speak for the vagueness or otherwise. Let me know what you think.
I think that covers everything specific I wanted to do with tags. However, in the poll I'll provide a section for you to suggest anything you'd like me to tag by that I don't already (e.g. "incest").
Unfortunately for people on Dreamwidth, you have to go here to vote on LiveJournal.
Header
First, I'm rolling out a new header. So far, it's only been put on fics that I can edit on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal at the same time, on the first page of my Dreamwidth journal. Eventually it'll get to all of the nearly three thousand fics I have written. So far, I'm just trying to figure out what exactly is best to cover all newsletter requirements, and provide accurate information to everyone. To that end, I've added two "character" sections -- "main characters" and "referenced characters", so now I can make it absolutely clear who is involved in a fic.
I was also contemplating changing my method of warnings slightly, after I read this post on Dreamwidth, which says, among other things:
BDSM -- So here we come to it. There I've been talking about death and rape and child abuse and then all of a sudden...here's something that is an integral part of my sexuality being comapred [sic] with those three things. Somehow fandom has decided that a form of consensual sex needs to be warned for, like it was the same as death or rape or child abuse.
Which bothers me. That isn't my motive in putting kink under "warnings" at all. My actual feeling is more along the lines of, "Some people don't like this stuff, so I'm going to warn them in advance that it's present in my fic." This might be fairly clear to some people, maybe only a couple of people actually think this is an issue, but I'm going to put a poll in at the end of this post, to see what you think. One idea would be to still have warnings, which would be stuff like angst, death, incest, noncon, sap, smut: the big general warnings. Then I'd have a "kinks" section -- maybe not called that -- with stuff like BDSM, breathplay, knifeplay.
The trouble is deciding what I'm going to call that section, and what would fall into it. For example, where would "AU" fall? Some people don't feel that's something that should be warned for, others do. "Genderswitch"? Some people would call that a kink, others would say it needs to be warned for.
There's obviously a third option, and that's changing "warnings" to something less loaded. "What to expect", maybe. I feel kind of biased towards this kind of solution, partly because of how much reworking of old headers is going to be involved. For now, this is what I've done. There is an issue then of what I write when there are no warnings, etc. For now I'm going with "n/a", but if you have a better suggestion...
Tagging
In my previous tagging system, my fics were tagged by pairing or character. I've decided I would prefer it if fics were tagged by pairing and character, and there's no better time to do this than when I'm already editing my whole journal. The characters in the tags will be the "main characters" from the header, not "referenced characters".
Then, of course, I worry about the fate of anyone trying to search my journal for non-pairing fic. An answer occurs! I will now also tag fics with no pairing in them with "no pairing". That doesn't help them incredibly if they're searching for non-pairing fic in a certain fandom, but it would still narrow things down for them.
I am also thinking about an overhaul of my tagging for arcs and multi-chapters. Eventually, I'm going to hit the tag limit, and this makes it that much more likely. I think it will be better if I make index posts of the chapters, and link to it in each chapter -- as I did with arcs in the first place. Also, I am not overly sure what real difference I intended to make between arcs and multi-chapters, but it hasn't really happened, so all things will be tagged with the same thing. The chapters/parts will all be tagged with "multi-chapter", the indices will be tagged with "index" and "multi-chapter".
I also want to do something about my "very vague smut" and "smut" tags. I might rename it to "sex" and let the rating speak for the vagueness or otherwise. Let me know what you think.
I think that covers everything specific I wanted to do with tags. However, in the poll I'll provide a section for you to suggest anything you'd like me to tag by that I don't already (e.g. "incest").
Unfortunately for people on Dreamwidth, you have to go here to vote on LiveJournal.
