My Bookshelf Arrangements

I have the faint hope that this writing may either suggest organization methods to others, or explain my own system more perfectly to authors and other readers alike. Perhaps even both. Also, my OCD called and I could not but heed. If you want a quick reference to how to most efficiently use my shelves, just start at the top-left of my library and go from there. The first shelf in which a given story is found is the best indicator of just how good I found it. (Many stories show up in more than one shelf; some in as many as five.)

At any rate, long before the bookshelf update dropped I had a good idea of most of what I wanted, in three broad groups: stories I liked, stories I hadn't read yet, and stories I couldn't like as much as I wanted to.

The first group is presently satisfied by six shelves: Tracking, for stories I find tolerable and at least a little interesting (private, two stars); Nice (three stars), for stories that were fun to read; Recommended (four stars), for stories that are rather good, about 35% of Nice; Highly Recommended (five stars), for stories that are excellent, about 30% of Recommended or 10% of Nice; and Pony Prose Perfection (!!! stars), for stories that are just ridiculously amazing, about 20% of Highly Recommended or 2.5% of Nice. There's also Pick-Me-Up as a sort of adjunct, with stories that are good at cheering me up, whether or not they're truly great.

The second group has expanded somewhat from its original outline of five. None of these are public, because come on guys I don't even know what's in those stories yet!
Dubious RIL: Potentially Bad Romance has unfinished stories in which the romantic (sub)plot might well mess the story up for me thoroughly; potentially lesbian stories qualify (potentially gay stories as well, but when was the last time you saw one of those?), along with various other sorts: a chance of TwiSpike, say, would just be weird, because of the nature of their existing relationship.
Dubious RIL: Interspecies Love — despite the name — is mostly human-pony relationships (or human-griffon), although some griffon-pony and dragon-pony stuff goes in; I'm not yet sure whether these are worth reading as a category, so it might get mass-purged in the future.
Dubious RIL: Dead, for fics that are incomplete and haven't updated in more than a year (or are on hiatus or canceled).
Dubious RIL: Misc is most of the other stories that look likely to turn out poorly-told for … whatever reason.
RIL: Waiting for More Completion is basically just stories that are too short to even try yet.
RIL: Great Expectations is for those I think will be really awesome. Unlisted, but not private.
RIL: Tough Going, for stories that seem likely to be hard to get through the middle of. Some of them might turn out well and some not.
Finally, Read It Later: Misc, for everything else.

The third group started out fairly simple, but has become much more complex by this point. Originally it was just Tough Going (applied to stories whether I'd read them or not), but since the update I've added Dropped Tiaras* for stories that could have made it all the way to Pony Prose Perfection if it hadn't been for an unfortunate and serious flaw in the storytelling. For example, a last-minute plot twist that shoves in some random sexuality and then ends, like It Takes a Village did in the epilogue. Then there's Cracked Glass for those that I couldn't even put in Nice because of the same sort of serious flaw, and Flawed Gems, which originally contained the first two but is now limited to those that might have been Recommended except for the part where they weren't. Later I added Tarnished Silver, for the analogous almost-Highly-Recommended-but-not-quite. Finally, there's Dubious Read Complete for completed fics when I am still unsure, after reading all the way through, whether I did or did not totally waste my time; this is currently private because it's pretty insulting, since it's a lot like Tracking except that the stories are already done.

The last two shelves aren't really part of any of those groups. One of them was in my plans from the beginning. It just marks stories I've proofread, although the lone entry on there is unfortunately one I choked on halfway through... so if you suddenly start seeing spelling/grammar/word choice errors around Chapter 5, that's probably why. (I never actually finished reading it either, sorry Black Denim Cap!)
The other, well, I'll just repeat the description: "Stories in this bookshelf have gone beyond the impossible by including an algorithm with a name that puns off the main character's name and story title." Why would I create an empty bookshelf, especially one so absurdly specific? That doesn't make any sense! (cue Discord) It's just in case one particular story does somehow manage to pull it off; if it does, it would be the best possible thing!

---

These shelves are very often used together; anything in PPP is also in Highly Recommended and therefore Recommended and therefore Favorites perforce; anything in one of the flaw quadruplets will probably get an entry in (Highly) Recommended, Nice, or Tracking respectively; the RILs are pretty strictly mutually exclusive with each other, such that adding to one usually means taking it off any other RIL shelf, except that the Dubious RILs often pair with one or the other of the Tough Going (depending on how far I got); and no story has both Tough Going and its RIL version at the same time. The reason for the splits is a little subtle, but it boils down to a pair of useful principles: first, that each shelf should be suitable to navigate through on its own (assuming it's public), so it must have the right semantics to understand its contents without the reader seeing any other of the shelves I added it to; and second, that there should be as few shelves as possible to satisfy the preceding. (Third is that some RIL shelves, Recommended, and Nice go on Quick Add, but the rarer shelves don't need to.)

So RIL: Tough Going must be its own shelf since I can't expect someone to look at my (private!) RIL shelves to see which of them a story might be on, and without that, marking a story I haven't even started as "Tough Going" to all and sundry is a little unfair. Splitting the flaws into four shelves when they're basically all the same test is a little less obvious, but while Favorites/Recommended/Highly Recommended/PPP are public (and a story's presence on Tracking or Dubious Read Complete could be presumed in the absence of the other three), comparing five shelves side by side to see which one(s) a story is missing from is not even my idea of a good time. In short, once again, I have to make sure that each of the shelves makes sense as a label on its own.

* I used to call it Dimmed Diamonds until I added Tarnished Silver for "didn't make it to Highly Recommended". The pun was too much to resist.

This post brought to you by job stress and Twilight "constant reshelving" Sparkle. It's The Only Way To Be Sure!™