A statement regarding my fics · 9:17pm May 22nd, 2015
There are fics I am working on (in a different fandom) that I have been working on since 1993.
I have a lot of unfinished fics. I have only ever acknowledged 3 of them to be permanently cancelled. Two of them, because I finally admitted to myself that I was never returning to that fandom again. One of them, because I took the OC out of it and made her the main character of an original novel, so I pretty much can't keep using her in fanfic.
In 1994-1997 or so, I wrote a lot of Q fics. The episode "The Q and the Grey" was so bad and bummed me out so much I more or less stopped writing in that fandom... until 2001, when the introduction of Q's teenage son resolved most of the issues that had been keeping me from writing, and I wrote Q fics heavily from 2001 - 2011. I was obsessed with the X-Men from 1986-1992 or so, and then in 1996 or thereabouts went back into X-Men fandom writing Magneto, did it until 2002, and got back out of the fandom mostly until X-Men First Class came out. If I hadn't been suffering from writer's block for a year around then I would have gone full bore back into my X-Men fandom.
The point is that nothing ever dies, in my writing life at least. Many of you live on a timescale where a few months is an incredibly long period of time, because you're teenagers or young adults. I'm in my 40's, and for me time has shrunk, so I feel as if things I worked on six months ago were things I was just working on a week or two ago.
All this is to say: STOP ADDING MY FICS TO BOOKSHELVES THAT CLAIM THEY ARE DEAD. Yes, maybe most writers who don't update in a year are never going to, but that's not how I work. As long as I haven't officially declared something cancelled, and as long as I'm not dead, my fics will be worked on and they will be finished. Eventually.
Edited to add: I thought the image link would actually click through and provide the attribution, but it doesn't, so here: Chaos Never Dies by karpetshark.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/11/25/481624__safe_solo_twilight+sparkle_animated_meme_mlp_twilight+scepter_spoiler-colon-s04e01_the+ride+never+ends_princess+twilight+sparkle+%28episode%29.gif
Oh god, I hate it when people do that, and I'm so glad you don't do that.
I know that feeling. I think it's been a year since I last updated any of my Fallout fics, but I do keep intending to go back to them, and I still get pestered about those occasionally.
But I guess that's what fans do.
Damn, that's rude.
Also, cool drawing.
3089139
It's not the people asking me "When are you going to update?" or "Please update!" that bug me, it's the ones who are like, "Welp, this fic is dead." Or put it on a bookshelf called Killed In Action. I mean, I'm an actively participating author who writes blog posts and answers comments, would it kill someone to check with me first to see if the story is cancelled?
3089363
I think both are their own unique annoyances, really, but I can see why the latter would be particularly irritating. I have another friend who gets really burnt out by those kinds of messages too. Though, he's far less active, so it's kind of a more obvious conclusion to reach in his case.
Wow. Seriously? And I thought the "mediocre" shelves were bad.
People, there's an option to keep authors from seeing that you've added their stories from a given bookshelf. Use it.
Good old age related time shrinkage. At 27 years old, years are still long but months have certainly shrunk down quite a bit and I've certainly ignored stuff I've meant to update for a few of them. I do still remember back when I was a kid and an hour seemed like a painful eternity. Now it's that annoying increment of time where it's too short for me to sit down and really do anything substantial.
Which brings up my fear that my favorite authors on ongoin fics will just get hit by a bus one day before they finish. And then I start wondering what if I get hit by a bus or something before I finish my fic. Then I feel guilty and wonder if I should leave an outline somewhere with postmortem instructions to post it up or designate someone to finish it. Permanently leaving my fic unfinished is, for some reason, more disconcerting to me than my own mortality.
3089363
Ouch. Yeah, that's pretty dickish. In addition to 'incomplete' and 'complete' there are actually 'hiatus' and 'cancelled' tags (though hiatus essentially means cancelled until further notice). I don't know if these people don't know about these tags, or think the author doesn't, but if a story says incomplete and not canceled it's a pretty clear sign they intend to write more. Unless of course they think the author is dead or straight up gone from the fandom, but you'd think activity like blog posts would clear that up.
3106986 There are plenty of authors on this site who don't use those tags. I have fics in my tracking list that haven't updated in two years that are still marked incomplete. I'm sure the authors really did intend to finish their stories but they haven't and—since many of those same authors haven't been online for months—they probably never will.
Harsh experience tells me that if a story has been quiet for a year it's probably dead. Sure there have been exceptions but they're rare. And on those happy occasions when the author does return to finish their long abandoned fic it often feels rushed and/or incomplete.
3235644
You're probably right. The vast majority of fans are younger than me and don't write stuff that's as long, so time seems longer to them, it takes them less time to get a chapter out, and in general few humans are as obsessive as I am -- I've only had 5 major ficcing fandoms in my life, and I've only ever given up one of them, and it was the first one and also the smallest. I've had a fic sit on hiatus for six years before getting back to it. So what's probably true for most fans is not the case for me. I'm actually producing more, faster, for this fandom than for any other I've been in, because the quality and quantity of the feedback is so much better. So nothing on my leaderboard is retired just because it's incomplete.