Jed On: Stories Taken Down/P2P

Short version. I've taken down several of my stories: I believe the phrase is "pull to publish", as I'm going to strip them down and work them back up as original novels, short stories and more.

Longer version, to be clear about what this means: because I spent the years I was active on this site (half a decade or more) working on making up my own take on expanded histories for the (at the time I started) scant history of Equestria/Equus/whatever, for both the stuff I did for Spectrum 2.0/Redux and the "Freeverse" of AOA, those histories are practically their own thing anyway. From a practical perspective, this means that with surprisingly less work than you'd think, that work can be made into original work, and from what I suspect is one of the many objections people have to this sort of work, this means that I am not reworking stuff that I hadn't already basically created, and what I didn't is the stuff that's getting removed/heavily reworked.

I already went through the process of reworking "fan" material into original material with a self-published short story that I was quite proud of (I posted a blog about it a while back if anyone cares), so now I'll be working towards an expanded version of that setting, with characters that fill the rough narrative roles whilst having a life of their own (which is the harder part of this endeavour, but one I've been relishing as I work on this material). 

I've heard a few opinions of this already - I'm not gonna pre-empt reactions to this for the most part, but I am going to apologise for those of you who enjoyed the stories I’ve taken down. I get that it’s disappointing, and I’ll explain shortly.

I am gonna head off one common complaint about this general practice, though, which is that it’s a cheap way of getting the audience from fanfic work to read original work (and thus for the author to financially benefit). I’m pretty sure that of the 99 followers I have, only about two of them have ever purchased my original work. I’m not transferring an audience with this, and that’s not my motivation.

In brief, without getting into details that are not pertinent, my motivation for this is a desire to write this work in an environment I feel comfortable and safe in, where I can share that work with people I feel safe to do so with, and so create the best work I can for myself and my own peace of mind. Again, without getting into details, that isn’t true of this site anymore and hasn’t been for a long, long time. I’m not gonna lie and say there’s nothing mercenary in this decision - frankly if I’m going to write hundreds of thousands of words, I’d like to be able to actually benefit from that in some way, and in lieu of the satisfaction I once thought to gain from this site and the work I did here, monetarily will do in a pinch - but I’m under no illusions that what I write will get me any riches. But it will, in time, bring me the satisfaction of having told stories that I’ve written and enjoyed writing and not felt unsafe in some way doing so. 

So yeah, that’s that. Only nine of my stories are staying up on this site, because they’re largely full of elements I will not be reworking (or those elements will be so reworked as to make the removal unnecessary). If that changes, I’ll probably do the thing. Other than that, I’m pretty much not coming back except to maybe answer/respond to comments. I don’t expect you to read my original work, so I’m pretty sure that makes this goodbye, with one caveat I’ll address in the postscript. I’m also more than happy to talk about what I’m doing instead if people who liked my work are interested in messaging privately (politely), so I’ll hang around for a few months to talk about that, but again, I have no expectations.

So - cheers for the ride and all, and happy fimfic-ing. 

Take care all,
Jed.

PS: the caveat. Some readers may notice a thing that complicates this “pull to publish” decision somewhat, which I've deliberately not addressed. That’s in hand, and will be addressed elsewhere separately - probably very soon. I might then need to address that separate address separately myself, depending on whether some folks decide to get angry at me, but here’s hoping not. 😂

Comments

[Mr cold ghost]

Good luck! I hope it works out great for you!