Love Shack Baby!

A few years ago I was at a tea party talking to fans about our love of zine fic. The editor of the Blake's 7/Wiseguy fanzine Risk was there and after the tea party she sent me the Word files of her zine to put online.

A looong while passed, the A03 went live and I started tracking down writers to give them soft copies of their fic.  This is what led me to help upload Gayle F, CatharineS and Thomas and TasheryS' fan fiction to A03 over the past weeks.

This week I found Blake's 7 fanwriter Bryn Lantry, gave her one of her stories and she is now uploading her Blake's 7 fanfic and poems to A03:  http://archiveofourown.org/users/Bryn

So if you know of a zine writer, love their fic and are in contact with them (or are willing to go find them), sometimes it is as easy as sending them an email: "Hey, there's this little old place where we can get together....it's called AO3."

And if they need help getting there, drop me an email to mdawn6 @ yahoo.com and I'll see if we can find them a ride. Possibly even in  Chrysler as big as a whale. Come on, we're about to set sail.

Now Be Careful Out There (or Saving Fandom From One Tea Cart At A Time)

Yesterday was "living will" day, an national outreach effort to encourage people to make living wills while they're still around to express their wishes if they're incapacitated ("But I'm not dead yet!).

Today,  I'd like fans to consider their Fannish Digital Will. A03 allows you to set up a fannish "next of kin" who can manage your account if you are ill or have passed.  There are also online services that will set up a Dead Man's Switch (if you don't check in in xxxxx months, an email is sent to your friends/family). Including your passwords and access info, along with instructions, to trusted fannish executors could be part of that process.

And there are also online digital storage places that allow you to store online access info.

Whether you chose to use these services is, of course, up to you. Or you can do nothing and allow your digital legacy to fade away.

There is an exception to the "you can choose to do whatever or nothing" rule.  If you are hosting other people's fiction, vids,  and art or if you moderate a community, a mailing list or a forum. In that case, it is part of your responsibilities as a moderator/owner to set up some form of fannish backup - to have at least one other person with admin access and to talk  with that person about what to do you if pass or gafiate.  Not being willing to do this means you may not really be in a good position to be a moderator /website host. 

And of course there is an exception to the exception - for  example, if you make it very clear to anyone who asks you to host their fic, vids or art or  who uses your community, forum, and mailing list that anything they submit or send to the mailing list or post to the community  will not be preserved and will not be accessible  in the event of your gafiation or death. These 'terms of service" should be made clear upfront and  then everyone can proceed on their fannish merry ways fully informed and  with set expectations.

I've often joked about the Tea Cart Paradigm - namely the more access you have to info and the more communities and mailing lists and archives and challenges you moderate, the greater the likelihood you are to be run over by a tea cart if you do not have a backup in place  While many of us do consider what to do about our physical fannish collections, thinking about the online fannish "possessions"  is usually overlooked. And we often  fail to consider what our passing or leaving fandom  might mean if we are are "storing" other fan's "belongings" online.  So fans, before you entrust your online fandom lives to someone else, before you start postings your recs and vids and stories to mailing lists and forums and LJ communities, consider asking what you would do if the moderator simply deleted it all or walked away. Or got run over by a tea cart. 

PS. In case anyone asks, I have at least one backup moderator for every LJ community  I moderate. Ditto on any mailing lists that I manage. My website backup person is xlorp and he also has access to all my passwords on all my accounts.

PPS. Feel free to link to this post where it may be of interest to fans and where permitted.