enchantedsleeper

Last entry I decided that I would do something I'm calling "Archive April", in which I focus on archiving to my personal site during April. I set a goal of at least 10 new fanworks archived, with additional soft goals of creating my Fanart and Fanvid pages and improving the site navigation.

It's taken me a while to make time for any more archiving since March Meta Matters, because I was on a trip a couple of days after my last post and then we had Things Being Done to the house that were quite chaotic and all-encompassing. And I held a belated birthday party 😁 But I still had a chunk of April left, so I was determined to get back on the archiving train and keep my commitment to myself ☺️

I got back into the groove with a quick, easy upload of a short Rurouni Kenshin fic that just needed a page and some formatting to go up. That was all I could manage on Saturday night, but on Sunday I had time to get stuck in. I realised that I'd been avoiding archiving longer fics because I wanted to improve the way I handled the chapters, so, I tinkered with my already-uploaded multichapter Yu Yu Hakusho Peter Pan AU (Hiei Jaganshi, Legendary Bandit) and added some links to previous and next chapters. Rather than create a page for each chapter, I wanted to make it possible for people to read the fic continuously if they wanted to, but also have the ability to navigate to individual chapters. I also looked up how to center a bullet point list so that I could create a little chapter navigation menu at the top.

After that I grabbed another YYH fic that I'd already got one chapter into archiving and then stopped. It didn't take me long to remember why 😅 I've got some cyberpunk AUs that use "code-style" text and the original method I used to style it was fiddly as hell, so I set about finding a new way. In the process I improved the CSS I used for my fics and created a style that I can use on other cyberpunk and adjacent fics, like my .hack OC fic \o/

Since I was in a Yu Yu Hakusho mood, I then tackled my drabble series, which I wanted to archive like a multichapter fic because the individual installments were so short. This was really fun and satisfying to do, and I wound up archiving all 10 drabbles, so technically I knocked out my Archive April fanwork allocation in one session! 😆 After that, even though I was wiped (I had thought formatting some fics would be relatively chill, but poring over and fixing HTML is less so 😅) I archived a last fic, my sole published Yu-Gi-Oh fic. All told, I was at it for 4 and a half hours, but I achieved a lot!

Archiving is addictive once I get going, so I'm now grabbing the chance to do it whenever I can (even at the expense of other things I should be doing xD). Last night I embarked on creating the Fanart section of my archive, to archive the few drawn works I have. This won't take long, but I'm also working with very different HTML and figuring out how to format things in a way that looks good but also contains all the important information (title, fandom, date, description...)

I really am enjoying archiving as a way to get back in touch with the fandoms I loved in the past - in particular, re-reading old Yu Yu Hakusho fics and reliving my passion for that fandom through the author's notes and character thoughts makes me really want to revisit the anime and even pick up where I left off on some of my WIPs. Plus, Yu Yu Hakusho is now my most fleshed-out fandom on the archive (there's just one work I haven't put up yet, my earliest one, because at some point I started to revamp it, and now I'm not sure which version to archive), so it's nice to have a body of work there for at least one fandom.

I'm creeeeping towards a point where I might feel comfortable with signing up to some directories or fic rings - but I'd like to make some more progress first. Maybe by the end of April, I'll be there!