New canon, fanon and classic fics

Reading isiscolo's recent thread about unforgivable new-canon-induced 'AU's, reminded me of my reaction to some of the pre-OotP fics I've read over the last couple of years, most memorably when reading Sirius/Narcissa, which used to be quite a fanon staple.

I reckon there will still be fics that are read and recommended, even if later canon contradicts them. But they will have to be very good fics for most readers to put up with the inadvertent AU-ness.

So that started me wondering: I remember a few debates over on FictionAlley about what were the new classic fics, or what defined a classic fic. I came to the personal conclusion that 'classics' were largely a staple of the early fandom, which has now grown so large that it's entirely possible for people to stay in their own ship or genre corner and still find enough well-written stories to read: good stories with a startlingly original premise (such as copperbadge's Stealing Harry) get a lot of attention, but I doubt they're as universally famous as the Draco trilogy. Hmmm. I doubt anything is as universally famous as the Draco trilogy; I'm not sure how Stealing Harry compares in the recognition-factor stakes with, say, Irresistable Poison or Pawn to Queen. But then even mctabby's Two Worlds and In Between isn't universally known. Perhaps the most a fic can hope for now is 'cult' status.

But if, of the fics that are overtaken by new canon, only the best or most seminal continue to be read, perhaps the progression of canon will itself help identify the (not so) new 'classics'? It'll be interesting to see, in a year or so, which post-OotP-and-pre-HBP stories are most recced. Time would give perspective too, of course, but the new canon will make the focus clearer, imo.


isiscolo also posed the question of what fanfiction staples might 'get irretrievably ruined' by HBP, but that seems to have been overlooked on that thread in the debate about AUs. I'd be interested to know what people think, though. So:

What new information would affect the assumptions you make in your writing (or reading)?

( My answer )

How do you manage uploading?

I was just wondering how those of you who archive in more than one site manage the different formatting each needs?

When I first got involved in fandom I started posting my fics to FA, and soon realised that if I didn't want the formatting to mess up I needed to upload in html. So I:

1) write in Word 6 (on my old laptop);
2) use Word 2000 (on my less-old, net-connected desktop) to do post-beta editing and to convert to html;
3) use Dreamweaver to strip out all the MS-crap. (I have to do this tag-by-tag because my computer doesn't seem to handle the automatic clean-up, but at least it's faster than manual coding. I think.)

This leaves me with a clean html file with a blank line between each paragraph, which an html reader will ignore but makes it easier for me to edit. This has always been fine for FA (though perhaps their process of adding headers and footers corrects any errors I make), but never renders correctly on other sites. I've posted fics to Skyehawke, Toujours Pur and LJ, but the amount of reformatting necessary is irksome enough to put me off doing so for all my fics.

So if you post fics to LJ, how do you do it? (I've just noticed the text formatting button: I guess if I select 'none' and post in html the paragraph tags and extra whitespace will disappear from the rendered text of their own accord?) And what's the best format to start off in to ensure minimum tweaking is required for each individual archive?