:An abandoned fan fic is a source of sadness and frustration. Especially when the author swore back in March of '08 that she wasn't finished, there's more coming! blah, blah, blah, and then nothing. No updates. It's been more than a year, now, since one particularly good story on my list was updated. And it's not even the oldest one. There's one that I check periodically that was last updated in December of '05!!!
Why do I keep checking??
To the fan fic library sites, why, oh why, do you keep incomplete stories that haven't been updated in more than a whole frapping year? Why not put them in a separate, abandoned fic archive? Get them out of the general pool of stories? Acknowledge that there are stories that never get finished, and get rid of them! Maybe if the authors knew their stories would be shunted to the dungeon if they didn't finish them, maybe they'd bother to complete their damn stories!
But really, why write 15 chapters of a really great story and then disappear? One author, ONE, in the four years that I've been reading fan fic, actually put out a note of explanation why, when after writing THE BEST fan fic I'd ever read, she pulled it, unfinished. While it was heart breaking to learn that I was never going to learn what happened next, I could really understand and respect that the author's head was in a different place and finishing this story just wasn't a priority anymore.
All the rest of them, no explanation, just abandoned stories. Why not just complete the whole story before you post it? Or at least leave a note: sorry, I'm not writing fan fic anymore, you shouldn't be reading this stuff when you're supposed to be asleep anyway, SOMETHING like that.
And why do I keep checking?
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Edited to reflect the fact that obviously I still have fond feelings for fanfic. Otherwise I wouldn't be grumpy when my favorites didn't get finished.
Plus, yes, the infamous MDC Harry Potter thread of '05 is sorely missed, even after all this time.
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