Fic: 'A Valued Gift' (Flight of the Heron)

[regshoe]

I'm working my way slowly through correcting the text for my Flight of the Heron ebook, and the chapters set in Edinburgh presented me with a very nice opportunity for a fluffy Ewen/Keith future ficlet... This is set in the AU future of my Kidnapped crossover WIP, so consider it a sort of preview for that story!

A Valued Gift
Read at Ye Jacobites By Name | Read at Squidgeworld
Fandom: The Flight of the Heron
Relationship: Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham
Characters: Keith Windham, Ewen Cameron
Rating: G
Content warnings: None
Word count: 1,066
Summary: Huddled in his enemy’s own cloak (for its real ownership, luckily for his peace of mind, he never discovered)... —In a happier future, Keith gets a chance to discover where the cloak Ewen gave him in Edinburgh really came from.

I have posted and linked to the story on my website and on Squidgeworld.

Thoughts on the AO3 Situation and posting there

I will post to AO3 as well in a few days or so. Given everything that's been going on I'm feeling increasingly unhappy about posting there, or certainly about treating it as The Place to Post Fic, especially with the much more serious wider problems coming on top of the existing issues for FotH and Kidnapped fandom. OTOH using and posting on AO3 isn't really materially supporting the site management the way it would be for a profit-making site owned by a corporation, so it's not a serious moral issue; and it is still pretty much a central place for fandom, and—I'm thinking especially of people in the Tumblr side of FotH fandom here—I don't want people who are in or on the edges of the fandom but who are not on Dreamwidth and not familiar with either the developments about AO3 or what alternative sites I and others might be posting on to miss things. (Whether new FotH fans, not connected to the existing fandom at all, will ever find fic archived on AO3 under a title they may well not even know is another question, of course, but I've made my feelings about that plain enough already.) So I'm experimenting with compromises, and this seems like a good one for now: keep posting to AO3, but prioritise other places first.

Comments

[luzula]

You know, you could also post it on DW? That's what I and many other people used to do before AO3 (well, we would post on Livejournal before DW)...and I think it would probably lead to more comments/interaction. But of course, it's probably harder to find afterwards.

[regshoe]

Yes, that's a possibility, and good point about interaction! But I agree DW probably wouldn't work so well as an archive. I might try it for a fic or two and see how it goes.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

I feel you about the whole AO3/OTW situation, and absolutely support posting fic in multiple places--also, decentralising is never a bad idea for archiving and preservation purposes. Have you heard of dwfanfic already? It's a directory of fanfic on Dreamwidth, and looks very useful!

[regshoe]

Very true! And that is a useful link, thank you :) —I might experiment with posting fic on DW too and see how it goes.