Introduction

I first started reading fanfiction around 1999, and ever since, I’ve kept coming back to it – some might even say that I’m addicted to it. What are fanfiction stories? Fanfiction stories are stories about the characters or world of some pre-existing fiction (be it a movie, book, game, TV show, etc.), by unofficial authors (i.e. it’s “fiction”, written by “fans”, thus the term “fanfiction”. Throughout most of the time I’ve been reading, I’ve done so on a site called “Fanfiction.net” – one of the largest fanfiction repositories for English language “fics” (a slang term used to refer to fanfiction stories).

Having read thousands of fics, I like to think I’ve somewhat refined my reading habits, and perhaps even streamlined the process somewhat. So, I’m writing a description of my insanity, and plan to focus on three main areas: finding stories, reading stories, and bookmarking/returning to stories.

I. Finding Stories

The most obvious way to find stories on Fanfiction.net is to browse through the specific section for the “fandom” that you’re interested in (e.g. the section for Star Wars, or Harry Potter). This method allows you a number of controls to help filter the list of stories down to you are interested in; Fanfiction.net provides filters for genre, rating (similar to the MPAA ratings), main characters/romantic pairing, story length, and language, among others. Browsing through the category listings is the most popular way to find stories, and most people never go any further. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other, more effective, ways to find stories.

Browsing through the section for a fandom can be a great way to find stories. However, you also run across a lot of cruft (i.e. stories with bad plot, or atrocious grammar). So, the logical next step is to look for some form of curation – some way to narrow things down to stories that another human has looked at, and deemed of reasonable quality. This is where the “Communities” (or “C2s”) enters the picture. C2s are kind of like “best of” lists – each C2 contains a list of stories that its founder and/or staff feel met a certain level of quality, and also coincide with their tastes. Depending on the fandom, there can be massive numbers of C2s, each catering to its own specific style of stories. Want a Harry Potter story where he travels back in time? There are a number of C2s for that. Wish you had list of stories for your favourite romantic pairing, and one that cut out all of the badly written stories that prevent you from finding the real gems? There probably is one, just waiting for you to click its link and view it.

Now, this is where things can really start to get interesting. Once you find a C2 you like, you can subscribe to it. When subscribed, you’ll get e-mail alerts whenever a story is added to that C2. So, if you subscribe to a number of C2s for a fandom with a large number of stories (such as the Harry Potter, Twilight, or Naruto categories), you can get a selection of quality stories delivered to your virtual doorstep as they appear – all without having to do the work of manually searching the fandom’s main listing to find them yourself!

Additionally, C2s aren’t the only thing you can subscribe to. It’s also possible to subscribe to authors. Having found  an author whose stories you enjoy, you can subscribe to that author, and you’ll be informed whenever they add a new story, or update an existing one.

II. Reading Stories

Having been around for over ten years, Fanfiction.net has added a few useful features for reading stories on their site. When you’re on a story page, the story bar above the story itself allows for a number of handy customizations, including:  typeface, font size, line spacing, line width, and colour scheme. A little tweaking with these settings can go a long way in improving your reading experience.

However, you can take your reading experience a few steps further, by utilizing something like GreaseMonkey to customize your reading experience. GreaseMonkey is a plug-in that allows you to modify the web pages you view. For my Fanfiction.net browsing, I use the following five scripts:

1. Menu Remover, this script is pretty self-explanatory. It prevents the top menu bar from expanding when you mouse over it. I find my accidentally mousing over it all the time, and that it would automatically expand downward was chipping away at my sanity, until I came across this script.
2. Power Fanfiction.net, this is the “power user” script for Fanfiction.net. From the script page, it does as follows: auto-loads the next page (for stories and lists), combines the review link with the review count, can highlight words in the summary (user definable, e.g. for things like “slash” or “John/Jane”), makes dates relative (“yesterday” or “2 weeks ago”), applies colours to the update date based on age, and several other small modifications. This is the Rolls Royce of Fanfiction.net scripts.
3. Story Export Script, this script allows you load all the chapters in a story on one page with a click of a button, add headings for each chapter, and create an index with internal chapter links at the top of the page. This is useful when you want to save a story, perhaps one that is particularly good, or if you’re going to be offline and just want something to read.
4. Anti-Twilight, the name says it all. If a story has “Twilight” in its summary, the script will hide it from the list. Useful for those of us who don’t care for the series, or its proliferation of badly written crossovers in our favoured fandoms.
5. Automatically Show All. By default, when you go to a C2 page, it will be set to filter the rating from K-T, and sort stories by the date they were added to the C2. This script will change that to show all ratings, and sort by the update dates of the stories, rather than when they were added to the C2.

III. Bookmarking and Returning to Stories

Unlike the traditional “book”, fanfiction stories usually aren’t completely written before being presented to the public. Often, authors post chapters as they write them. This leads to the interesting problem of how to check all these stories for new chapters, and keep them organized.

My personal preference is to use a system of folders in my fanfiction browser of choice (FireFox, though my system should work in the other major browsers  as well). I begin with a parent folder in my bookmarks bar, for the fandom – e.g. “HP” for Harry Potter. Then, within that parent folder, I create numbered folders for each batch of one hundred stories; so, Harry Potter bookmarked stories 0-100 would be in a folder named “1” or “HP 1”. I then have another folder inside the parent folder named “Completed”, where I place stories that have been finished, and wont be having any more updates.

 

To check for updates to these stories, I use the “Open All in Tabs” option at the bottom of each folder’s menu, to open blocks of one hundred stories at a time. When they’ve loaded, I then blur through them, using the command-option-right/left arrow (control-alt-left/right arrow on Windows) keyboard command to scan through the tabs. If I find a story that’s been updated since I last bookmarked it, I then read the updated chapter, and update the old bookmark with the new chapter number using a search for its story ID in the bookmarks manager.

 

There are, though not my favoured tactics, two more mechanisms for keeping track of story updates. The first is to subscribe to each story for “Story Alerts” – like with C2 and author alerts, you’ll get an e-mail each time a new chapter is posted to a story on  your alert list. The second option is Fanfiction.net’s built-in “Storymarks” feature, in the upper right-hand corner of each page. While Storymarks might be useful to some, it simply doesn’t scale well for me personally, with the numbers of stories I want to have bookmarked.

In Closing

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about the habits of an addicted fanfiction reader, but there you go. Hopefully, this is helpful to somebody out there who is struggling to keep a bit saner with their own addiction.