oh, pit of voles

So there's a post/rumor going around tumblr that ye olde ff.net may genuinely be going belly up at some nebulous point in the unspecified future, because the maintainers have just...not been maintaining or responding in well over a year at this point, and at some point the domain will go kaput if no one is paying for it anymore. I think it's a TERRIBLE site and will not miss it at all if it does go, but god knows I spent my teenage years on there constantly, so, y'know, pouring one out in advance. Maybe it'll linger like a cockroach after all. Whatever.

But I do have about 20ish VERY old fics that reside there and nowhere else, because any other geocities or fandom-specific sites are long since defunct, and I'm genuinely unsure what to do about that. I don't LIKE any of them, I was very young when I wrote them and it shows, but the archivist in me doesn't want them to just vanish into the ether forever. I don't mind my name being associated with them in the abstract -- as they currently are, if someone manages to stumble across them, wow, good for you, but I'm not gonna make it EASY for you, y'know? But I don't really want them easily findable on my AO3 account, either.

I could just copy & paste them all to my own google drive and let them die off the face of the public internet. Or I could post them to AO3 into an anonymous collection, so that no one sees them on my author page but they're, y'know, accessible in my fic archive of choice. I could also post to AO3 and then orphan them, but I don't like that option -- I'd want to still have control over what happens to them in the future, which orphaning does not allow, so that's a nonstarter for me. Hmm.

So, private download or anonymous on AO3. Or something else I haven't thought of? Any thoughts? I can also just let them die if and when ff.net does, but that doesn't sit right. I cared about them once. Writing them helped me become the writer I am now. And I have my fair share of fics downloaded privately that were written by other people and I can see now objectively they are Not Good but I still have a great deal of fondness for them anyway, and was VERY sad when they disappeared off the internet otherwise. So. Yeah.