This morning I sat down for an hour with my writing tag open on Tumblr and copied the currently published versions of each of my fics (besides the multichapter ones and Court of Cups, which are already here)
- to my local notes folder,
- backed up to a remote Git repo,
- to this website with linked ISO timestamps to their original posts.
I'd gotten negligent in my workflow. I treated my local directory/Git repository original copies as first draft, copied them into Tumblr's desktop post editor (with Markdown enabled, of course), and edited them there for typos, clarity, aesthetic nitpicking... without copying the "final" published version over locally. I think this is called drift. Or something. Either way, embarrassing and irresponsible of me.
Of course this website is a forever WIP and a living archive, but I only had my longer fics on here for months because I was putting off the aforementioned ~1 hour of work. This weekend, though, I saw that a selfshipper I had overlapping mutuals with had her account terminated by Tumblr out of the blue. Which should terrify everyone.
Hopefully, from here on out I'll do the above steps every time I publish something. It will take literal seconds. The issue is sometimes I catch typos days later when my friends have already reblogged it, so the real reason for my version drift is trying to let the Tumblr versions "marinate" a bit. But even outdated redundancy is better than data loss. I might even take my one-shots to Archive of Our Own for yet another backup, but I'm satisfied for now.
I also created archive.json so I can do jq shenanigans that approximates some convoluted wc scripts I have in my local notes/drafts directory For example, running
jq '[.archive[].words] | add' archive.json
showed me that as of this post, I've written 64,475 words. Just this year! I'll never post my abandoned 3rd person fic I spent most of last year writing, but that would bring me past 100k since I started in 2024. I can also do
jq '[.archive[] | select(.tags[] == "crocodile") | .words] | add' archive.json
and see that 23,247 of those words focus on Sir Crocodile. (I know 7k of these are shared with Hawkins, but you know...)
But more broadly:
I'm a little concerned, culturally, about the practice in this part of Tumblr of deleting and remaking blogs or moving accounts (because Tumblr doesn't let you switch "main blog" between side blogs and URLs) and hope everyone who does so at least exports their Tumblr archive, which is usually a .zip file tens of gigabytes in size because it includes images from reblogs. I wish there was a way to specify you only want your original posts, or maybe even your original text posts, but that would require Tumblr to be have a thoughtful UX.
Another annoying thing is URL changes. I changed mine in June right after I finished publishing Suit of Cups. Being who I am, I copied the HTML versions of all my posted fanfiction and my tightly connected pinned and navigation posts and ran sed -i 's/sailorspica/bicho-bicho/g'. This is not other people's process and the implications for archives and tracking provenance are massive.