Here at the OTW, preserving fannish history is a central part of our mission! We’re proud to be able to offer fans a place to archive their works on the Archive of Our Own, and tell their own fannish histories on Fanlore. As of March 29, 2013, Fanlore has 24,423 articles which have undergone 439,529 edits, while the Archive of Our Own recently passed 143,000 users, and more than 640,100 works have been posted on the AO3, across over 11,600 fandoms!
We’re really pleased and proud to see so much fannish representation. However, we know that there are many, many wonderful fanworks out in the world which haven’t found their way to the AO3 – for example the classic television show M*A*S*H has only 264 works on the AO3 while Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman sits at 83. There are even more fannish stories left untold on Fanlore – we’d love to see the fannish activity over the Veronica Mars movie documented as it unfolds! Last year, we welcomed in lots more edits to Fanlore and works to the AO3 with our April Showers promotion. This year, we’re hoping to do the same! This month, bring us fannish April showers by digging out those old zines, memories of past cons, archived personal webpages, tales of shipwars and fannish events, works on slowly-decaying archives, new works you’ve been putting off creating, and more! Upload your old (and new) works to the AO3 and tell your tales on Fanlore.
We’ll be highlighting a different fandom for each day of the month on our Tumblr ao3org, to help jog your memories about fannish loves of the past and highlight some currently active fandom activity. When uploading to the AO3, you can tag your uploaded works April Showers 2013 – at the end of the month we’ll round up all the works with this tag and post stats on how many were uploaded for each fandom. However, don’t feel you have to stick to these fandoms – we hope people will reach into their personal fannish histories to preserve what’s important to them!
We kick off today by hearing the people sing with the 2012 film version of Les Misérables. Bring your works beyond the barricade into the AO3 and share all of the dreams you dreamed on Fanlore!