Over the years, some of my favorite writers — who wrote the fanfics that I’d go back and find and read again, over and over — have deleted their journals, deleted all their fanfics. And I feel guilty for hoarding the few bits I’d downloaded to listen to because of my vision problems, and now I’m like OMFG iPad never ever die because it’s got THOSE fics on it, and I don’t want to lose them, but I feel guilty for keeping them because the writer had some reason for deleting all those wonderful stories. I’d hunted down eBook editing apps just so I could give them fancy custom covers instead of the default covers. And it just… Why? Why do people remove huge swathes of their fanfic? I still have one single piece saved from the lost canon of cupcakemonster, and now I have a few more treasures, but iBooks is being stupid and only letting me back up the eBooks I’ve purchased, not ePubs I’ve downloaded from AO3. I hate losing the stories I love. But they belong to the author, not me. And copyright includes the right to erase them. It makes me sad, like mummy cartonnage made of paper scraps from Alexandria, like half-remembered snatches of song of the High-Elves who have set sail.

---

This entry was originally posted at http://auronlu.dreamwidth.org/240337.html, where it has comments.