My brief respite from fear of total neutrality

I’ve seen several people in the past 2 weeks post in utter confusion about their works disappearing after they were notified that they’d been added to a collection - or not notified at all. This sounds like a deep mystery, but it’s not.

A somewhat new feature on AO3 is the ability to invite works to a collection. Each user can set their preference to either accept all such invitations automatically or decide each one manually. You can also set whether to be emailed about invitations or not. These settings are under your “Preferences” menu, in the “Collections, Challenges and Gifts” section.

Recently, several users have started creating collections instead of using personal bookmarks for a topic. This is fine! These users then started inviting works to those collections. Also fine! That’s what the system was designed for.

Some of those collection owners got excited about the Anonymity function that collections can turn on or off. They decided to make their collections anonymous. To protect anonymity, if a work is listed in a collection that is set to anonymous, the work does not appear on your personal works page. This makes sense if you enter a challenge and it has an anonymous period before reveals - having the work appear on your personal works page would break anonymity pretty badly!

Unfortunately, I think most people setting Anonymity on these new invitation-only collections don’t realize that they’re making people’s existing works disappear from their works pages. If you have “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” and “Turn off emails from collections” both checked, your work might seem to literally vanish. Someone adds it to their collection, you don’t get an email because you turned those off, and you never find out what happened.

However! There’s a very simple solution.

Go to your works page (http://archiveofourown.org/users/YOUR USERNAME/works).

Select the button “Works in Collections”.

All your works in collections will pop up, and all the collections will be listed in the filters.

Skim down to find your missing work, or use the filter list to look for a collection you don’t remember seeing before and filter by it.

Edit your work.

Under “Post to Collections / Challenges”, press the “x” beside the collection’s name.

Save your work.

This will remove your work from the collection - for now. If this happened to you, I highly recommend turning off “Automatically agree to your work being collected by others in the Archive” in your preferences to avoid the work being re-added to the collection by a confused collection owner who doesn’t understand what happened.

When I was a child, from the time I was about four and could understand things, my mom told me and my brother that we should have a secret word. That way, if we were ever in trouble or felt unsafe and we didn’t want the people around us to know we needed her to come get us, we could let her know. So she let us pick the word and my brother and I chose the phrase “peanut butter cups.” (I’m happy to share the phrase now since both my brother and I are adults now). 

I used the phrase twice in my life. Once, I was at a friends house when I eight years old. Her dad got really drunk and was throwing things against the wall. I was really scared and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself on the phone when I called my mom to come get me because I didn’t know if he would get more violent if I asked her to come get me. So I called her and was calm and after a couple minutes I asked “Hey mommy, did you get me those peanut butter cups from the store?” And she said “I’ll be right there.” And she came and got me within minutes. 

Second, I was a teenager spending the night at a friends house. Her brother and dad were drinking and they started talking about things that made me uncomfortable - ie: what they liked to do to women. My friend didn’t seem perturbed and said that was normal for them and that I shouldn’t worry. But I was worried because they were really drunk and I was 15 and the only ‘woman’ around that wasn’t related to them. I went in my friends room, told her I needed to call my mom and say goodnight. Before I hung up with her I asked “Next time we go to the store, can we get some peanut butters cups? I’ve been craving them.” And she came and got me, just like that. 

Massive Tom Burke announcement!!

According to the linked article from the Times, Tom is to play private detective Cormoran Strike in the series of novels written by JK Rowling

“A very old man came in to my Starbucks. Halfway through struggling to understand his order through his thick accent, he noticed my necklace. He stopped and said “Your star is beautiful.”, and I thanked him. There was a long pause before he spoke again. When he did, he said “It is beautiful, but I am having a hard time looking at it. The last time I wore one, it was mandatory.” We then spoke to each other in Hebrew for a bit. But soon enough he stopped again, and looked back to my star. With one hand he held mine, and used his other hand to shakily touch the sapphires on my necklace. His lip shook, and tears rolled down his cheeks. In a shaky, heavily German-accented whisper, he said “I am so happy you are here. Your generation is here. We won.” and kissed my hand.✡”

Aramis is my penance.