A Fanworks Archive

Since last year, I've been drafting my fanworks with my Trello account after leaving it dormant for almost a decade. I never thought that I'd look forward to opening my Trello every day, specifically to my page for fanworks about Exceedraft and the other Rescue Police shows. It's not the first note-taking platform that I've got attached to and it's not one seen as "trendy" in general. My growing attachment to Trello is like falling for a familiar friend who's similar to my flashier ex (other note-taking tool Notion) yet is far more low key and brings me more comfort.

Trello is an online platform for creating kanban boards. The kanban board was first created for the Toyota Production System before becoming integrated into note-taking and Personal Knowledge Management tools as a database for organising data and workflows.

I first signed up for a Trello account to organise my research for my Bachelor's graduation thesis. But I didn't find it useful and inspiring for academic writing, and pretty much abandoned my account soon after creating it.

Fast forward to many years later with me trying out different solutions for saving episode guides, timestamps and other notes for creating different kinds of fanworks. I returned to Trello after becoming dissatisfied with simple checklists for laying out my projects. It's much neater to save text in Trello cards that I could colour-code and label with a big heading like they're paper notecards, then easily drag and drop them into different columns labeled according to a fanwork's stage of completion. My current setup involves a board for a series or franchise with two columns for each show; one for works in progress and for completed fanworks that also double as a detailed episode guide.

I first became familiar with kanban boards while actively using Notion, but I didn't particularly like them until my return to Trello. Perhaps because on its free plan, I could only create a limited number of kanban boards with unlimited cards, which concentrated my attention on developing my projects with the kanban board's features.

From just planning GIFsets with Trello, I've also started to store and draft my meta on it. It's not optimised for drafting long pieces of text, but it has a feature that many digital writing tools lack: separate areas to input the title and the main body of work. I just like the division that appears kind of old school, even if it's unimportant for whatever I want to do with the text saved.

I've created more GIFsets and meta since sticking with Trello, and I'm thinking about turning to it more for creating fanvideos and fanfiction. Yet unlike when using Notion had boosted my creativity, I lack any desire to promote the benefits of Trello to other fanwork creators.

Most seem to pick up tools and methods that they've arrived at on their own with suggestions and advice from others playing a minor role in influencing their decisions. And in my case, what has been valuable isn't the discovery of any brilliant features, but instead a journey in personalising my approach to using what I already know and have for building with what inspires me.

On BSky, I've created an account to share fanworks centred on episode 13 of Exceedraft. I post one fanwork on each day and will continue until I get to 100 fanworks posted over 100 days. My daily posts started since the start of April and I'm currently almost midway through my project. I've shared meta, GIFs of single scenes, collages, memes and screenshots to compare Exceedraft E13 with another creative work.

My BSky account is basically like a Xitter (X formerly Twitter) 'fan account' common in K-Pop fandom. I did run a K-Pop fan account before for my SF9 OTP, which taught me that I dislike posting on Xitter. On the surface, BSky is more or less a Xitter clone, but it has been much better posting there, perhaps more likely due to the kinds of posts I chose to put out rather than BSky's offerings.

Community engagement would be minimal anywhere as I'm posting about an old, obscure and non-English TV show. Most support that I've got so far are from sharing the BSky links of my fanworks on Discord.

I wanted to try sharing new fanworks every day after finding it an energising and inspiring habit during my participation for TokuShipping Week. Like for that fanweek, I created fanworks for my BSky fan account in advance, saved them as drafts to later share one by one. As I share more fanworks and further populate my fan account, I could better pretend that I live in a world with a consistent stream of a variety of appealing and interesting fanworks about my favourite show and character (lol). For edits in particular, as opposed to any kind of writing, it's easier to pretend someone else has made them.