this is why I always, always should remember to tag all my reading

[ratcreature]

As my last post mentioned I'm browsing LOTR fic right now. For reading in my most regular fandoms I'm pretty good about tagging all stories I finish unless they are really short and crop up on my reading list. That is not always so when I revisit one of my older fandoms on a mood.

Then I open a lot of stories, search, click on links, and start reading stuff, but in a much more erratic and simultaneous fashion than my usual reading habit. And bookmarking and tagging does not always happen, because it does seem a bit tedious sometimes. Except then I end up being driven crazy by recalling some bit of a story, which could have been part of any number of stories of the types I've been browsing for, but I don't remember which it was. Looking at the couple I did tag, doesn't bring results, so now I'm trying to go through my browsing history, because I'm sure I must have read it in the last week or two, and I'm trying to reconstruct which stories I read, but of course my browsing history also shows the stories I just clicked to check out, and that are a ton of pages across more than half a dozen archives.

Why is my brain not better at recalling these things? I can't even go to a story finder community, because a) I don't know any for LOTR, and b) I'm not even sure I could turn the confused jumble I'm looking for into something coherent enough even for a finder community. (Yes, my recollection is *that* confused.) I don't remember the characters or which time frame the story took place, or what happened in the story. What I do remember is a phrasing that stood out to me, only I actually don't remember the exact phrase either, except that I'd recognize it if I saw it.

Comments

[busaikko]

I feel your pain... this happens to me. I'll think I've been so diligent, but it will turn out I have 50 fics tagged nothing but Jim/Blair *headdesk*

There is http://community.livejournal.com/lotrips_finders/profile which ficfinds for fictional characters (as long as they were portrayed by an actor in a film). Their tags are not very specific, but might jog your memory? (Judging by the SGA Storyfinders comm, people are amazing at finding stuff from small details.) I hope you can place at least some of the ones that are haunting you: it's frustrating....

[ratcreature]

Thanks for the link. I might try that, though I couldn't say for sure that the story falls under characters that appear in LOTR movies, because while it is quite likely that it was Aragorn background, it could have also been original character Dunedain fic, or Aragorn anceestor fic or the like. It should not be this hard to track down this story, since it's not like it was a year ago or anything, and yet I've been going through my browser history wasting hours by ńow, and still haven't turned up anything.

I mean, I read a whole bunch of stories recently, but it weren't *that* many. And yet. I should be at least be able to retrace my steps, but I've been finding stories so erratically with searches and link hopping, that it is hard. I'm starting to wonder whether maybe this browser history does not work right or something.

Unfortunately the detail I remember happens in a lot of stories, and what made it more specific was the context but having read a whole bunch of stories it's all jumbled in my head, and I'd recognize the sentence, but can't recall the phrasing. It was a pathos filled oath phrasing (really common in LOTR for obvious reasons) that worked quite well, but not a fealty oath, but I think it was sort of Dunedain ranger thing, but I'm not 100% sure, there is a small chance it might have been something Gondor-related. It was some sort of promise stand against the darkness or something like that, if needed with their life, but what made it stand out in my mind was that it connected that to this Middle Earth worldbuilding thing that Men in particular have more freedom because they are not bound to Arda thanks to the "gift" of death. So it was also a promise to accept the own mortality rather than fear it so much like the those of their Nuemonorean ancestors who brought them all to all sorts of calamities. So iirc it ended its formula with something like that they are mortal but also free.

[ratcreature]

You bought me luck! Sorting out my recollections enough to describe this to reply to your comment, helped me to find enough phrase bits for a google search. It was from chapter 7 of Roots by Dwimordene, which I had reread recently. Incidentally I didn't double check that one earlier, because it was a reread, and I like that story quite well. My memory, it sucks.

[busaikko]

\o/ Go you! (and now the fic is tagged with 'remember_me'?)

[ratcreature]

No, but with 27 other tags, among them dunedain and oath... (The only reason I can respond at all to story finding requests is because the number of my tags exceeds the number of my bookmarks, and it would be more if delicious didn't have a limit on the number of tags you can assign to a bookmark.)

[busaikko]

Delicious is a tool, and it sounds as if you are using it the way it ought to be used! (I remember when I discovered Delicious and tagging, after having thrown things in my browser's bookmarks for years, where all it saved was the link and a title... it was wonderfully freeing.) I have been known to browse through your lovely bookmarks when looking for things to read....

[ratcreature]

yeah, browser bookmarks never really worked for me either. Before tagging I saved a lot more stories I read, and then text-searched on my hard disk when I wanted to find something again. I really hope delicious will find a new owner who'll keep it. And I'm always glad to hear my bookmarks are useful for others too.