What We Archive
This archive began as a repository for pieces that feature Alex Cabot and Olivia Benson from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It has expanded to include stories featuring other female characters from the Law & Order universe. Cross overs are acceptable but they have to include one or more of these characters in substantial roles.
Several fan fiction sites have recently dumped their "adult" content (in this instance that means anything NC-17 or better in the U.S. which would probably be equivalent to the Australian M). While this site will accept content from G to NC-17 we do have some standards.
What's Acceptable "Adult" Content
- Graphic portrayal of consensual sex between two adults (this includes Plot, What Plot? (aka: PWP) stories)
- Violence in the context of or service to a plot
- Medical and forensic details in the context of or service to a plot
What's Unacceptable "Adult" Content
- Graphic portrayal of sex between an adult and a child.
- Graphic portrayal of non-consensual sex between two adults when it exists simply to titillate. To put it another way, if rape gets you off, go somewhere else.
- I can hear you saying "But what about the nature of SVU and what it deals with?" This is where the "exists simply to titillate" part comes in.
- "Who makes that judgement," you ask? In this instance the archivist and select panel of readers. We're a bit like the U.S. Supreme Court, we'll know it when we see it.
How We Choose What We Archive
The choosing part of the Archive Policy is pretty simple here. We only archive pieces if we have prior permission from the author. What constitutes prior permission? Any one of the following:
- You contact the archivist and request to have your story archived
- You give permission to be archived in the template of your fic when you post it to one of the Law & Order fan fiction groups at Yahoo!
- Which groups do we monitor? At this time, only LawAndOrderSVUFanfic. Permission can be in the form of a general yes to archiving or a specific yes to this site, Women of Law and Order Archives aka: svuchick.fateback.com
- Very rarely we may contact an author who is not archived here and request permission to archive or link to that author's work. If you want to be archived here don't wait for this to happen. Right now the maintenance of the site is just me and, unfortunately, the Lotto tickets keep coming up losers so it's off to the day job and squeezing in this archive in my spare time. While I'm devoted to this, I'd like to spend at least two hours a day doing something besides sleeping or coding HTML
What We Require When You Submit Your Story
Technical Bits
- If you send your story via e-mail, please send a plain text file as an attachment. In most word processing programs you can "Save As" either plain or ASCII text, usually with the default extension of
.txt If you are using Mac OS please make sure you save your file with an extension.
- MS Word or other proprietary formats will not be accepted. No offense, but Word documents and their cousins are a main vector for computer viruses and worm programs.
- Please don't send HTML. It will take me longer to reformat your HTML to conform to the site's look than it would to just put your story in the site's template.
- If you have your own site and would prefer that the archive just link to you, please send along the full link in an e-mail.
- If you give archive permission, we'll take your story directly from the Yahoo! group.
Content and Format Bits
To live on the archive site your piece needs to meet the following criteria:
- It needs to be spell checked and corrected for your version of English (U.S., UK, or Australian).
Addendum (12 April 2003):
The archivist will read your work before archiving or linking to it. Wanton abuse of the English language (the use of your for you're for example) and an unwillingness to correct mistakes which are grammatical in nature when they are brought to your attention (in the most constructive and helpful way possible, of course 
) may disqualify your story from archiving. If you have grammar questions please visit the Resources list to find some answers.
- It needs to include the template below appropriately customized to your story:
Title: Your story's title
Author: You...yes, you, the author. What should we call you?
Fandom(s): Does this story cross-over? If so, what show(s) besides SVU?
Spoilers: Does this reveal anything about any episodes of the show(s)? If so, include what episodes and when they originally aired in your locality as not everyone is on the same air schedule around the world.
Feedback: Do you want it? If so, include your e-mail address here.
Rating: Use your local rating system.
Summary: One or two lines for a summary.
Author's Notes: Anything you want to include here, including dedications.
Warnings: Anything you think someone might be shocked, scared, or offended by.
- It needs to meet the acceptable content standards listed in this policy
Archiving Timetable
As mentioned above, at this time there is only one pair of hands maintaining this archive. Archiving by link will usually happen within two to three days of receiving your link. Archiving on the site itself may take as much as two weeks. Your stuff will be here eventually.
If you provide your e-mail address with your piece, the archivist will notify you when your story has been added to the archive regardless of which method (on-site or by link) we are using to archive your work.
Copyright and You
Since this is a fan fiction archive each author is, to a certain extent, infringing on the copyright of the owner of the show or shows the author works with. Because of this, we've got to be careful and make sure that those copyright holders don't smack us right out of existence with a lovely bit of paper known as a cease and desist order.
To keep that from happening, all works will have the site disclaimer added to them. You can see it at the foot of this, and every other, page on this site.
Neither the archive as an entity or nor the archivist as an individual make any claim to the copyright of an author's work.
Copyright on previously unrecognized characters and places, and stories is retained by the authors whose works are archived here. Works hosted on external sites are subject to any declared copyright statements on those sites.
Copyright for show canon elements is retained by the original copyright holder(s).
Disclaimer: The TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and the characters therein are the property of NBC and Wolf Films. All fan fiction pieces were created for entertainment not monetary purposes. No claim to copyright of any other TV series, printed, film, stage, or musical work is made. Previously unrecognized characters and places, and stories, are © 2002-2003 to the author(s). No infringement of copyrights or trademarks was intended. These stories may not be reused, reproduced, archived, or otherwise published elsewhere without express written permission from the author(s).
