NEW Fiction Archive + Thread Removals

[Hawker]

Thanks Sal! Yay, it's working woohoo!

Cracking. Thanks for pointing it out to me...it'd have been a while before I'd notice!

[Hawker]

I thought I'd mentioned this (I knew I'd forget something!) but it'd be appreciated if you could try and keep your username similarish to your username here.

 

I don't mind if you want something entirely different but if you take a well known name on here and the original member lays claim to it, I'll give it over to the original member.

 

Similarly, don't take Staff or Management usernames (or our previous usernames) - it'll only cause confusion.

 

Cheers!

[neighbours fan 1986]

Love the idea of the Fiction archive.

[~ Jen ~]

Love the idea.

 

Don't love that I seem to write lots of long fics!

[Didge Napier]

Great idea!

 

My fic is far from finished so should I add it or not .

[Hawker]

Glad you guys like the idea.

 

I'm not sure what to do about work in progress fics at the moment. I quite like the idea of the archive holding completed stories so that people know when they read stories on there, there'll be a conclusion to them and not just a loose end or a cliffhanger.

[~ Jen ~]

Speaking as someone who just transferred a 30- and then a 40-part fic over I think it'll be more writer friendly if we are allowed to archive as we go. There's a tick box for completed fics, and so if you're the kind of reader who wants to avoid WiPs then it's easy to look for "Completed : Yes" and avoid the "Completed : No" ones.

[Hawker]

I don't know...I'm yet to be convinced. I just don't like the idea of a heap of webspace being taken up by long abandoned stories.

 

There's already 180 stories in the WIP forum that haven't been touched in over 2 years. I have nightmares about how large that number would grow to in the archive.

[~ Jen ~]

The rare valid point. It's a great idea to have a "completed" section; if it weren't the summer hols then finding the time to re-format, copy and paste my fics over (and even then I've been selective!) would be really tricky.

[Hawker]

What formatting issues are you having? Is it anything that needs to be looked at?

 

The only thing I will say is that most people (hopefully) will finish a fic and then archive it, so you won't normally have a huge backlog of stories to put up.

 

I was hoping a little bit that because it was just a copy/paste issue (apart from the initial header details, adding characters etc), it wouldn't be too long a job.

[~ Jen ~]

It is the formatting, but also the division into chapters. Speaking for myself, I write one long Word document that I paste over to the board. I remove tabs, double space, and change the Word formatting to the board format.

 

Decided really early on that I couldn't use my Word files to archive as I'd have to go through all that, as well as working out where I'd split the fic into chapters.

 

So I went through my fic threads, hit "quick edit" on the posts, copied the text, pasted into a Word document (which thanks to Vista presets meant I then had to change the formatting as it double spaced my double spacing), edit the [ ] tags to < > tags, and also replace the formatted ... so that it shows up as the three dots instead of the smaller version it pasted as.

 

Post chapter one, find chapter two in a twenty-odd page thread, lather rinse repeat!

[Hawker]

Yeah, I can't help you too much then - a couple of those problems are a quirk of how you do things.

 

I would agree...I find the most logical way to archive is to use the edit function on the board (because then you've got separate chapters already).

 

I would copy and paste into a light editor (such as EditPadLite) instead of Word, as that will preserve your double spacing without you needing to mess with your Word set up. [ to < and ] to > and the short ... to ... is a case of 3 'replace all instances' which should take about 10 seconds.

 

I do appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think those problems are wholly insurmountable. I can appreciate it's a bind if you've got 40 chapters... I suppose the other thing is, if you know you're going to be archiving, you could always save as separate txt files?

 

I haven't done many long fics that have made it onto the board (I.e. I can't complete a fic to save my life) but the one that I did, I wrote each chapter individually in txt files and numbered them WWB_001, WWB_002 etc. Perhaps adopting an approach like that where when you post to the board, you also copy and paste into a txt file to save on your harddrive, you'll escape these problems...as all you'll have to do in the future is copy and paste?

 

I don't know if you think that's workable though...just thinking aloud really.

[Tractor Girl]

Sal, sorry I don't think I was clear with my earlier question about asking whether we should post fics in parts or as a whole. I've got some fics I've written that are rather long, so the question I meant to ask was should I just upload it in one go or should I upload chapter by chapter?

 

I agree about only uploading completed fics, there is nothing more annoying as I have found on other sites than reading through what you think is a completed fic only to discover it stopping half way. There's also the issue of storage space.

 

One other question, is the archive only for fics that were posted on this site. I've got various fics that I posted on previous incarnations of site, (Erinsborough.com etc) that I haven't loaded back onto this site. Should I put them in the archive or not?

[~ Jen ~]

It is workable and is fine from this point on... which I guess is what you were getting at. It's just archiving my back catalogue may take a while, hence my selectiveness. It's not impossible or sufficiently annoying for me to actively seek another option,

[Hawker]

Sorry, I probably missed it or was being daft or something earlier. I'm still a bit fuzzy with the old grey area at the moment.

 

I've got some fics I've written that are rather long, so the question I meant to ask was should I just upload it in one go or should I upload chapter by chapter?

 

I would leave this to your discretion. If you've got chapters already, I would definitely use them. If you've not and have to break the story up to make chapters...then yeah, I'd leave it up to you.

 

There's a 10,000 word limit on each chapter, so if your story is over that, it might be wise to break it down into chapters. Although I think it would look silly to have 500 words per chapter for 10 chapters (I tend to use a *** style break to add lots of small scenes into a chapter), I think there's something psychologically rewarding when you read a long story to get to the end of a chapter...if that makes sense.

 

Also, if you have a 9,000 word story (instead of 2 4,500 word chapters, or 3 3,000 word chapters) if someone takes a break, it makes it more difficult for them to pick up where they left off.

 

But it depends on whether or not there's a logical break in the writing. I'm currently wrangling with that myself over a story I wrote years ago that was originally posted in several parts but I then edited into the first post to make a coherent story...I can't decide whether to break it up or not.

 

Sorry, that advice was probably about as much use as a chocolate teapot!

 

One other question, is the archive only for fics that were posted on this site. I've got various fics that I posted on previous incarnations of site, (Erinsborough.com etc) that I haven't loaded back onto this site. Should I put them in the archive or not?

 

Post them up!! Yes, that would be fabulous - and all fics are definitely welcome. I've only written about 3 fics in the past 4 years (whereas I wrote heaps on Erinsborough), so all of the ones I've put up are old ones. It would be great to see some other old ones.

 

So yeah, any and all Neighbours stories are welcome - new creations or old.

[Hawker]

Nice job Sal. Love the tagline!

 

Will there be a link added to the nav bar at the top in the forum and summary archive?

I've done this for the forum, and will look at doing it for the episode archive soon.

[Swanny]

Cool another bit of random praise but nice go on hijacking the RSS Bot

[Tractor Girl]

Sal, as ever the advice was most helpful

 

I might try and get some fics up this evening, if not definitely over the weekend.

[Dino Hoyland]

Fabulous site, really well organised and set up. I have several stories that I'll start moving over as soon as I'm allowed. I also agree with the idea of only posting finished stories, and maybe keeping the WIP's on the site as - in my non technological view - it might free up space from the original site?

 

Thanks Sal and co for all of your hard work, and am looking forward to a good read.

 

C

[Hawker]

Cool another bit of random praise but nice go on hijacking the RSS Bot

Haha, I thought it was about time he did some more work.

 

Helen - good to hear, it'll be great to see them.

 

Thanks Sal and co for all of your hard work, and am looking forward to a good read.

 

Well, thank you to you for the idea!