My Fanfic Move

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My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Fri Nov 05, 2010 9:54 pm

...trying to use NaNoWriMo to get some serious wordcount out on contracts, personal projects, fanfics and blogs. In the meantime, the process of moving my fanfiction is slowed down.


Current status:

In PDF format:

Divine Blood (FMP/OMG/R.5ng)
Chi and Chakra (Naruto/R.5ng)
Bridal Shower (Dresden)
Slut Virus (R.5/silly)
Ryoko Saotome (R.5/TM!)
The Amazon and The Money Lender first 3 chapters (R.5)

In Webpage format:

Chi and Chakra Chaps. 1-15, 31-33

As to my original fiction:

Pdf format:

Greenwater: Books 1 and 2 (minus the four prologues)

Bystander: Chapter 1, All of the Flashback characterization stories (7 chapters total)

Zodiacs: the six hero stories, Mentor/Villain story for purchase only

Choice and Consequences: Only part 1 of first story is written at all...
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Spokavriel » Fri Nov 05, 2010 10:03 pm

I wouldn't have so much trouble with PDF's if only they would be easier to get printed in smaller pages. But it publishes to 8.5X11 because that is the default letter page size.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Fri Nov 05, 2010 10:07 pm

well, I like the webpage format better myself...especially since it gives a "next episode" link rather than having to back up to menu and find the next epi...

I'm just groaning at the work of transferring all those stories over...and then I've started to pull some of my anime threads over with PCHeintz's inspiration...soooo

I've set myself up a huge amount of work...

If I was a successfully independent writer, I could perhaps hire someone to do the move for me....but I can't afford that....sooooo
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Spokavriel » Fri Nov 05, 2010 10:09 pm

If you don't mind the quality or schedule you could always ask for volunteers to do some of that.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Fri Nov 05, 2010 10:17 pm

True...find someone I could trust to give admin ability and ask them to do it based on the format I started in Chi and Chakra...
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Spokavriel » Fri Nov 05, 2010 10:27 pm

Or give someone the format and have them transcribe the fics for you as the pages and send them to you attached to E-Mails without you having to give up admin access.

It all depends on how much time you want to save and how much risk you are willing to take.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby PCHeintz72 » Sat Nov 06, 2010 12:33 am

Ehhh... this issue of needing huge tracks of time makes little sense to me...

I do data manipulation and conversion all the time. (One of the reasons my own reporting program does so many formats, though that program has nothing to do with this.)

If it is a matter of editing and clean up and redoing of the story... you should merely:
1. Pick 1 format among those he wishes to support(to me, it would either be TXT if have a high end text editor with a spell checker, or Word if prefer a word processor with spell and grammar checkers),

2. Make it perfectly clean using the spell and or grammar checkers if desired,

3. Give it a read through looking for issues.
Once that 1 format is deemed *perfect*... simply convert it to HTML/PDF/RTF/DOC/BBCode or whatever formats are desired... then give a quick glance through for things like scene breaks.

Personally I would use TXT (and Helios Textpad or Textpad++ each with spell checker plug in installed) as the master with no hard carriage returns except between paragraphs and scenes ... then set standard guidelines across the board for following:
- use special symbols to indicate underlining, bold, italics, etc...
- use another set for internal thoughts or telepathy
- use another for scene breaks
- use another for any I'm missing

When importing into a more or different graphical format... set up and use some macros to turn those special character codes into proper ones for the format. In my own case, being a programmer, I might instead of macros write a crude scan and change program to scan the file and partially convert it in place. Were I going that route... I'd likely convert TXT to XML and go from there. Fully XML compliant TXT

For editing/new chapters in future... make your self a rule to always edit in the master format, no matter what it may be, then always convert/reconvert afterward to the other formats the changed/added material.

Initial set up of the first format will be the overhead and time consuming part... but the others will snap in line right off once the macros are made. there would be no need for any real work beyond a glance through, maybe a beta or editor as a second set of eyes.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Sat Nov 06, 2010 12:59 am

I'm using the web-builder software provided by webs.com.

So, I'm basically creating a new page, telling it to create a content box, pasting material into the content box related to one scene out of a chapter, then creating a new content box.

I don't every really look at the coding involved. So the process is basically:

cut

paste

put in carriage returns to separate paragraphs

next time I do a chapter, I'll take some screen caps to show the process...

I've let pretty much all my programmer savvy that I had pre-college fade away to nothing, unfortunately.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby frice2000 » Sat Nov 06, 2010 1:22 am

Can't you just use a CSS file to maintain style and just use a dump from a WYSISYG HTML editor to do the formatting? Pretty sure that'd be slightly more efficient. Anyway if you want to I use this program: Calibre for document conversions. It maintains formatting pretty well may want to give it a whirl.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Sat Nov 06, 2010 1:29 am

Sorry, don't really know what CSS is.

I haven't actively maintained a website since around 98 or 99. I have no idea what sort of developments have come up since then save I know the name "java".

So this is my first return to this sort of thing in over a decade...sorry if everything you're saying goes over my head and I'm doing things the hard way...only way I know how
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby frice2000 » Sat Nov 06, 2010 2:22 am

CSS stands for cascading style sheet. It's how a group of websites maintain the same look throughout each page without having to add the same code for background image/font/font sizes/headers/other. It does a lot of other things too but I'm not anywhere near good at HTML programming to itemize them but there are a ton of free guides if you do a cursory Google search. A WYSIWYG editor is just an abbreviation for "What you see is what you get". Frontpage, Microsoft Word (although incredibly shitty), Dreamweaver, etc. are all examples of that kind of editor. So basically make a CSS file (there are a TON of guides how to do this on the internet) that'll save you an immense amount of time per page. Then you can just pretty much copy and paste your work into a graphical HTML editor of which there are many copies readily available. Here's a link to a trial of Dreamweaver (which is considered by most of my web development buddies the best, though lots of them like to use pure HTML code because they're nuts like that). Shouldn't take long at all if it's just text and Dreamweaver will guide you through the creation of CSS files if you ask it to.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Sat Nov 06, 2010 3:18 am

looking at it, it looks like it just changes the program I'd be using to do my cutting and pasting....
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Sat Nov 06, 2010 4:50 am

First Go to the chapter to be converted (either on my website or msword or ff.net)

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Second Open/Create the Empty Page

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Third Make the top content box which will have links to other parts of the page as well as the next and previous episode

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Make the out-of-episode links

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Block and Copy first scene

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Make second content box and paste first scene

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Put in the returns and title

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Rinse and repeat for remaining scenes of episode (11 total times in this episode's case, including first run through above)

Make last content box (13th in this case) for the links at the bottom of the page and copy what already have in the top page

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Go back to first content box and start making links to the content boxes on this page finish when have a final table of contents for the episode

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20 minutes, not including screencapping and pasting

go to next chapter
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Spokavriel » Sat Nov 06, 2010 7:59 am

I personally think you are making it harder on yourself than it needs to be but seeing your screenshots I also think you don't make screenshots that often. The extra white space can be avoided. And this was almost as painful to look at as trying to read a fic by someone who doesn't know how to use <br> or other styles of carriage returns.
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Re: My Fanfic Move

Postby Thrythlind » Sat Nov 06, 2010 9:38 am

figured it might be, I lost any right to carry a "tech-savvy" title a long time ago...however...I don't trust any program to make a judgment call as to where one scene ends and another begins...most of the time it can be found where I put a line separator, but in some cases, I separated dialogue and description that was really part of the same scene and too short to be really given it's own section...also line separators are sometimes not included in cut and paste....especially FF.net's separators, which seem to vanish if they leave their unhallowed ground...

there's just too much in the way of decisions for me to be able to trust much in the way of an automatic method, and I suppose "trust" is the keyword here
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