A few random things

[loaded_march]

First!  I have not fallen off the face of the planet!  I've... been avoiding the interwebs by immersing myself in fic.  Also, it was the long weekend; I totally turned off my brain for the vast majority of it.

Second!  Part #10 is still in beta -- and although I have an ETA, I am not sharing it, because Things^TM happen, so it might be a bit longer.  Plus, I still have to go through it and fix it.  And believe me, there's a lot of fixing to do.  No, I am not sharing word count, even though someone came close to guessing how many words there are.  I am denying it totally until I have it posted.

Third!  I finally have a title for Part 10.  Amazingly, I have a title for part 11, too.  And the opening scenes to part 11, which I want to start writing right now, but I have a fest fic to write.

Fourth!  Speaking of fest fics -- I am in serious need of someone to Brit Pick my merlin_horror fic.  The fact that I'm coming to this realization now, when I'm only two parts into the fic, is a pretty bad thing.  So I am putting up my official Craigslist ad here:

Wanted:  One poor sap wonderful human being willing to beta a horror fic set in a modern AU.  Specific needs: British slang, location descriptions, and help me I'm lost in London address fixes.  Some knowledge of the medical profession would be helpful but not required.  Should be willing to answer frantic and frequent rare and occasional PMs with random questions as I work my way through the fic, because all these is there even slang for this in the UK? notes I've left myself all over the documents are driving me freaking crazy.

Fifth! I...  I totally had a fifth.  I swear.  I seem to have misplaced it.  I'll get back to you on this one.

Comments

[k-nightfox.livejournal.com]

Dang it! LJ ate my original comment, so if another one shows up later, you'll know why!

I didn't find cutting the three parts of my fic into "chapters" for LJ to be all that painful. I just figured out what the character limit was when posting Part 1 and since the other 2 parts were all around the same length, I cut them all into the same number of chapters. Honestly I just started with the whole section, then cut it in half to see if that fit and when it didn't, I cut it in half again. When that worked, I just broke each chapter off at the nearest line-break to that quarter section so that cutting the thing up didn't really interrupt the flow of the story much. Plus I got to use more of Alby's pretty line-breaks that way since I put one at the top and bottom of each "chapter" ;-)

AO3 on the other hand, what a nightmare! Yes, it let me post each part as a whole but have you ever embedded a lot of art into a draft at AO3 before? You can't really edit it once it's saved! You have to delete it and redo it entirely. Even tiny adjustments will cause the code over the whole thing to go insane! All of a sudden code you never inserted appears out of nowhere and screws up all your carefully placed art! Also, anything I tried to center got bunged. Ugh! It took me three times as long to get the coding perfect on AO3 as it did on LJ. So in that respect, LJ was actually easier to use even if I did have to cut a three part story into 3 parts with 4 chapters each.

Is your artist planning on finishing the art even though it can't officially be part of the PL post? I love all the art that came out of this fest! I've been able to peek at all the artwork even though I've only had time to read 2 stories. It would be nice for both of you if you could still add the art to story later on.

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

(late comment is late, sorry)

Yeah, that is one thing that I wasn't a fan of with AO3. You can edit your first chapter, but you can't edit the later chapters -- at least not if they were in a do-not-post-until... holding pattern. It got frustrating for me, too.

I think my artist is planning on finishing the art, but I know she is swamped with work right now, so I have no idea when that will happen. I will add the art as it is done and point a big arrow toward it :)