Amalthia's recs and fan works

You know when fandom talks about Tumblr it sounds like a great service. What no one mentions is that if your internet is too slow, all you'll see on your tumblr feed, is a bunch of blank squares where the images/gifs should display. Occasionally, a bright spot will appear as one gif out of six loaded.

I gotta say this much for Dreamwidth/LJ at least when I scroll down my flist I see something.

I know I'm probably not the only person in the United States that isn't happy with the 10 day delay in watching Avengers. It seems like everyone else in the world has seen the movie and today as I was browsing tumblr I keep seeing cut tags for reviews (which I do appreciate btw) What is annoying me is that I really would love to read these reviews and thoughts on the movie but I have to wait another week before I can view them.

I'm seriously annoyed with whoever thought it would be a good idea to not have a single world wide release date for this movie so I can participate with my fellow fans and squee about the movie.

I could save the links to notepad to read after Avengers but I shouldn't have to. I feel cut off from the conversation and it's a weird unpleasant feeling.

And in other news, there is already a cam version of the movie online for anyone that knows how to use torrents.

Well, it was bound to happen. My account was suspended...I'm still not changing my name because I don't want my real name online at all! But I did add a fake last name that's sort of generic. Google + is smoking crack if they think their service is going to be successful when people can't pick which names they are known by online. My real name doesn't mean anything to the people I interact with online and why would I want to interact over the internet with people I already know if I can't trust them with my online pen name?

I hate that people think everyone wants a Facebook account.

Some guy at the Mobile Read Forums is annoying me and I can't pinpoint why his statements are rubbing me the wrong way. I suck at expressing myself and the idea of tackling his latest post is daunting. I'm also not sure if I'm overreacting or he really is being somewhat trollish.

The AO3 thread was going so well too and then this guy came along and said he wanted nothing to do with the A03 because someone said that RPF fan fiction was the only real fan fiction and as a gen fan fiction writer he found it offensive and thinks the whole organization feels that way. And yet he has not cited anything.

The discussion has gone a bit downhill since, almost into wank. I don't even know what to say anymore. I should let it go or hope elf is willing to whack him over the head with her brains. I'm sure if I write anything more I'll probably make things even worse...or give him more ammo.

Post in question

Master Posts are posts where an author lists their header information as well as chapters to all the parts in their LJ posted fic. This helps the reader find all the parts in the story.

The basic Master Post shares essential information about the story such as:

Author:
Title:
Pairing:
Fandom:
Word Count:
Warnings:
Summary:
Artist: (Include link)

Most authors get this part just right.

The part many authors miss is helping the reader find all the parts to their fic. I don’t think readers are asking a lot. We want to read your story, we want to read it in the correct order, and we actually want to read ALL of the story.

Some authors use tags, which helps, but tags are not nearly as effective as a simple list of links leading to each chapter or part in the story.

But in doing that, sometimes the links aren't enough either because they lead to locked posts, they aren't in a logical order; in so many ways, writers shoot themselves in their own feet by making it difficult to read multiple post fic.

For example, what many authors do is list Chapter 1a but make no mention of 1b in their chapter post let alone at the top of Chapter 1a, which could lead the reader to believe that there are no links at the bottom of the fic. This is NOT good. Not everyone (like me) is going to scroll down 18 plus chapters to see if there is more at the end. Trying to read a story shouldn’t be like a scavenger hunt.

This sucks. And the author gets no cookie or brownie points from me or any other reader that has experienced this.

Another issue for the multi-part stories is that some authors make 2 Master Posts. For the reader this is confusing, first because it makes me ask why there are two master posts for the same story? Why not just have one master post and list all the links there.

One time there was a multi-part story with two master posts, and in master post #1 (which was part 1), there were (let's just say) seven chapters numbered 1 through 7. But in the master post #2 (which was part 2), there were eight chapters, and they were numbered 1 through 8. If you stumbled upon master post #2, you might think you were at the beginning of the story, but instead you ended up in the middle. Much confusion develops for the reader when trying to figure this out.

If you MUST have two master posts (though it boggles the mind as to why you would want this kind of maintenance nightmare), then the chapters should be consistently sequential from beginning to end. Like this:

Part 1

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6a
Chapter 6b

It’s the author’s job (if they choose to share their writing) to make the access to their stories clear and not confusing. It does not inspire confidence in a story if an author cannot share their story in a way that does not confuse the reader or cut them off from the rest of the story.

Many workplaces now block social networking sites such as Livejournal. Readers have found a few ways to get around these blocks such as downloading fic to usb sticks, emailing the stories to themselves, and etc…as a result when they (including myself) are at work and have the time to read the fic, this is not the best time to find out they missed downloading parts of the author’s story. Keeping in mind with a limited amount of time in the evening to download and etc…this happens quite often.

These are just some things to keep in mind if you’re an author posting a multi-chaptered story or splitting a story up due to LJ word posting limitations. The simplest solution would be a single file version but if that is not possible then it is rather important that the author make it as easy and clear as possible for their readers to find every part of their story in a single post.

I just ran across a story that used apostrophes in the place of quotations. I'm still rather sure that in 99% of the cases quotations are required at the beginning of dialogue and at the end of the dialogue. It's not even something that's easy to fix because you can't just replace all the quotations with apostrophes without messing up the apostrophes in the story. grrrr

I'm normally not a grammar nazi but in this case I'll make an exception. It's ugly formatting and not proper writing!

EDIT: it appears that this type of formatting is common in the UK. I didn't know that, but I do still prefer regular quotes so you don't get sentences that look like this.

(random sentence that I modified)

'They do.' She slipped into the galley, moving soundless on little bare feet. 'I'm hungry.'