"viridescent" Pros: The viewpoint character doesn't yet know the name of the character being described, meaning that an epithet might actually be appropriate here Actually a pretty cool word, considered in isolation Better than "greenette" or whatever the hell Cons: You are referring to a character by a made-up word for his hair colour. It is not ever going to work or be a good idea. Ever.
Are they actually written like individual pieces or just as chapters? Because as someone who does in fact have like AUs that are just spread across a variety of one shots I don't entirely mind that in concept. I suppose I could in theory write a chaptered version of my Star Wars AU for Kencyrath but the thing is that I honestly do not want to. I do not care enough about the continuous "plot" to really do that, and would rather just capture short moments that are interesting. And the fics I have done for it can't really be slotted together into a chaptered fic because they're written in entirely different styles. Some are poems, one is a prose poem written in the second person, and another is just your common third person prose one shot. They aren't really connected works, though in terms of plot progression they are connected. But if they're short entries that read basically like chapters then I am kind of confused as to why they would do it?
They should. They do most of the things Word does. I own Word because they don't do everything that Word does, but I'm kind of a superuser.
WRT writing in gdocs and moving to ao3 like zeroesper said, change the doc’s spacing so it adds an extra space after each paragraph, and then only hit enter once per paragraph. thst should fix the extra spaces issue (though if any extra spaces remain, or if you don’t do that, you can go into the HTML version of your fic on ao3 and remove any extra <br />s) BUT i would like to share a VERY HELPFUL THING SOMEONE MADE https://docs.google.com/document/d/19eZnBQ4989Dr17v2ODFgE8QWAo9Oahi4USDNS3hOSvM/edit save this google doc to your drive, and then it automatically turns your shit to ao3-friendly html! it’s a lifesaver. i mean you should still double-check to make sure it doesn’t mess up somewhere, but i’ve found it to be much better than just pasting my fic into ao3 and letting ao3 sort out the html. (note: you still have to only hit enter once per paragraph i think, unless you want to spend time getting rid of errant <br />s.)
when i copy from gdocs i just delete the extra spaces in ao3’s rich text editor when i paste it in, it takes like a couple minutes maybe and gives me a chance to proofread again while i’m at it
The particular instance I just ran across had them written as chapters, not individual pieces, which is what made it 100x more frustrating for me. Rambling series that are actually written as a bunch of lightly interconnected pieces is one thing—posting each chapter as its own work to artificially inflate your kudos counts is another. Which is, generally, why I assume people do it. Though in this case it can also be “I imported this fic from LJ and made the executive decision to make each journal entry its own fic instead of chaptering it” since it was an LJ fic originally, but at that point I’m just. It was agony having to go from journal entry to journal entry and HOPING the author had them all labeled and linked so you didn’t miss part 27 in the 63 part fic, why would recreate that when you don’t???? Have to???? WHY HAPPEN....
yes, you delete the entire text contents of the doc/explanation (well, i guess you don’t have to, you’d just have to be careful to not accidentally copypaste the explanation bits :P) i have no idea how, but the doc itself has a special script that’s not in the text itself, so deleting the text contents of the doc doesn’t affect the script that converts the doc to html.
Using open office seems like it'd be a lot easier and it's just as free as gdocs is. When I'm no longer working professionally in Word I'll probably have to go that route myself. I used open office for a while and it was really super similar; it just doesn't allow me to do a lot of leet formatting tricks I can do in Word unless I want to use regex to do them. It also doesn't support non-US English, making spell check a pain if you write or copy edit for settings or publications that use UK English, which I did for long enough that I really don't like American spellings for a lot of words any more.
The issue with only using OpenOffice is that I can only have my fics in one place, which is a problem when I sometimes write from my phone or my baby laptop. :(
I hate to write on my phone so I don't have a fix for that, but you can put OO or LibreO on all your computers and keep your fic on a flash drive, using the computer as your backup. Anything that lives on my work's servers legally belongs to my work, so I keep any writing that I don't want them to read on a flash drive that has a metal clip attached to it with a keychain ring so that I don't lose it unless somebody steals my entire purse, and that way I can work on things during breaks. If I didn't have Word at home and was using OO I'd just do the same but save everything I edited in Word as an .rtf file.
A flash drive would be a pain in the ass for me, alas. I lose things like that WAY too easily for it to be a viable solution.
I hear you, but the Lexar ones that swivel open and have a place you can attach them to a keychain through are much easier to keep track of than most flash drives are, if that helps at all.
Might be useful as a general thing. Still not sure I wanna do that with my fic, because it's still effort and money. :P
So I am in Les Mis fandom. Canon is set in 1830s France, and I often want to read, you know, fic that is set during canon instead of modern AUs. To do this, it is easier to go through the tag people put on canon-set fics instead of looking in the general tag, because no one tags their goshdarned modern AUs. Call me crazy, but I feel like most fics in a canon's tag on AO3 should either be set during canon or tagged as AUs! (I am glad people are having fun with their modern-day US high school and college AUs, but I just want to know they're AUs before I click through and waste time reading a few paragraphs because neither the tags nor the summary indicates they're not set in the 19th century)
On a vaguely related topic, fics for canons that have aliens or robots or whatever that don't tag for human AUs. I didn't come here to read about humans, I came here for weird shit!
The ratio of modern AU to canon era fics in the Les Mis fandom is insane. Not that I'm exactly complaining, since I do like modern AUs (especially if they are also reincarnation AUs mmyes) but it's interesting. probably it's that way because everyone fucking died in canon and the whole fandom lives in denial
