Igenlode Wordsmith

I think my marigold seedlings probably got frosted last night; they are not looking at all happy. I suspect the trouble is that they were still in the shallow tray. Fortunately I had not put the tomatoes out -- although since the surface of the balcony is currently warm to the touch in the sunshine and the indoor temperature is still only 55F, I have them outside at the moment!

I have typed up about half of Chapter 2 of "Ashes", and it is clearly going to be far too long (four and a half thousand words already, and we have at least three more major plot points to cover; in fact very little has actually happened yet). It will almost certainly need to be cut heavily and/or split, but I don't think that simply splitting it is going to solve anything :-( I suppose I shall need to go through yet again and try to pare it back to focus on the actual original vision for the scene, as opposed to all the embellishments that seemed like a good idea at the time...

( Gloom )

Pages on AO3 continue to fail to load on a regular basis, which is particularly awkward if you are trying to submit any kind of data (e.g. edits or reviews), but apparently the problem is not actually at this end for once... ("known performance issues")

I'm guessing this explains a lot...
https://paganinpurple.tumblr.com/post/710083135096913920/ao3-etiquette-updated

It would seem a whole new kind of AO3 reader/writer is emerging and it is becoming clear not everyone quite understands how the website community works. Here is some basic guidance on how most people expect you to go about using AO3 to keep this a fun community archive that funtions correctly:

• No critisism unless the author has specifically asked or agreed to hear it (so use your notes to say if you want some constructive feedback). Even constructive critisism is a no-no unless an author note tells you it’s okay. No, posting it online is not an open invitation for that. Many people write as a fun hobby or a way to cope with, among other things, insecurity and just want to share. Don’t ruin that for them. I’ve seen so many authors just stop writing coz they can’t handle the negative emotions the critism brings, and it’s only meant to be a fun thing shared for free (pointing out tagging errors is not included in this).

Right *exhausted*
I've managed to upload eleven chapters across three stories in the course of a very protracted evening, and remembered all over again why I was *not* uploading all my back catalogue to AO3 (never mind the issue of access dropping in and out, including several continuous hours of 'out' in the middle of uploading Ch5 of 7).

But the "Pirates of the Caribbean" material from my very old fanfiction.net account is now at least under the same roof as the other fics, or at least some of them.

Continuing this process over the course of twenty-odd other fanfics, some of which are of considerable length, is a less than appealing prospect, I have to admit...

I have been rigging up tomato-strings for the benefit of the towel-tomatoes (thus covering my hands with yellow -- I'd forgotten tomatoes did that!)( Read more... )
The Demon Red chilli finally managed to outgrow its initial yoghurt-pot, and I have repotted it into a larger pot using compost retrieved from the various pots I have been emptying, including the gone-to-seed pak choi, from which I was able to harvest a little seed, but not nearly as much as I had been expecting (an awful lot of those seed pods turned out to be empty, and some of them were hosting caterpillars!)


( AO3 offline )

Of course it's always *after* you have uploaded the chapter in three different places, one of them inaccessible, that you notice you used the term 'enlighten on [the matter]' twice in two different contexts in the space of the final paragraph... :-( "Apprise of" will do as a substitute, I think ("inform" isn't quite right, being too direct, and moreover we've had "form" in the preceding clause). "Advise of" would be less obscure, but I feel that unfortunately it risks getting read as Perrette actually offering advice on the matter rather than merely deigning-- or not-- to provide minimal information!

( AO3 series )

( page-view stats )

I *knew* this was not going to be popular and I wrote it anyway, just as I always do. It would be nice to be popular, but if you're going to insist on being wilfully obscure then you can't expect it.

Meanwhile I have very nearly finished typing the second chapter (another few hundred words to go), which is considerably shorter.

( my stats software is definitely broken )

Memo to self: the only part of the backdating process that is actually necessary (and indeed the only part that finally produces the desired effect on the author's story list) is changing the number of chapters from 2 back to 1 again.

So you don't have to create and then delete a spurious second chapter. All you have to do is to go to 'Edit story', tick "This work has multiple chapters" and define the one-shot as being 'Chapter 1 of 2' when setting a different publication date, i.e. change the total number of future chapters without actually creating any. Then in order to update the overall record for the story as a whole, all you need to do is redefine the original single chapter back to 'Chapter 1 of 1' again.( Read more... )

( seeds and seedlings )

There have been a total of eleven hits on Chapter 5 of Hertha since uploading it to AO3 on Friday -- or at least on the story as a whole, since AO3 doesn't provide chapter data -- which is depressingly low for a chapter that took me so long to complete typing and editing... but the only moral to be drawn from *that* is that I should get round to typing more quickly, since this is definitely a niche story and viewing figures aren't likely to increase. (Especially if people are really tracking their reading exclusively by tagged favourite 'ship': https://archiveofourown.org/comments/516425749 )

On the other hand, those eleven hits are at least enough to propel it into the "Top Five By Hits" display which is displayed by default on the stats page!

The bicycle has been temporarily patched up -- which involved waiting around for five hours, since the shop in question is five miles away and walking home and then back again really isn't an option unless absolutely unavoidable. But they were quite frank that the wheel is worn out and needs to be replaced altogether. I hope I've sourced a replacement (dated 1973, so even older...)

There is *definitely* something weird going on with my AO3 stats; after uploading the new chapter of "High City on a Hill", I got 11 new page hits, two new subscriptions to the story (*very* nice; that means that people actually want to know what happens next), and... +19 kudos, all from guest accounts, with the proportion of kudos exceeding page hits going up over the course of the day. So not only have I got at least one reader whose page-hits don't register, I've apparently got about 50% of them, all wildly enthusiastic about the story...?

A 100% reader:kudos conversion rate would be improbable enough, but a 175% conversion rate looks decidedly fishy!

[Edit: the kudos is now up to +27 for +12 page hits, so something very queer is going on!]

Right, I think I've finally created a working command-line script to highlight, record and allow me to query changes in my AO3 stats on a monthly basis -- functionality which the site itself conspicuously fails to supply :-p

( limitations )

The script is based on the old FFstats script I developed in order to highlight which stories had received hits recently (e.g. since I last saved the status), plus the added ability to display the number of hits over the whole of a selected month, information made available natively on FFnet but not provided by AO3. The latter displays only data for the entire lifetime of a story, and it's nice to be able to see how the figures change over time.

So you can display either a list of which stories received hits since your last download/save (with the option to record that data and restart the comparison from zero, or to exit without saving and keep accumulating more hits until the differences are sufficiently numerous that you start losing track of where the changes are), or a list of which stories received hits over a user-specified month. I didn't provide any flexibility to query the figures over any period other than a calendar month, simply because I wasn't used to being able to do that in the old days and hence haven't really felt the need ;-)

I only have a relatively limited amount of data saved so far during the development period (from 19th Jan onwards), so I haven't been able to test exhaustively for all possibilities, although I've experimented with fake figures for testing purposes. More bugs will probably show up with use.

( Sample output )

And... finished. Well, that's certainly three thousand words I wouldn't have written otherwise ;-)

(And a canon I almost certainly wouldn't have written fan-fiction for at all -- I can't even remember why I started, except that I happened to have mentioned that novel a few days before in some context, probably because it's one of the very few of Broster's works that happens to be available online, and therefore I had the book off the shelves and hanging around on the first of November. Though I *have* always had a fellow-feeling for de Brencourt, along with various other deeply flawed anti-heroes...)

( Read more... )