Igenlode Wordsmith

Having decided to rename Auguste-Philippe-Gérard du Chaligret de Fouilgieux to Henri-Auguste-Gérard in order to avoid an overlap with the familiar Raoul and Philippe of my "Phantom" stories( A Mad Hatter's name-party )

( Class consciousness )

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Viewing stats: Chapter 1 received a grand total of six views [edit: now eight!] in its first few days before getting stuck. ( invidious comparisons :-( )

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Chapter 2 — A Fresh Start

Warm, well-fed and comfortable, Venya slept until long past daybreak, and woke to find himself sharing a bed with a small and wriggling body that was kicking him in its sleep. Venya kicked back, instinctively, with one of Big Dima’s favourite oaths, and sat up with a jolt in the realization that he was no longer in Dima’s cellar. Sun was streaming in through open shutters, boys’ voices echoed down the corridor outside the room and dogs were barking somewhere beyond the window, and it seemed his companion of the night was a curly-headed child some three or four years younger than himself, into whose bed he had evidently been put the evening before.

The two of them pummelled one another wordlessly for a moment, then broke off by unspoken common agreement, with honour satisfied on both sides. The little boy bestowed a beaming smile upon Venya, along with a hopeful enquiry in a language he could not understand at all. He did his best, haltingly, to explain.

( Read more... )

I woke up this morning to find that my hot-water-bottle had leaked -- I can't find any cracks in it, and it made squealing vacuum-noises through the top, so I think I probably just hadn't done the screw up quite right (thanks to spending the small hours trying to wrestle with AO3 tags†), and then compounded the problem by lying on it during the night. ( Read more... )

( AO3 tags )

I think I have finally almost finished my Athos crack-fic (which, as usual, is of course completely lacking in any crack humour save for the initial bizarre concept, being written entirely straight). I am not particularly happy with it; the balance of the various parts is, I suspect, distorted by how much trouble I was having in writing them respectively, which means that what I thought was the main section, consisting of the introduction and arrival of my OC, is probably now overshadowed by the much longer following sections between the canon characters, making the beginning seem a bit pointless -- even if the only point of the OC was in effect to provide a handle by which the entire AU scenario could be established.( Read more... )

*checks on AO3*
There is no separate "Little Men" fandom, as it gets rolled into the general "Little Women Series" category; checking on characters from that fandom who don't appear in any of the earlier books (e.g. Nan, Dan, and Jo's sons Rob and Teddy) suggests that many of the stories that are set within that book don't bother to use the two or three variants on "Little Men" tags that do exist and are mapped to "Little Women", but I'm guessing that there are maybe twenty or so of them out there.

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...)