Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[Beth Pavell]

Do you mean this entry:

There are many in form and shape but little is known about this mysterious Pokémon.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Do you mean this entry:

No, I mean the forms section of the PokéDex.

 

[AceTrainer14]

Better? HA!

Though it would be awkward if TPCI "paraphrased" my work, changing it just enough to make it distinct in its own right, but an obvious ripoff. There wouldn't be anything I could do about that, though.

I swear once that one of my fan fics for a different fandom (people who have read my AOTM interview will know which one) got stolen for a movie that series made XD The plot wasn't 100% similar, more like 75%, but I still raised an eyebrow when I first heard what they were doing.

 

[Misfit Angel]

Isn't it always nice to run a spellchecker on a rough draft of a chapter and not find a single spelling mistake? It's been happening more and more often lately and I'm starting to think that I might be getting a grip on this writing business. Now comes the part where I'm inundated with a deluge of grammatical errors as I proofread this thing.

 

[Arkadelphiak]

I swear once that one of my fan fics for a different fandom (people who have read my AOTM interview will know which one) got stolen for a movie that series made XD The plot wasn't 100% similar, more like 75%, but I still raised an eyebrow when I first heard what they were doing.

Spoiler: which one

 

[AceTrainer14]

Isn't it always nice to run a spellchecker on a rough draft of a chapter and not find a single spelling mistake? It's been happening more and more often lately and I'm starting to think that I might be getting a grip on this writing business. Now comes the part where I'm inundated with a deluge of grammatical errors as I proofread this thing.

The exact opposite of me, who recently had to cope with the fact that the number of errors in Eight Easy Steps temporarily broke the spell checker. I managed to fix it somehow - not so lucky with Galactic, have to edit the new chapter in a different document. Such fun! Lesson of the day, kiddies: proof read before you are 400,000 words into a story

@Arkadelphiak

Spoiler

 

[Misfit Angel]

I feel like the better alternative may be to have each chapter in its own document. Much easier to make minor changes without having to dig through dozens of chapters. And if you finally need all of the chapters in a single document for whatever reason (possibly submitting to a publishing company), it wouldn't be all that difficult to cobble them altogether, I'd imagine.

 

[AceTrainer14]

@Eliza Prescott That is a good idea, but 8ES has 113 chapters at the moment, with about 30/40 left. That's too many chapters to keep hold of all over the place XD Though splitting things up between arcs probably would have been easier, especially to edit them all later.

 

[Time Breaker]

I keep each chapter in a folder along with some other documents related to the story; I always have! In other words, keeping them all in one document is new to me.

Also, am I the only one that writes my chapters well under the length of a book chapter? I'm thinking I'll go a bit longer with my revamp I've been planning out, but still a short enough length that you can see the update, proceed to read the new chapter, and be finished within a few minutes. (Not that I expect many readers, mind you, but that's hypothetical anyway. )

Perhaps it's just because I'm lazy, because I'm a slow reader, or because I won't be writing it book-style. Actually, it's probably all of those.

 

[Misfit Angel]

@Eliza Prescott That is a good idea, but 8ES has 113 chapters at the moment, with about 30/40 left. That's too many chapters to keep hold of all over the place XD Though splitting things up between arcs probably would have been easier, especially to edit them all later.

You could further split them up into "seasons", like I have. Organization is necessary for proper productivity, I've been told, and it's certainly been easy to keep track of things. I often refer back to what I wrote for Storm Island for inspiration for some scenes in Land of the Roses, and I know exactly where to find them with this method.

 

[Lyca]

I write exclusively in Gdocs, and I've been using a new document for each and every chapter.
I recently had the pleasure to assemble all chapters of a previous story. About 50 of them. It's not fun. So this time around, when I finish one chapter, I copypaste the entire content inro to a "Master Post" kind of doc, complete with table of contents etc.

Edit: Not to mention that Gdocs starts to struggle loading about 250 pages worth of heavily formatted text.

 

[AceTrainer14]

@Six Paths: Length really just depends on the chapter itself and what you need to tell a good story in that segment. There's nothing wrong with short chapters, but if they are too short that can either lead to them being rushed or having too much crammed in for a short space. But that really just depends on the writer and what type of story it is - and don't worry about readers, they will come

And I just can't fathom having my chapters split up too much. It makes for a crowded document, but it is a lot easier if I need to double check something to just hit Crtl+F and find the right bit, especially as a lot of the time when I need to double check something, I usually end up looking in the wrong place anyway XD

 

[Beth Pavell]

I have a master document to make the old Ctrl+F search easier (I use that to keep the voices of the characters straight). It's obviously easier to do that and have separate chapter documents when you create them as you go along.

That being said, I do most of the actual writing in an A4 notebook - well, two notebooks actually, one for the plan and one as a drafting book - so the digital document is really just to prepare it for publishing

 

[diamondpearl876]

Instead of just doing ctrl+f in one document, just have all the chapters in one folder and do a general search of the folder.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Today I made an announcement video, and it got two likes and no comments, like most of my videos... Problem is, I was specifically requesting input. /rant

 

[Beth Pavell]

You know, it occurs to me how relatively difficult it can be to invent a name loaded with the same kind of associations a real one is. Glastonbury Tor, for example, comes with its own ancient magic - but break it down and all you have is "people-living-by-woad-fort hill"

*sigh. Oh well. Time to hit the folklore books to see if I can't engineer something

 

[Nitro Indigo]

There's someone on another website who keeps sending me long PMs whenever they're annoyed with me, and then gets mad when I give short responses because I honestly don't know how to respond. Most recently, they've been annoyed that I keep changing my mind about my YouTube character, and I'm worried now that thinking about Moonlight Museum Ver. 1 from Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil will make me feel ashamed now because they called it a "random song" that has nothing to do with anything. /rant

 

[Lyrebird]

How about not responding or reading them?

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I blocked the person, which is a short-term solution, but I was just scared of getting another response. The same person also sent me an angry PM when I corrected someone who got Kabutops' type wrong.

 

[Lyrebird]

Then ignore that response then. If someone wastes time on getting petty but sending random angry shit to people then they got issues.