Story Writers - Thoughts?

LOL, Lynet. I got fed up waiting for Josh. Feel free to post in the thread if you want. If Josh ever gets a story section up and running I'll move the whole lot there (I'm doing this one in MS Word from the word go ... and I'm using a concordance so it might even make sense )

 

I hate when that happens.

(uh...and I'm just joking here. My husband says that all the time when he spills something, or the like.)

 

How bout here? Any objections? SBW? Lynet? No your honor. Yeah i'm planning my career in the practice of law. And i'm twelve. Yes..YES!... stand there bug-eyed and marvel! MARVEL I SAY! I'm done.

And Josh the story forum sounds great! I personally cannot write stories myself, (as I have no creativity points, for they left for Bermuda was I was but a lad.) but I would love to read everyone elses!

 

Jazz! Goodness gracious, Mirelly already did: The Saga of Penn Vale.

Let me see now, you might like my Ironsides story: http://forums.worldsims.org/showthread.php?t=8414

As Mirelly has pointed out, there is a lot of unrelated conversation and comments posted between the chapters, but it's a very long story, ultimately about a civil war, with some battle scenes. Very exciting, if I do say so myself. Lots of pictures. I do admit that if you are really twelve (I thought you were older ) the first few chapters might seem a little boring until you get to the part where Joe and Ironsides go back to Joe's country.

I plan to move the entire thing over to the new story forum.

 

LOL, Lynet. Been reading I-Sim meself. I forgot how good it was. A plot that twists this way and that, keeping Constant Reader on her toes.

 

Ironsides is even more twisted.

 

Thank you very much Lynet I will read it right away!

 

Here's a quote from Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard's Almanac 'Tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.

I've decided that it applies to me and story writing. I should have suppressed the first desire to write a story because now I'm going crazy trying to satisfy the urge to write a hundred more.

So I have another story, and I've called it The First Desire. It's a spinoff from I, Sim but does not have Errol Waring or Iven Harcourt in it, not as I've planned it this far, anyway.

I will post it to the new story forum which I believe is in its final stages of development.

It's why I haven't been doing too much around here. I've been working with a sim named Ben. (His last name is NOT Franklin, nor is he related to Ben Franklin. ) And I have a raging desire to hear what my friends here at Worldsims think of him.

 

Looking forward to it, Lynet! Your stories are among the VERY FEW threads I've subscribed to!

 

Sorry Josh. I stopped using because it isn't a one stop shop - can't add pics without the gallery and the gallery is going to become unusable if the world and his wife start piling in sims pics in the few obvious categories that seem to fit eg Odds and Ends.

Each episode has to be added as a separate thread and there is no obvious connection to previous episodes.

The blog format would still seem the more ideal solution where comments on individual episodes can be hidden by default, but easily exposed by readers who wish to discuss the story with other readers. Also, the blog format, by design, has an archive menu that clearly links to previous episodes.

As an added bonus, blogspot (now under Google) allows direct uploading of images and full html/css control ... as much, or as little, as the user wishes.

See the the Penn Vale Saga link below.

 

Um I didn't know that was possible. Don't the attachments just show as thumbnails at the foot? (Like on the main forums?)

 

I wouldn't mind using the attachments at the foot.

My only problem is that I have just about used up my attachment allotment: 91 MB out of a maximum of 98 MB.

As for the gallery, the Odds and Ends subcategory was one I set up myself a long time ago when I had the privilege of being able to do that in the Gallery, which I don't now. (Program change, I guess) I had also set up the Travel and TravelEgypt subcategories.

I am, perhaps, more guilty than most of going overboard with pictures and clogging up the gallery. Maybe if I could have my own subcategory -- Lynet's Mess . SBW does pictures, but can easily rely on her writing and doesn't use or need them the way I do. The same for Mirelly and Chee-Z.

As for each chapter as a separate thread, that's true. I thought I had found a reasonable work-around by making each story a subcategory where the next/previous buttons could be used to get to the next chapter.

I am not familiar at all with blogs and how they work. But I thought the issue with them is that the story appears in reverse order. That's fine if you've been following it from the beginning, but maybe not for reading the complete story for the first time.

 

I have to say, I have been so anxious and eager to see the story forum open that I will be hugely disappointed if the idea is scratched.

However, if you decide for some reason to close it down, I would like to have a little time to move what I've posted over there down to the Fan Fiction/Art section in this forum. I spruced up the original stories a little, and believe the "reruns" would be easier to find and read down there in the Fan Fiction/Art forum than where they are now, buried in the General Discussion section.

But I'd still really like to see the forum open up.

 

I am beginning to think I missed something with the story forum. I found that I had to post each chapter as a new thread or else any comments on a chapter would just be interspersed with the actual sory and therefore no different from the main forum.

Having the most recent post show as the entrance page on a blog is not a problem because if you create a new blog for each distinct story (or series of stories) most common blogger sites (a) permit users to have any number of blogs and (b) ach blog contains an automatically generated, date-order set of links to the "archived" preceeding episodes thus making reading from the beginning a doddle. Each and any episode that generates reader response/discussion etc. will be obvious by the comments (No.) tag at the foot of each post. Do take a look at the PVS blog and see what I mean.

Going back to the story forum to see what, if anything, I missed.

POSTSCRIPTUM Josh. Thumbnail images are not what I have in mind for storytelling. If I use an image, I choose it to specifically because it does illustrate the text and it therefore belongs 'in line' with the paragraphs it relates to. Plopping it down as an attachment at the end of the section of text, requires captioning as well as an effort by the reader to actually open the image for viewing ... both of which break the flow of the reading. I choose my images to reduce the wordage ... I hope they do not delay the eye (and/or attention) but fill in the corners of the reader's mental imagery. I belive that Lynet's images are in a different category because it is absolutely obvious that she has gone to very great lengths -- in dressing the set, and her characters. Such detail would be intrusive in my, and SBW's style of narrative ... the reader is as contemporary as the stories and needs not to have their nose rubbed in to the minor visual clues and cues. Lynet's stories, on the other hand, are raised to another level entirely by her illustrations. Pulling them out of the story and plopping them into quire-breaks* like medieval woodcuts might be allegorically cute in a clumsy sort of way, but it would IMHO detract significantly from their literary and artistic merit.

For a writer, chucking out a couple of thousand words needs little in the way of effort ... beyond the necessary mental discipline (which I often lack) and, of course, some sort of consistent set of characters and a plausible plot-scenario for them to inhabit (also an area I often flounder in ). But what Lynet does is highly laudable. Those pictures don't happen quickly.

* Before modern printing made woodcuts and engraved copper plates obsolote for mainstream printing, book illustrations were routinely called "Plates" and were invariably printed on fine-quality, hot-pressed, coated paper, on one side only; such plates were then bound into the folio structure of the finished book ... usually, but not always, as folio sets spanning or interleaved within the various quires that made up the finished volume. Modern DTP, and high-plasticity synthetic glues for binding, means that illustrations can be directly printed inline with the author's text.

 

Thank you, about my pictures. No kidding, I did put a lot of effort into staging many of the scenes. Battle scenes around a castle, for instance, don't come natural to sims.

It occurred to me this afternoon that as long as the pictures in the story forum threads are not actually LINKED to the pictures in the gallery -- in other words, they're just copied and pasted -- I should just go back and delete those in the gallery since they're taking up space for no reason.

Think I'll go test the process right now.