Powerless to Fix My Own Story

[Whispersecret]

My chain story chapter was posted last night, and there are numerous glitches in the formating. If only I could zip in there and fix them all myself! Anywhere I had an ellipse, or a dash, or an i with an accent, it gave me a weird "i-" thing. I even got a copyright symbol once. And in one place I forgot to put the ending </I> which made the rest of the story on that page turn out in italics.

I've sent Laurel a couple of emails about it, but I can't know when she'll see them, or when she'll have the time to go through and fix the mess. I offered to fix it on my original manuscript if she would tell me how to do it. Then I can just send her the fixed version.

This is so frustrating, and only you writers would understand. When you've worked so hard on something and are excited to see it posted, and then you find it's full of "mistakes!!!" <wails>

Well, there's nothing to do now but wait for a response. That, or go eat massive amounts of ice cream.

 

[CreamyLady]

Shhh. Go have some ice cream (as much as you can eat), and let time pass. Laurel will get to it eventually.

I know it's frustrating, but in the absence of the ability to fix it now, ice cream is the best you can do.

Unless, of course, you want to start writing a story in which your heroine single-handedly takes on the Evil Formatter, turning it into digital toast and saving the universe for writers.

 

[Whispersecret]

Okay. <smiles> Most of the glitches have been fixed. Laurel jumped on it while I was out running errands. Only a few things remain. I've sent her a third email showing her where.

Most of the weird symbols occured in the places where I had Italian, and it really worried me because I feel like I was sort of already going out on a limb by putting a foreign language in there. But then, to have some unreadable symbols show up too...! Oy vey. I thought, "Well, a restless reader won't put up with THAT weird junk and will click the back arrow for sure."

Thanks, CL, for your reassurance. I didn't have any ice cream, but I reserve the right to justify it later tonight based on this stressful writer's dilemna!

 

[CAT~~]

Don't worry about it...the story speaks for itself and it was an absolute joy to read. I barely noticed the glitches and it didn't make me want to stop reading.
So STEP AWAY FROM THE ICE CREAM. Unless you want to celebrate a great story. Personally, a good massage or some champagne would be a better choice...grin.
Cat~~

 

[Tawny T]

If I remember correctly Laurel said in a previous post to make all the corrections, then send it to her as an attachment with a note to substitute it for the other one.

I just made an error in my latest story that a reader caught. Is my face red! But if only one reader caught it, and it involved a discrepancy beteen one story and the sequel, I'll leave it. Grin!

[Edited by Tawny T on 05-29-2001 at 12:08 AM]

 

[Tawny T]

Whisper, when you submit, always preview it! Some glitches creep in in even an almost perfect story. Most are spacing.

You can edit it as many times as you want, but will see it as it will appear in Lit. Keep going till you have it perfect - or as near as you can get. LOL! Keep up the good work!

 

[Sonia_de_Beaumanoir]

editing in the submit page

I submitted my last story as html in the submit box rather than as an RTF file. Then I kept hitting preview and re-editing. I think I must have made 20 changes. Of course now my Word version is different from the lit version.

 

[Weird Harold]

A tip for MS Word users and maybe others too.

I submitted my last story as html in the submit box rather than as an RTF file. Then I kept hitting preview and re-editing. I think I must have made 20 changes. Of course now my Word version is different from the lit version.

One of the most common things I see in stories that the authors can prevent, is apparently random paragraph breaks.

MS Word has the ability to display "non-printing characters" such as Paragraph Breaks, Manual Line Feeds, spaces, Tab characters, etc.

Where the script that formats stories sees a paragraph break, it inserts the HTML code "<br><br>" to form a paragraph break. If you have extraneous paragraph breaks in your story that are placed where they appear to be a normal word wrap, they show up in the preview as a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence.

Tab characters display as a single space in HTML. If "show non-printing characters" shows tab characters where you though you had spaces, It's NOT going to show up as you think it will.

Checking your story for invisible characters before cutting and pasting or saving as a text file will save you a lot of trouble with strange formatting errors when you post it.

 

[Whispersecret]

Thanks for the tips, TT and WH. I'm afraid to send a new attachment with the needed </i> because Laurel had to hand fix some other strange errors in the first one. For all I know those errors are still in MY version.

Laurel, if you read this, the second "page" still has a huge chunk in italics that's not supposed to be. I'd appreciate it if you could fix it before Gaucho's chapter is posted. I know that when Chapter Three shows up, people will be looking at Chapters One and Two and I'd really love seeing my part the way I intended it to be. Thank you!