Okay, this is the "Swarm Authors" email list, resurrected from the dead because we've all come to depend on it so much. We use it to help us write Swarm Cycle stories, yes, but we're all writers, and we write other stuff too.
If there's anyone here who doesn't follow all the writer drama on SOL, there is (was?) a writer named Shaddoth who came to SOL a while back and dumped some old stories on the site plus some new stuff. If you haven't seen his work, it is all very well edited and proofed, and they are all complete novels. A short story for him is a quarter-million characters long. 25,000 words?
He creates a whole world or universe for his stories. You can base a role-playing game on any of them. One of them, 'Axeman', does that backwards. It describes a 'system' which takes Earth in and turns us all into characters in a dungeon-diving game.
Naturally, when I've got writers' block and I can't get anything done on what I'm spostabe doing, I noodle with other stuff. A while back I wrote a short story about a 16-year-old kid caught up in that world. I also started on a second one, but I never finished it. I certainly never posted the story I finished!
Fast forward five or six years. Shad hasn't been around for a while. Another writer has started posting stories in Shad's 'Axeman' universe. I wrote to him, and he pointed out a story on SOL that I hadn't noticed from a 3rd writer. I started to harass the site's administrator about creating a shared universe to collect all the 'Axeman' stories.
Every couple of months James Girvan would post another 'Axeman' story, and I'd ping the sysadmin again about the universe. A couple of months ago he got back to me and told me he was creating it and wanted to know what-all should be in it. Well, Shad's original, of course. And Girvan's stories. And that other one. And my 'Writer's Guide to the Axeman Universe', that I'd started just to make sure I stayed in canon.
Oh, why not? I added my old short story "The Missile 1". Which had NEVER BEEN PROOFREAD BY ANYONE. Uh, guys? If Zen Master's stories all look good, it ain't MY fault! It's because I always run them past every proofreader I can find.
Man, I got so many private emails and public comments on everything wrong with M1! That's fine, I volunteered everyone who commented to proofread the next installment, "The Missile 2" which I'd hurriedly finished. M2 looked a LOT better when it came out.
I had outlines and scenes written for a lot further, and I was able to write M3 in time to put it out before Christmas. I was about to post M3 when I realized that there was a terrible problem with the way SOL displays stories.
SOL has an 'intake processor' that converts whatever you give it into some sort of storage format. Then, when someone wants that story, an 'output processor' converts that into whatever you asked for: HTML on the screen, text or .PDF in a file you download, whatever.
Those two processors are homemade collections of kludge upon kludge upon kludge, and they don't work well. The SysAdmin has posted a guide to formatting, but it doesn't match what really happens. What's worse, is that he has a 'sandbox' where you can input your code and see how it comes out. The real problem is that he appears to have at least five different versions of output processor. There's one for stories, a second one for comments after a story, a third one for blogs, a fourth one for the discussion forums, and a fifth one for the 'sandbox' trial page. I did not write down all the exact results, but I've proven that each and every one responds differently to formatting codes I've tried.
Naturally, the SysAdmin refuses to mess with, well, that mess. I don't blame him, it works, sorta, and if he messes with it his site may well crash.
However. I think of Storiesonline as a text self-publishing site, and it won't even accept standard text without butchering it. My "Missile" series uses simple "ASCII Art" to show graphical information, like our party's formation for facing a frontal threat:
Eric
Sam Cindy George
Margie Matt
That doesn't work, on SOL. SOL compresses the file I upload into minimal HTML (with quirks, yes). All white space gets compressed to a single space. All leading spaces get deleted, so paragraphs can't even have the standard three-space indentation. (In the readers preferences you can turn that 'on' so EVERY chunk of text gets that, but that isn't implemented well either, so it looks stupid). What gets shown to the reader later is:
Eric
Sam Cindy George
Margie Matt
This can't be fixed by replacing the spaces with periods or other symbols. If you string together 2 or three of any symbol, that gets compressed to just one like spaces. If you string together 4 (I think) or more, the system interprets that as "The author wants a blank line, a horizontal rule, and another blank line here".
I've had endless discussions with the SysAdmin and other writers, and there is simply no way to fix this on SOL using text. All we need is a simple format code <@>...</@> that means "Don't fucking touch the characters inside this code" but SOL doesn't have that option and the SysAdmin doesn't want to add it. Again, I don't blame him. He's trying to protect a house of cards and I'm shaking the table.
The only way to show the readers how Our Heroes are arranged is to embed an actual graphic, a .JPG or .PNG file. Well, that's simple enough to do, I just take a screen-shot of the above ASCII Art, trim around the edges, and upload the resulting tiny file.
I'm about to re-post M1 with those embedded graphics. It should work well, as long as all the readers are using black letters on white background. Anyone who has their browser set to 'night mode' is in for a shock. What irritates me about this 'fix', however, is that this is gonna break the story for people who download the text file. They don't get the original ASCII Art, they don't get the embedded graphic, they don't even get the mashed text.
That graphic should be doable in HTML without any embedded pictures, but we haven't found a way to make it seamless.
Anybody got any ideas? I need to re-post M1 and M2. I have M3 and M4 ready to go, once we have a fix for this. I'm about a quarter of the way through M5. But, I'm stuck on this stupid "This site does not support simple ASCII graphics" problem.
-ZM
