Short Story today...

[seawasp]

... I have posted To Duel the Gorgon on my site today. It was posted here previously -- about two years ago, for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch day -- but I felt it should go up on my official site, too.

Comments

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

FYI: It would be nice if you, or your technical minions, fixed whatever it is that causes every story chapter you post on grandcentralarena.com to have a blank paragraph inserted between every real paragraph (I checked — that's exactly what's in the HTML). It is IMO rather uncomfortable to read and looks unprofessional.

[seawasp]

That's the way I write them. I have a separate line in between each paragraph (a double return, in essence). For submissions I remove those, but then I also have to then convert them to double-spacing, and that is EXTREMELY uncomfortable to read for me. I like clearly separated paragraphs.

Also, it's necessary for cut-and-paste in various areas, as many of these online fora remove things like tabs; without a tab, the ONLY way to tell when a paragraph ends is if there's a blank line inserted.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

A double line break is perfectly respectable plaintext-style formatting and I wouldn't think of telling you to change that part; the problem is that whatever you're feeding it into is interpreting every line break as its own paragraph break.

Without knowing your exact workflow and software (and I have never used WordPress, for example) I can't make an accurate suggestion, but (1) there might be an option or plugin to modify the input interpretation, and (2) as a workaround, any decent editor should be able to handle a find-and-replace of "two line breaks" with "one line break", which might be handled better.

I assume you're copy-and-pasting from some editor into a text box provided by WordPress. What editor? (I'm asking because I'm trying to find a way to solve this problem that won't burden you with fiddly additional work that Is Not Writing and Therefore Doesn't Pay the Bills.)

I'll also refrain from commenting on the right way to do first-line indents :-)

[seawasp]

Um... I don't understand your differentiation between "double line break" and "paragraph break". I put an extra line between paragraphs the same way I end a paragraph, by hitting "return" again. It's showing exactly what I put in, and -- honestly -- I can't imagine how "double line break" would *look* any different than "double paragraph break" unless you're trying to read the darn code raw. Both of them will put an extra space in between the paragraphs.

Fiddling with Wordpress is a problem. I don't know how to do a lot of things in Wordpress and that's actually become a pressing problem because I can't figure out how to add a section for "Portal" and "Spheres of Influence" like those for the other books.

I copy and paste from MS Word X.

First line indents? A tab is what I use. What else would you do, hit "space" five times?

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

(Please don't take this as a continued demand to change stuff; I just can't resist an opportunity for exposition.)

Ah, I see. What you “should” (according to how the software you are using was designed to be used) be doing is telling MS Word that you want inter-paragraph spacing, then hitting return only once to start a new paragraph. However, I don't know how to conveniently also get plain-text-for-forums double line breaks out of that — it may well be possible, but I don't use Word so I wouldn't know the trick, other than doing a temporary find-and-replace.

First line indents? A tab is what I use. What else would you do, hit "space" five times?

Type no extra characters, but specify in the stylesheet that paragraphs should be indented that way. Most word processors have a T-shaped widget in the ruler to specify first-line indent independently of the normal left margin; there's an analogous but more code-y mechanism in CSS stylesheets for web pages.

Since Word assumes that you mean to write paragraphs, each of your line breaks is getting converted to a paragraph break when you copy into WordPress, and the stylesheet for grandcentralarena.com is specifying vertical space (and no indent) between paragraphs, so every paragraph of yours gets one blank line plus two inter-paragraph spacings.

[seawasp]

"Stylesheet" is a word I have heard, but I don't really know what it is; some kind of template that you set up to format stuff, I guess. But I don't use stylesheets myself nor do I have the time to even begin to figure them out. I just type my stuff, so to speak.

[jessica burde (from livejournal.com)]

Wordpress is bloody annoying is what it is.

I'm actually pretty familiar with it from work (I do a lot of content writing for business websites and managing blogs for doctors and such). I can walk you through setting up those pages (or set them up for you) if you'd like. Shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. jessicaburde @ gmail.com