Oh, ff.net...WHY?
*stifles a scream of incoherent rage*
Ahem.
I'm forever feeling slightly sorry for poor fanfiction.net. It seems that everyone sneers at it for containing 95% of the badly written fanfiction currently in existence or whines about it going down for a few hours every once in a long while.
This has left me with sort of a knee-jerk impulse to defend the site from its many detractors, or at least to croon something comforting to it while stroking the scre--erm.
Anyway.
There is one cry that I do fully sympathize with, and that is the cry against character-stripping. FF.net is notorious for stripping just about everything from the summary. In stories themselves, asterisks (the apparent line-separator of choice), are also stripped. That's fine, because I've always used a string of double-hyphens or long dashes.
And now those have been taken away too.
But that's not what's killing me (because going back and finding those hidden places where the scenes used to be separated actually hasn't been taking too long). I just discovered, however, while I was replacing a line separator at the end of chapter ten, that it's not just the scene separators that were being stolen.
Those bastards are taking away my other dashes! That's--just--! *muted scream* I use those things with criminal frequency! Nullifier is one long, passionate love affair with dashes! They are everywhere! And now, inexplicably, half of my dashes have been deemed in violation of the terms and half not (which is how they lulled me into a false sense of complacency at first as I went around grumpily replacing the scene separators).
All of which means I now have several pleasant hours ahead of me copy-pasting the new chapter text, sans 50+% of the dashes, into Word and then taking my slightly out-of-date editions of those chapters and running a compare, and finding all of those places where the dashes were stolen (leading to such lovely phrases as "It galled me that I should be forced to heal my most hated enemy to preserve the integrity of the defencesassuming this would indeed helpeven as it surprised me..."). To complicate matters, I can't do a simple merge and then replace the offending dashes with the one type of dash that isn't stripped, because the older editions contain errors/changes that I don't want trickling back into the story.
To summarize: ARRRRRGGGHHHHH!
...okay, I feel a bit better now. And, um, hello to everyone who was wondering which hole I'd gone and fallen into this time. Spring break will give me some time to breathe and write another State of the Fanfiction.
Oh, and Bri: I'm adding "posthaste" to my list of time-expressions-never-to-be-used-under-any-circumstances. This is a depressingly long list. I'd been banking on the hope that you'd request something I already had written in some form. *sheepish* But it's getting written, just veeerrry slowly.
Ahem.
I'm forever feeling slightly sorry for poor fanfiction.net. It seems that everyone sneers at it for containing 95% of the badly written fanfiction currently in existence or whines about it going down for a few hours every once in a long while.
This has left me with sort of a knee-jerk impulse to defend the site from its many detractors, or at least to croon something comforting to it while stroking the scre--erm.
Anyway.
There is one cry that I do fully sympathize with, and that is the cry against character-stripping. FF.net is notorious for stripping just about everything from the summary. In stories themselves, asterisks (the apparent line-separator of choice), are also stripped. That's fine, because I've always used a string of double-hyphens or long dashes.
And now those have been taken away too.
But that's not what's killing me (because going back and finding those hidden places where the scenes used to be separated actually hasn't been taking too long). I just discovered, however, while I was replacing a line separator at the end of chapter ten, that it's not just the scene separators that were being stolen.
Those bastards are taking away my other dashes! That's--just--! *muted scream* I use those things with criminal frequency! Nullifier is one long, passionate love affair with dashes! They are everywhere! And now, inexplicably, half of my dashes have been deemed in violation of the terms and half not (which is how they lulled me into a false sense of complacency at first as I went around grumpily replacing the scene separators).
All of which means I now have several pleasant hours ahead of me copy-pasting the new chapter text, sans 50+% of the dashes, into Word and then taking my slightly out-of-date editions of those chapters and running a compare, and finding all of those places where the dashes were stolen (leading to such lovely phrases as "It galled me that I should be forced to heal my most hated enemy to preserve the integrity of the defencesassuming this would indeed helpeven as it surprised me..."). To complicate matters, I can't do a simple merge and then replace the offending dashes with the one type of dash that isn't stripped, because the older editions contain errors/changes that I don't want trickling back into the story.
To summarize: ARRRRRGGGHHHHH!
...okay, I feel a bit better now. And, um, hello to everyone who was wondering which hole I'd gone and fallen into this time. Spring break will give me some time to breathe and write another State of the Fanfiction.
Oh, and Bri: I'm adding "posthaste" to my list of time-expressions-never-to-be-used-under-any-circumstances. This is a depressingly long list. I'd been banking on the hope that you'd request something I already had written in some form. *sheepish* But it's getting written, just veeerrry slowly.