A Chapter system

[disasterifickaz]

Title
A Chapter system

Short, concise description of the idea
Fan Fiction authors are in desperate need of a system capable of linking chapters in the same story.

Full description of the ideaHopefully you're aware of the number of writers and Fan Fiction writers in particular who make use of your site. It would be exceptionally helpful if you would

Comments

[siderea]

I also have a use case for this feature, and am not a fanfiction writer. Every two years, I write a massive guide to a week-long local music festival; I divide the posts up by days of the festival, for usability, but that means I have to hand-code an internal navigation system, which, NNGGGGGG!

Also, I do read a lot of serialized fiction on LJ. As a reader, I'd really like to be able to navigate through sections of a serialized story. Tags don't cut it. A friend of mine wrote a massive 100+ chapter novel, and I only went back and started reading it when he announced it was almost done. Using the story's tag, each time, I was brought to... the last ten chapters. And I had to navigate back through the tag results to where I was (which involved remembering which chapter number I was on -- chapters were unnamed). Man, that sucked.

I don't know what FF.net does. But I'd propose implementing this as a new asset type, "Series" which organizes serials1) Under the "Journal" menu item, add "Series

[snakeling]

In that case, it would also be great to be able to display a tag page with posts listed chronologically, so that Part 1 would be at the top.

[charliemc]

Yes!!!

[siderea]

Oooh, that could be elegant! Good thought. I think it will be simpler to implement, though perhaps not as much faster as you think: getting prev-in-tag/next-in-tag functionality into all those styles will be a treat I'm sure, and we're talking about adding functionailty to the tag management interface. And at the very least, we'd need that dropdown for skipping among chapters (make it an V0.2 functionality).

(As an aside, I would dearly love a generic "prev-in-tag/next-in-tag" functionality on all posts. Which, yes, would take some serious UI thinking to figure out how to display that when a post has lots of tags. But it would be all sorts of massively convenient; as I describe, trying to read all the posts in a tag that has more than 20 entries is a real PITA because you have to go through multiple clicks and page loads, and remember which ones you were on. Maybe I should just go and make a top level suggestion about this.)

[damnitnicole]

I was feeling pretty ambivalent about this suggestion until I read this comment. My LJ is purely personal, but even I could use this as a means of better organizing my tags.

[fiddlingfrog]

What if the implementation was a custom HTML tag, like lj-cut, that displayed links to all entries with a particular tag? So an author could put something like

[charliemc]

I love the sound of that!!!