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 serials:
1) Under the "Journal" menu item, add "Series".
2) The Series page will have a "declare new series" functionality and will list existing series (in a multiply sortable table) for editing.
3) Series have names (200 char strings) which are changeable. If there are a choice of series nagivational systems (I can think of two that should be supported, one for shorter series (links) and one for longer (dropdown control)), it is specified on the series object/asset
4) The user can assign posts to series, either on the "Edit Series" page or while drafting/editing a post.
5) Posts (entries) get a new field (property): "Serial chapter title". Because users are going to want to title their posts things like "Great American Novel, Ch 43" but have them appear in serials as "Caviar and Kimchee (continued)". Or in my use case, the post is "[music] BEMF 2011: The Earlier Guide: First Sunday, Monday and Tuesday" and the series chapter title is "Su1 M T".
6) On display of a post in a series, the series-specific navigation appears at both the top and bottom of the post. This includes the title of the serial, a "previous in serial: $serial ChTitle" and "next in series: serialChTitle" links (contingent), and a way of skipping around through the work, as per #3: either a list of serial chapter titles as links, or a form select and submit button (MUST HAVE SUBMIT BUTTON; do not rely on ONSUBMIT please).

This is a serious development project. It's the sort of thing I would like to see LJ do, but I don't know it's higher priority than a lot of other things.

ETA: Actually, on further reflection, I think this feature might be even more popular on the ЖЖ side of things. I'm given to understand more "bloggish" style usage is common in the russosphere, rather than the "diaryish" style typical to the anglosphere; the problem of serials is a regular one for classic blogs. I was just noting this about WordPress, which fails to support article series, too, despite it being a reasonably common phenomenon in journalistic style writing.

[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!!!