Short chapters feel weird.
Formatting
I’m updating individual chapter posts and my working files.
Going through in order of my working files, so out of numerical order, I’m adding a ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ tag to each post of TiH with appropriate links. All chapters are now linked in the ‘Fiction’ text box, and in general you can click to any of them via the calendar. TiH updates Wednesdays and Fridays, and has for a while.
With regards to working files, I’m organizing and simplifying, but hopefully that will all happen backstage.
Stuff
Are there website lists for serialized fiction? There have to be.
Thoughts
It’s a mistake to focus on where you want the story to go. It’s better to think about what’s going on in the story and tell that as well as possible.
Everyone knows this
Life is just easier when you’ve got a buffer.
Writing the Next Chapter
That feeling where you’re staring at a blank document, your notes, and the plants, thinking, ‘How do I want to do this?’
TiH Thought
TiH needs a bigger cast.
Scheduling
I’m a bit behind in updating the Archives, but I’m working on it.
Style Sheets
My style sheets consist mainly of spellings and weird little in-world grammatical rules. In the real world, the US military capitalizes the nomenclature for servicemembers in their field, so the Army has Soldiers, Navy Sailors, etc. While generically soldiers can be servicemembers in any military, one would never call a Sailor a soldier, regardless of the general correctness of it.
I guess you might if you were looking to start a fight or just be a jerk. I do see things that like in news from time to time, and it always gives the impression the writer has no idea what they’re talking about.
But that’s what style sheets are for, because I never keep it all straight.
I just realized I use two different spellings for Tollos on my style sheets, which makes me very, very sad. It’s double-l Tollos now, baby!
KN Update
You’re occasionally writing along, slapping words on a page, when you come to a scene, and the little voice in your head says ‘this is a big scene.’ There’s no real reason for it to be. It’s A meets B or C gets to D, and the gut response is drive on. Slap the words down.
The kicker, the trick, the really hard bit, is that sometimes the voice is right and sometimes the gut is. Sometimes you should just slap words down and get through it. But sometimes you need to get things just right. Too much shaping means the story never gets written. Not enough means you run into huge problems later that sap all the joy out of it.
I’m at one such problem in KN. About nine chapters ahead of what’s published, I’ve run into a wall. The story doesn’t go anywhere, and I wound up putting it aside for six months or so. The problems are because of this one scene. If I don’t get this exactly right, I have no plot. And if it is exactly right, it won’t look like too much story.
Completely unrelated, I only learned a few months ago that in American English, the punctuation is almost always inside the quotes. Em-dashes are a weird exception. British English puts them inside and outside as situation warrants.