the zine site is moving to WordPress

Or at least being copied over and then not being updated at Google. This may not be its final home, but at least WordPress is open source and has tools to export a site easily, and I am a great deal the wiser and much less irritated after an hour of poking at WordPress than I was after an hour of of poking at Google Sites.

Because the site hasn't been updated for so long, some of the external links are out of date -- in particular, I know that Hafren's fics were linked to on GeoCities, and I'm fairly sure the Pink Asteroids links need to be updated. Do not panic if you find broken links. :-) But yes, let me know, in case I miss one or can't find where the item has moved to.

If anyone *doesn't* want material from Tales 3 to 10 and Dead Boyfriend of the Week up, speak now. It's going to take a long time, but eventually I do want to get most of it up, since they're now all out of print in dead tree format save for a few last copies Watervole may still have lying around.

And success in moving one zine

The Dead Boyfriend page is now on a new WordPress blog set up in the name of the editorial pseudonym, complete with updated links and current availability of the treeware edition (i.e. OOP). This was decidedly less painful than working with Sites, and not just because I have at least some familiarity with WP's little quirks, so I'm going to go ahead and make WordPress the site's new home.

At the moment it has only the editorial material locally, and links to the stories on archives elsewhere (mainly Pink Asteroids). But something I need to consider for the future is whether to put a zine up as one single webpage, or to break it up into chapters (for the novels) or stories (for the anthologies). It doesn't make any practical layout difference for Dead Boyfriend because this zine was very plain internally, but most of the zines had a lot of filler material in the white space at the end of long stories -- ultra-shorts, snippets, amusing exchanges from the mailing list, oddments of art. They were explicitly designed to cram as much entertaining material from the list into a saddle-stapled booklet as possible while still being readable and nicely laid out, and they are very much designed and laid out as a treeware archive. A few items use typographical layout tricks akin to Lewis Carroll's "The Mouse's Tail". I'm going to have to think about the best way of putting that into a reflowable text display format.

Other things -- for now I'm inclined to leave comments on so that if people wish to comment on stories they can do so (which makes me lean towards a story per page format). I probably need to have a note somewhere to say that if people want their stories pulled or comments off, they should email

Shameless begging time

All right, anyone got a spare AO3 invite so that I can experiment with using it as a host for stuff that might get booted from WordPress for naughtiness? (Also, it is long past time I put some more of my *own* fic online, and the Hermit Library is now pretty much read-only.)

Not having looked at AO3 other than grabbing some links for stuff already there, does anyone more familiar with it know if they have any facility for a zine editor to archive a complete anthology zine, or is it a case of you have to be the author to put a story on?