The wonders of ancient technology

[julesjones]

I spent a chunk of the afternoon rummaging through my hard drive looking for my copies of some of Predatrix's stories that she wants to put on AO3 and/or submit to a New Zine. (I never thought I'd be typing that last phrase again.) Stuff that was only ever in my email spool courtesy of beta-reading may be beyond practical reach now that I've finally abandoned Turnpike, but I should have had copies of everything that was published in one of my zines. You will note the word "should".

I have all the Tales zines on my hard drive, with the emails, in-progress files and final proofs neatly arrayed in their individual folders. I have Endless Farce 2. I do not have Endless Farce 1, which is the thing she most particularly wanted, on account of having completely lost any trace of it on her own machine.

What I do have is a box full of CDs, with assorted backups from over the years. I grabbed a handful and started working my way through. And on the CD I burned on 25 April 2000 I found the missing sub-directory. A fifteen year old CD, and the data is still perfectly readable. I wasn't really expecting that.

I should probably think about putting some of my own stuff on AO3, or at least more of other people's stuff from the zines, but the thought of fighting with AO3's horrible interface wearies me, even though I am assured that it has improved since the last time I did battle with it. I'm not that desperate for opportunities to cat-vacuum on the profic WIP.

Comments

[kalypso]

Somehow, I find posting stories on AO3 less hassle than formatting them here...

[julesjones]

I don't post them here either. :-)

[lexin]

What problems do you have witn AO3? It's been some time since I posted anything on there, but I don't remember it being a hassle.

[julesjones]

It's quite a lot of time since I last tried, so I don't remember the exact details. I just remember that it had a nasty habit of stripping formatting out (not just italics, etc, but actual paragraph breaks), and dropping chunks of text if I tried to copy entire stories over. It meant a lot of proof-reading and manual tweaking, and it all seemed like too much hassle for something that was essentially a tedious chore I was only doing out of a sense of obligation.

[espresso_addict]

I've not had problems recently with importing from Word to AO3 using the rich-text interface (rather than the html default). It does tend to strip paragraphs if you try to use the html interface directly from Word. It might be worth playing around with formats and which AO3 interface you use, as there might be some combination that is stress-free.

[kalypso]

I may have deleted the memory, but I can't remember any problems with paragraph breaks etc; I tend to write my fic in html (where necessary) anyway, so just dump it straight from Word into the AO3 text box, and that seems to work. So it's just a matter of filling in the forms, which isn't too difficult apart from the moment when I remember I need a summary... but I now find myself publishing in AO3 first to sort all that out, and then copying to DW/LJ, whereas originally I did it the other way round.

[julesjones]

What is this Word of which you speak? :-)

I'm still using Lotus Word Pro, and the earliest stuff was written/typeset in Lotus Ami Pro. This Does Not Help when it comes to AO3's import system. At one point I was dropping stuff onto the WordPress site I set up for the zines, and then copying from there to AO3.

I need to check if I've set up collection frameworks for all the zines, and if not, do so, but after that I think it can be up to other people to add their stories to the collection under whatever pseud they're using these days.

[espresso_addict]

I've been forcibly downgraded to Word 2013 of late, with the death of XP.

[julesjones]

$DAY_JOB is still on XP and Office 2003, with bespoke support from Microsoft (presumably at a hefty price), but not for much longer. I have been tentatively experimenting with Word 2013 at home since $DAY_JOB's wage slaves can get a home use licence for a tenner ("your employees can train themselves on shiny new Office 2013 on their own time if you join this programme!") and am underwhelmed, but I've hated every iteration of Word since 6. Unfortunately the publishing industry has standardised on the Spawn of Redmond, so I need to start using it for the profic; and I hate OpenOffice for the same reasons I hate MS Office, with added incompatibility-with-MS suckiness on top, so I may as well go with the Corporate Evil.

[espresso_addict]

I detest almost everything about it, except the fact that the word count is given in the bottom bar, which stops me from obsessively word counting as a form of writing procrastination.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I do hope you find it! I'd love to see Pred's B7 stories on Ao3 - though I still have the zines themselves, I do :)

And yours too :)

I ended up making a template for stories to go on Ao3 and just cut and paste. I agree, the interface is not all that user friendly (buit at least it lets us download stories, unlike FFn's attempt to stop it)

[julesjones]

I've got the EF1 sub-directory copied over to my current machine and the Lotus Word Pro file opened, so I've saved it into rtf and sent that off to Pred. It is now her problem. :-)

I've also sent her the proofs of all the Tales zines with her stuff in. Mostly pdfs, so she'll have to do some cutting and pasting, but at least she's got them.

Which reminds me - do you need any of yours from Tales?

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

Probably not, thanks - I'm a packrat and don't think I lost any... but if it's no trouble, maybe just to see it I did forget some {ahem} masterpiece of minific :)

Do you have my email address?

[julesjones]

Not sure I've got your current email address. My old ones still work, as does jules.jones@gmail.com - email to remind me at the weekend when I may have a working brain.