Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic fanfiction.net help

I've started to post my epic Strong Medicine story on ff.net and could use some help from a folc who has posted on their before--this is my first time.

My story so far (postable chapters) is at 15. Under Document Manager I see all the titles and then beside each one it says: format, edit/preview/life/remove. under the "life" it says 60 days. My question is, it's not allowing me to upload anymore chapters. It claims I've reached my limit and need to convert the ones I already have to stories/or publish them? I thought they already were published as I can see them on ff.net! Do I simply need to "remove" them from the document manager list?

Thank you,
Mona

P.S. Are there any SM fans on here?

Good question, Mona. I'm interested to see if anyone has a better solution than what I did when I reached 15 - pasted the contents of one chapter onto another (just in case I wanted to edit later), then saved the composite version and deleted to make space. Of course you could just save them in your wp, and replace the content of a chapter on ff from there if you wanted to. But surely there's a better way.

The document manager thing isn't really supposed to be used for long-term storage of files. I've currently got only two documents there, although I have more than 100 stories on fanfiction.net

Basically, you upload or paste a chapter to the document editor, sort out any problems with editing, save it, then publish the file as a new story or a chapter of an existing one. Once you've done that the saved documents aren't linked to the stories in any way, and can be deleted without affecting them. I generally just paste each new chapter / story into the same file. I suppose that you could actually type a story into it, and keep the file at ff.net rather than on your own computer, but I wouldn't want to risk that in case something went wrong. They've lost or corrupted all of the saved documents from large numbers of users on several occasions.

Thank you gr8shades and Marcus, very much. I have the story saved as a whole on my flash drive. I only divided it up into chapters because I thought that was how ff.net worked. I definitely don't need have "Document Manager (DM)" save them at all. I just wasn't sure that by deleting them off there, that wouldn't then also delete my story.

Speaking of editing on there, I went to where you can live preview and then edit chapters...I did so and hit the "save" button, but nothing has changed in what readers would see by opening the story? Did I miss something?

Thanks again fellow folcs,
Mona

P.S. I just deleted all the saved chapters under Document Manager and it allowed me to then add the new ones. Also, I discovered that looking at the story under edit/preview BEFORE "adding" it, allowed me to make a few edits. I still would love to know if there's a way, to make edits to a chapter once I guess it's been "finalized." I ask because this is a story aboutt he aftermath of a rape (not normally something I care to write about but in this case...anyway, I listed RAINN's website just in case any reader could use it and it's only showing the .org no www.rainn. When I thought I had edited and then saved that in the annoying DM, it showed the changes still but then not in the actual "published" part. If this makes sense..confusing I know. I so much prefer the ease of our friendly boards.

No, once you've saved a document then used it to create a story or chapter the only way to edit it is to edit the document, save that, then go to the story / chapters menu, and replace the existing chapter with the revised document.

I have no idea why it works this way, I think that saved stories are on a different server and backed up more often, but I could be wrong.

They won't let you include web site addresses at all, and go to great lengths to stop them being posted.

Thanks again, Marcus.

Mona

All of this stuff is why I stopped archiving on ff.net years ago... Also, their formatting sucks. All my scene-breaks got stripped out the last couple of times I posted stories there. Ever since, I don't even read there any more, let alone post.


Wendy

I'm reasonably happy with their system, it's a little bit complicated but it has a reasonable WYSIWYG editor which makes up for a lot. Once you get the hang of the things that they don't allow - some combinations of characters, URLs, etc. - it works pretty well.

I hope this is a good place to put this. I have been threatened with bodily harm if I go through with this, but I'm quite proud of my daughter's work and I want to share her genius with other writers. Here is her website on FictionPress.com. For those of you with dark leanings, I recommend "Love Bites." It certainly surprised me when I read it.

I placed this here because she seems to like this site a lot. She's ever so much happier here than on Quizilla (which apparently now sucks big time). She also compares this site favorably to fanfiction.net, saying that it's easier to navigate.

And please don't tell her where you got the link!