Struck by inspiration yesterday, now into heavy plotting. I finally feel like getting somewhere.

I finally started writing yesterday. I find my prompt not bad but quite challenging. But after several sleepless nights (figuratively speaking) I think I have the story roughly plotted out, so it will hopefully work. Though I'm not convinced it will turn out the way my recipient might expect. But I'll try my best.

Once we've finished our stories, what should the introduction consist of?  A summary of the story and a mention of prompts and of the intended recipient, yes, but what else?
 

Stay anonymous, then, until the big reveal, as we did for the Christmas exchange.
 

Hey everyone, hope the writing is coming along and you're all having fun

For those who are wondering what to do with your stories when they are finished... Well, I haven't had a chance to test anything out myself, but I've been reading through the forum to see what was done in the past. Here's what I know so far.

Converting your finished story into forum-ready text

You'll need to email your finished story to me (the forum private message system has a 3000 character limit, so email is the best way to go) and then I will copy and paste it into the Midyear Fic Exchange thread. However if you have any formatting (italics, bold etc.) it will not transfer when I copy and paste unless you put in the correct tags.

Presumably most of you are typing your stories in Word or Open Document, so the text will need to be converted to BBCode. If your story is fairly short or has very little formatting (say one or two instances per page) it will probably be easier for you to go into your document and add the BBCode tags yourself.

Here are the most commonly used tags – just take out the spaces inside the [ ] brackets for them to work.
Italics [ i ]{text}[ /i ]
Bold [ b ]{text}[ /b ]
Underline [ u ]{text}[ /u ]

A few other tags you might like to use to make it pretty
Center text [ center ]{text}[ center ]
Font size [ size={number} ]{text}[ /size ]
Font colour [ color={colour} ]{text}[ /color ]

However if you have pages and pages of complex formatting you can follow a two-step process using online converters. Unfortunately this isn't a reliable process and you might need to do it more than once, but hopefully we'll all get there in the end.

First you need to convert your Word or Open Doc to html. There are many converters available, here are a couple you can try:
http://document.online-convert.com/convert-to-html
https://word2cleanhtml.com

The second step is to test that it will display correctly in the forum thread. You take the html file and convert it to BBCode using one of the many online converters:
http://www.garyshood.com/htmltobb/
http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/html2bbcode/

Then you start a new topic on the forum, fill in a title (this is necessary), paste your converted text (or the text which has manually-added BBCode tags) in the box and hit "preview". This will allow you (and no one else) to see if the text is going to display your formatting correctly. Don't hit "submit"

If all looks good, email me the html file, and I will re-convert it to BBCode and post it to the Fic Exchange thread. Apparently there were a lot less formatting errors when it was done this way, so please don't skip the test step in case there are problems with formatting, line/paragraph breaks etc. that need to be solved. It is the author's responsibility to check their formatting!

You may like to write a short introduction to your story saying who it is for and what your prompts were, but don't forget the idea of the fic exchange is to stay anonymous until the reveal at the end, so don't sign your name

I included my email address with the questionnaire I sent out, but if you need it again ask me in a PM.

Any questions, ask them here, as others may need to know too or be able help.

Last edited by ukaunz (June 4, 2016 9:09 am)

Definitely! Please do 

Checking in quickly to wish everyone the best with writing - I love my prompt although I'm a bit 'daunted in the face of' disappointing for my recipient, but that's just me being pessimistic, as always.
I've to finish one a friend strongly asked for and then I'll get to writing.

What am I doing here instead of actually doing it?!

Apologising in advance for the quality of the writing - given that I'm swamped with...IRL stuff, I can't concentrate as much on it as I did the Christmas one.
I'm doing my best, I swear. And who knows, by the time it's actually finished I'll have written something as worthwhile as A Singular Gentleman (because it seems to have been a success, not saying that because I want to show-off).

Sending positive vibes to all of you who are still writing, struggling or not.

And Yitzock, finished already? Congrats

Since writing that last post, I actually added a small extra bit to the middle of mine. But yes, I'm finished.

Best of luck to everyone else. One month to go!

Fun is what this is all about, so that's good!