I think the word Standalone originated in the computing industry to mean capable of operating on its own without needing help from another similar thing. So when a story is described as Standalone, to me it means a story you can enjoy to its full, without having to read or refer to another story. Consequently, the episodes of a serial are not standalones, but a series would normally consist of a number of standalone stories.
So I'm a bit confused by the heading of the first quick link on the Home page "Recent Non-series fiction (Standalones)". Without the word in the brackets, it would refer to serials, except that they have a separate section, and when you toggle the tag at the end of a story, it flips from "Standalones" to "Series, Verse or Drabble".
Since my memory has never been good (and doesn't get better as I grow older), I always tend to read Standalones (my usage) because I can never remember what happens in serials posted at intervals of weeks or longer. But this usage seems to suggest that series are specifically excluded from the Standalone category.
Yet as I glance down the current list on the Home Page, I see items like "A TG Dress Shop Story" and "A TG Mixed Tape". Presumably both are part of two different series and I'm very happy they are on the Standalone list as I want to read them, but the quick link heading seems to suggest they should be hidden from my view. Why? Is there something wrong with series?
Please help my confusion.
Comments
Series....
Standalones within a series are stories which are conclusive and standalone in and of themselves, as opposed to an episode in an ongoing story. An example of the first would be an entry into the MAU or Bikini universes which is self-contained. An example of the latter would be an episode of Easy as Falling Off a Bike or Tamara's Trials.
Love, Andrea Lena
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
DO NOT CLICK ON THE STANDALONE TAG!!!!!!!!!! Or the Series, Verse or Drabble cocnverse, either. Clicking on it changes it!
The system is not perfect but we try. Standalones, we used to call them Solos because they don't fit the usual definition of standalone, are those stories that don't require you to read anything else. The TG Mixed Tape entries are collections of (usually) standalone stories so they get a pass to be included. A TG Dress Shop story would not be a standalone, normally, since it is presumably part of a series, I'll investigate.
There's nothing wrong with series, btw, but most stories ARE series and keep having chapters appearing on the front page and so keep getting reads. Standalones in that sea of serials vanish like blueberries to the bottom of the bowl. So people kept asking for a way for solo stories to last longer on the front page, or at least a link to them. Hence the system of standalones.
It's a compromise that works well enough that it has been being used for several years now.
Clear as potato soup, right? :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Yes?
I love potato soup! Thanks for everything, while I've got you 'on the line!'
Love, Andrea Lena
try this on your palette (couldn't resist)
http://czechmatediary.com/2008/04/19/another-classic-czech-r...
Or
http://www.spiciefoodie.com/2013/12/09/bramboracka-czech-pot...
The second recipe is presented by a foodie who probably paid several times more for the soup than the going rate. With that said, the recipe is good. Substitutes; Oregano for Marjoram, whatever mushrooms you can get (watch your costs, this is working class food).
May you have many food-gasms in your future!
Enjoy.
(That goes double for you Erin since, you brought up potato soup.)
:-) :-) :-) :-)
Mom's Tater Dumpling Soup
Put some some water in a large, deep pot and turn the heat on high. Add a little salt. Take two or three medium to large white potatoes and peel and dice them into about 1/2" flattened cubes like you were going to make breakfast taters. Dump the taters into the water. When the water starts to boil, add a cup or so of milk and turn the heat down to a nearly flat boil.
Take some flour, enough for a serving of noodles for each person that is going to eat and more than that, be generous. All-purpose flour is best for this but you might want to sift it a little to get some air in it. Put the flour on a large, clean cutting board or on waxed paper covering part of your table. You can add a little salt to the flour, not much. Make a crater in the flour and break into the crater some eggs, one egg for each person at dinner and one extra. Don't have enough flour, add some.
You can add some other things now, too, if you like. Really finely grated cheese is good, or minced spinach. Try red pepper flakes that have been rolled and broken up into nearly dust. Don't add too much of this stuff, you want to taste the egg and flour. If you've done this before and the dumplings came out too dense and hard, you can add a pinch of baking powder to see how that works for you.
Mix your dough by hand, add a little milk or water if it is too dry. Let it rest while you clean and chop a small onion to add to the boiling water, milk and taters. Or a carrot. It can be good to add a pat of butter to the boiling water now, too.
Roll the dough out so it is flat and about a quarter of an inch thick. Maybe less. Bring the water back to a harder boil and then tear off pieces of the flat dough, wad them up a little and toss them into the boiling soup. It's done and ready to serve when the dumplings are cooked through. They should be slightly fluffy and very chewy.
Serve in bowls with green onions on the side, or a salad, or cold fried chicken, or all three, and lemonade or iced tea on a hot day, fresh brewed hot tea on a cold one. There should be almost as much potato as dumpling in each bowl. Have black pepper and maybe other seasonings ready.
My mom's recipes always came down to me like this, almost like a story. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
What I've wondered about, and
What I've wondered about, and seen it happen once or twice, is this: If an author posts a complete story, which happens to be 8 parts (or chapters), it's a _standalone_ story. It's complete. There's no new postings that's going to happen. However, I've seen a couple of those get yanked out of standalone and put into series.
Why? If it's complete, it's done. It doesn't matter that it's 487 parts. It's done. You can read from the first to the last at one time.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
But if it was posted in parts
But if it was posted in parts. it was POSTED as a series, and you have to read all the parts. If we allowed that, would we allow someone to post a 5 part standalone and take 5 slots on the standalone list, or only the title page? what if it doesn't have a title page? Do you keep the first chapter in the standalone list or the last chapter? It's just easier to say "all multi-part stories are series" and leave it that way.
-Piper
Standalone is complete in one post
Standalone means complete in one post. That's what people wanted it to mean and that's the way we made it work. If the story was posted in many parts, it has had its time on the front page. That's what the standalone category is about, being as fair as practicable to people who post single stories complete in one post.
Like I said, it isn't perfect.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I did say at one time. Yes,
I did say at one time. Yes, a title page post. (I'll be honest, there are stories I've avoided like the plague becuase there's nothing on it that says 'this is a story about X'. I think title pages should be .. not required, but strongly encouraged, and -put a blurb in it-. )
If it took up eight slots, that would be annoying, yes. Give it one.
Isn't there a size limit on individual posts that several of the stories have gone over? If so, it'd be very difficult to post those as a 'standalone' :)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Not really
We recommend no post be longer than about 10,000 words or so, but that is for the convenience of readers who might be on a slow connection. We did have a slow server with an earlier version of Drupal that had a problem with posts longer than 64K. It would serve them but it just hung up between lumps and thought about it for awhile since the database at that time saved things in a series of text-types rather than longtext-types. Currently, the database actually saves a pointer to an array of longblob-type blocks to maintain compatibility with different kinds of storage.
And if you post six or eight chapters at once, I will have to move them off the front page unless you are savvy enough to do it yourself. If you do, and it is complete all at once, then, yeah, I might put it into standalones. I think, in fact, that I did that for someone who posted three chapters of a complete story all at once. But it isn't how it normally works. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
reading a series
Go ahead, sample series stories and note down the ones you like then, when a story ends or has a bunch of chapters, give it a read.
Check the ongoing ones periodically then read the whole story or an additional large chunk. Also, check other stories from authors whose stories you like.
Enjoy reading.
Is this a US/UK difference
One or two people have used the words series and serial almost interchangeably, but here in the UK they have very different meanings. A serial is an ongoing story published in several parts and, to make sense of the story, it's necessary to start with the first and read through in order. A series is a collection of standalone stories, connected by theme, characters, location etc. Examples from popular authors of my younger days were Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Famous Five series, and Agatha Christie's Poirot and Miss Marple series. Each of those stories can be picked up and read individually without having any knowledge of the others.
So the tag which has Standalone on the one side and Series, Verse or Drabble on the other makes no sense to the UK reader. Drabbles, by their very nature are Standalones, and verse almost always is. It would be better to say Serials on the one side and Standalones (Series, Verse or Drabble) on the other. And the title for the quick links would say Standalones (Series, Verse or Drabble).
But if this is simply a different usage between US and UK then I'm sure we on the other side of the water can live with it.
Incidentally, it was my understanding that the Standalone tag was specifically designed so that any reader could change it if they thought it needed correcting. My preference as an author would be that the author alone decides whether the story is Standalone.
It's just meant to convey single- or multi-part stories mostly.
Here's a quick primer:
Standalones:
--Require no background reading to understand
--Are complete in one posting
--Typically will not require knowledge of a universe
--Are not fanfiction, drabbles, or poetry
Fanfiction isn't included as a standalone because it is typically required to understand the original work to fully grasp the fanfic. Drabbles and poetry are both short and, to be frank, too low in popularity to warrant their own sub-section but too common to let them take space in the Solos/Standalones/whateveryouwannacallit section.
Sometimes works that are part of established universes or worlds will end up finding their way into the standalone section, but these should typically be relabeled unless they include all possible information necessary to understand the universe in question. For the most part, though, standalones here are meant to be one-shot stories with no requirement to read anything before or beyond their content to grasp everything included within.
There is a separate tag at the bottom of stories that works similar to the standalone/otherwise tag that marks a story with multiple parts complete or ongoing, and most people's difficulty with these tags arises from the inconsistent use of THIS one, because it's really the important one, telling whether a story can be enjoyed from beginning to end with what's available, or still has more to come.
Melanie E.
I think you are very right
I think you are very right about the Completed tag, and particularly that most people either don't see it or feel it is important.
It would be good if this tag for a serial chapter copied the corresponding tag in its title page, so that an author would only have to change the title page to "Completed" for all chapters to bear the same tag.
One of the major problems I see with the Completed tag (and probably the reason why it is neglected) is that I cannot find any way to search on Completed stories.. At least the Solo stories heading (I believe) uses the Standalone tag to determine what is displayed within it.
Which of course, comes back to whether Standalone serials should really be allowed to be given a Standalone tag.
Semantics
In the wider world, while series and serial are not the same thing they are not mutually exclusive either. I'm not going to argue with your definition of serial but to me there is nothing that says a series can only be standalones in the traditional sense. What if an author writes books that are mostly standalones and then decides to have 3 books using the same characters where the story continues from 1-3, does this then mean that these books are separate or does this mean that the author no longer has a series at all?
As for Standalone vs Serial,Verse or Drabble, think of them as shortened forms of "Standalone story" and "Series story, Verse or Drabble". We are not suggesting that verse or drabbles are not self-contained but the purpose of Standalone is to highlight non-series original stories. Fanfics are never standalone as they rely on pre-existing stories and the same applies to stories set in a story universe for a similar reason.
The standalone tag cannot be changed by any reader, it can be changed by any author, or admin.
Hugs
Cat
-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
Why?
"the purpose of Standalone is to highlight non-series original stories"
Why? Since there are quick links for serial chapters, why are you suggesting that series standalone stories should be denied a quick link? That seems rather bigoted to me.