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or, How Long and How Often?
I posted Better Late Than Never on three consecutive days, and each post was about 25-27 KB of straight text.
Journey to Humanity is a bit more than 310 KB of straight text.
I'm thinking of chopping it into pieces of about 40 K, and posting 2-3 times a week. I'm open to suggestions.
(I'll try to avoid cliff hangers, but no promises. ;-) )
By the way, I'm trying to figure out how to post it as a regular HTML file with a cascading style sheet, or perhaps along with a .css file. Is there a set of instructions somewhere?
And yes, I'm a geek. Sue me. :-)
Ray Drouillard
Comments
In my opinion
Each author does things their own way. I like longer chapters, posted frequently. The serial craze is OK, as long as the posts happen often enough so that I don't have to go back to the beginning to pick up the thread of the story again. Perhaps it is my own brain. I seem to be having some memory problems.
On the other hand, there are three chapters of a story here that I will likely not get to read, apparently because they are just too large for my system or IP to handle. I am having increasingly frustrating problems with it. I don't know what I am going to do.
Which chapters?
What are you trying to read? I can download the chapters and email them to you.
By the way, I have problems downloading some stories at the library. I can't get to this site at all, and some of the MORFS and Whateley stories trigger a 'this is inappropriate' algorithm in the server. I get a nice big red message telling me that I hadn't ought to download filth like that. (So what if the 'F word' appears a few times?)
Ray
As long as there are landmarks
My preference: when a piece is longer than 3000 words, I appreciate landmarks of some sort.
It could be something as sophisticated as "CHAPTER THREE" or something as simple as a horizontal rule.
As long as I can find the spot where I left off reading yesterday, I don't care how it's posted.
How Often and How Long?
The more frequent posts are, the shorter they can be seems a reasonable algorithm. Let's consider two famous and popular serials:
Tuck is posted, mostly, in 8-9,000 word chunks (about 64k) once a month or so.
Easy...off a Bike is posted daily in about 1500 word chunks.
Five thousand words once or twice a week would look to be a nice average there? (Arithmetic mean on length, ~logarithmic on time).
Not too big to download (that's about 36-40k) and maybe read away from the keyboard and get back and make a comment before the next one comes out. Just a suggestion.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Big Posts
Big posts tend to slow the site down. Anything bigger than 10,000 words (about 64k or ~30 pages) is a noticeable hit to the system. Not too big a deal though since there aren't many posts that big. Really big files, 30,000 words or more, (~200k, 90 pages) are really pigs for system resources. Might be better to do anything bigger than 20,000 words as an attached file instead of an inline story.
The Tuck stories are done as attached files if anyone wants to know what that looks like. The Tuck chapters are plain text, .txt, but you can also attach .pdf, .rtf, and .doc (though I don't recommend .doc, too freaking bloated and less than ideal security-wise).
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Post size
I've always avoided posting unfinished stories and that's perhaps why I've only posted 3 of my own and one for a friend. However two of the stories were quite long and were posted in segments quite quickly - IIRC both were completely on-line in less than a week. With a few exceptions I much prefer substantial and completed stories, though they're getting rare. I make an exception for a 'soap' like 'Easy as Falling off a Bike' which is an interesting exercise by a determined writer. Although I must admit I'm finding the recurrent rate of tragedy extremely funny and I'm wondering how Angharad is keeping a straight face - perhaps she isn't :)
'Who Hates Lola' (my story) is 54,000 words long and I posted that in 6 roughly equal parts - so just under 10k words each. 'Wild Horses' by Rebecca Anderson was posted (by me) in 8 parts. It's 133,000 words so that's about 16,0000 words/post. Erin seemed happy with that.
Geoff
Thanks.
Thanks for your opinions, everyone. Thanks for the info on how not to hit the database too hard, Erin.
I just posted part one of Journey to Humanity. There was a little excitement when the database stopped talking to the server for a few minutes. It would have worried me if I was in the habit of writing straight into the editor. As it is, I didn't even have to re-paste the content. I just backed up and resubmitted once the database got over its little coughing fit.
By the way, the rule in computers, especially servers, is that 'feces occurs.' What I recommend in this case is that you kill a goat by the full moon at midnight and lay its entrails across the keyboard. (And no, you can't have my goat. Nobody gets my goat.)
Ray