BronxWench

My pleasure! It's a great series!

That's LondonLampy's Exit series: LondonLampy The first is Exit Strategy, then The Outset, Second Exit, Exit Wounds, and finally Exit from the City.

My first abomination is safely offline and will never see the light of day again. I had maybe two decent sentences in the entire mess. The rest was trite cliched bullshit. On the bright side, I do manage to learn from my mistakes. Now it's just bullshit.

It's okay! It's new for us all, and we'll figure it out together.

The chapter list on the left is actually links to the chapters. Clicking on Chapter 30 of that story should take you right there.

I'm taking time out from doing my taxes to answer this, only because I find it offensive that you think you, while hiding behind anonymity, have any right to make assumptions or to denigrate anything. Humor is largely subjective, yes, but what makes you think that AFF must be so very serious? Are we an actual publisher's website, where people are asked to pay for the privilege of reading works? Are we selling you anything? No. We are a free to use fiction archive, and you are free to read elsewhere if you find a bit of levity so objectionable.

I'll reserve the right to disagree about the cat pokes being embarrassing, but as you can see from above, we're looking into the text field issue. But we can't go backwards, so please understand that. The old format broke too many things, and we're not going to risk losing the entire database over style issues. The first priority was data preservation and accessibility. We're a fiction archive, and without the stories, we're not much of anything. That's still our focus: getting the rewrite tweaked and running smoothly, fixing any hiccups we find, and finishing the upgrades to the forum. Then we can take a breath and think about getting out color swatches and picking curtains.

::dies laughing:: Trust me, read my earlier stuff, and you'll be whimpering and begging me not to be associated with you in any way, shape, or form. But yay to regular updates! I need to read more, and maybe then I can get past this idiot block!

Thank you!

We're looking at getting the lighter background behind text re-implemented, since it does give the chapter pages a better feel. (Given how many of those pages I review in a week, I won't argue that at all.) However, our coder, manta, is the one who can tell us if that's even possible.

Logging in to update stories has always been necessary, so that hasn't actually changed. If you mean needing to click the Control Panel to update, that's been around for a while, too. The database/archive and the forum are entirely separate entities, and what we can do on the forum isn't possible in the archive. As far as toggling back to the previous, please understand that the archive code itself had to be rewritten because the previous code was incompatible with what we need to do to keep it from crashing altogether. The language was defunct. We tried to apply a routine forum update and the archive went down. It took sixteen straight hours of DG's work and fourteen straight hours of manta's work to get stories to appear again at all. Going back to the old format simply isn't an option. I understand no one likes change, and I remember all the grumbling when we updated last time. Everyone hated the new logo, the layout, the colors, and half the staff. Give it a chance as it's fine-tuned, and keep in mind that we are doing this to keep the archive up and running, not to be annoying.

Actually, I think as far as professionalism, AFF is heads above other sites where staff and admins actually interact with members, and respond to emails, posts and PMs. However, we're not a for-profit publisher, and therefore, I think having a little fun is not a bad thing. Our authors get paid in reviews, and our readers get to enjoy some outstanding writing for free. That's pretty much my definition of fun, really. As a site author, I love the kitties, and I love the sense of family here. As a published author, this will always be my safe place to try something new, something I might not submit to an editor. As a reader, I hope to discover many more amazing writers to delight me.

You may want to clear your history in Firefox, log out of AFF, close Firefox completely, then restart Firefox and log back into AFF using the upper right hand fields. That should clear the issue, I believe.

I'd also make sure the document is saved as a .doc file. The extension native to WPS Writer, .wps, is the same as was used by a now-defunct program, Microsoft Works. That defunct program has been an issue for years as far as compatibility with the Rich Text Editor. As DG says, once the archive is up and running again, you should be able to use the Paste from Word option in the RTE to paste in the copied .doc file.

34578

We've posted the news at the beginning of the archive, and here on the forum. The archive is being updated and is read-only until 5PM EST (GMT-5) today. While that's going on, we can't put a banner on the subdomains being updated, because it might interfere with the update. The point here is to not blow things up and have the archive down for months.

It may be temporarily turned off today, while the archive is in read-only mode. As announced, the character set for the archive needs to be updated to unicode. However, that function hasn't been eliminated, and I expect it will be back later today, when the archive is put back on active status again.

The search function is still there under the Member Tools pulldown menu. It works like it always has, and allows you to search a subdomain by story title, author or summary.

Dafdes, you are going to make my head swell at this rate! But thank you, so much! The old tales are very much alive for me, and that is one that's always resonated. The death and rebirth theme just suits the way I feel about the swing of the year, and all gods should be mad. It's not fun otherwise. I'm sl glad you think I've done them justice, our mad things.

We dragons are like that, you know. Exploiting the masses, coveting the shinies, snacking on the unwary (although I really prefer a nice tarragon mayonnaise to ketchup).

Oh, my dear, dear 24CaratCoal, we're not feeding you to Bob. We're going to make you write many literate, intelligent, terrifying, wonderful stories for our enjoyment.

Pfft. We never tremble. We just feed authors to Bob. As far as the ABO thing, I've seen a great many Mpreg fics written without resorting to that nonsense (and I personally find ABO dynamics to be unspeakably silly from any standpoint). I also know just how good dafdes is at this sort of thing, and I have a feeling she's found a partner in 24CaratCoal. The trick to writing anything like this, and to capture the true horror, is to NOT fall into the use of silly tropes. The more realistic, the more terrifying. This isn't meant to be romance, or even particularly enjoyable, unless you like nightmares. Which I rather do.

Okay. First of all, there are two kinds of marketing blurbs when you publish. There is a short, two to three sentence blurb that needs to be very catchy, and then there's the back of the book type summary. What you have now fits the first category. What you propose is the second sort. Of the three examples you have there, the first is the one that catches the attention best, with some judicious tweaking: "Lauchlan lead led a simple life, a happy one, and all things considered, he was quite lucky. He had a steady job, a roof over his head, and food on his plate, a family who loved him, if from a distance, and good company to surround himself by. All it took was one night and a few too many pints for it to come crashing down around his head. He didn’t know what drove him to it, didn’t know what he’d do, didn’t know what he’d done. All he knew was that he'd woken up in a strangers bed, with a stranger man curled against his side, with bruises like handprints on his hips, and the sinking realization that what he’d done could never be taken back, never undone. He never thought he was the sort of man who would do such a thing. Never thought himself capable. Then again, he'd never thought he’d come to like it. Never would have believed he’d come to love the stranger him. It turned out that there were a lot of things he’d never thought before." Try that on for size. My editor tells me I'm getting better at these.

If it's a link to another fiction archive where the story is published, that's fine. We don't permit links to sites that serve as download portals, or host fiction without the author's consent, however.

I need my "Like" button back!