Desiderius Price

Oh...my first fanfic/story, the start of it… pure dialogue in committee style, discussing how to better Harry’s falling marks (because he’d been spending all his time in the owlery writing love letters to his muggle girl.) I certainly wouldn’t write it that way anymore! I’ve grown to figure out way better ways to have done it. I also wrote in PRESENT TENSE, which… wasn’t great either. One trick I learned ages ago for details, don’t describe it ALL. Instead, draw focus to one specific detail, ie, a tear in the green lamp shade, and it gives the illusion of depth without pages of detailed description.

41652 I’m trying to avoid those infinite loops!

You’ll almost always find something you missed if you go back to it, I know I do. Usually, it’s trivial enough that I’ll tweak it in my local copy and websites. As long as you make a reasonable effort, I think most readers understand...it’s not like we’re getting paid to do this full time. It’s a hobby, I’m an amateur, and so it’s basically second draft quality at most. I actually experimented a while ago… I deliberately wrote short chapters (~2k) and limited myself to ONE proof/edit, overall, I liked the speed the story developed at due to that. However, my main stories… longer chapters let me get more into the meat of the tales.

Depends on how fast I write them, which seem to be monthly now… I usually like to wait at least one week between finishing a chapter and reviewing it for posting, that’s balancing the desire to post with catching at least the glaring grammar and other issues. Thought you were sitting on a stockpile of finished yet unposted chapters… I’d do those at least 2-3 days apart, as it’d also stay at the top of “freshly updated” stories for longer.

Ignoring the recent AFF website issues… normally one story/chapter at a time, spread days apart. If I “shotgun” blast them all at once, I don’t really get a good feel from the hitcounts.

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41644 … @Wilde_Guess you sent us back on the count. This includes @kagome26isawsome and @Melrick getting caught up in the miscount.

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Thanks. It was certainly nice making the “body count” go the OTHER way for once, too.

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What can I say? You clearly have good taste in friends

Also known as republicans?

While I saw this earlier today, I was at work and couldn’t exactly type out a lengthy reply. My idea is to research the military, like average boot camp times, and training times for the elites like army rangers, navy seals, that sort of thing. As there’s aliens involved, maybe slip some “bad-ass-powder” formulation into X’s food to accelerate the progression?

Many sympathies. I’ve got an episode/chapter of one of my stories that took a darker direction because I was starting to draft it when I lost a fur baby… (and I’m the human that discovered the queen cat had kittens).

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Abandoned stories are so frustrating. This was very common when I first delved into the realm of potter fanfic, because of the number that would get dropped whenever a new book was released. I think my current potter fanfic (the sequel) is an exception to that trend. On AFF, it’s quite clear, you’d need explicit permission from the author of that other story relayed to the mods here.

Still, give that other author/fanfic a shout-out for inspiration. Always good to know when one story inspires another.

My first fanfic, the one that got me hooked on writing, isn’t coming to AFF because it was inspired by another fanfiction. My head was full of ideas of where it ought to go—thankfully I didn’t message that author with where their story ought to go. I began to sketch things out, immediately wrestled the narrative into my own story, and I’ve not stopped. Like any other fanfiction, I credited the original (and that other fanfic) for inspiration, cobbled together some badly written prose, kept their names for Mr. & Mrs. Granger, kept the name for what might’ve been a Mary Sue muggle that Harry spent his entire fifth year Christmas Holiday...snogging. It’s sequel is the one I’m still working on, and that’s so different that it’s definitely mine. (Outside of the name for Harry’s GF.)

Or make the training/fight itself a seven book series… (cough, cough… JKR) More seriously, some episodes to the training might be realistic, portray an evolution from that elliptical wanna-be of the local fitness gym to the badass you want them to be. Some mishaps along the way? Is their life at a complete standstill? Perhaps take something like… early on, being unable to open the pickle jar at the family reunion, to smashing the glass to shards toward the completion of their bad-ass training?