Desiderius Price

It’s also devaluing to be accused of using AI for writing simply because you like dashes, ellipses, or using proper grammar.

Hmm, maybe we ought to make AI-generated-reviews a FEATURE?  Author wants such a review, press the button, ask ChatGPT for its opinion on your story?  (Secretly, we’ve hot wired it to troll/flame mode.)

Simple, have a quick conversation chapter one of the sequel.
“Where’s Joe?”
“Six years in prison, because when they say NO PARKING, the really mean NO PARKING.” or
“Got transferred to far, far, away.” or
“He learned why there’s safety bars on woodchippers.  Coroner estimated they recovered 60% of the remains.”
And if you want the villain to be a surprise, have his whereabouts accounted/dismissed for in this conversation too.

Tag for teenagers is minor2 (14 and older).  Tag for younger is minor1.

Ack!  Run, hide, Halloween is nearly here!  (Whoever’s eating the calendar, please stop, time goes by fast enough as it is.) 

Ack!  Run, hide, Halloween is nearly here!  (Whoever’s eating the calendar, please stop, time goes by fast enough as it is.) 

Those ranks… take a while.  AFAICT, a post is 5, a like/reaction is 1.

Those ranks… take a while.  AFAICT, a post is 5, a like/reaction is 1.

Tag for teenagers is minor2 (14 and older).  Tag for younger is minor1.

I’ve got zero recommendations & two “current reading” in mine; so guess the bots like you!

Once the time turner gets written in, “linearity” is out the window   Not that it was the first point of non-linearity, as I’ve also got some “alternate reality” creeping in too.  Thus, quirks are starting to appear, like new yet old paintings showing up on the walls at Hogwarts.

I guess I’ve gotten into your head? My bad.

Heh… was recently thinking of this thread while working on my potter fanfic as it involved a time turner

My take is that brilliant non-linear stories you here talk about get their fame from being good despite not being linear.

A possible comparison is the Westworld tv-show season 1 that had a big reveal when you realized what you had been watching. In season 2 they wanted to repeat the trick and made things just as non-linear and in the end it was barely watchable. I have avoided the later seasons like plague.

My point is that for every successful non-linear storytelling there are many more trainwreck attempts. Doing non-linear storytelling that manage to capture the reader is seriously difficult.

While I overall consider the first real big “rewrite” of my potter fanfic to be a disaster on several fronts; one good thing I added was a snippet of a near-climatic scene at the start of it  (Voldemort proclaiming he had the elixir of immortality) along with “two years earlier...” line.  On my originals, which I marked in AO3 as a “series”, I start with a quote from a future historian, which sets up the atmosphere; all stories are timestamped at the start, though the years are renumbered to avoid an explicit earth-year connection (which can present challenges in dialogue).

On the practical side, I’d suggest against super long chapters too.  I’ve tried that on my potter fanfic years ago, reorganized/rewrote thinking it was a “good thing” with my highest being like 107k… nope!  Not only did I lose some details in that consolidation, I also lost focus to the chapter too.  Small details/scenes were now one/two sentences in basically a wall of text.  (Which it became as FFN.net somehow seemingly lost all my carriage returns, so it was one big “blob”; and a fast re-insert of them is how I uncovered FFN’s new 65k max per chapter limit.)
I’m still pulling that 107k old chapter apart right now with my “rewrite” … though I’ve now got at least 121 in its place, which is probably close to 1M words itself as I now hover around the 6-7k words per chapter average, and if the chapter nears the 10kword mark, I seek to break it up.  Even in my Jefferey episodic story, I’ll effectively do “part 1” and “part 2”.

The technical limit would be a @manta2g or @DemonGoddess type of question, and it’d be in bytes, not words. 
I know we’ve had some of the annual halloween/holiday round-robin submissions where it’s 50k max for the rules, but that’s more of a reader tolerance limit IMO.  In comparison, AO3 limits it to 500k characters, and FFN limits your documents to 5MB (and will stop adding to the word count at 65k words).

Fanfiction *is* a spot to experiment with writing, so try it out, and see if it works!

On the practical side, I’d suggest against super long chapters too.  I’ve tried that on my potter fanfic years ago, reorganized/rewrote thinking it was a “good thing” with my highest being like 107k… nope!  Not only did I lose some details in that consolidation, I also lost focus to the chapter too.  Small details/scenes were now one/two sentences in basically a wall of text.  (Which it became as FFN.net somehow seemingly lost all my carriage returns, so it was one big “blob”; and a fast re-insert of them is how I uncovered FFN’s new 65k max per chapter limit.)
I’m still pulling that 107k old chapter apart right now with my “rewrite” … though I’ve now got at least 121 in its place, which is probably close to 1M words itself as I now hover around the 6-7k words per chapter average, and if the chapter nears the 10kword mark, I seek to break it up.  Even in my Jefferey episodic story, I’ll effectively do “part 1” and “part 2”.

The technical limit would be a @manta2g or @DemonGoddess type of question, and it’d be in bytes, not words. 
I know we’ve had some of the annual halloween/holiday round-robin submissions where it’s 50k max for the rules, but that’s more of a reader tolerance limit IMO.  In comparison, AO3 limits it to 500k characters, and FFN limits your documents to 5MB (and will stop adding to the word count at 65k words).

Fanfiction *is* a spot to experiment with writing, so try it out, and see if it works!

Yeah, possibly it’s going to be an issue. But I think I can make it work. I’m making somewhat clear I think. I have for instance in the description “Then we went to work here”. So in the next chapter when they aren’t working there yet, I think it will be clear. Though I can’t be sure.

Getting the readers onboard with minimal confusion is always the trick here.  As you’re doing character A/B/C/D treatment, I’d still recommend making it as chronological in order as possible, with dates and some transition for wherever it’s not.  Star Trek usually did it with “stardate...” that became meaningless, and outside of a main character coming/going, a lot of those episodes you couldn’t be pressed on what the actual in-universe order *is*.  My potter fanfic has the POV thing, so it’s doing slight shifts as I cover the Hogwarts crowd in one chapter, and Harry/Ron/Hermione on the next; simply because it offers better focus.

Another idea, maybe this is what you’re going for.  First chapter is a scene  of that party (or whatever it is), with your last lines being “This is their stories.”  And your next chapter be like “A year before that party, the awkward Name was sitting in the library.”  Making it abundantly clear to the (typical) reader what you’re up to here, because as you noted, readers generally expect chronological (or near chronological) order.

Another idea, maybe this is what you’re going for.  First chapter is a scene  of that party (or whatever it is), with your last lines being “This is their stories.”  And your next chapter be like “A year before that party, the awkward Name was sitting in the library.”  Making it abundantly clear to the (typical) reader what you’re up to here, because as you noted, readers generally expect chronological (or near chronological) order.