Thundercloud

Thanks for the answer. It was not such big issue that it disturbed my reading.

We keep resurrecting this thread from last year...time to move to something new before the dust bunnies catch us?

Thanks for the explanations, they explained a lot. There are some really great story puzzle pieces there that you avoid showing to the reader.

I have now posted chapter 7 named The Time of the Prophecy: The Princess and the Dwarf This chapter features the events that happened at the same time as the previous chapter. Princess Ezame makes a dangerous decision as Ezame and Cymari gets involved in desperate rescue mission. Meanwhile the Entaro family are starting to get worried about what has happened too Cymari and Helian. Story codes for the chapter Tort, Tent, MF, Preg, Rape, Violence Main hero featuring in the chapter is Ezame, Enbon, Cymari.

A busy work schedule has with lots of overtime has meant that I could write my intended piece...will have to save it for another year. I very much look forward at reading your stories.

Thank you for the encouragement.

I am a bit infrequent here for the moment since I have no steady internet in the summer house...but BronxWench gave a very good explanation of what I was trying to say in my previous post. If such things happen...why are you not showing such an event for the reader? How does he feel about his work situation? What are his reasons for working at the Inn? I would be much more interested in reading such at the beginning at the story than how Janina has blasted some fellow with her magic.

All that is background for the character, but that does not equal a good reason to tell the reader about it. There is not inherently any problem with a character having large tits...but why are we told the boob size of the females but not given a description of the dwarf tavern owner that is bound to be important to the main character? If I am blunt...what does these girls actually do in the first chapter? If the focus should be on your main character and him being average you could probably just as well tell the reader there are some babes working at the Inn without any specifics. You could continue with telling the reader about how the babes never looked in the direction of main character and that he feels insignificant and invisible around them. Some visual descriptions from the viewpoint of the main character as he dreams about them could work. You could also expand more about the main characters personality by him thinking about he never dared to ask them out since he recall how they reacted on customers trying take advantage of them could let you rescue some of details if they are important to you. I could also imagine to saving the visuals for later chapters and using the space in the first chapter to tell reader about the dwarf tavern owner and why the main character works for him instead of talking about the babes. I think you should devote more focus on showing this to the reader than girls working at the Inn. One option could be to alert the reader about the apocalyptical setting into the descriptions of the first chapter by having the elven sorceress working on the Inn because even with her spells she does not dare to travel alone in the wilderness. Her trying to assemble the coins to secure travel with a caravan for semi safe travel to her destination would frame the readers thoughts about the setting in the right direction. The important thing IMHO is that you should use the space of the first chapter to develop the main character and the setting. Visuals and details that advance those goals are a good idea, but telling the reader stuff that won’t matter until later chapters is a tricky business.

I think much depends on why details are presented to the reader. Somebody looking into a mirror or a certain characters looking and remembering are good narrative tricks to give visuals...giving an info dump about females that happen to be at the location but does not feature in any action or plot is quite the opposite. The equivalent of movies where the camera crew go hunting for camera views that make the babes look sexy instead of things that advance the plot. Trying to balance the scale afterward by “objectify” a male lead character is like digging deeper into the hole. Those who think the description of the female jumped at them, won’t be less irritated because it is done again for another character. In short I think you should listen to your wife…

It is easy to find stories that have got between 100 and 200 totally after being online for a year so bots in general is not a significant problem for dragon hits. Possibly there could be some tailor-made bot that is specially looking for the word Skyrim or something similar, but that is life. As a funny notice I used to frequent a now gone story site where the email was visible with the story but you could not see the equivalent of dragon prints. This meant that I received spam proportional to the number of hits from readers with malware on their computers. Good chapters got lots of more spam than the bad ones…. a very different time.

I think a downvote button just opens for abuse. At the end of the day you can’t use the downvote metric for anythings useful since you don’t know why somebody downvoted the story/chapter. The upvote/like is more useful for the author...but it can be abused by authors/readers who want to promote a story. How about having a “like” button for the chapters where the result is only visible for the author? If you remove publicly visible aspect of the like/upvote you remove a lot of reasons for people arranging a bot that clicks on the like button.

One thing that make dragon prints a measure a bit tricky is that a large number of chapters in the story raises the effort to read it all. This mean that each time you post a new chapter you can expect a number of people checking the beginning out but not becoming fans so they drop out. The increased perceived effort to read the chapters will mean these random visitors lessens over time. In essence you can a growing number of regulars that read everything, but having a dragon print that is falling as fewer random visitors visit the story. If you keep a steady beat of dragon hints as chapters grow in number I would say it signals you are doing great. From another perspective, exchanging reviews with other authors is a great way to making it more likely new people will check you story. If I have to choose between reading two stories and one of them has a review I will most only choosing the 0 review one when doing community-service-style-reading. Stories with reviews are generally a better read. The thing lacking at AFF today is we don’t get dragon prints for the individual chapters. If we had those we could tell how many that read to the end. The tricky thing is that adding such feature afterward would imply that later chapters of all existing chapters has no dragon prints even while they could have been visited by loads of people.

Nothing major that needed to be axed so far. One minor example would be that the previous version had more of Talinda and Retalia having to spend time together before they arrived at the court...but eventually it did just resolve to the scenes I kept in the new version so it was kind of pointless. Another example would be an Inn discussion that I realized fitted better with a scene from the next chapter than just randomly following the story teller talking about kind of related things. One thing I actually changed was lord Harper going into a fight with Talinda, in the original he was more interested into getting Talinda in bed and did not really talk about how her identity was a danger to him. Have you seen My Elf Girlfriend on College humor? A wonderful take on the horny elves trope that is good for quite a laugh. Yep, the witch king will pack a punch when he eventually gets around to fight. Maybe I can tweak the dialogue to make it clearer. IMO it adds quite a bit to making the scene even more funny.

Considering the revising took me one and half year I can verify that it was a lot work. The basic plot of the second half of the chapter is about the same...but there was far too much telling instead of showing in the original story. The information from Ezame for instance was just info dumped on the reader without any real scene for context. The chapter also used to start in the domains of Lord Harper with Midiilon arriving there and the switch to the council happened almost directly before the events with the Apinion couple. The good news is that one of the revised scenes will go into the next chapter so I have some work finished already...I also have good reason to believe that the rest of the chapters of the Time of the Prophecy will be more easy to adapt since they are more coherent when read them. Good thinking...but I actually cut a reference to the audience figuring out how many hundred back the story took place. The humans that are still around (if they exist) need to be very special...elves and possibly halfelves on the other hand. There are reasons for the dwarfs absence...the next chapter will have some hints considering that chapter also describe events that happened during the great council. This scene is like I mentioned one of those that I added. Having the heroes understand better how dangerous opponent Lombadiel Iglack works wonders to explain why they need to be so careful and not get into an open fight with bad guys. A nasty pair of vipers...they will return later in the story. Not sure if had the word play in mind when I chose the name way back...but I have thought about it later. It is very important to show what kind of raw deal Azbezil delivers to his followers. Did you realize that Midilon earlier boasted about having drugged Lord H so he would not have reason to visit Retalia’s bed chamber… Having a child at that point would have exposed Madel from being proved to be the father and thus revealing he was present when the king’s peace was broken. *smiles* The saving grace is that Azbezil’s mind reader has lots of minions to keep track off. The demon need to spend magic power to read minds and Azbezil thus have to chose where it provides the most benefit. It will be explained later. It is a very useful spell. The even more useful spells will feature in the upcoming chapters. *evil grin*

You succeeded if you ask me, plenty of good jokes. I think I frequented just about all of those you mentioned, grey archive was the first site I posted on. One you failed to mention is btw mcstories.com...there are some great stories there if you can stand there being quite a lot of repetition of themes in the stories considering the sites narrow focus. As for the story site that ruined the story session is was actually the Aurora Universe by Sharon Bast. When I broke the spell and considered what I was doing I decided the stories was providing to little payoff considering the length of stories and so much just being a weird superman/supergirl ripoff. Considering how many authors that contributed since and original author changing his pen-name and revising everything I suppose there must be a staggering Aurora stories around now. If you have time to spare, I would say mcstories is a better bet to find interesting stories. There some of the classics that was posted there. I just realized there is Yaoi manga that is named Overdose... I have not any ideas finished yet, but I am toying with the idea of somebody that is stuck with exposition fairy and realize that he/she cannot help to answer when prompted no matter how kinky the question is. No idea if it will work out as a story, but it sounds fun with anti hero that force the fairy to talk dirty.

I have now posted chapter 6 named The Time of the Prophecy: The Great Council This chapter features Talinda that is on undercover mission among the nobles of the realm. The assignment suddenly becomes much more dangerous when all the nobles are summoned to the royal court since Azbezil wants a new Great Council decision to be made. Story codes for the chapter 3Plus Anal MF Preg Rape Violence Main hero featuring in the chapter is Talinda, but the following heores also make an appearance: Ezame and Fenlyw Next chapter will hopefully need a lot less work than this chapter...but I don’t have a planned date for the release. If you want to read it any time soon then it works wonders to let me know this.

Glad that you enjoyed the washing machine scene...I don’t know how many revisions of the scene that I deleted before I got my act together and made the scene work. I think I caused those linebreaks when the AFF editor was messing with the formating and I tried to fix it in a hurry. I did I quick read through and fixed those visible in the editor. Thank you forthe tip. When the ending comes you will now. Not many chapter left now, but lots of words to write. I will perhaps feature that scene in the next chapter. I have not decided really about Julia. The basic character is a tease that uses her great looks for favors, but there is always room for a deeper reason. I actually had foreshadowing for this in the first chapter with a picture of dogs on her wall. I also realize that I probably spent 8 chapter without revisiting the visuals of the room. I was inspired by the movie The Secretary when I wrote that scene. Good that you enjoyed it. That was the single most difficult scene to write. I don’t know how many revisions I did before I got my act together. Thank you for the encouragement.

Instead the source of inspiration is Twilight… Maybe she is also spending demonic energy on gathering fans to read her works so that it is hard for people to be suspicious. Ah...that explains it. It seemed so much like fantasy name that failed to think about that explanation. Precisely my thought. She pretends to be nice since she see opportunity atthe comic-cone. I think it would be great entertainment to have her at the Con shapeshifting into different forms to get sex and fans. I intend to review the rest of chapters also in due time, but there are other stuff also in the pipeline to be read so you get the rest of the reviews.

Obviously there is too little Jadis fanfiction around. Especially such without minors involved. No worries...there are quite a number of words. It is not like chapter 10 will be done any time soon...other stuff might be in the pipeline.

M Through R???

Chapter 9 has now been posted. This chapter giving you more details on Ronja’s troubles caused by the supernatural world. Additionally I have reviewed the earlier chapters and fixed a couple language mistakes...actually quite many things. The story tales place in 2010 when I begun writing it, and I might have learned a few things since then. If you review it the likelihood I review some of your story increases a lot...:-)

Correct...I don’t expect his first assignment to take 100 hours. If it does then I need to have a talk with my boss. As for overtime, we at my work have the rule that you have to explain yourself if you have too much overtime collected. We laughed quite a lot about that at work back in the days. Regional Manager was the award that collected most laughs. The actual hunt was to find a consult work we had that done not merit the achievement...it was tricky. Thanks for the reminder. In return I give you an XKCD about Bad Code https://xkcd.com/1926/

As a reference at my job I am currently bringing in a new programmer in one of the projects. I expect him to spend 100 hours before he get proficient enough with the codebase to make design choice on his own. Until then I devote hours each week just to answer questions and say yes/no to ideas. It takes serious effort to vet a new programmer for serious work.

If the crew like some suggestions in this thread they can look into if it economical to implement the changes, but just to be clear, I am not volunteering since I do programming for a living. Neither am I suggesting that is reasonable for some other external programmers to setup a group to doing the actual overhaul of AFF. If anything should change is must the be owner of AFF and its crew that initiate the work. My reasons for posting in this thread is mostly that I don’t agree with original posters assumption that it is easy solve his suggestions, but I also wanted to describe my preferred changes in case by luck some of them happen to be reasonable to implement. Like I said before it much depends on the codebase if things will take hours or weeks to fix.

As a professional programmer I would say that it close to impossible to say how much effort a new feature would take without looking at the actual codebase. You can make an effort to stay current with the latest tech so that it is easy to do overhauls, but that require continuous development and the typical case is thatthe effort to do a overhaul depends a lot on details of the codebase. AFF runs on PHP and I think it is fairly certain that it is more of the fix-things-when-they-break kind of site than a site that play catch up with latest technology. The top priorities from me to overhaul would be: Adding more allowed bytes to the disclaimer field and the description fields so authors can write something more than the required sentences would be great. There is bound to be authors that decide against using AFF because the limits of bytes that is very annoying. The limits presented look like reasonable limits back in the days when screens/webbrowsers could not show as much text. In a modern webbrowser that can show a lot more text the limits does not make sense anymore. More allowed bytes for the tags field might be worth to consider so the authors can get the option not use the hard-to-understand acronyms if they don’t want to. The sidebar that the Guest complain is empty space has a lot uses when logged in onthe author page. When just browsing stories it is empty...why not duplicate the search control there when it is not used for the author components? If it has the option to remember search terms the user like it would save a lot of clicks when searching for interesting materials. Possibly it could work as a filter so the user can remove stories with unwanted tags on permanent basis without having to do a search click on each visit to AFF When reading a story the left sidebar could offer quick links to other works by the same author Password limitations and implementation updated forthe modern age. Fixing the bug that means I don’t get messages when reviews are posted on my stories would be great….at least for me. :-) I am not saying the above is reasonable to implement since I don’t know the state of the codebase, but it sounds to me like much more useful improvements than the proposal from the guest.