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Thundercloud

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  1. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in Introducing characters   
    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.
     
  2. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in Introducing characters   
    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…
  3. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  4. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  5. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from Wilde_Guess in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  6. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  7. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  8. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from Wilde_Guess in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  9. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in How do you know if people like your story?   
    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.
  10. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in Thundercloud's Review Responses   
    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.
  11. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in JayDee's (Originals) review reply, story discussion and additional notes thread   
    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.
  12. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in Thundercloud's Review Responses   
    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.
  13. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in JayDee's (Originals) review reply, story discussion and additional notes thread   
    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.
  14. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in JayDee's (Originals) review reply, story discussion and additional notes thread   
    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.
  15. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in With the Mirror Came...   
    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...:-)
  16. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from Desiderius Price in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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/
  17. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from WillowDarkling in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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.
  18. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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.
  19. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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.
  20. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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.
  21. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from WillowDarkling in This Site Desperately Needs An Overhaul   
    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.
  22. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from JayDee in What is the price of hypothetical buying this website   
    The actual concept that anybody think they can purchase an archive hosting fanfiction is rather weird. I mean...they could begin to read the sites disclaimer about not accepting fanfics written for money before they consider to waste everyone's time by posting questions about purchasing the fanfic-archive.
  23. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from BronxWench in What is the price of hypothetical buying this website   
    The actual concept that anybody think they can purchase an archive hosting fanfiction is rather weird. I mean...they could begin to read the sites disclaimer about not accepting fanfics written for money before they consider to waste everyone's time by posting questions about purchasing the fanfic-archive.
  24. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from WillowDarkling in What is the price of hypothetical buying this website   
    The actual concept that anybody think they can purchase an archive hosting fanfiction is rather weird. I mean...they could begin to read the sites disclaimer about not accepting fanfics written for money before they consider to waste everyone's time by posting questions about purchasing the fanfic-archive.
  25. Like
    Thundercloud got a reaction from Desiderius Price in What is the price of hypothetical buying this website   
    The actual concept that anybody think they can purchase an archive hosting fanfiction is rather weird. I mean...they could begin to read the sites disclaimer about not accepting fanfics written for money before they consider to waste everyone's time by posting questions about purchasing the fanfic-archive.
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