Darkniciad

I'll post this one since it's "my" story

Figured out a better way to kill the whitespace. Save it to HTML as I've been doing, then open the document in Wordpad and Find/Replace all the whitespace BRs. Far quicker and has fewer problems in the long run. Will make redoing all the ones that posted previously much easier. Did one with a larger cover for the "Hot Shorts Vol. One" which includes the first two shorts from my RR shorts page. Of course, this one was designed for a larger cover from the get-go, so it's a completely different animal from converting existing covers. The image of the girl on there is probably about as big as what I have gets, though. That's the full-size image as scanned, when put on a cover to Amazon's cover size requirements. I'll experiment with some bigger but not full-size ones and see what happens. That cover quite naturally appears the same size as other books from Amazon on my tablet's Kindle app, which is nice. The rest of my covers were showing up as little bitty things, which annoys me *laugh* We'll see how big I have to make them to get full-size thumbnails, and how many/whether it's possible. Once I figure that out, I'll take it into consideration during the design process. The next release of Danica chapters will also go to no-whitespace, now that I've figured out an easy way to do it. Experimentation with the "Hot Shorts" Ebook also showed me some of what I did wrong with "Even, Steven". It looks fine on the Kindle PC app, but the pics are horribly small on the tablet app. I simply hadn't resized the images properly when inserting them into the document in the first place. I should be able to fix that and get a 2.0 version of the illustrated Ebook up soon. Now for some lists that are as much for my information as anybody else's. I keep having to look up what I've already converted from all three pen names every time I go to upload new ones, so today, I went through and checked them all. Here's what remains to convert and upload: Reject Reality: Lucky?, Merry Ex-Mas, Milf Allie, Nailed, Nude Holly Day, Paige From Her Diary, Pick Up the Spare, Pickin' an' Grinnin', Recycled, Sunny Daze, Taste of Sherry, Three Alarm, Wash Away the Blues, Wish of Jeanie. Les Lumens: VR: DQ 1, VR:DQ 2, VR: DQ3, VR: DQ 4, VR: DQ5, Window to a Dream Darkniciad: ARS 9, 14, 19, Danica 16-Epilogue, Grandfather Yule, King Thakkorias, Laresa's World 5, 10, 15, 20, 22, 24, Lowborn, Of the People, The Beast Within, Arts Ardane 1, 2, 3, Innocent Devan Trilogy ( shorts ), Breakin' in the Boy ( shorts ) I'm not going to post "Virtual Lapdance" as Les, because I doubt anybody is interested. I'm up in the air about putting the LST3Ks online as Ebooks. For one thing, I've never gotten around to finishing covers for all of them. I'm also not really sure about the interest in them outside of Literotica. I'm up in the air about posting the existing chapters of SOTM as well. The only reason I'm going to convert the ARS chapters is because I'm going to provide a link to my ARS page in hopes of getting people interested to go read the rest of the stories in the chain

This is just a piece of something -- an idea. This is hardly the beginning, but that would give it away. There's a chance this will never actually get written. Well, other than the words I'm going to put down here right now. I may fiddle with this here and there in the future. It's almost a notes file for me, other than the obvious that would give away the beginning and the premise of the whole story. Can you guess what it is? I'll own up to it if anyone calls it. Not all that difficult if you're familiar with it. This is being written in the post window, so pardon the green edges. ============== "What... What is it like?" He chuckled, though the sound contained nothing of mirth. His eyes were distant as he answered, "Painful, to tell you the truth. Your whole body is on fire. Every muscle is contracting. It jerks you around like a puppet. The worst part is your head. It feels as if it's expanding. Every time, I'm sure it's going to explode. But there's something else, too. Power. Raw power. You feel like you're dying, but at the same time, as if you could rule the world with a thought." She started to ask another question, but he stood, and she could sense that there was more. "Afterward, there's even more to deal with," he said as he reached behind a chair and picked up a guitar. A blues riff filled the room as he strummed the strings -- deep and sorrowful. He stilled the instrument and said, "A year ago, every dog in a mile radius would have howled if I'd tried that. I play six instruments, even though I couldn't have carried a tune in a bucket when I was young. I speak more languages than I can count. There are times when I remember something, and then realize it isn't my memory it all. After all these years, I'm not sure where I end and where all of them begin anymore." "So it's..." "All that they've learned. All they've seen. All that they are." He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and said, "Everything."

The last four Ebooks to go up are all no-whitespace versions. ( The Offering, Ride No More, Labor Day, and Jerk ) Feel free to let me know what you think. Still haven't started to create the larger cover images yet, but I'll probably experiment with that soonish.

Well, ratshit My attempts to fudge away the existing whitespace between paragraphs via formatting options in Word and Wordperfect have come to naught. I suppose there's probably a way I can do it with a macro, but I've never messed with macros in either of those programs before. I tried doing it the hard-hard way and deleting every carriage return manually, but that proved problematic at the page transitions, and took bloody forever. It's beginning to look like my best option is to copy-paste from SOL, put back in scene breaks where necessary, and eliminate the odd orphan whitespace. For those stories not available on SOL, I'll have to do it all manually, which is going to be a huge pain in the ass. Doubt I'm going to change my writing habits for that purpose, though. All the sites where I post require that whitespace between paragraphs generated by the double carriage return. I don't think there's any way to fudge it in reverse short of a macro either. Besides that, it's going to look fucked up and alien to me, which will distract me from writing. It will slow down Ebook conversion, but what can I do? I suppose that once I get caught up, it won't be as big of a deal. I'll only be making a few conversions here and there after new stories publish. It's going to make the thought of going back and converting all the ones that are already up pretty discouraging as well *laugh* I'm going to take a break from it now. I'll make the final few fixes to The Offering in a while and get those two up.

Heh... found an easy way to cheat to remove the whitespace - at least for everything that I've posted to SOL. If I copy-paste the story from SOL, it automatically eliminates it for me. Convert to HTML - Done. The next two that go up ( "Ride No More" and "The Offering" ) will be absent the whitespace, and I'll likely continue that way from this point forward. I'll check out the two new ones on my tablet once I get them uploaded for a final evaluation. EDIT: Well, crap. Or so I thought. I'll have to double-check Ride No More, which I've already converted. When I copied The Offering, it sort of worked, but not quite. First off, it completely lost my scene breaks. Second, there were a few places where whitespace was left in for whatever reason. So much for the easy cheat. On to seeing how to do it the hard way - if possible.

Finally looked at the Ebooks on my tablet. So far as I'm concerned, I like them better without the whitespace than with. On the PC app, I was pretty much ambivalent. Going to look into converting my docs to remove it for future releases. Eventually, I'll probably go back and update all the ones that have already been uploaded as well. Probably going to think about creating larger cover images especially for the Ebooks as well. I've usually got larger versions of them saved nowadays, although I'm going to have to experiment and see how horrible the colored pencil sketches look when used at that size LOL Part of what makes them look better is shrinking them down. A lot of the older stories that use the free-for-non-commercial-use images from Artmam are just going to have to stay as they are. There aren't larger versions to work with there. The images in the illustrated Ebook of "Even, Steven" are beyond too tiny for ebook format. Something else I'll have to think about in the future. Not sure if I have or can retrieve larger versions of those old sketches, but I think the ones for the work in progress story should have the larger ones available.

Getting closer to having everything available as an Ebook. I won a tablet in the Christmas giveaway at work, so I'll probably be looking at them from within a portable Kindle environment soon. One major advantage of posting Ebooks for readers is that stories which are exclusive to one site or another will be available here without having to "patronize" a competing site. At least, as long as someone doesn't consider me a competing site LOL "Sister's Shadow" was only available on SOL. "All In My Head" was the only RR story not available on Lushstories. There are lots of Laresa stories that are only available on Lit. A new RR story "Wash Away the Blues" will most likely remain a Lushstories exclusive, but will be available here. I'll also be publishing my shorts as Ebooks as well. Some will get individual releases ( Breakin' in the Boy ) while others will be series releases ( Young Devan Trilogy ) and others will probably be true collections ( RR Shorts ) Eventually, you'll be able to download pretty much everything except my ancient work ( linked through the "About Me" section of the site ) and the lost work ( Linked from the "My Work Extras" page ) Once I've caught up and all finished stories have been converted, I'm planning on about a two week delay before new stories are converted to Ebooks and put up for download. That's to give the stories plenty of time on the story sites. It's the traffic there that generates new readership, so I'd prefer if there weren't a lot of people simply waiting for the Ebook. You can if you want, but I'd just rather you read, vote, and comment on the story sites. It's good for me in the long run The Downloads section may eventually expand to have a few things other than Ebooks as well. No hints as to what that may be, but it's a possibility.

Unlike many, I'm not really looking forward to the upcoming 4.0 version of IP board. Invision has made it very clear that virtually every mod and hook is going to have to be updated to work with the new 4.0 core. That means there's a good chance that a lot of my original code may have to be modified to function within the new environment. I make a lot of calls back to IPB functions, and if they're changed, that means digging through the code to find the new versions. I may have to finally set up a test board and install 4.0 there before even considering upgrading the public side of the site. Odds are that I won't even take that step until the new version has had time for the end users to work the kinks out of it, and for certain mods such as Stop Forum Spam, Shoutbox, and a couple of others to have updates that will work within the new environment. I just see potentially huge headaches in the upgrade, and dealing with that would be taking time away from writing. I have enough trouble finding the drive to write without some huge annoying project to fix the website looming over my head. Honestly, there's not much in the reports of new features and such that has me all-fired excited, either. Don't expect to see my site go to 4.0 any time soon, once it's released.