IT IS HERE! Forumshire fanfic collection

Orwell How are you ? I was just thinking of you yesterday....

Orwell wrote:I have often thought it over the years, but never clearly said it, Eldo, but you are an amazing young man - or hobbit... (by the way, that was my tongue in your ear...)

Orwell wrote:I am looking forward to this. Forgive me if I read Julia. Figg’s ‘Abent Nora’ tales first. I started doing a pen edit myself and lost momentum... then it will be on to Petty’s ridiculous Dark Planet Tale, even without rather weak idea of making Odo and Orwell some sort of sp,it person, which stretch credulity, but otherwise a wine yarn.. and then.. of my gawd... there is soooooo much other stuff I loved... and Winter coming... perfect... i’ll start collecting the wood for the fire and beeswax my for my reading candles.... ... this is gonna be great...

Thank you, Orwell. It means a lot to know people are looking forward to this; makes it easier to push through the really tedious parts. And it is very kind of you to say that about me.

makes it easier to push through the really tedious parts- Eldo

{{You're really selling it there Eldo!!  
And talking of thinks Figg shaped and wearing a bustle where is she?   }}

I notice in the birthday notifier at the bottom of the main page that Squach is going to be 19 next week. I was 16 when she started posting here! Where did the damn time go?

OTOH when I was 19 The Desolation of Smaug came out and Forumshire completed its first of four consecutive years as the second-largest Tolkien forum ... that might make me feel even older.

{{{Relatively speaking, obviously. }}}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:makes it easier to push through the really tedious parts- Eldo

You're really selling it there Eldo!!

What I mainly mean is standardizing the formatting. Most people (myself included) posted their fiction with blank lines between each paragraph and no indentation at the start, which is pretty standard for web writing. But I want everything to look (a) consistent and (b) book-like, which means going through paragraph by paragraph (more like line-by-line when there's a lot of dialogue) and deleting extraneous spaces and/or adding intents. Though in cases where there were already indents it usually means replacing those so that they're the same size as everything else. And doing stuff like replacing rows of periods with proper ellipses, turning short dashes into long dashes where appropriate, correcting typos (except when intentional, which requires looking at the context around it), etc.

Also, if I were to copy directly from finished posts to a word processor, stuff like the font, color, embedded images of emoticons, and possibly the green background would be preserved, requiring a lot of mucking around to get rid of that since it's annoyingly persistent. But if I were to paste the post into notepad as an intermediary, all original italicization and the like would be lost. So what I'm doing in most cases is clicking quote and copying the unformatted version of the post with original BB code and then going through, re-italicizing, and then deleting the extraneous bits of BB code. Which is made somewhat easier by doing a ctrl-f search for square brackets, but it's still pretty tedious. Then I get to go back and re-read the whole thing to catch stuff I missed the first time.

There's more but that's the gist of it. And keep in mind that this is probably going to be about as many words as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion combined by the time it's done. But I think it will improve the readability of the finished product and work better as a cohesive, enduring testament to Forumshire's fanfic community. Plus I tend to hold the view that anything not worth doing well is not worth doing, so y'know...

If you care that much about paragraph formatting it would be relatively easy to write a script to do that for you, though you'd be going from HTML to RTF or you'd have no hope.

A lot of work there!

The thought occurred to me but since I'm going through paragraph by paragraph to try to correct spelling and punctuation anyway it didn't really seem worth the time to try to learn how to do it. I can't rely on the word processor autocorrecting everything because there are both a ton of false positives and also things it can't pick up like people typing homophones by accident.

Edit: and I know I won't catch everything either but I'm giving it my best shot.

Anyway I hope I'm not coming across as overly defensive... :/

No, the drive to edit everything means you are not saving quite as much time by programming it up. Quite a labor of love.

Eldorion wrote:I notice in the birthday notifier at the bottom of the main page that Squach is going to be 19 next week. I was 16 when she started posting here! Where did the damn time go?

OTOH when I was 19 The Desolation of Smaug came out and Forumshire completed its first of four consecutive years as the second-largest Tolkien forum ... that might make me feel even older.

{{{Relatively speaking, obviously. }}}

And I was 21 with a relatively full head of hair when I first joined, christ the years go past so fast...

I applaud your enthusiasm and hard work in this endeavour Eldo, but I can't help but pity the hours spent compiling it...

Ive got a very good feeling about this !

My daughter is mad keen on him !!

malickfan wrote:And I was 21 with a relatively full head of hair when I first joined, christ the years go past so fast...

I applaud your enthusiasm and hard work in this endeavour Eldo, but I can't help but pity the hours spent compiling it...

Thanks Malick. To be honest I get kinda restless if I go too long without something to do that engages my mind and requires more thought and/or perseverance than work/school or just normal mucking around with ideas that I find interesting. Sometimes it gets to be like a compulsion and I keep going after its no longer fun, but so far I have genuinely enjoyed this and hopefully if it starts to weigh on me I'll be able to just take a break. And it's always nice when my obsessiveness ends up producing a neat end product.

Fake edit: take two of this post, without quite so much whininess. Sorry guys; I've been moodier than usual the past several days for a number of reasons.

Well, pardon the bad joke, seems like you are doing a great job

azriel wrote:Orwell  How are you ? I was just thinking of you yesterday....

Hope they were pure thoughts... ....

Eldorion wrote:

Orwell wrote:I have often thought it over the years, but never clearly said it, Eldo, but you are an amazing young man - or hobbit... (by the way, that was my tongue in your ear...)

Orwell wrote:I am looking forward to this. Forgive me if I read Julia. Figg’s ‘Abent Nora’ tales first. I started doing a pen edit myself and lost momentum... then it will be on to Petty’s ridiculous Dark Planet Tale, even without rather weak idea of making Odo and Orwell some sort of sp,it person, which stretch credulity, but otherwise a wine yarn.. and then.. of my gawd... there is soooooo much other stuff I loved... and Winter coming... perfect... i’ll start collecting the wood for the fire and beeswax my for my reading candles.... ... this is gonna be great...

Thank you, Orwell. It means a lot to know people are looking forward to this; makes it easier to push through the really tedious parts. And it is very kind of you to say that about me.

Yes, and might I just say, I’d much rather you push through my tedious parts than Petty push through my tedious parts.... goes without saying....

{{What? But Ive got an old shovel and a broken buckie bottle all ready for the job Orwell! (which bit of you am I pushing through again? }}}

Nobody's been pushing through my tedious parts recently.

Orwell wrote:

azriel wrote:Orwell  How are you ? I was just thinking of you yesterday....

Hope they were pure thoughts... ....

Only the very best, tho, one can have purely bad thoughts ?

I'm feeling an eye watering moment here

Bluebottle wrote:Well, pardon the bad joke, seems like you are doing a great job

Thanks man. I appreciate you guys putting up with me being weird and moody in various threads when I get like this.

Anyway, a quick update. I've now finished 54 chapters, or exactly half of the total! (I decided to use the beginning date of this project as a cutoff so as not to keep pushing away the finish line, even though the CC still sees updates.) In practice though I'm well past the halfway point. Yesterday I finished importing Gingerlocks and I took care of The Darkest Day tonight, so the only really long chapter left is Haddon Hall. That'll probably be a bit slower going due to the nature of how it was posted, but I'm actually kinda looking forward to it.

Here's what the main document looks like at this point (though 54 pages are placeholders for chapters I haven't gotten to yet):



And as a comparison... http://lotrproject.com/statistics/books/wordscount

been catching up on all the posts I missed. and WOW! this is one magnum opus. cool!

Thanks Figgy.

Bump so that the update will be at the top of the new page.