Shades of Greyias

Apparently I'm still not making an awesome Writercon post, despite my best intentions. Soon! Soon!

( Newsflash: SGU makes me seethe so badly, it breaks my snark. Spoilers in links, probably going to be in the comments section as well. )

So, I was planning on making a very thought provoking post about Amazon-Fail, censorship (intentional or not), and how to make a proper apology (ie: "I am sorry. I am so sorry, we did not mean for this to happen. Please accept our apology as we attempt to fix this" over "It's a glitch, just hold on and it'll be fixed. Gawd.")

Sadly, those plans were cut short by being granted the opportunity to share with everyone yet another fun-filled car story, this time with direct involvement!

Not-so-long-story-short: I am fine.

( Actually, it's not a very long, complicated, or nearly as hilarious of a story as the last one, sorry guys... )

As I promised tipper_green and leesa_perrie I have spent some quality time with FFnet's Document Management system this afternoon. I've come to the conclusion that I still hate it with an undying passion. However, after many angry exchanges and several choice words, I've come up with about three methods that will hopefully save my fellow authors a few headaches in trying to replace/fix what those idiots broke the scene breaks in their stories.

First up, the official recommendation of placing the actual <hr> tags in your Word Documents is crap, pure and simple. It doesn't recognize them in normal documents. It recognizes them in the DocX format (the Word 2007 format intended to make everyone's life more painful), however it will double and/or triple space your paragraphs, which quite frankly looks just about as lovely as their little horizontal line. So I wouldn't try either of these methods.

(Please note, these are just what I've found that works. I tried about fourteen methods, and these were the easiest for me. Also, I'm sure many of you are plenty tech savvy, but I wrote the directions in case someone has the technical expertise of most of the customers I talk with at work do.)

So then, if you have only used FFnet to upload your stories, but you still have the original Word Document, here's what I would do.


If you've got it posted on LJ or your website, you've got another option. What I did was the following:


It's not an ideal way, as it still takes some extra work, but at least this way you aren't hunting and pecking out thousands of scene breaks. I've found it's just easiest to do everything in Word and save the stories in a seperate "FFnet Formatting" folder. However, the HTML method works just as well too if for some reason you don't have a backup document of your story.

Clear as mud?