HTML Format for Stories

Writing Journal: Jauntily hacking on The Adjusters #41. Going well—it's a pretty straightforward chapter, as far as those things are concerned. Some things are still rough, but I'll figure them out when revising. And there's one character that I wasn't expecting that showed up and said: “Hey, can I have a part?” And the answer might just be yes, yes indeed.

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Okay, so I spent part of the weekend hacking on getting an HTML version of The Adjusters on ASSTR.

And I do mean hacking. I ended up writing a perl script to take the HTML output of Scrivener (which is what I generally use to write my stories) and clean it up and massage it to that it matches the CSS I wanted to use. All in all, it went better than expected.

Why do I want HTML? Mainly, because I want true UTF8 encoding, so I can get accents (fiancée) and nice quotes (“...”) and true em-dashes (—). And because I rely a lot on italics for internal dialogue.

Right now, I've only converted the installments from the first book, such as the first installment, Daniel and Jennifer. Check it out, let me know what you think.

In the coming week, I'll finish converting the rest of the tale, and upcoming installments will be posted that way as well, coinciding with the start of Book IV.

A couple of questions for you all, if you care about this in any way:

(1) does anyone actually need the .txt versions? They are suboptimal because of the lack of italics, and it might be a pain to keep in sync, but I'm willing to keep producing them if there's demand.

(2) does anyone care about reading the stories on mobile? Right now, the layout I favor may not look great on mobile (though I haven't tried except on my phone, which is frighteningly dinky). If you do, let me know how things look.

Feel free to post in the comments, or contact me privately.

And as far as stories are concerned, here's another one by Kirk, Marlene's Story: “Marlene Catalano reunites with her brother, who used to dominate her when they were younger.” Sweet, sweet domination. And hopefully, more parts to come.