A.M. Gray's Blog, page 26

Non-canon awards

I have been nominated in the non-canon awards.Thank you to whoever nominated me. I am not eligible in any other categories because I have more than three stories with 1,000+ reviews. Sniffs.Some of the pack categories are still open to change, but they are now:·       Bella/Jake,·       Bella/Sam,·       Paul/Bella,·       Leah/wolf, and·       a whole set for Seth! Yay
This is much better than previous years, so now you can all nominate those cool, sexy Paul/Bella stories.Of course, if you have a story that won’t fit in any of those, pop it in the other non-canon pair category. So Quil and Embry can go in there!Don’t forget they must have been updated in the last three months and the story must have less 500 reviews. This is a competition for the underdogs!Go on… off you go. Well not my stories obviously…

Six million

Unbelievably, today my total hits at fanfiction.net, clicked past a total of six million.And what is really amazing is that I passed five million in September 2013, so I have gained another million hits in six months.Blinks.Side-eyes excel spreadsheet.That can’t be right? Can it?The big ones are the usual suspects, Best Friends, Apologies and Closer. Together they make up 3.6m of that total.Pats self on back.

Wattpad update.

My muse has been rather squished for the last few days. Dealing with some real life stuff that was draining and emotional and my poor muse just got … flattened. I haven’t written anything for days and it is killing me.So I went back and scraped through some of my original stuff from a couple of years ago. I can’t post it at fanfic or on Ao3 as it is original work and it predates this blog so it was never posted here. I have been fooling around and uploading the stories onto my Wattpad account. They are all short stories basically.And I am learning as I go. Nothing like throwing myself in and dog-paddling like mad before I drown.Wattpad is very basic. All html - at least I think it is. Half my bio has links and half doesn't and I don’t know why. Sigh.I paste in text and it retains formatting so that’s good… I think.I have muddled about with covers and worked out how to do them in photobucket but they are pretty basic and I swear that site has it in for me. No no don’t resize it; damn you. It looks horrible now! Reload and start again.Covers in Wattpad are book sized; a vertical rectangle of 256x400. Good for books, bad for any other kind of banner size. I think fanfic is trying to use that shape, too. But that means that none of my current banners can be reused unless I get them resized.You can add links to an image but it kind of shows up down on the right hand side like the image below under a heading of ‘media’ and I think the only way you can use more than one image is to make a collage of them yourself before you add the link in. I think… You can add videos, though. Which means you could probably put a song into your chapter if you used a video link to it. Hmmm… or maybe those cute book trailers that I don’t even know how to begin making. Possibilities there.


I am surfing YouTube watching videos made by teens to try and work it out.Such is my life.Grins.
Oooh. I have one Wattpad follower! Yay *hugs solitary follower*

Twitter Etiquette

I unfollowed someone on twitter this week. That is not that unusual but the reason why I did it was because she broke what I consider to be a rule of Twitter etiquette.In order to promote her book she used hashtags that related to other things. For instance: ‘he’s no #teenwolf but he’s what she has been looking for’ OR ‘#onceuponatime a mermaid left the sea’ or whatever they said. For the record, her book had zero to do with either of those fandoms. And she did it often enough for me to notice it in the huge stream of twitter messages that roll over my dash.I think that is just flat out rude. People who have those tags marked to show up in their search engines will get her promoting her book by piggybacking on another fandom.No.Just, no.

Killing off characters

You know… in the past I have been accused of hegemony. I know, right… bwahaha. But in any case, someone once accused me of this. Meaning that all my fics ended in marriage and babies and the subjugation of woman. Which they don’tand it was abundantly clear that the person hadn’t actually read any of my fics because they left the review that said that in my polyamorous fic where Bella left her baby at home (with his two fathers) to go to university and study law. Hey, they couldn't have the baby for her. Biology is not that advanced yet. And I don’t write male pregnancy because science.I have been very busy uploading all my one shots to Ao3. Phew. Wipes brow. I think they are all there now. All … let me just check… yep 49 of them. 120,650 words in total. Odd pairings and all.Wow!But the one thing that is a bit different on Ao3 from fanfic.net is that you can search by tags. And a number of warnings are standardised, including Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, and Underage sex. And that is a good thing. Those are all major triggers for some people.I have been trying to tag things properly and of those 49 fics that I have loaded, I killed a main character in ten of them. They died of old age, they died in childbirth, in one I even killed all the Cullens (and the demon baby - ‘Shattered’) and destroyed people left, right and centre. I have a 20% kill rate… lmao. And I haven’t even started to load the longer fics although they often do have happier endings.
I suppose in a shorter form it’s a chance to try more unusual pairings or to write riskier things. It’s only 5k words.

Wattpad vs ao3 update

An update of my earlier post.Fictionpad is very quiet. I made a point of following back everyone who followed me but I am not getting many hits at all. But it is very Twilight heavy and twilight Edward/Bella heavy. The top 40 stories are ALL Ed/Bella. Sigh…I will try harder to review other stories. I don’t read much fanfic anymore, I just don’t have the time and I suppose it might look a little one sided if I am posting and expecting reviews and not giving them myself. But it does have ‘likes’ and it takes no effort to click that button.The stats are unusual. I can’t see my stats for a story unless I go to my main page and when you have 70 stories that is a lot of scrolling to even finda particular story on the main page. The stats are not viewable within the story to me but oddly, other viewers can see my stats if I have elected not to hide them. And more easily than I can as the poster. Huh?And I open my stories in full page mode but other people’s open in an app style small format called ‘popup viewer’. I am using the same interface so I am not sure why it is different for me as a viewer. And it is different for different authors, too and I can’t see where to change it on their stories. I’m confused. Wattpad stats on the other hand are not very informative. I get that they are in the beta stage but they have three axes and no date. So you can’t tell how your stats have changed over time. Surely any meaningful stats table needs a time/date axis?So all I get is a giant blue rectangle that gets bigger according to the number of hits. hmmmAo3 I have spent days loading up some of my one shots. Yeah, I know right, some… I am up to 33 stories so far. I haven’t even tried to load any multi-chapter stories. Curse you fanfic for stopping auto uploads! Seriously it is all the tag entering that takes the time.I write a lot of rare pairings so the tags are not searchable for some of my pairings but it seem to be those stories that are garnering the greater number of hits. Interesting.Fanfiction.net. Comparing ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ on each format, it looks like this after a week.

And it seems that fanfic is still my best forum. I do have more of a presence on there so that might be understandable but this story is still pulling 10-15 hits a day and it has been posted for two years. 

Wattpad versus Ao3

Joanna Penn from the creativepenn declares that Wattpad is a good and useful tool for authors and a great place to find readers. I saw one of her YouTube vids about using the site and decided to sign up.I have seen mentions of it on the news. Most famously for a sixteen year old girl who wrote a One Direction fanfic being offered a three book deal by a major publishing house because of her statistics. Yes, really.I have been a member of An archive of our own (ao3) for a little while but have only been reading, when I got the time, and leaving reviews for a few of my favourite authors who are not at fanfiction any more. My post page was empty.So, as an experiment, I posted ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’ on both sites at the same time. It is my most popular one-shot on fanfiction and has the ridiculous number of 122 reviews and 12,830 hits. They both allow uploads of banners and it has a nice banner that don’tcallmeleelee made for it a little while ago.Let’s see what Wattpad and Ao3 do with it!Here are the links for my page on each site: Wattpad and A03.
My username at wattpad is mtramg; you can load original works on the site and that is the point of the exercise, so I hope no-one accuses me of plagiarising my own works of fanfiction. Bwahaha.Most annoyingly, fanfiction is blocking pings from external sites, so you used to be able to copy existing works over with one click… but no more! Dammit. It will take me 78 days to load them all if I do a story per day. AND chapter stories have to be loaded chapter by chapter. Sigh…

Almost done running

One of the pairings I haven’t ever done is Bella and Seth. Ooh can I cross that off my challenge list? I will have to go check. Yes, I can! There ya go wolfgirlandproud.As mentioned in yesterday’s post, I wrote two stories for the ‘Paws and Art 3.0’ and I finally got around to posting the second one yesterday.It’s here at fanfiction and here at fictionpad.Because the original banner had been adopted, don’tcallmeleelee made a new one for me, too. It had to be a seductive and flirty looking Bella and Seth. I think she got that down.
I had to mess with the ages a little to make him over sixteen, and therefore legal for sex in Washington State, and I made Bella a college dropout. Initially I had her breaking up with Jasper when he has an affair with her best friend, Alice, but Feebes convinced me to change that. I believe her words were that I would have to extend it one day and the vampire Cullens might need to visit Forks. She knows me so well, lol.It has almost twenty five reviews, oddly most ask about the rest of the story. *faceplant into keyboard*Cursed, I tell you… cursed.

Kiss me out of desire

*banner made by don'tcallmeleeleeWhat is it about me and rare pairings?The ‘Paws and art 3.0’ contest had a huge number of banner entries. Eighty of them!I subscribe to their page on an rss feed, and I kept a copy of the page so that I could access it offline and chose a Seth/Bella banner. I wrote my story and it wasn’t until after I had entered it that I realised that that banner had been adopted and removed from the competition entries. Cue panic attack. Silly me for not checking first! I wanted to support the contest; previously I have won it in 2011 and come third in 2012, so I chose a different banner. There wasn’t another Seth banner option and the point of the contest is to write to the existing banners.I literally wrote a one shot in an hour or so and sent it in. I knew it wasn’t my best work, but I didn’t have time to do anything else as I was in the middle of nanowrimo and there were very few entries already posted. I was worried about the contest.So I chose the banner above and wrote ‘Kiss me out of desire’. The title is a line from the Jeff Buckley song ‘Last goodbye’. The rest of the line is ‘kiss me out of desire babe, and not consolation.’ I love that line.It is posted here at fanfiction and here at fictionpad.Summary: Leah's deep and abiding anger attracts the attention of someone who feels emotions. Someone who is tired of control, and strict diets and suppressed libidos.It has over fifty reviews most of which complain that they need more and I can’t leave it where I did. Bwahaha. My eternal curse!It certainly has places that it could go but it would be a rare outing for me; I have never written fanfiction with a Cullen main character before, but I like Jasper’s darkness.

Google drive scripts

I use Google docs (sorry, I am so old school) Google Drive to post chapters for my betas to check. We can all access a document, once I have granted them permission and vice versa for me with their documents. We can even chat if we are in the document at the same time. It’s a great system and it works well for us. We have fallen into a colour coded pattern where each of us uses the same colour so that the doc owner knows who made which comment.My big issue with Google Drive is that it has no running total word count. I know I can press ctrl/shift/C and get the number of words in the document, or the part I have selected, but I can’t add a sentence here, a word there and a big bit in the middle and know how many words I just added.I have searched for a long time to find something that would do that. I did find a program on greasemonkey but I don’t trust the maker and there are not enough comments from people to say whether it worked for them (or not) for me to be installing a program that allows access to my documents.I use a program called Evernote to copy web pages. It is very neat and very useful when I am researching a topic. It is all stored in the cloud, with urls, text and images etc and I lose nothing if disaster happens. Plus, it starts to auto tag stuff. Oh, this should go in ‘fic ideas’ marked ‘succubus’. Yes, it should. Pats Evernote. It also synchs with your phone.The Evernote ambassador is Jamie Todd Rubin, a scifi author who writes computer code as a day job. He loves spreadsheets and being super organised. Recently he shared his basic code for a Google doc word counter that works with Evernote.I read it and it looked perfect for me. I took a deep breath. I am not techie. And I love the way that people who deal with code all the time say ‘it’s so easy’… sure, it is.As I understand the code, you write in a particular folder. At the end of the day, the script makes a copy of what you have written and puts it into a different folder. It compares it with yesterday’s copy and counts the number of words added and posts that total into another spreadsheet under the date. It then emails to my Evernote address, a copy of what was added.As a writer this is neat. I am always terrified that I will edit and ruin something. It would effectively give me daily backup copies. Bonus!To use this code, I had to install goggle scripts, copy in more than a thousand lines of code on two pages and make some adjustments - my email address, time zone, document names and so on. But I couldn’t get it to work. Test runs failed at a particular line. It took me long enough to work out how to do a test run! Jamie said he doesn’t have time to help people get it to work and that is fair enough; he’s busy.I did some research. I read up on Scripts and I changed one line of code and voila! (I had to change the spreadsheet to find by url not id#. If I ever move that spreadsheet it will fail again. Note to self: do not move spreadsheet.)Today I got an email and a line of numbers in my spreadsheet. And I am so proud of myself.