This update is a bit short, I’m sorry to say. I’ve had no energy at all today, and I’m putting this up so I can go get some sleep. I’ll manage a more ambitious update tomorrow!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 28, Part 1
Writing Life | in General 
The project I’ve undertaken to rebuild the site’s navigation so that it’s easier to actually find the stories you want to read is well underway.
It’s not even CLOSE to finished, though.
This is what I have right now for Fiction Fragments. It’s basically the same as I have for Draft Stories, except that each finished draft story is a single post. Fiction Fragments so far have a minimum of 2 posts per story, and many stories have a LOT more than that. That’s a problem.
Right now what happens when you click on those links is they’ll take you to a filtered display of posts matching the category you select. Each story has its own category for now, so finding an individual story is pretty simple. But you have to move backwards through the story to get to the first entry and read ahead from there, which isn’t really ideal.
Up until now I haven’t really cared too much, because I’ve been a lot more concerned with creating actual content for the site. It was pretty empty when I started this crazy venture, after all.
Now it’s getting to the point where I’ve got enough work up here that it should be easier than it is to find stuff, and I don’t want nightmares later when I have a whole lot more than I do now.
This system works really well in the Drafts since we’re looking at just the one post. For the fragments, I’m a little torn. Is it terrible trying to find an individual story among all the posts? Or does it matter so much given that I always collect them into finished drafts after I’m done anyway? Opinions and comments would be very welcome.
I’m pretty encouraged by how much of my daily word count I’m managing to maintain in the wake of Camp NaNoWriMo for June. Last December after November’s event I found that my word count had dropped pretty low, into the 50-200 words a day range. I’m doing a lot better than that this time around.
Hopefully with the August event coming up quickly, I’ll be able to maintain it all month and then reinforce it further. That ought to leave me in really good shape for September, with several months of high word counts behind me and two months “off” before NaNoWriMo 2012 begins.
Here’s another large chunk of chapter 27. I might have to write a little more to call it finished, but this is largely it. Tomorrow I go on to chapter 28!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 27 Pt. 2
Writing, Writing Life, Writing Process | in General, News 
I’ve posted the first of two parts of chapter 27 of The Ship of the Unforgotten. It’s the last part because this is the last contiguous piece of fiction I wrote for the Camp NaNoWriMo event in June; there’s more of the story written, but there’s a gap that I have to fill with new writing before I can post that, so it’s all new from here on out!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 27
Two new chapters of The Ship of the Unforgotten are up tonight; links below. 25 is by far the shortest chapter I’ve written to date. 26 is of a more typical length. With 25 we return to Cobb’s part of the story, however briefly, and then 26 moves us back out to see how Dann and Rose are progressing.
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 25
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 26
In other news today I spent some time checking out Squarespace Version 6. It looks pretty promising and one day I might switch the sight over to that; right now I’m running Fiction Improbable on version 5. V6 has much better social integration, which I like a LOT, but it’s also highly template-based and you lose a lot of the ability to customize the templates that I love about V5. My ability to use 6 will probably depend on the availability of good templates, and right now the selection is thin, though the ones they have look fantastic.
Once I determined that I wouldn’t be making any sudden switches today, I did a bit more work on this version of the site. I’ve gone back and corrected tags and categories for all the posts in the Draft Stories section.
I’ve also converted the Draft Stories link into a menu. It’ll take you to one of two places for right now.
One is a page of links to all of the draft stories I’ve posted, which’ll make them MUCH easier to find. Sorry it’s been such a mess for so long!
The other is to the typical blog view of the draft stories, with one story per page, currently counting in at 14 total.
I do plan to come up with a similar solution for the Fiction Fragments section, but I now have the better part of a year’s worth of daily writing in there so fixing all of those tags and categories could be… fun. Wish me luck on that!
Writing Life | in General, News 
