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Date Posted: 10:09:44 07/28/02 Sun
Author: DeepaD
Subject: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread
Ok, I've been enjoying my break, but here is the Plan I was talking about -
I think our bookmarks pages have got way too huge and unwieldy to function with, plus, they take forever to load. So I wanted to reorganise them.
Since we have an anti-pairing classification thing going, I thought the most fair way to segregate bookmarks would be by size. Because most of us would like to know which is an epic, and which is a tiny POV, so that we can choose based on the time we have to read...
I'm looking at four categories here - vignette, story, novel, and series. And I guess we'd have separate folders for Buffy, Angel, and Crossovers, so we are looking at 12 folders of bookmarks.
From the first of august, we are also going back to the old policy, of having the new bookmarks on the links page, and sorting them into folders only after a month.
So, any strong opinions on this idea? I still have to determine definitions for each category - I was thinking we need rough ranges of both KB sizes, and words.
I was thinking, Vignette - below 1,000 words, Story - between 1,001-6,000, Novel - 6,000 - 11,000, and beyond that, series...
anyway let me know opinions!
Deepa D.
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Barb, 10:45:26 07/28/02 Sun
>I was thinking, Vignette - below 1,000 words, Story -
>between 1,001-6,000, Novel - 6,000 - 11,000, and
>beyond that, series...
>anyway let me know opinions!
>
>Deepa D.
I want to put in a plug for the novella, the red-headed stepchild of fiction. I snagged these off a couple of random writers' guide sites--
Vignette: 1,000 words
Short Story: 1,000 - 7,500 words
Novellette: 7,500 - 20,000 words
Novella: 20,000 - 50,000 words
Novel: 50,000 -100,000
Epics and Series: Over 110,000 words
Novel: 45,000 words to about 150,000 words.
Novella/Novelette: 7,000 - 40,000 words. These terms are often used somewhat interchangeably, although novellas tend to be longer, and novelettes shorter.
Short Story: 2,000 - 7,500 words.
Short Short: 2,000 words.
Vignette: under 1000, 500, or even 99 words, depending on the market or guidelines.
Obviously the exact word count where a novella becomes a novel is flexible, and maybe using the novella category would make it too complicated, but even 40,000 words just doesn't seem very novel-y to me, and calling 6,001 words a novel is Right Out. Save the novella!
Barb
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Robert, 11:16:07 07/28/02 Sun
Sounds like a good idea.
There are some series of vignettes, so I wouldn't put
series in their own category. What matters is the overall
length.
For comparison, paperbacks have roughly 250 words per page.
A slim 200 page novel will be about 50K words, while the
largest single volume works are about 1200 pages, 300K.
6000 words is 24 pages, barely a chapter.
I'd say split them
Vignettes - Under 1000 words.
Short stories - 1K to 20K words.
Novellas - 20K to 50K
Novels - 50K and up
However the best thing to do might be to see how many
stories are each length, then split at the round numbers
that make each category closest to a quarter.
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Cas, 00:26:38 07/29/02 Mon
>I was thinking, Vignette - below 1,000 words, Story -
>between 1,001-6,000, Novel - 6,000 - 11,000, and
>beyond that, series...
Like the others I think this is a good idea. Sometimes you're in the mood to read something a bit longer or a bit shorter and depending on where something is archived it's not always easy to see at the start how long a fic is going to be, so this would be very useful. I would go with either of the breakdowns Barb gave and having a distinction between a novellette and a novella is useful - there's a big difference between 7k and 50k words after all. Ultimately I don't think it matters though what each of them is or how many categories we end up with as long as there is a definition for each category.
Cas
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Lakrids, 07:14:04 07/29/02 Mon
How about subcategories with genre drama pow pwp romance etc.
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Robert, 10:44:59 07/29/02 Mon
>How about subcategories with genre drama pow pwp
>romance etc.
That's asking for problems.
People aren't always going to agree which category a fic
falls in, and some fics will belong in multiple categories.
If I'm looking for drama stories, and stories I think of
as dramas are in every category (because they were recced
by people who see things differently), then the
categorisation hasn't really helped me find the kind of
story I'm looking for.
Also, if people aren't careful, such systems tend to end
up with most of the fics dumped into a catch-all category,
negating the point of the exercise.
Besides, the quoted rec should make it clear enough what
type of story it is.
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Ok, second thoughts -- DeepaD, 08:44:51 07/29/02 Mon
Whew! It's nice to have people think my ideas are good for a change!
Ok, all of you, thank you for those definitions. My next problem is, how do we classify them by file size? Because the thing is - unless an author mails us and tells us how many words it is, we aren't going to know, unless some dedicated reccer copies the entire text, pastes it into Word, and does a word count!
And we need a system that will be easy for reccers to use, because there is no way me and the other mods will be able to verify each length on our own...
So, if we have
Vignettes - under a thousand words
Short Story - 1000 to... I don't know Robert, I think 20,000 is too big, I was going more with 7,000.
Novella - ok, if you think we need five categories, but it's going to be a lot of work - we could peg this for roughly 7,000 to... 50,000
Novel - 50,000 up
Series - ok, do we need this category in this case? It is more of a thematic than a size difference, after all, just for instance, Herself's bittersweet stories are not really that long put together, but since they are episodic, they seem like a series, and not a novel. So, going strictly by size, couldn't we just incude the term 'series' in whichever category we bunged the bookmark into?
Thanks so much for your ideas. I'll need all the support I can get to pull this off, because now that I think of it, it is such a big job! *whine*
Ok, so next, can any of you wonderful authors who post in html files, tell me how I classify according to file size, and how I make a guide that even the laziest reccer can follow...
I know, I know - I just keep on asking, don't I?
Deepa D.
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Re: Ok, second thoughts -- Robert, 10:34:17 07/29/02 Mon
>Whew! It's nice to have people think my ideas are good
>for a change!
>
>Ok, all of you, thank you for those definitions. My
>next problem is, how do we classify them by file size?
I'm not sure you can.
The file size for a story can vary by over 50%,
depending which programme was used to produce it.
>Because the thing is - unless an author mails us and
>tells us how many words it is, we aren't going to
>know, unless some dedicated reccer copies the entire
>text, pastes it into Word, and does a word count!
There are other ways to do this, of varying degrees
of sophistication.
Set your browser options appropriately and you can
open the file in the text editor of your choice then
do a word count, without any need to copy and paste.
For a more approximate figure, which requires even less
technical skill than finding the file size, you could
ask the reccers to go by how long it took them to read the
fic.
It's easy enough for people to find their reading speed
to within 10% and it's not difficult to work out how
long it took to read the fic.
>And we need a system that will be easy for reccers to
>use, because there is no way me and the other mods
>will be able to verify each length on our own...
Of course.
However you do have a number of fics in the list archives.
You could, as a one off exercise, find the length of each
fic. I've seen freeware programmes that will do that for
every html file in a directory with a single click. Doing
that would give you a much better idea what the
distribution of fics lengths actually is, meaning that you
can actually get a near even split.
You don't want to find that 80% of fics fall into the
same length category, because that wouldn't be helpful.
>
>Series - ok, do we need this category in this case? It
>is more of a thematic than a size difference, after
>all, So, going strictly by size, couldn't we just
>inlcude the term 'series' in whichever category we
>bunged the bookmark into?
>
Yes, just put series in parenthesis next to the title.
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Re: do you have a link for that? -- DeepaD, 20:52:20 07/29/02 Mon
That freeware programme - I could use it to do the fics in our archive, and hopefully arrive at some kind of standard... would you have a link to it, or the name?
Right now, I'm not really concerned about dividing the fics into equal categories. If there are more stories, and only a few novels, or lots of vignettes, its fine by me. I'd much rather work by a definition that is eaily accepted by the majority of readers.
Since you've been so helpful, do you think you'd be up to helping me size the fics in the bookmarks...?!
Well, ok, at least you can just tell me the length of your own!
Deepa D.
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Re: Ok, second thoughts -- Cas, 03:24:26 07/30/02 Tue
>Ok, all of you, thank you for those definitions. My
>next problem is, how do we classify them by file size?
>Because the thing is - unless an author mails us and
>tells us how many words it is, we aren't going to
>know.
It would propably be worth checking how many of the stories already have the file size listed at some point in the site they're archived with. For example, anything at ff.net will do, and for all the fics archived at my site I've always included a word count.
Cas
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ah...? -- DeepaD, 08:57:34 07/30/02 Tue
Cas, brain me for being an ignoramus incarnate, but where is the link to your site..?
And, do you think you might possibly be up to helping me track down at least some of the fics' sizes in our bookmarks...? maybe just the ones you already know...
(ok, I know I'm pushing this)
Deepa D.
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- Jacqui, 02:33:41 08/01/02 Thu
I've been thinking about this and a question occurred re - sizing stories - How are you going to classify WIP's by size? They will just keep growing - you could do yet another separate folder for all WIP stories (which will probably please those who do not like to read them until they are completed).
Also I've been thinking about a separate 'subject' folder - one for B/A crossovers to other series - e.g. Runaway trains crossover with Smallville. The list has been questioned in the past for recommendations for this type of fic.
Jacqui
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Re: The Bookmarks Reorganisation Thread -- DeepaD, 09:26:08 08/01/02 Thu
>I've been thinking about this and a question occurred
>re - sizing stories - How are you going to classify
>WIP's by size? They will just keep growing - you could
>do yet another separate folder for all WIP stories
>(which will probably please those who do not like to
>read them until they are completed).
We will be leaving WIPs on the main bookmark page until they are finished.
>Also I've been thinking about a separate 'subject'
>folder - one for B/A crossovers to other series - e.g.
>Runaway trains crossover with Smallville. The list has
>been questioned in the past for recommendations for
>this type of fic.
Hmm.. I don't know. It sounds a little close to the thematic division that our mods really want to avoid. i'll check, though.
thanks for bothering to share!
Deepa D.
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Robert's nifty word-counter -- DeepaD, 12:41:36 08/01/02 Thu
I've not found the program I was originally thinking off,
but I have found a way to get a word count on all your
html files in just a few minutes. much quicker than doing
them all individually.
You do need to go into dos, but it is straightforwards.
I don't know how much you know so I'll give brief
instructions. If you want I can give step by step
instructions.
I assume your copies of the files in the archive
are all together in one directory (and maybe
it's subdirectories) not mixed in with your
non-archive html files.
Go to
http://www.thugworld.com/utility/utiltext23.html
and download
wt16v12.zip and wc10b.zip
Create a new empty folder on your system,
say WordCount, and unzip the two programs
into it.
Use the find icon on the start menu to
find all the html, htm and txt files
Select them all from that window and copy them
into the WordCount folder.
Click on web2text.exe
This will list all the html files in the directory and
make pure text copies by removing all the html
code.
Highlight the top file in the list, then hold down
the mouse button and move down to select them
all.
You could just look at the sizes of the text files
and estimate word counts from that.
For exact numbers (subject to the caveats I
mentioned in the last e-mail) open a Dos window.
Go into the WordCount directory
(e.g cd C:\WordCount)
and type
wc *.txt > wordcount
(Don't use wordcount.txt or wc gets confused.)
The file wordcount will contain a long four column
list.
The first column is the Dos name of a file.
(A maximum of eight letters, so long names will have
been truncated)
The first three columns are the number of lines, words,
and characters in the file named in the fourth column.
This should let you see what the word lengths of
the files in your archives are a lot quicker than
checking each of them individually.
I hope this helps.
--
Robert
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Kyra's word counter -- DeepaD, 06:52:58 08/04/02 Sun
http://javascriptkit.com/script/script2/countwords.shtml
maybe this can persuade more people to cough up some of their time and come to my aid...!
Deepa D.
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