Question Will the fan fics be migrated?

A lot of good stories were posted to the forum over the years, including fan fics and (for technical reasons) the canon stories that were posted to Authors' Corner. Are they lost forever, or will they (eventually) be migrated?

The canon stories will be migrated. The fan fics are up to the discretion of their authors. Several have already been posted in the new fan fic section, some may never. Some probably won't because their authors are now canon, but Morpheus' stories, at least, can be found on other sites.

The "Featured Fan Fiction" section of this new site has inspired quite a few of the Fan Fiction authors to attempt rewrites of thier Fan Fictions in the hopes of their stories reaching a level to be posted there.

As with the migration of the main Canon stories, this endeavour seems to be taking quite a deal of time.

I'm not sure what the final fate of the old stories will be, Kristin has often talked of maybe putting up the backed up posts from the old forum somewhere as a read only archive, but has warned this is more a long-term goal as it would be a lot of work to do.

I'm sure if you wish to read a particular story, a quick message to the forums will find you some member who has it backed up and can pass you a copy.

joreymay wrote: A lot of good stories were posted to the forum over the years, including fan fics and (for technical reasons) the canon stories that were posted to Authors' Corner. Are they lost forever, or will they (eventually) be migrated?

I've got an extensive archive of the old Fan-Fics which I'm happy to e-mail on request. I also have a listing spreadsheet which I can send if you only wish to pick and choose rather than get swamped with over 660 story files. I also have a lot of the Library Stories and other stuff which might be helpful.

Just send me an e-mail address via a PM to which I can send the stuff and I'll be happy to help.

John.

And even if you ignore the legal aspect - it's the author's story, and they get to decide what is done with it.

Hmmm... I posted my opinion elsewhere regarding fanfics, and it matches what was said above... but I noticed one odd situation that may warrant an exception.

It's this: Renae (a canon author) once wrote a Whateley fanfic, and posted it to the forums after becoming a canon author. Furthermore, her character Casey Steele was brought into canon by J.G. -- so the fanfic is now kinda-sorta-maybe-semi-canon.

So we have a semi-canon story, featuring a canon character, written by a canon author and posted to the Whateley official site forums.

Would the authors' agreement extend so far as to allow migrating "Casey Steele: Whateley Dazed" into the new Fanfiction section even if we are unable to contact Renae for permission? (By the way, I have a saved copy -- but as usual, my copy is somewhat edited; if we decide to go ahead with it, if someone has a more "originial" version it would be welcome)

In a related note, now that we HAVE a fanfiction section, wouldn't Brandy Dewinter's story "Dream Lover" be a better fit for that section than the "Library" one?

^whimper

Please feel free to send links to this story to me and I'll migrate it.

If there are any other weird ones send me the files and let me know what Kristin wants me to do

It was originally posted to the forums, so I don't think there are any links up.

I can send you my copies (I no longer remembered it, but apparently there was a full story, "Casey Steele: Whateley Dazed" and a second one, I think it's incomplete, called "Casey Steele 2." Also a pic that Renae attached to the thread to illustrate how Casey looked). But, as I said, mine are already converted to HTML but with some light editing.

Rubberjohn PM'd me that he has the stories in raw form, though, and offered sending them.

@ Sir Lee & Phoenix Spiritus - I have got your PM's and I'll be sending the file for Casey Steele to Phoenix as soon as I finish on site here. However, I can only find the one Casey Steele story in my archive so I'm afraid that I can't help with the second that Sir Lee recalls. Sorry.


John.

Sir Lee wrote: I can send you my copies (I no longer remembered it, but apparently there was a full story, "Casey Steele: Whateley Dazed" and a second one, I think it's incomplete, called "Casey Steele 2." Also a pic that Renae attached to the thread to illustrate how Casey looked). But, as I said, mine are already converted to HTML but with some light editing.

What edits do you do, actually, other than CSS and spelling corrections?

Hmmm... it varies a lot, but other than applying a number of CSS styles, not that many changes in the actual text. Yeah, some spelling corrections -- but not many, because that cannot be done automatically with any certainty. The odd repeated word or missing word which really bugs me and in which it's pretty obvious what the author really meant.

What else...? "Smart" quotes, proper use of ellipsis (ellipsis is always a three-dot grouping. Not two, not four), superscripts on ordinal numbers. Replacing ASCII pseudo-formatting, such as _underline_, /italics/ and *bold* with proper HTML formatting. Proper em-dashes instead of two hyphens. Things like that.

I also have a half-automated routine to check if opening and closing quotes match. I started doing that because of an author I really, really like but who is very bad at proper quoting -- stop reading their stories wasn't an option, but the amount of quote errors bugged me a lot, so I developed a procedure to fix it. Once I had the procedure, well, it got incorporated in my standard workflow...

Oh, and I replace the fancy image-based "rulers" from the site with plain HRs. That's mainly because this works better on ebooks.

On the styling front... that's where the thing starts to get more heavy-handed. To begin with, I structure the HTML in a more semantic way than what we usually see, so the CSS works better. I also tend to standardize heading levels:

*H1- Story
*H2- Chapter
*H3- Scene (time or location)
*H4- POV (change of focus character)

no matter how they were tagged originally in the story.And I style headings in a different way than the official one.

A few things get special treatment. I dislike the overuse of italics for things like radio communications, for instance, so I use a different font (sans-serif instead of serif) and special quote marks (usually French-style angled quotes) for that.

The dream-plane scenes in the Pejuta stories are styled in a completely different way than the "official" way -- instead of italics, I use a special font (Kotta One) and a colored background to highlight the scene.

But the all-time champion of heavy styling is probably Renae. I went to a lot of effort to style differently all the voices going around in Merry's head... yeah, to make it easier to keep track of who was talking, I gave them all different colors and text styles (Mai was green and monospaced, like an old-fashioned computer screen...). But that was what, almost ten years ago? I probably could redo it in a fraction of the time now. I think that back then I didn't even know what regular expressions were...

I would be happy to show my reading copies to the authors to see what they think of it; but much of what I do probably would be troublesome to insert in a CMS-based site.

Sir Lee wrote: I gave them all different colors and text styles (Mai was green and monospaced, like an old-fashioned computer screen...).

OMG! I wanna see that~! It sounds AWESOME~!

Sir Lee wrote: But that was what, almost ten years ago? I probably could redo it in a fraction of the time now. I think that back then I didn't even know what regular expressions were...

I know, right?

Well, I can't really circulate my versions without author permission... and Renae is not around very much these days.

OK, the version of Casey Steele rubberjohn had is migrated and awaiting Kristin.

Reawakening this thread, I would like to bring up for discussion the pre-canon fanfics by J.G. featuring Caitlin and the Outcast Corner...

At one time, back in the old forums, there was a bit of interest in those stories (mainly because, after "Upheaval", they went in a completely different direction than where the canon eventually went) and J.G. authorized reposting them in the fanfic subforum. This poses a few questions on whether:
(a) this permission would extend to repost them in the fanfics/Library story section
(b) this permission would still be considered valid at all
(c) if it is still desirable to post those stories.

Thoughts?

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: OK, the version of Casey Steele rubberjohn had is migrated and awaiting Kristin.

Looking at the Featured Fan Fiction it seems Kristin has had time to publish this:
http://whateleyacademy.net/index.php/featured-fan-fiction/485-fan-fiction-casey-steele-whateley-dazed