Editing problems!

Yesterday I posted a note about my fears as I had just published a story I really liked called 'Mystic Godfather'.  It's been posted (I've added the link the my stories here too) and already gotten a review that was lukewarm favorable which is certainly better than no response.

I am having trouble reading it for a few different reasons.  The first I discussed yesterday.  The other makes me mad every time I put a story up. 

This is my 7th story on fictionmania.  You'd think I would have figured it out by now but perfection in posting a perfectly formatted copy still alludes me.

The biggest issue is fictionmania as their posting process drives me nuts! I write my stories in Microsoft Word's *.docx format which is the defacto standard as Word dominates the sector.  I actually write in LibreOffice and save in *.docx but the problem is fictionmania prefers *.rtf files using a character set from 1990.  They accept an older version of *.doc files but I've tried that before with unpredictable results. 

Every time I've posted I think I've finally got it figured out only to be denied.one more time.  Last time I used LibreOffice and Notepad but still had a few weird characters in my story.  This time I wrote in LibreOffice, edited in NotePad++ as NotePad++ has more options than plain NotePad.  I used a plugin to save in *.rtf, and then pulled the file up in both NotePad (in *.rtf format) and WordPad (in *.txt format) to see how it looked.  After that I sent it.  During this process I noticed a few small mistakes and I corrected them (verb tense, 3rd vs 1st person, among others).  They weren't huge errors so I fixed them and moved on.  That was a mistake.

Whenever you change a story, no matter how small, it is important that you reread it to make sure the sentences surrounding the error make sense and you've added back all the words you needed when you rewrote the sentence.  This was a bit tougher because of the translation process.  Notepad++ doesn't use margins and is hard to read but I didn't want to send it back to LibreOffice and start the process over.  Instead I decided to do a final look through in NotePad but by that point my frustration was getting high as I had spent about two hours formatting and translating so after a cursory review I sent it in.

That was a mistake.

When the story posted last night I started to read it.  I found a grammatical error in my very first sentence.  I continued and found another in the 4th sentence.  I was only reading to make sure the formatting looked good so I stopped proofreading (it was too late anyway) and looked for odd characters.  I found about 5 instances where I had a '-' that had turned into something like a '&7'.  It's an issue with NotePad++ that I need to work on for the next time I post.

Fictionmania also has another little quirk.  When the site was developed in the 90s they set it up to be viewed in DOS (Windows didn't gain popularity until Win95 came out).  DOS only allowed a fixed number of characters per row and at the time the most common format was VGA.  VGA gave the user 75 characters per line and so files uploaded to Fictionmania have a soft page break whenever a line hits 75 characters.  Twenty years later and that is still the limit.  That means there will be many times where you post a file with careful space to make things easier to read but you ended up with a mess with page breaks where you didn't expect them.

Add the character translation issue with the line return issue and you can get a mess.  It isn't a problem for 99% of the characters and I'm sure most people don't even notice or even care.

I do.

I decided to get a little fancy this time as I was sure I'd figured out their posting format.  At one point in the story I posted a chart of the changes happening to my character.  I used exactly 75 characters per line as that is what the system allows.  I know this.  I counted.  So I made my charts exactly 75 characters long only to find out that it will put a soft return in at 73-74 if the work is long enough.  So all my charts are messed up.

Like I said most won't notice but it's left a bad taste in my mouth.  Combine that with the few grammar errors and I can't read my story.  My anxiety is too high and I now feel the story is bad.  I know this is irrational but I took some chances this time as I wanted to try to write a story in 1st person instead of my normal 3rd.  The only thing I see now is a story written too passive (told not shown) with lots of formatting issues.  I know the story isn't that bad but this is why I wait so long to publish stories that I really care about because if I feel this way for a story I worked on for 2 weeks, imagine what I'd feel for a story I'd written for two years.

In the end I need to keep reminding myself that I write these for me to cope and I had fun writing 'Mystic Godfather'.  In the end that is all that matters.