Zen Master: Blog

The last chapter of M1 went up in the middle of the night. Since it was less than 24 hours after the previous chapter, it wasn't shown on the home page 'stream'. The story is now completely posted.

The webmaster saw what I was trying to do with graphics, and found another way to deal with the problem. Apparently what I originally wanted to do _should_ have been possible, but the code to allow it has been broken for a long time. Certainly, for as long as I've been here. It's fixed now, and the final chapter of M1 should show Sam's status screen at the end. It should work right no matter how you access the story, whether on a regular monitor, a tablet or phone, or even through a text-to-speech converter.
Still, getting everything working right took some time, and the last chapter of M1 didn't go up until after midnight last night. And it didn't show up in the 'stream' or anyone's lists of updates.

I have pushed the start of my repost of M2 out to tomorrow. With the 'leave my formatting alone' code working right, I should be able to post chapters that are all text, no pictures, with them showing up at 8AM (Eastern time? Not sure.) every morning. After that's been reposted with all the corrections, I'll post M3 and M4. I'm doing everything I can to get M5 done in time, but I won't promise that. M6 is gonna be awhile.
-ZM

...beyond any reasonable expectations. The site doesn't allow text formatting, using spaces to place words in specific places. But, it DOES allow imbedded pictures, so I made a screen-shot of the text I wanted set up the way I wanted it, and attached that PNG as an imbedded picture. Today's chapter -The Missile 1 v2 Chapter 4- was the first test. It looks great!

Actually, it looks a lot better than it should have. I suspect that the management team here went a bit farther than simply plugging my picture in where I asked for it. Dunno what they did, but it looks like it belongs there, just some more text only with formatting. Thanks, management!

I think I have all the bugs worked out on the graphics, or at least we've got a functional work-around. So, I'm starting to re-post M1. Chapter 1 is going up as a 'new story' immediately, with the rest of the chapters scheduled for 0800 each day until done. Once it's up I'll take down the original and do the same thing with M2, then M3 and M4. Assuming nothing goes wrong, of course. I'm still working on M5 and M6.

Hope you like it!
-ZM

Okay, I'm really getting close to re-posting M1 and M2, I really mean it this time, and after that I'll throw out M3 and M4. M5 and M6 may be a while, y'know?

Anyway, I decided I'd re-read the whole series to make sure I didn't go off the tracks on M5, and I just noticed that I mis-spelled the name of Sam's home town the first time he mentions it. Seven paragraphs in. It's spelled right the next two times, in the following paragraph. Fine. 'grep -rn Atalla *' only found one other place, in the most-recently completed chapter of M5, so that's it. It's Attalla everywhere else, like it's spostabe.

Still... Me going over this stuff a million times to make sure it's perfect. A half-dozen proofreaders. Twenty thousand downloads. And no one noticed that I mis-spelled a city's name. We're all blind.

Shaddoth's 'Axeman' story is about the whole world waking up one morning to find portals scattered around the planet. Those portals allow some people to enter them and battle assorted monsters for fun and profit. The protagonist is a database programmer geek, so naturally one of the things he does is create a website to collect everything that we've learned about the portals and make it public for everyone's benefit.
The website, 'www.PortalControl.com', becomes one of the major side-stories. It has info on all the portals, things you can do in there, all the monsters, loot you can find, items you can buy from the System Store, forums for the people who enter the portals to discuss things, and so on.
Anyone here in _our_ world who writes a story in that universe has to keep track of everything that his character would know from that website. Unfortunately, that website doesn't exist in our world. It could. I just checked, GoDaddy is squatting on the domain. They will sell it to me for a cool $3500, or rent it to me for only $170/month. Then hosting, programming costs, etc, etc, etc. Uh, how much does SOL pay me for these stories again? Right. I do this because I enjoy it, and it doesn't cost me much on a retired old man's income.
Ideally, we'd get Shaddoth to turn over all his notes, but he's not answering the phone these days. So, each writer dabbling in this universe has to come up with their own version of what 'everyone knows' about it. I've previously posted a 'Writer's Guide to the Axeman Universe' here, and I've got a couple other untidy piles of notes here and there.
Where should I put them, so that the other writers can use them? Not here. This is a story site. I've talked to the proprietor and he doesn't want the site cluttered up with lists of spells, lists of System Store prices, etc. I guess I can email what I've got to writers who give me an email address.