Sneak Peek!

Sneak peek!

I finished my cross-post of Falling into Darkness, and thus finished sharing all the illustrations from that one. But I've got something else waiting to start posting to AO3, and it does, in fact, have one single illustration.

Obviously done much more simply. Instead of an attempt at a somewhat comic-style coloring job, I wanted this one to just be sketchy lines and a rough watercolor job, hence the lack of shading.

Stay tuned for an announcement of when I post the first chapter!

It's Friday preview time!

After that breather (and low point), we're back to another fight scene! (Why did I do this to myself back when I was writing the thing?)

First up, a fun angle for a nicely dynamic shot. I went a bit stylized with the background, rather than going for more realistic colors for the moment the scene depicts (since it is neither at sunrise nor sunset, and this shot lacks trees). I had to mess around with it a bit extra until I was happy with the background. The horizon line was originally a little too stark.

As for the other... Knuckles is pink. and maybe needs to glow more but I need to stop messing with it and just call it done.

Reblog if you write fic and people can inbox you random-ass questions about your stories, itemized number lists be damned.

What's this? Monday's chapter?

Yes! And a bit of a banger if you ask me, but that would be because it's the peak of the story's action. There's two chapters to go after this, but this is where most of the plot comes to a head.

Enjoy!

Hey look, previews! ::jazz hands::

It's a three-fer this week! Um...with maybe some surprises in store, for anyone who hasn't read the story before, so enjoy, I guess, and no, I'm not offering huge explanations here because that'd be...y'know, spoilers.

But hey, there's one with the in-mind version of Sonic turning a mite yellow, and I'm pretty happy with that one. (Though I realized after the fact that, unlike the other two pictures I did of Sonic in his head, this one I forgot to use the rougher shading brush and instead used the same one as on all the other illustrations. Oh well. It's still fine.)

Then one in a forest scene that almost ended up too muddy because I messed with it too much before I caught it and dialed it back. Also realizing that I drew Rotor's Season 1 design, but gave him a bit more of an Archie color scheme, and I'm okay with this. (I do not like his Season 2 design.) The odd mat shape is mostly due to the way I did the lineart. It was not a square, and I didn't feel like forcing it.

And then the third picture, the one illustration from this entire series that took me the longest. I spent far too much time on playing with this one, but honestly, I think it was worth it. I'm really happy with the lighting effects on it, and unlike the second picture, I don't feel like the time spent on messing with it further was wasted (I didn't have to undo anything unlike some of the muddy shading on the forest scene). I did have to go back and up the saturation on Knuckles a tad because it came out too yellow/desaturated, but that was about it.

And hey, Knux is pink again. Hm.

Posting Fic - How to prep your writing to display correctly on AO3 (via LibreOffice)

So I've seen guides online about how to convert your fanfic for AO3 after writing it in Google Docs, because a lot of people use GDocs to do their writing (which is a decent option, since it saves it in the cloud and all that). I'm not planning on repeating that here.

But I don't do my writing in GDocs, I do my writing in LibreOffice Writer, because it emulates an older version of Word (which is what I grew up on and am most used to), and because I can have more robust spellchecking than on GDocs. And when I was first considering finally posting my work to AO3, I'd heard lots of commentary about how often pasting into the rich text editor sometimes loses formatting, or what hoops people had to jump through to make sure everything looked good.

So I'm here with the actually-pretty-darn-simple method I use to post to AO3 for anyone who needs this, because I want to be helpful.

Please note: this is largely for the basic formatting one might use on AO3. I haven't tested it with fancier things (not even smallcaps yet, though I'm hoping that won't prove too difficult when I finally get around to a chapter that needs that functionality). Also, these instructions are for Windows, which is what I use.

The first step is, obviously, to write up your story in LibreOffice Writer. I have some formatting standards I prefer because it makes my works look like they're publication-ready, which helps me stay in the "I'm actually writing fiction here" groove.

Once you're done writing, you need to make sure the file is ready to save for AO3. With how I write, the only thing I change is that I remove that first-line indent across the whole document. This is easy enough. Select everything, and then go to Format > Paragraph.

Once in that dialog, change the first line indent to 0. If you don't see a number there at all, just enter the number in there.

Then press "OK." This will realign all the paragraphs, including their first lines, to the left margin.

Note that I haven't changed the spacing between paragraphs at all. It's still single-spaced, and that's fine, because the next step can handle that.

DON'T SAVE OVER THE ORIGINAL.

What you want to do at this point is select "Save As" and make sure to save it as an html file, not whatever file format you normally use. LibreOffice will probably ask if you want to do that or use its native format, and you can just tell it "use html format."

You should now have an html file wherever you saved it. If you double-click it, it will open in your default browser, and you can check that the formatting carried over properly if you want. It should look ready for posting, complete with the internet-standard single empty line between paragraphs. LibreOffice knows to wrap each paragraph in html paragraph tags, which is what AO3 likes, and AO3 (and generally the rest of the internet) reads that as the extra empty space between paragraphs, just like you should see here on Tumblr.

Now you need to navigate to where you have the file on your computer via your file manager of choice (I'm on Windows, so I use File Explorer, which I can reach just by right-clicking on the Start button, but I also have a shortcut to it on my taskbar). Right-click on the file, and "open with" Notepad. You can also just open Notepad and open the file from within the program.

You should see the html code for the file.

This is all set and ready to go. Copy everything between the "body" tags in the file (I also skip the lines that are for the chapter title, because I can enter that in a different spot on AO3).

Copy the selected code and paste it into the HTML editor on AO3. If you want AO3 to do a bit of cleanup for you, you can click over to the Rich Text editor, then back to HTML, and it will clean up extra carriage returns and such, but this isn't necessary. Double-check that everything looks good by clicking "Preview," and if you're happy, click "Post."

This even preserves smart quotes, which I don't bother to change to straight quotes, though I suppose you could do so if you wanted.

But honestly, that's how easy it is. Save the file as html, copy the html over to AO3, and done. No scripts, no file converters, no worrying if your formatting is going to survive being pasted into the Rich Text editor. Just LibreOffice and Notepad.

It's Monday, and you know what that means! Chapter 12 is now up, and yes, Knuckles is back! And pink!

It's Friday preview time!

After that breather (and low point), we're back to another fight scene! (Why did I do this to myself back when I was writing the thing?)

First up, a fun angle for a nicely dynamic shot. I went a bit stylized with the background, rather than going for more realistic colors for the moment the scene depicts (since it is neither at sunrise nor sunset, and this shot lacks trees). I had to mess around with it a bit extra until I was happy with the background. The horizon line was originally a little too stark.

As for the other... Knuckles is pink. and maybe needs to glow more but I need to stop messing with it and just call it done.