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Ainae said: "As it stands, next year, a story must be easily navigable or it will be disallowed."

That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but I would hate to have LiveJournal posts inelegible altogether. So many stories are only one chapter, and many multi-chapter stories have links at the bottom to the following chapters. Many authors post somewhere besides LJ, but not every one and I hope that if their stories are clearly posted that they will remain elegible.

Most multi-chapter stories from my Story Challenge sites are also posted elsewhere, and if I nominated any of those I used the links from other archives. I hadn't thought of it before, but from now on when an author submits a multi-chapter story to a Challenge I will post links to the next chapter at the bottom of each one. That will make it easier as readers won't have to go out of the story to click on the next chapter.

Cheers,

Marigold


--
Marigold's Red Book
http://marigold.tolkienshire.com

Marigold's Recommendations Page
http://www.geocities.com/marigoldsrecommendations/

Marigold's Live Journal
http://www.livejournal.com/users/marigoldg/

Tales of The Red Book
http://www.livejournal.com/users/talesofredbook/




There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

>
>Sam, in Mordor, RoTK

Hi Marigold,

(Keep in mind that I'm working through email backwards, so the only
context I have for this is the little bit of Ainae's quoted below. I
reserve the right to clarify my opinion when I get to the original
post.)

On 11 Jul 2005, at 03:08, MarigoldCotton@aol.com wrote:

> Ainae said: "As it stands, next year, a story must be easily navigable
> or it will be disallowed."
>

For those people who are newer to the awards, last year we decided not
to allow stories posted to http://www.tolkienonline.com/ because there
was no easy way to navigate from one chapter to the next of multi-part
stories. So I think that's the concern with LJ -- for multipart
stories, some of them won't have one links from one to the next.

> That sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but I would hate to have
> LiveJournal posts inelegible altogether.

So would I. Because of the things I write and read (i.e., mostly
Gondor- and Rohan-based), those things are not often posted to LJs. Or
if they are, it's usually a header and a link to where they are at some
archive either a personal site or a public one like SOA, HASA, etc. So
the disallowing of LJs would not effect me strongly, but I know there's
a lot of great stuff out there available just as LJs.

> So many stories are only one chapter,

In my mind there's no problem at all with single-part stories posted on
LJs competing in the MEFAs. Or at least there shouldn't be a problem.

> and many multi-chapter stories have links at the bottom to the
> following chapters.

As long as this is the case, I don't think there should be a problem.

Where things get iffy is that in a couple of case, people would post
links to *previous* chapters but not to ones that follow that one. For
example, if someone is writing a three-chapter piece, the first chapter
would just be that chapter. The second chapter would have a line at the
top saying "For chapter one see [link]." And the third chapter would
have a line at the top saying "For chapter one see [link 1]; for
chapter two see [link2]." The author never got around to going back and
editing the first chapter after the story was finished.

The problem with this is that the only chapter with navigation to the
other chapters is the last one, but it's a bit of a backwards way to
navigate things. KWIM?

As far as I can see it there are three good options here, any one of
which would make posts of multi-part stories to LJs eligible:

==> What you're suggesting. Every post of an LJ must have links to all
subsequent and previous chapters.

==> This is an idea I was going to save for the post-mortem, and I'm
not sure whether Anthony will even say it's doable. But right now we
have just one link per story. One solution to this problem might be to
allow the nominator to enter multiple links, one for each chapter, and
have those display on the website.

==:> The third option involves getting someone else to host a "table of
contents" page. Many of us have our own websites. If an author or
nominator sent me the story, summary, ratings, and a URL for each
chapter it wouldn't take me long to throw together an index page. (This
would be like a table of contents, and it would be similar to what I
already have for my own multi-part pieces at
http://www.freewebs.com/aure/multipartstories.htm .) Now, I'm hesitant
at this point in the game to volunteer for anything new, because I'm
not sure how much time I'll be able to commit to the MEFAs next year.
But if an author could find someone with their own site who would be
willing to do this, then those links could point to the different LJ
entries.

Marta
*****
Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words. - St. Francis
of Assisi


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