Guest Lecture - On Fiction Organisation

[amiserablepileofwords]

Hi, I'm Miz.

You might remember me from such sites as Cohost, or uh... Cohost (RIP 😿), and I've been invited here today to talk to you about... Organizing Your Dreamwidth Serial Fiction¹, Because Tags Aren't Enough And They're Displayed In The Wrong Order To Boot.

If you ever read any of Cohost Writers' Salon most prolific writer Caffeinated Otter²'s longer works, you might remember the beautiful little navigation header and footer boxes that contained useful links related to that story.

When I started to repost my archive on here, I decided to do the old "copy the homework, but change it a bit", and created my own, slightly uglier looking version.

Below you will find the bit of html/css³ that makes it look⁴ like my header in the post above.

<div style="border-radius: 50%/10%; border: 2px solid; display: flex; align-items: center; flex-direction: column; font-size: 90%;">
<center>SERIES TITLE GOES HERE</center>
<div style="width: 90%; display: flex; justify-content: space-around;">
<span><a href="BEGINNING LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">beginning</a></span>
<span><a href="PREVIOUS LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">previous</a></span>
<span><a href="NEXT LINK GOES HERE" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" tabindex="0">next</a></span>
</div>
</div>

Going back and forth fixing up next/previous links each time you add a new chapter is some degree of More Hoops™, but I do think it makes things nicer and easier for your readers, and they're who we're doing this for, right?

Anyway, I hope this'll be of some use to you.
^{maybe read my stories, please and thank you}

---

^1: Or other things you want to help people track on here in a sequential order
^2: Who is also on here with recent work
^3: Which you can post straight into the markdown editor as well, with no problems
^4: I would really suggest fiddling with it further so it's less... wonky

Comments

Ooh! Interesting!

[follypersist]

I love the simplicity of this — thank you for sharing it! I don't typically write serial fiction, but I think it can still be useful for serial nonfiction as well (and is super helpful as a starting point for fiddling-around-with.)

Re: Ooh! Interesting!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yeah, my series tend to be long and complicated, where things get dropped into the middle. But I also do sets of nonfiction articles sometimes, and it would be really useful for that. Maybe also for shorter and less complicated series.