My story was ruined :(

[ChloeTzang]

Ever had a fuck up?

I've had a couple. One where half the story ended up in italics, so now I check all the way through before I hit submit. And I quite often post some lines from a song at the start of a story, I use central alignment and that's gone wonky on me a few times. I've never figured out why it works sometimes and doesn't others but its a pain in the ass.

 

[onehitwanda]

When I'm proof-reading before submitting I keep the edit window open in one tab and preview open in the second. Any time I change something I save it but keep the edit window open, then switch to the preview tab and refresh to check the change is as I expected it.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm sorry to hear what happened to your story. This experience reinforces my contentment not ever to use special formatting in stories. I KNOW I would screw it up.

 

[stickygirl]

Yea - I had a hissy fit ages ago having tried unsuccessfully to used < stuff in brackets >. It was an edit on a very old story and the effed up code is still there to this day. I lost the will to edit any further and wear my scars with pride.
The underlying code to the forums and stories is/was different and hopefully an old hand will link to a page where all is explained.

 

[HeyAll]

I once edited a story for someone. She had italics dialogue for some parts, so I put the <> brackets for italics.

Little did i know she was submitting with Word, so when the story posted the <> brackets were there and it had to be fixed later.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I published a story that had thoughts in Italics, which is how you should do them. I didn't use RTF format, and from the second line on the first page to the end of the first page, it was all italics. I saw what I'd done and immediately went in and saved it in RTF, and republished it. One commenter on the first day waxed poetic about my inadequacies as a writer for the page of italics. I told him, that was a format error not a writing error. Once the new version was up, I deleted his comment, my response, and another direct attack on me, not the story.

The italic hater reposted complaints about what had been fixed, that I was trying to hide my ineptitude, and then blasted me for deleting comments, especially his.

I deleted him again.

 

[stickygirl]

I published a story that had thoughts in Italics, which is how you should do them. I didn't use RTF format, and from the second line on the first page to the end of the first page, it was all italics. I saw what I'd done and immediately went in and saved it in RTF, and republished it. One commenter on the first day waxed poetic about my inadequacies as a writer for the page of italics. I told him, that was a format error not a writing error. Once the new version was up, I deleted his comment, my response, and another direct attack on me, not the story.

The italic hater reposted complaints about what had been fixed, that I was trying to hide my ineptitude, and then blasted me for deleting comments, especially his.

I deleted him again.

Sheesh. People

 

[MillieDynamite]

And the horse they rode in on.

Sheesh. People

 

[stickygirl]

And the horse they rode in on.

The horse too?! Neigh, that can't be true.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I always write in plain text and manually add the tags in that text.

 

[AchtungNight]

I’ve missed plenty of spelling and grammar errors in my own writings, left out important details too. Go look at my writings on AO3 for corrected versions with additional author’s notes. I may never get to everything but I have gotten to a few of the most important stories.