Exaltation and aggravation

The exaltation is that my partner is here for a visit and we’re on the road, wandering around the mountains of Washington. So far, we’ve mostly seen rain, clouds, trees, and – well, rocks and trees and trees and rocks and waterrrrrr!! But it’s all lovely.

Another bit of exaltation, easier to share, is that I got chapter 12 of Reverb finished, with some lingering holes patched (thanks kirsty841 and pepper_field!!), and finally posted! I’ll post a teaser and a link next.

The aggravation is that fanfic.net, aka The Pit, has once again tweaked their coding so that, once again EVERY SINGLE TEXT SPACER IN EVERY DAMNED STORY has been parsed out. I used to use ASCII characters, and ff.net tweaked its code so that they vanished from the displayed text. I switched to lines. Parsed out. Most recently, I switched to using dashes. Well, guess what’s been parsed out!?!

I have the most recent half-dozen chapters of Reverb still in the Docs Manager, so I replaced the lost spacers in those with a text spacer ( - x - ) that I hope will stay in place. But the spacers are important, damn it. I rely on pacing in my writing, and that’s a critical part of the pacing, not to mention key to basic reading comprehesion. Now I can either live with retroactively f*cked-up fiction, or go back and fix a couple of hundred thousand words of text.

And yes, I know that there are other archives.  But the readers are in the Pit, and I have to be where the readers are.  I've posted some pieces to other archives, and the traffic just isn't there.

Well, it’ll give me something to do while I’m mentally chewing over chapter 13, which is following the current tradition of being very reluctant to get started. As long as it also follows the pattern of coming together well when it finally does agree to get out of bed, I shall be content.

'Beth
May 2010

Chapter 12

For a peek into the AU of this AU, feel free to visit macgyverdeleted -- but in this, the non-AU AU (are you following that?), Mac and Nikki did not, in fact, do anything as sensible as jump each other's bones between chapters 11 and 12. 

Reverb

Chapter Twelve:  Interrogative

- - -

Nikki woke up, trying to puzzle out what was missing. The bed was very short and the rough wood of the ceiling was very close, close enough to touch – right. She was still up at the cabin, and she really needed to get out of bed and radio for the helicopter pickup that she’d had to cancel the day before. Bed was the lower bunkbed in MacGyver’s granddaughters’ bedroom – AnnaRose’s bed, apparently; Petra had the upper bunk. AnnaRose, it seemed, was the only one of Mac’s descendents to have inherited his distaste for heights.

And if she’s anything like her grandfather, she’ll cope with it by becoming a tightrope walker. Or an astronaut.

( more behind cut . . . )



- - -

The full chapter is here on ff.net.  It has text spacers.

'Beth
April 2010