clare_dragonfly: woman with green feathery wings, text: stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories (Writing: stories last longer)
Clare-Dragonfly ([personal profile] clare_dragonfly) wrote in [community profile] writerslounge2011-10-20 12:01 am

The story of a girl and her obsession with organization on the internet.

So! [personal profile] analect suggested a while ago that I post here about my Garden of Prose call for prompts and how I organize my fiction. Now that I have revamped part of my tag system I will do that.


So my obsession with organizing my tags probably started when I discovered that a friend had nested tags, and realized I absolutely had to know how to do that. Now I have ::counts:: eight of them. And five are for my original fiction.

First there's the "fiction" tag. I now have every piece of original fiction on my journal (hopefully) tagged with that. It used to be the head tag for the "fiction:" group but now it seems to be separate on the list? I don't know what's up with that.

Under fiction, I have apocryphal (one story that had worldbuilding elements I've since changed), betas only, posted in full, sponsor this!, and unfinished. Sponsor this! and unfinished are distinguished only by the fact that in the latter, I'm not specifically looking for money to post more. I have a fair amount of sponsorable fiction for which I will write or at least post more of the story in exchange for money.

Next on the list is "garden of prose." This is my fiction fishbowl/call for prompts project, which I absolutely intend to do again, but have only done once so far. (I'll probably do it in December. During November I will be too busy to write to prompts!) Under that I have call for prompts, followup, summary, and update. Summary is for the listing of all the pieces I've written in response to the prompts; update is for... basically information while working on the prompts; followup is for figuring out what went right and wrong during this Garden of Prose. Oh, and polls. Doesn't everybody love polls?

Next down is length. This is new! Previously I had tags for length nested under "fiction," but they lacked specificity and I didn't use them consistently. So now I have very precise length tags: under 1k, 1k-5k, and 5k or more. Did you know that you can't have >< symbols in tags? This is perfectly logical, yet it took me two tries of adding "<1k" and ">5k" tags before I figured out what the problem was. I may at some point break up the middle length into two tags, as I seem to have a fair amount of stuff between 1k and 2k, and there's a big difference between that and 4k. Then again, I have wordcounts listed in all my headers.

Prompt is next! This is the longest list of nested tags and I will not bore you by going through them all. Garden of prose is one of the tags, though, and is appended to every piece written from a Garden of Prose prompt. I get prompts from a lot of different places. I like prompts. I like them even more if they come with deadlines. ("As soon as possible," for the Garden of Prose, is an excellent deadline for me.)

And finally, my favorite: the world tag. In alphabetical order, my named worlds that I have posted pieces from on Dreamwidth are: Arite and Tovran, Atash, Chatoyant College, Extranormal Crimes Division, folklore, Garthier, other, prison planet, Sefadare and Kunidare, and The Wasteland. Some of those have a lot of pieces, some have a few. The Wasteland has the most (okay, other has the most, but that doesn't count), because it's post-apocalyptic. The others are mostly weird fantasy worlds. Chatoyant College is the name and the setting of my online serial novel, and Extranormal Crimes Division is urban fantasy, for which I'm working on the first novel in what will hopefully be a series.

So yeah... those are my tags for original fiction. I have no idea whether they've been useful to anyone else, or whether anyone else has even tried to use them. But they make me happy. And please, feel free to steal my tag system. If I like your fiction, I will probably use them :D
intothewood: (Default)

[personal profile] intothewood 2011-10-20 03:02 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm so confused! It's not you, it's me, I hardly ever use tags and when I do it's very simple, nonhelpful stuff. Maybe I'll have to look at your garden of prose to see exactly how it's done.
intothewood: (Default)

[personal profile] intothewood 2011-10-20 06:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, okay that helps, seeing it. That's very impressive, I learned something new so thanks!
scarylady: (Default)

[personal profile] scarylady 2011-10-20 04:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I feel that I should offer you my username. That's a scary level of organisation!