I use Scrivener for story-writing, but for basic word-processing, I like TextMaker, which is a free Microsoft Word clone. You do have to pony up an email address so they can send you an activation code, but otherwise it costs nothing.

DA is...interesting. I think since the focus seems to be mostly on visual art, there's just not as much functionality for "literary" submissions. And honestly, I wish they would refer to it as "the written word" or something less highfalutin. I don't really think of my stories as "literature" in the same sense that I tend to use the term.

There's also the problem of indiscriminate "watching." I can't keep up. I used to operate on the "you watch me, I'll watch you" principle. It's a nice gesture, but I really don't know what someone sharing unicorn drawings (no offense to unicorn drawers) would see in my stories, and vice versa. But I guess that's a broader issue above and beyond simple formatting.


That's pretty much where I am. It's easy to nitpick, but I don't have idea one about what goes into running a website like this. Sure, there are features I wish FF had, but I'm publishing content here with a decent amount of exposure, so I don't feel entitled to complain too much.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out. Anything to make formatting easier across multiple sites.

I also post my stories across multiple sites. However, I haven't run into the technical difficulties elsewhere that I've run into here on FF.

I just discovered that DeviantArt also apparently has tweaked its formatting somewhat. I used to be able to add basic HTML tags to get my stories to default to a serif font and to indent each paragraph. But now it seems like that's been replaced by CSS. I tried to copy the CSS code that shows up in the editor so I could duplicate the style of my older posts, but it doesn't work. The CSS code shows up as text when it's published. Another minor annoyance.

I'd have to say that Curvage seems to have hit the sweet spot. Text doesn't retain the emphasis formatting I like so much when I copy and paste it into the editor there, but I guess it's not too much trouble to add it manually with the appropriate buttons.

Thanks very much for the reply!

I guess I will have to resign myself to asterisks to indicate emphasis for the time being. But I don't have to like it!

Something else I'm not too fond of is automatic chapter numbering. That would be fine if there weren't a character limit, but back when I first started posting my stories here, the character limit was still 10,000. There was a fair amount of trial and error involved in copying and pasting just the right amount of text into the FF editor so as not to run afoul of the maximum character limit.

I found that I had to break the story into sections, which I labeled myself. My self-titled selections are along the lines of "Pt. 1," "Pt. 10," "Pt. 20," and so on. But now with the automatic chapter numbering, the titles read like "Chapter 29, Pt. 22," which makes it seem like there are 22 parts to Chapter 29. It's really frustrating.

I'm sure the readers can figure it out, but it's the principle of the thing.

Maybe eventually I'll go back and change the titles so they're less confusing, but that's an awful lot of tedious extra work.

Apologies if this has already been addressed in another thread or elsewhere on the site (if so, feel free to direct me to the right place), but is there any way to add basic formatting to text when drafting a story?

I don't need anything fancy, but I can't live without at least bold and italics. Block indenting would be nice, too.

UBB code used to work on the "old" site but doesn't seem to function anymore.

Nothing much to add, except that fat is more calorically dense than carbs and protein. A gram of fat has 9 calories. Carbs and protein each have 4 calories per gram.

That said, I wouldn't go chugging MCT oil in the hope that it would act as some kind of weight gain elixir. MCT oil is basically a type of refined coconut oil that is liquid at room temperature. Purportedly it provides a long-lasting energy boost and mental clarity...if you're already in ketosis. (By the way, we're talking maybe a teaspoon here at one go.) Having used it for this purpose, I would say there might be something to it, but it's hard to say how much is just hype or placebo effect.

But in general, dietary oils are poorly absorbed, and consumed in any significant quantity most likely will result in indigestion or other gastric unpleasantness.

I would say keep it sort of light and jokey for a while. There's truth in humor, and most people will drop the subject of weight gain or fatness pretty quickly, since it tends to make most people uncomfortable. So the longer you can keep on successfully steering the conversation towards feedism-related topics, the more likely it is that your friend has some interest in it. And if your friend responds with any kind of enthusiasm, that's probably a dead giveaway.

Inadvertently finding someone in real life who's into any of this, even tangentially, would be quite a feat.

This has been my experience as well.

I've also encountered a few catfishers, although I suspect those are one or two of the same people just periodically creating fake accounts, which disappear after a couple of days at most.

"Fat" by Violent Femmes.