How do you organize drabbles?

[valiha]

and short stories in calibre? Do you merge all drabbles written by one author into one html, which is what I was thinking about, or keep them separate? Would you also merge all short stories into a sort of a Fanfiction Anthology for that particular author or fandom or whatever?

ETA I also need advice on how to title fics such as anon fills in kinkmemes, multiple fils of a single prompt, anon comment fics and what kind of regex to use in calibre's Preferences > Import/Export > Add books section in such cases, or would I need a different one for each occasion?

Right now I have

(?P<author>[^_-]+) -?\s*(?P<series>[^_0-9-]*)(?P<series_index>[0-9]*)\s*-\s*(?P<title>[^_].+) ?

which handles those with titles such as Author - Series # - Title.ext well; how would you go about saving fills from, say, norsekink, if you didn't want to save each fill separately?

Comments

[amalthia]

I merge short stories into a single HTML by author and then use the table of contents to locate the individual stories. With epub you can have nested table of contents so if any of the stories have chapters you can still navigate to those as well. Not sure what people with Kindles do???

[valiha]

What do you use for that? Do you create a TOC manually or do you have a tool that does it for you (e.g. Sigil or something like it)? I have an android tablet, but my preferred reading app doesn't do links (go figure, but it seems they're working on it). If they don't implement it soon, I'll be looking to move to something else.

[amalthia]

Before I create an ebook I start off with the story in Microsoft Word. I use MS Word's TOC creation tool save the file. Then open the doc in Corel's Word Perfect X5 and save as plain html. The TOC is retained in the HTML file that is created. Then I clean up the code a bit and import the html file to Calibre and convert.

However, if you know how to create anchors in HTML you do not need Microsoft Word to create the Table of Contents for you. I just do it because I'm lazy. If there are only a few stories I hand code the TOC into the HTML.

Now if you don't want an inline TOC (which shows up within the ebook) you can still create a table of contents by tagging your chapter headers with h1 and h2 tags within the HTML file. I use this method 99% of the time.

For stories with nested TOC I use h1 for the top level chapter heading and h2 for the next level down. Then I use my devices TOC viewer to navigate to the chapter I need. This is helpful for stories that have over 60 chapters or for older readers that are not touchscreen capable.

[valiha]

Got it, thanks. Creating a TOC shouldn't be a problem; deciding how to treat and combine (if at all) short fics and drabbles is going to be an issue.

[glitteryv]

If it's one of my fave authors and they don't have anything on AO3, then, yeah, I tend to create my own Author Anthology.

OTOH, I try to keep my library kinda on the lower end of the 100s so, I usually will delete any of the 'anthologies' once I'm done reading them.

[valiha]

I haven't deleted a single fic I saved since 2004. Well not quite, I deleted the really bad ones, but a large majority is fics I wanted to re-read, and did, often. :)

[trialia]

My immediate reaction to the idea of merging all drabbles into one file was "ugh!"... I would never, EVER do that. Especially since as a drabble writer most of mine aren't on the same theme, even if they do share a fandom or a pairing. It feels a horribly messy thing to do. If a drabble was posted as a separate story, that is exactly how I would keep it - and how I would want it kept if it were one of mine being sorted like that.

[valiha]

I hate the idea of doing it. I'd much rather keep them separate, but I'm trying to organize my fic library with calibre but I'm having trouble with organizing my various and coming up with meaningful names.

Some drabbles I've saved over the years are fills to anon kink memes or comment fics without much of a title - how do I treat those? name them Drabble #1, #2 etc? Add the fandom and/or theme of the drabble to the title? Or maybe group all drabbles covering the same theme into separate chapters of an html file? What would be your suggestion in that case?

[trialia]

It's understandable. That's why I make sure to title all my non-anonymous drabbles, even after the fact (I add them to my own archive, so I have to give them titles of some sort for that).

I would say fandom and theme and possibly pairing or character focus as a title, and maybe the date? Depends on how many you've got of each kind, really.

[valiha]

(Ugh, I'm glad you understood what I was trying to say because what did I even write there?? It was supposed to be "having trouble with coming up with meaningful names.)

Pairing not so much since I'm predominantly a gen reader, and character focus would also be used only occasionally because I gravitate towards fandoms that have a group of characters with more or less equal standing. Even when canon leans towards emphasizing one or two characters in a group, it usually balances out in fiction. But perhaps for at least some of them.

I was thinking perhaps Fandom - Anon - Title, but calibre is going to treat that as Author - Series - Title so that won't work. Fandom - Theme - what about title? Do I just use Various if I combine all fills of the same theme; or do I combine just the promps which have had multiple fills and use the prompt as the title?

So I also need advice on how to title such fics and what kind of regex to use in calibre's Preferences > Import/Export > Add books section.