I believe that formatting issue relates to the fact that the story submission box had a major upgrade at some point to introduce some new functionality and a few text elements are coded differently to the old version.
I don't know without checking but I would assume that what you see in the preview is how it will appear on the site once editted. You may need to remove the additional carriage returns.
Thing is, they're not extras. That's a single blank line between the paragraphs. It's just that wide. ( Actually, there is one double at the beginning. Not sure where it came from )
If I backspace between paragraphs, it becomes a wall of text. If I hit return after that, it creates the same wide space. So, I can't fix it in the editor. I'm going to have to copy it from the editor, paste it into Word, fix it there, and replace the entire text to eliminate it. I've tested with a few paragraph chunks, and that does indeed work.
Guess I don't really have any choice. I don't relish the idea of going through the process, but I really don't like having to force a mod to do a full read of something already approved for a technical glitch + adding the series designation, because I'm sure it will show up as having been 100% modified in the mod panel. These are not quick reads. I'll do them one at a time and try to leave some time between them so I don't put too much extra work in the queue.
I just submitted the edit to the second story, and already did the full replace on that one. Looking at the next story in the series, both parts of that one only have one unexplained double carriage return at the beginning, so those will be easier fixes that can be done in the editor. It looks like "Secret" has the same issue as "Daughter".
The good news is that when the "Submitted for moderator approval" screen came up on "Daughter", the series indicator was there, so at least I got that part right. LOL ( ETA before submitting post, it's been approved and the final is good )
I'll try simply deleting the carriage returns between paragraphs on the next one that has the problem when I edit, but when I last tried that, the preview was a wall of text. I'll try Shift+Enter when I do the next one as well, to see if that will work in the editor.
Deleting the carriage returns worked, thankfully. Incredibly tedious, but better than having to replace the entire text after fixing it in Word — at least for not eating up excessive time for the mods.
All 17 existing parts of the series are now finally connected, and ready for the stories to come to be added to the timeline. I'm really hoping my muse will cooperate to get Dale's story "Queen of the Wood" out for Earth Day in the upcoming year, and the story I've been laying groundwork for since all the way back in "Kindred" out for summer — "Beloved of the Wood" Kindred was originally finished in 2010, so I'll have been a decade laying the groundwork for one scene at the end of "Beloved". Yep. That's right. One scene. I needed a logical way to explain something, so I've been creating characters and locations specifically for that purpose this whole time.
One down, two to go. I need to establish the series for "The Ancient Peoples", which only has two existing stories so far. Then I get to go through another marathon collating the 16 stories in the "Adam's Aunt" series. Blinking into those, it looks like they aren't plagued by the double carriage returns that were in most of the Wood stories. Thank heavens. Can't really collect my "Nobles by Deed" stories, because I bounce around in that timeline a lot. Decided not to collect "The Fey Folk" because there's no character crossover, none planned, and no timeline. Everything else I think works fine just being connected by the links and having "Ch." or "Pt." in the title, without the addition of a series designation.
Thanks to everyone who commented and offered advice. This first quest was painful due to the changes in the editor that happened after I submitted most of the stories, but not quite as vexing as I had anticipated, once I got the ball rolling.
Even better, I was able to create "Ancient Peoples" and "Adam's Aunt" with no edits to the text, so those series designations were created and linked up without issue, or need for them to go into the queue. Remembered that "Her Flock" needed a series, and it went off without a hitch. Never linked the two chapters of "Pawnographic" together, and that's cleared up.
Must have accidentally clicked in the story text box when I went to add the links to "Jackin' Jill", though. That one went to the mod queue, so I'm on pause. If I'd known it was going to hit the queue, I would have removed the double carriage return at the beginning. Decided that leaving that one little bit of formatting buggery was worth the mods not having to verify it again, but alas...
Several more that I never linked the chapters together on, but I know many of them have the double carriage return issues throughout, so I'm going to leave those alone until at least after the new year. That's why they didn't get the chapter links when the feature was introduced. I know how to fix it now, but I've stuck enough stuff in the queue at a busy time of year cleaning up "Magic of the Wood". After Jackin' Jill Ch. 02 clears, if 3 hits the queue ( though it shouldn't ) I'll pause on that until after the new year as well.
