Thorn Wilde

So I see I now have a banner. Thank you. Is that the thing, that you have to put it there for me? Can I change it myself?

I don't know. I don't even know where or how to upload it. What dimensions is it supposed to be?

Pics or it didn't happen.

Yeah, you're stubborn. Some might even say pig-headed at times. But I'd rather say you're determined and brave. ❤️

Oh, I know. Having to move it doesn't help either.

I've noticed that other promoted authors have banners on their Stories pages and in the authors lists, but I can't seem to figure out how to upload one. There doesn't seem to be an option in any of my settings, nor is there one on my stories page. Is my profile banner supposed to carry over? Because it hasn't. On a MacBook Pro, 2015, running MacOS Mojave and using Safari.

That was lovely. The piano could do with tuning, though. Incidentally, I read somewhere yesterday that the same things happen in elephant brains when they see humans as what happens in human brains when we see cute animals; they think we're adorable. Inter-species empathy is a weird and wonderful thing!

Good advice in these potentially pandemic times...

If the sort by reputation goes by community rep rather than story rep, why is it a sort option? People who use it will likely be looking for the authors with the most liked stories, not the ones that are most active in chat... Can story rep be made visible? Just thinking out loud here, it's not a criticism.

I loved editing this story. Thanks for letting me be a part of this adventure! It was quite a ride.

I adore this music video so much. The song's catchy, the dancing's good, and it's so gay! A commenter on YouTube said it best: Edited to add: OMG! This one has the same dudes playing Khrushchev and Kennedy! lol

This is an important point. There's nothing new under the sun; it's just a question of how we tell our stories. Originality rarely lies in the premise or the basic themes of the tale. It's in the details, the voice, the tone, and so on. That's how you set your story apart from other stories that, if you strip away all the trimmings, are the same story underneath.

I agree about the club forums. They don't seem to be organised in any discernible way at all, neither alphabetically nor by update or club or content.

Maybe that's why there's so much sexual assault that goes unacknowledged and unreported in the gay community. You say no one would have reacted like Daniel, well I personally know people who would, and have. One thing is fantasising about it. Having it happen is quite another.

I wish to add that, as a reader, I've often relied on the sidebar. Precisely because of the community focus of the site, I'm more likely to just revert to the forum front page, glance at the sidebar, and click if I see an interesting title, than I am to go to the stories page and actively look. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this. I don't see how this change is beneficial to anyone. If you could demonstrate that it is, maybe I'd be more at ease with it, but to me it looks a lot like change just for change's sake. EDIT: Also, if you want to see how readership has dwindled, just look at the amount of likes on the weekly top stories now compared to earlier. Cause there are regularly stories with one like on that list, including right now.

I don't think it's very healthy to end up in a relationship with your rapist. Do you?

I get that, but I think this will have a detrimental effect on author exposure (I know of several authors on the site other than myself who feel like they're getting fewer reads than they used to already and I can't see this change helping), and surely the forums are for registered users and not guests in the first place, but I suppose it's not up to any of us. The community is absolutely important, and part of what many of us enjoy so much about GA, but it shouldn't be at expense of the stories and authors, should it?

I think it was better as it was. People are less likely to click through to see more than to just click whatever's right there. This way, new chapters may only be visible on the forum front page for half an hour when lots of people are posting. This is a site for stories, isn't it? Doesn't seem to make much sense to make the stories less visible. Edited to add: With how long the club forums thing is now, there's plenty of space in the side bar for a longer story updates list. If anything, you could make it longer.

You should be!

I really enjoyed the way you described Ronnie's powers growing and manifesting. The energy travelling along tendrils. It was a very cool visual, really brought the scene to life. Good job!

This is perfectly true, but the potential ambiguity of English is never made better by poor grammar either.

You say you lean toward clarity, but that wasn't clear at all. Like I said, you put three people in the sentence. Raven, she, and John. Now, 'Raven and John have been best friends since third grade' is perfectly fine. It was the 'since meeting' part that made the sentence not make sense. As for how you write vs how you speak, in dialogue I'm all for writing like you talk. But in the prose itself, you really should follow basic rules of grammar and punctuation, unless you have a very good and compelling reason not to that furthers your narrative artistically (Cloud Atlas, A Clockwork Orange, and Flowers for Algernon are examples of titles that purposefully did this, and to great effect). Edited to add: I believe in writing the story you want to write, the way you want to write it, and I'm not one to enforce hard rules about how to tell a story. But it should be told in a way that the readers can understand, and that's why we have spelling, grammar, and punctuation rules and conventions; so that we can communicate our message to people in a way that they understand. That's the whole purpose of language.

Probably not. What punctuation rules there are are much younger than the language itself.

That's not grammatically correct. First of all, you've changed the tense from past to present, by using 'have' rather than 'had'. Also, 'Raven' is the object of the first half, with 'she and John' being the implied subjects of both halves, so you've put three people in that sentence rather than two. EDIT: It would in theory be understandable if you wrote 'John and she' rather than 'she and John', but it's still ambiguous.

Oh, that's an excellent museum! Been there several times.