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We are pretty diverse when it comes to what counts as a transformation. Just a few, off the top of my head, include:
However, if you come up with something not on here, we'll most likely applaud you for being creative, not condemn you for not sticking to "the list." Keep in mind that somethings aren't very transforming, though. Someone changing his clothing may be transforming into a better-dressed person, but that's not exactly what we're here for.
Well, to be blunt, just sit your butt down on a chair and start writing. Even if you think what you wrote isn't all that good, we sure as heck might feel differently-and if not, we can at least give you some ideas as to where to go from there!
You may wish to just sit down and visualize a transformation and then attempt to describe that transformation. That will at least give you a framework to work from. Then if you like you can build a story from there by trying to explain why the character was getting transformed.
When writing, remember an observation by list member Will Bell, who stated, "Many of the stories posted to TSA-TALK seem to permit the transformation element to be secondary to the plot." While the transformation is what makes it special to the list, working on good characterizations and plot can never hurt.
Alan Hoch also chimed in, saying, "The build up and aftermath of a scene can be just as important as the scene itself. It gives it a context in which to exist. Likewise, because you've been introduced to the characters and have been given a chance to identify with them, you are much more emotionally involved when the big scene hits."
You may also wish to consider using one of the story universes that people are writing in on the list (see Section IV). This has the advantage of prefabricated characters and settings. However, if you do this, you should be respectful of what guidelines that universe's creator has set down for that universe.
There is no official policy as to how individuals should format their stories. "I don't really care how you format your stories," writes Thomas Hassan, the list manager, "and I will not carve anything in stone." Likewise, nearly everything in this section is only advice and not the weight of law.
The only "formatting" law is this: no formatting discussions or complaints should be posted to the list, but instead they should be sent to the author of the story privately.
Also, purely on a technical basis, compressing your story using an archiving program or "attaching" it to your file is problematic at best. Subscribers to the list use a wide variety of operating systems, not to mention mail programs, so if you do so you'll find many people unable to read your story at all. For best results, it's recommended you just paste it from your word processor into the mail window as plain text.
Thomas has a program which will convert stories into HTML, the language of World Wide Web pages. It will convert words surrounded by asterisks ("*") into boldface, and words surrounded by underscores ("_") into italics. Angle brackets ("<" and ">") have to be cleaned up by Thomas individually. However, "the request not to use them," he cautions, "is not anything hewn in stone, just a little thing to make my life easier."
Running your stories through a spell-checker, and reading it thoroughly for spelling and grammar mistakes, is well-advised. For the truely obsessed, you can print a copy and read that; people usually catch more mistakes when it's on paper.
You are posting your message using a format known as MIME quoted-printable. When a mailreader program sends a message this way, it replaces all characters that don't have internationally-agreed-upon interpretations, such as quotation marks, apostrophes, etc. with MIME standard codes, which typically look like this: "=20".
Many mailreaders come already configured to use MIME quoted-printable format when posting. The result is that to a MIME-enabled mailreader, your message probably looks fine, but to an (older) non-MIME-enabled mailreader, your message probably contains glitches every twenty characters or so, and is probably almost unreadable.
To solve this problem, find the setting in your mailreader program that controls this feature, and turn it off. MIME quoted-printable format should basically never be necessary for stories posted to the TSA list. Plain no-frills ASCII text should suffice, and will allow everybody to read your text.
but
come out on the list with alternating long and
really
short lines, like the way this question is
laid out?
What can I do to fix this problem?
The alternating long and short lines are due to a mismatch between what your mailreader thinks is the maximum length of a line and what your word processor or other text editor thinks is the maximum length of a line.
In particular, text that is entered into most mailreader programs is considered a single "paragraph", no matter how many lines it occupies on the screen, until the <enter key is actually pressed. When you are entering this text, it will normally be "word wrapped" to the current width of the window containing your mailreader program, so that you can see all the text without scrolling horizontally. Many people therefore assume that this will be the layout of the text when it is sent, not realizing that this is done merely as a display convenience. In fact, there is a setting in most mailreader programs which controls the maximum length of a line in posted E-mail. (In Agent, for instance, this defaults to 77 characters.) When a message is sent, each "paragraph" is wrapped so that all lines are less than this length prior to sending the E-mail message.
The alternating-long-and-short-lines problem occurs because many people have developed the habit of pressing <enter> at the end of each line of text they type, or are using a word processor which puts a <enter) (otherwise known as a "hard carriage return") at the end of each line that it outputs to a text file. Furthermore, the word processor or person in question is typing lines of text that are longer than what the mailreader thinks is the maximum length of a line. The result, therefore, is that the mailreader thinks that each line is a separate paragraph, and it attempts to word-wrap each line that it outputs individually. Since the lines are usually just slightly longer than the mailreader's maximum output length (i.e. the word-processor outputs 90-character lines, but the mailreader wants to wrap at 77 characters), the mailreader is able to fit most of the line within its limit, but typically the last word or two exceeds its limit and is thus word-wrapped to be on the next line, all by itself.
Here are some ways to solve this problem, in decreasing order of desirability:
Your word processor speaks a more complex language than your e-mail program. People's e-mail, across the world, uses a universal set of letters, numbers, and symbols that everyone's computer (whether it's a Macintosh, a Windows system, or a Unix box) can understand. That set is called ASCII, and it includes the various letters of the alphabet, the numbers, and standard punctuation, such as asterisks, exclamation marks, periods, commas, and so forth.
However, many word processors use a more complex set of letters, numbers, and symbols that, in addition to ASCII, includes such things as arrows, bullets, dashes, 'smart' quotes, and copyright and trademark symbols. When authors use these symbols in their stories, unlike ASCII, not everyone can see those symbols in their e-mail program. Those who can't see your smart quote, your bullet, your dash will instead usually see a character that makes no sense in that place, sometimes a box-drawing character, a foreign character, or a blank space (depending on what computer system they're using). And with symbols as commonly used as quotation marks or dashes, the end result can be a story full of garbage characters, practically unreadable.
As an author, you want your story to be read by the widest audience possible, not just by those with Windows systems, so it's best to make sure your story uses ASCII characters only.
How can you do this?
First, the easiest way is to let your word processing program do the work for you. Don't simply copy your story to the clipboard and then paste it into your e-mail message; instead, save it as a plain text file (WordPerfect users should choose "ASCII (DOS) Text", Microsoft Word users "Text Only") in your word processing program, and then, if you're using a Windows system, open it up using the Notepad or Wordpad utilities. This will show you what your story looks like in ASCII characters.
Often, the act of saving it as a plain text file will let your computer convert most of the unreadable-in-ASCII stuff for you. However, some word-processing programs simply strip the characters away, leaving you with a story bereft of the smart quotes or dashes you had placed. Depending on how your word processing program saves things, you may have to go through and manually change some of the things within there. The following aren't laws set in stone, but simply common ways of handling these things:
Your posts, on the other hand, should be 40k or less. The list software puts a hold on anything above that, to make sure nobody's sending spam or something to the list. It'd probably get through eventually, but the List Uncles would have to sent it on its way manually. You can avoid that by breaking it up into chapters.
Don't hesitate to make it small, either, just a scene of vignette. In Marty O'Brian's words, "A good story is like good sex. A marathon is great, but sometimes a quickie can be just as nice."
As a word of advice, you may find it useful to have the entire story written and then post the story bit-by-bit or, if short enough, in one message. This way you don't get caught with getting swamped by other work and then have people hanging for you to post the next segment, or, worse yet, getting attacked by writer's block.
"In other series, which have more or less generated spontaneously out of one basic story (like the Circe Treatment Stuff), just try to keep the other mentioned characters intact, and follow more-or-less logically (or not, if you're good). I think contradictions are to be expected, and I do not think, that this is necessarily a bad thing. If both Visions are interesting and well-written (as most TSA-TALK material is) they are both valid.
For instance, I originally wanted to explore how a not-so-nice society would deal with the possibility of transformation. It went very much elsewhere, but I like the stories and thus, I don't have any bad feelings about this.
"And in spontaneous send-up and revenge series, which we had in the Bob/Jack-war or in the summer series, anything goes. (Period) Everybody is expected to wriggle himself out of any situation other people put him in."
These aren't list rules, but they certainly are common courtesy. You can break them and get away with it. Still, if you do you have a good chance that you'll screw up how you present someone, or the character they put so much thought into. This justifies that person declaring the story non-canon, no matter how closely you follow the rules of that universe.
What follows aren't rules, they are suggestions. Nearly every author would like their story read by the largest number of people, but certain things many authors do when writing their stories create technical problems that make their stories difficult to read on others' computers. This section of the FAQ, newly written by former FAQ maintainer Radioactive Loner, hopes to aid people in avoiding those technical problems.
From the Word Processor to E-Mail: Dumbing Down Your Characters
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As long as it needs to tell the tale. Stories have been posted to the list of novel length; don't hesitate to make it long.
"Adult story content doesn't bother me at all," writes our listowner. "As a working model, I propose that a story with heavier sexual content should be marked 'adult' somewhere in the subject, and those who don't want it can delete it unread."
In a reply to an altercation about continuity that formed over a Summer Series story, Thomas posted, "There are personal series [...] If you want to write an addition to that, ask the main author for guidance. (If you write a send-up, anything goes.)" [Thomas doesn't mention the FAQ because at the time he wrote this, it did not exist.]
Here's a few general guidelines for doing this:
