extrapenguin | (no subject)

When doing

china_shop's title meme,

tinny commented on her temp titles and how she kept some of them. Now, I LOL'd at that when imagining my own temp titles – I only really scramble for a title at the last minute, so before that, the only title is the filename. And those tend to be quite literal. angstproposal, swtempdeath, twinroleswap, etc. Sometimes there's prefixes to categorize the things together: yz-hallowstheft, fsfeb-yqzh-geese, bal-lqsy-electricity. Sometimes the filename does contain something related to the fic concept, but which isn't that prominent in the actual finished product: goldencoreloss. Stuff for exchanges has its own folder and its own hyphenation scheme: 520-qwerty-space, Rainbow-green-enviropony-Guardian, songflash-Zdenka-JiangCheng, WBEX-2020_Guardian, YT-2018_Guardian-naphyla. (The naming scheme isn't consistent between exchanges, but is consistent within the exchange.)

As for the system, well, it works – when browsing the folder for the fandom, I can tell that e.g. namemagic and heisenberg-power are WIPs I've put aside for lack of knowing how to continue them. But most of the filenames aren't suitable as fic titles. The closest I've come is spaceshiprental, but that wasn't that apt for the actual fic, and then there's stuff like hallowsbutt. And bonus points if anyone can figure out what the fic whose filename "script" was is called!

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"hallowsbutt"? Is that what it sounds like?

The fic is Passion's Wide and Shoreless Sea, or, "Don't touch the Hallows, touch my butt instead, Yunlan!" Did that match what you imagined it sounding like? :P

Not quite, but that's really cute! Thank you for sharing.

My temp titles are soooo boring! Looking over them they are generally the main character(s) (thyra.odt, jeannemary.odt) or the fandom (brandy.odt, black coffee.odt) but I do have one that is what eventually became (the basis of) the SUMMARY rather than the title (walk out of a bar.odt) and a few general fic ideas the way you do.

Nothing wrong with boring, as long as they're refindable! I generally go with fic idea rather than main character, since I do write more than one fic per main character in a fandom.

My draft file names are very boring. It's either [name of fest] [year] or [names of main characters].

Nothing wrong with boring, as long as you can find it later!

My file names are usually boring and description (SW & Fourth Uncle v3.doc, SW sort of kink thing.doc) or the title of the fic if I know that in advance, but one time I called a file "like dating a brick wall" and Trobadora liked it much better than the actual fic title, so I used it instead.

(I archive files for finished fic, so having file names like "SW sort of kink thing" doesn't get confusing unless I have too many WIPs.)

Nothing wrong with boring! And archiving finished fic sounds like a very good idea. Maybe I should start doing that, too...

Well, that's because I keep everything in one big gdoc, so no filenames there. Just single-word titles. :D I only save to separate local files once I finish them.

I mean, if I had filenames, they would look *exactly* like yours. Being an old nerd has taught me to make filenames short, lowercase, and categorizable (i.e. starting with pairing abbreviation). Those titles you list here look very good to me. :D

And bonus points if anyone can figure out what the fic whose filename "script" was is called!

The one with the old-script Haixing soulmate name on his arm?

I keep everything in one big gdoc
*quiet screaming* ...yeah, I couldn't. Either the "everything on gdocs" or "everything in one file" :P

The one with the old-script Haixing soulmate name on his arm?
Exactly! The WIP sequel to that is called, very creatively, script2.

I wont go into it, since this is a public post, and I've already said too much.

But part of it is that I'm lazy. :)