[Fic] "Trollstuck," chapter 5 -- Homestuck

The final version of Trollstuck, chapter 5, complete with illustration, is now up on AO3! It would have been up a couple days ago but I have had a shitty week -- we are ridiculously short-staffed at the smoke shop since both RE and PB left, and PM still hasn't so much as called any of the job applicants in for an interview because aside from one guy who was kind of ehhh, they have uniformly sucked -- and fighting MS Paint to get any sort of usable result is, shall we say, a challenge.

I really need a better art program. (Speaking of which, anyone have any advice on that front? Cheap and simple is best, since I will not be using it as a regular thing once I'm done with this story. Or failing special programs, even advice on a stylus and pad or whatever would be nice because half the trouble I have with MS Paint is that a mouse is really not anything like a pencil. (The other half is pixel compression issues. God, why can't a black line and a white background stay a black line and a white background? Why must they blur and fragment into scraggy grays every time I save or open a file?? WHY???))

Anyway, I'll probably start chapter 6 on Sunday, once I know whose POV I'll be writing. :-)

wherein Liz is a scientific editor (or at least a low-rent facsimile thereof)

What I have spent my day doing: taking biographical sketches in the form of responses to a set of questions and playing cut-and-paste until they are in the form of an actual encyclopedia article, with all the small grammatical changes that entails. Plus editing for typos, adjusting paragraph lengths so the articles are not WALL OF TEXT, and gently correcting weird usages from writers whose native language is not English. The idea is to keep as much of the original writer's work as possible intact, so I am merely an editor and not a full-fledged co-writer.

That is easier with some submissions than others.

...

At least I will eventually get paid for this?

(This work is for my dad's encyclopedia of mass spectrometry, incidentally. I really ought to have done these last weekend but as I said in my last post, I have had a shitty week and today is the first time I've had the right combination of physical and mental spoons to tackle this job. *sigh* I have such terribly first world problems, you know?)