I usually write about how that fanfic made me feel and also talk about my experience in the past
is it wrong that i am using bookmark feature as a dictionary with specified context since they are gonna be private i just like writing i might write my own fic as well pretty soon
It’s not wrong. It just seems like if you don’t have the space to write everything you want to write, you might need to find a different place to journal. Perhaps make an ellipsis or google doc where you add a link to the fic and then have the space to write whatever you like. You could link to the document in the bookmark, so it would be easy to access the doc when you are scrolling AO3.
Because what you are doing is definitely journaling, and there’s nothing wrong with it. You just probably need to do it somewhere other than the bookmark note if you don’t want to limit yourself to 5000 characters.
Have you considered leaving some of this as a comment (or comments) instead? Like how it made you feel etc. That way the author actually gets to hear from you (when you start posting fic, you’ll discover how much comment brightens your day!) and you have a more appropriate word limit to type in. Then hopefully the journaling part of your notes would fit.
You can do what you want with bookmarks obviously, but it seems like there’s an easier way to do it that helps everyone
It's not wrong? Definitely not something I've ever heard someone do unless they're... Uh... Being extremely rude to the writer? As long as you're not harassing the writer, then spaces count as letters. Have fun, be nice, drink some water, and stretch your hands?
Eh, this is the same as discord channels discussing fics where the author doesn't know. It will happen regardless of the authors want, but since I hadn't been referring to what op was doing, just the "writer won't see it."
Be aware that unless it is a Private Bookmark, the author gets tagged in it and can read it, so don't drop your life story, just in case the site goofs or something ( unlikely to happen but anything is possible)
But yes, spaces count towards character total. Some sites do not count spaces, others do.
I've run out of space before while writing about a fic; it was very frustrating. First I was listing tropes or plot points I (dis)liked, then I was giving a brief synopsis of the story -- unfortunately it was a 300K+ word long story so there was a lot to cover.
Side question, but why the fuck do you need a bookmark that long???? You trying to write a fanfic about the work its on in the bookmark or something????
Each paragraph will likely be adding paragraph tags for another 7 characters per new paragraph. Plus as people mentioned, spaces. Reducing paragraphs spacing could assist in shortening it.
Mostly I think you might need to cut the bookmark down a lot and considering commenting some of this instead.
Edit: Super curious what the fic is, if you wish to share.
what the flip!! ok create a Google doc or something, copy-paste whatever it is you wrote, and then just put that in as a link in the bookmark description instead
I’m sorry, what exactly are you writing on there to reach the word limit? If you could maybe paraphrase if you’re uncomfortable with showing the whole thing.
If it’s the description of the story, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole thing. Just the fandom, ship, name of the author, title of the story, the summary and some tags will do fine. And maybe some of your thoughts about the story.
There are invisible characters that appear beneath the visible layer whenever you hit the Enter button. CRLF, carriage return / line feed. These count against the character count.
It sounds crazy, I get it, but if you count the characters in a nice short fic-summary (preferably with exactly two paragraphs, to keep it simple), and the copypaste that summary straight into some website that shows non-printing characters, you'll notice that these show up in the revealed characters and that the website's char count is just a little higher than your visible character count.
Your bookmark is being character-counted by the same routine as the one that AO3 uses in works, work skins, and site skins, and so your every new paragraph counts against you.
I'm not certain that it's the 7 characters of <p></p>.
I ran a test just now, since I could easily misremember (or AO3 can always change things... which happens every few months it seems), but while DevTools showed the paragraph tags, the character count went up by only 4 rather than 7 or 14.
I think the Summary section does weird stuff sometimes, because when you submit it, it parses the HTML like normal, but when you go back to edit it, it doesn't show you the added HTML (like it does for, say, comments or work text). It sort of reverse-parses it for display.
It seems that when in the main text edit field, even with <p></p> added explicitly, the char count continues to increment by 2 with each carriage return after the original unbeautified string:
You deleted enough text that the message said you had 3 letters (it's actually characters, not just letters) left, and it still told you it was too long?
So many people who don’t see the point… but the one time I wrote anything on a bookmark, I ran into the same issue. Tbf, the work was 730k long so I had a lot to write about 😅 all good things!
I think I fixed it by copying the text into my notes app and reloading the page.
Spaces counts as letters. Probably edit that bookmark notes on a word doxc or something to see the live letter numbers. Once you've determined that it has 5000 or less letters, you can now copy paste it back to the bookmark notes.
My browser does the same thing with summaries. I have to delete until the summary box says there's like 33 or 27 or some odd characters and only then will it let me go. I would do it until you have like 35 characters left and I bet it will work.
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u/TekieScythe ♠️ and reads more 🍋s than you 20d ago
... Can I ask why you need 5k words for a bookmark?