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06/30/2003: a bit of grouching...
I enjoy reading WIPs, and I have no special prerequisites for reading them, like regular or frequent updates, or that the installments are "chapter-like" and not just the random breaks based on how much was written at a time, however I really like it when authors make it easy to find the previous installments, especially when they post in their LJ or a blog without search function. Of course many authors do this, for example they link to all previous parts in their latest post (which I find the most convenient), they use the LJ memory function, or they have an extra journal for their WIP, however some do nothing like that. And if you read that writer's blog/journal regularly and started to do so before the first post of that WIP it's not a problem, however several times now I've seen a WIP mentioned, with just a link to the LJ it's posted in, and it was really difficult to find the parts, sometimes not even the subject lines indicated that the post contained an update, and more often than not I just gave up.
I mean, I assume if authors post their WIPs they'd like to have an audience, so why make it so hard to find the parts? Surely they don't expect that everybody interested in their WIPs already reads their journal regularly. I'll even go through the subjects of all posts in the last months, but if a WIP started months ago, and not all posts containing parts have a subject line with the WIP title, and they aren't linked or indexed either, I don't get that, how am I supposed to catch up with it? No matter how interesting the WIP sounded to me when someone talked about it, I won't spend more than maybe 15 minutes trying to track down the parts in a LJ or blog.
On a less grouchy note, I enjoyed reading Joyfulgirl's Smallville AU WIP "The Road Not Taken" (its premise is "what if Lex had been raised by his mother and Pamela"), which I only found yesterday thanks to mecurtin's list of WIPs and Joyfulgirl really makes it easy to find all previous parts through links in the most recent one posted to her LJ.
