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ENHANCED LOGS
NEW: There are now two kinds of enhanced logs: "enhanced", and "enhanced
with patented Hinder-90". (Don't ask, Hinder-90 is an obscure in-joke
deriving from Mystery Science Theater 3000, episode 520: Radar Secret
Service). Regular Enhanced logs have all the proofreading and formatting
described below, but have NOT had their lines shuffled and rearranged, beyond
the bare minimum (putting lines into their proper scenes when they have
overflowed into the next). Enhanced logs with patented Hinder-90 have the
full treatment: proofreading, formatting AND line shuffling.
The reason for this distinction, is that the line
shuffling is the most difficult part of the enhancing. Correcting typos and
formatting is pretty much mechanical, but line shuffling requires
interpretation to decided which order the lines belong in, especially if
there are several reasonable ways to do it. Rather than hold a completely
proofread log back until I've done the more difficult task of line shuffling
to it, I prefer to make the cleaned up logs available as quickly as possible.
Enhanced logs are ones that I have proofread and edited for increased readability. At this point, all but the most recent logs have been redone this way.
Enhancing the logs involves correcting all typos, fixing punctuation, and formatting them uniformly. It also involves some shuffling of the order of the lines. For example, if someone tries to respond to a line, but due to a flurry of dialogue, the response ends up halfway down the page, I might move the two lines closer to each other to increase clarity. Note that only the actual play itself has been enhanced. I have not gone to the trouble of fixing everything that was said before, after, or during the interval, when such text exists.
Three of these stories: Christmas at Collinwood, Glimpses of Glastonbury, and Seaview Too have not had their lines rearranged. These stories came out rather chaotically, and so enhancing of these 11 logs was been limited to proofreading and formatting. If there is a demand line shuffling on these stories, it may be done at a later date.
Enhancing the logs does NOT involve any rewriting of dialogue. If I did that, it would no longer be a sim log, merely a story based on the log. Except in extremely rare cases, no lines have been added or deleted, even audience comments, which are a part of the story inasmuch as they show how a scene is being reacted to by onlookers.
WHAT IS INVOLVED IN ENHANCING LOGS?
When formatting a log, one of the things I do is to make everyone's dialogue headers look the same. This makes it easier for the eye to spot where the line begins. Everyone has their own way of doing it during the sim, but I change everything as follows: each line of dialogue shows the name of the speaker, in all caps, followed by a colon, two blank spaces, then the actual line (EVEN when the person in question came to the sim in a special screen named after their character). For example:
BARNABAS: I think I'll slip out of these wet things and into a dry martini.
Another thing I do is to clearly separate dialogue and actions. Many people simply use colons to link sections together, but these are a little harder to read, and make it impossible to use a spell checker. I simply change them so that "stage directions" are inside parentheses, and dialogue is not. For example:
JULIA: (swats the DS Fly off her forehead) Where has Angelique hidden the magic transistor?
If a line of dialogue was obviously intended to be thought rather than spoken out loud, may put it into double parentheses, like:
WILLIE: ((Hope Barnabas doesn't notice that we're out of blue candles.))
But usually people use their own stage directions to mention that a line is being thought. For example:
WILLIE: (thinking) Hope Barnabas doesn't notice that we're out of blue candles.
Other changes to the log correcting typos and filling in missing punctuation.
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