Hi!
I was checking some of your fics in this link https:// www.trickster(.)org/speranza/stories(.)html and next to the titles there is a number like for example Eight Sessions (270K) -my favorite dS fic ever- and I was wondering what is the number? I thought it was the number of words but I didn't remember that fic being so long so I checked ao3 and yeah it says 34,432 words. Then, I checked other fics' word count in both pages and at least some of them don't match. What is that number then?
LOL - I love this question, even though it makes me feel OLD AS DIRT.
In the olden times of the dial up internet, the number you put next to a story was NOT the word count but the FILE SIZE - it was 240k in size, this is to say, a quarter of a mb--and this told the reader how long it would take to LOAD in your BROWSER. Now of course 240k is not very much, but understand me when I say that my first computer/word processor was an Atari 130, which had as its total system memory, 130k!! (Which was double my dad's computer, which was an Atari 65, which had--yes--65k total memory!)
Anyway Eight Sessions was written in--hm, looks it up, May 2002! Which means that only 20% of people had broadband internet at that time - so 80% would have had dialup and have to get the story through a modem. I posted the story to the F/K email list in parts, and then when it was only you wanted to make sure people knew how big it was so that they could anticipate the loading.
I didn't even have a LJ yet in May 2002--I caved and got one in December of 2002. Yikes!
