"How to Fight a God in Three Easy Lessons"

[shivver]

Title: "How to Fight a God in Three Easy Lessons"
Fandom(s): Doctor Who
Characters: The TARDIS, Fourteenth Doctor, Donna Noble
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Genre: General
Word Count: 1585

Summary: The TARDIS' uninvited passenger is waking, and the Doctor isn't prepared.

Read it on AO3.

Author's Notes: Two fics this month (so far)! Though the last one really doesn't count and I didn't even post it here.

Basically, my husband and I had a lot of questions about how things went down during the 60th and the last season, and after coming up with answers that satisfied us (i.e. a dual headcanon), I decided that writing a story about them would be more fun and interesting than discussing them in a meta post.

I wrote the story, then my husband reviewed it, offered suggestions, and worked with me to shore it up. While 98% of the words and the overall shape and progress of the story is mine, I definitely want to credit him here because he definitely made important contributions. He's done some proofreading on my stories before, but this time, his contribution was much more substantial.

Also, I got to practice some CSS here, something I haven't done in nearly a decade. I have no idea how I'm going to post this to Teaspoon, as they have only very basic formatting options.

Comments

[romanajo123]

I looked up what CSS is. So it’s like HTML?

[shivver]

It's like HTML in that it accomplishes the same thing - makes the webpage look the way it does - but it does it very differently.

So in my story, you know how the TARDIS speech is on a gray background and uses a different font (Courier New)? In HTML, to do that, you'd enclose each piece of speech in tags that would say to make the background gray and use Courier New. It's just like you've been doing with italics, putting your phrase in those "<i>" tags.

But now, let's say you decide you want to change it so that the background is blue instead of gray? Now you have to go change every single instance of the TARDIS speech to blue. Yikes.

In CSS, that stuff is all removed and put in a different file, and your main text just references it. So, I'd put in the CSS file something that says, "The TARDIS speech is called 'tardistalk' and should have a gray background and use Courier New", and then in my main story file, I mark each instance of TARDIS speech with the name 'tardistalk'.

Then, when the story is displayed to you, the webpage sees 'tardistalk', looks it up in the CSS file, and knows to display it on a gray background with Courier New.

And, if I decide to change the background to blue, I just change the CSS file to say that, and the webpage adjusts automatically. I don't have to go changing every instance of speech.

So, CSS is more complicated to set up, but is more powerful (it can do a lot more than just format text) and easier to maintain.