Chroniwat (Patreon)

One thing I struggle with is how to format conversations. First you have the narrative version.

"I don't think that at all!" he said. Martin considered it and replied "I was certain all along. Wait... does that mean you didn't move the clothed?"

It often works well, but not when you get into rapid exchanges like

- Clothes?
- My gym cloths?
- Why would I move your gym clothes?
- Well, someone did. If not you, then who?

This all falls apart when you have more than two parties, then you need to do the narrative version or prefix each line with a name (bleh!). But the bullet list style doesn't work when you sometimes want to add additional text. Like if someone says something, wait a bit and then say something. If it is just pauses ellipsis can work

- I have no idea... Who else has a key?
- Only us... or?

So as part of my experiments I wanted to make a mobile phone styled conversation. That could both serve to show which side said what, show passage of time by breaking up text into multiple messages, but also allow for images to be inserted into the conversation. So I worked on trying to get any of the tumblr HTML/CSS to work, but after a ton of experiments the closest I got was some simple styling that only showed up if you read the story on my blog as a stand alone web page.

Unfortunately there isn't anything but the most primitive formatting available on Patreon at the moment, so I don't see any new formatting coming to the rescue.