![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
- Mon, 20:53: Spent the weekend... http://t.co/ZoEILFcCZy
Sep. 2nd, 2014
Time for another rant on formatting!
Sep. 2nd, 2014 02:13 pmI really wish all the editors and publishers would get together and decide what Standard Manuscript Format actually is. At this point, I'm just thrilled that they all agree that one-inch margins are the way to go.
Everything else is in flux. Some places want italics, while others have stuck with underlines. One space after a period, or two? RTF, DOC, or plain text? Headers, no headers, page number in the footer? Single hashtag as a scene break, or three, or asterisks? Times New Roman, Courier, Palatino, Garamond? Single spaced with a space between paragraphs or double spacing throughout?
And why the hell does it matter in the damn slushpile? Hell, some of these places only pay five bucks, and they want me to go in and do all this fiddly formatting to satisfy them? Ha. No. I'm pretty sure I can put it up on Amazon and get more than that.
You know what? Accept the thing, and I'll format it in Wingdings, if you friggin' like. But I've got six different versions of some of my stories sitting in their respective folders, and it's getting old. It seems like every time I send it someplace new, I have to format it yet again. Rather than spending my time writing, I'm spending it being an unpaid typesetter for a story I don't even know if they'll accept (and probably won't, odds being what they are). And then I sit here and rant about it to all of you, because screaming at my child for something not his fault is not cool.
Everything else is in flux. Some places want italics, while others have stuck with underlines. One space after a period, or two? RTF, DOC, or plain text? Headers, no headers, page number in the footer? Single hashtag as a scene break, or three, or asterisks? Times New Roman, Courier, Palatino, Garamond? Single spaced with a space between paragraphs or double spacing throughout?
And why the hell does it matter in the damn slushpile? Hell, some of these places only pay five bucks, and they want me to go in and do all this fiddly formatting to satisfy them? Ha. No. I'm pretty sure I can put it up on Amazon and get more than that.
You know what? Accept the thing, and I'll format it in Wingdings, if you friggin' like. But I've got six different versions of some of my stories sitting in their respective folders, and it's getting old. It seems like every time I send it someplace new, I have to format it yet again. Rather than spending my time writing, I'm spending it being an unpaid typesetter for a story I don't even know if they'll accept (and probably won't, odds being what they are). And then I sit here and rant about it to all of you, because screaming at my child for something not his fault is not cool.
