NFE 2013 Submission guidelines
1) Your story must be beta-read. One typo will not set off an alarm, but an unbetaed story riddled with typos and errors will be returned to you, and you will need to have it beta-read and corrected before submitting it to us.
2) You should email your story to us at narniaficexchange@gmail.com. The email subject should be “Your user name’s Submission” (for example, mine would be Snacky’s Submission)
This is the header you should use on your story:
Title:
Author: (your livejournal username - it will be removed before posting by the mods)
Rating:
Content/Warnings:
Summary:
Author’s Notes: (not mandatory, you can leave this out if you don’t have notes)
Original Prompt that we sent you: (just a note - this part will be moved when it's posted)
Do not bold any other part of the header. All of the information you fill in should not be bolded.
3) Your story should be tagged for Livejournal posting before you send it to us. This means all formatting, including bold, italics, centering, etc. You can find information on coding on Livejournal here.
If your story does not need tagging, you should note that in your email submission. Do not use Word’s bold/italic/center/etc function - this will not translate to LJ. If you do not create the tags, the mods will not create them for you.
4) Do not submit your story using tabs and no returns between the paragraphs. Your story should not look like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed tempor risus a erat malesuada sed laoreet mauris pellentesque. Phasellus dolor arcu, volutpat eu facilisis vel, lobortis vel dui. Nulla ut nibh sit amet lacus pellentesque tempus. In feugiat, eros ac congue posuere, felis mauris imperdiet metus, at vulputate sapien ante euismod nisl. Morbi lobortis hendrerit justo ac dapibus. Etiam at nibh metus. Morbi id vestibulum odio. Nullam faucibus vulputate nisl sed gravida. Vivamus sit amet elit dui, egestas molestie metus. Nulla a ornare orci. Nam nisi nisl, vehicula et imperdiet quis, accumsan tincidunt ipsum. Nunc scelerisque vulputate leo, vitae scelerisque elit semper sed. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec molestie rutrum est ac tristique. Sed aliquet, dolor a rhoncus pulvinar, justo nisl cursus magna.
Praesent sed nibh at odio elementum rutrum semper et nisi. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Phasellus interdum erat quis mi egestas mattis. Maecenas ut vehicula neque. Fusce sit amet nulla odio, eu convallis lectus. Suspendisse dolor felis, sollicitudin eget congue a, rutrum sit amet nulla. Etiam tristique scelerisque eros, sed scelerisque erat lobortis a. Curabitur arcu magna, sollicitudin ac auctor eu, auctor sed est. Suspendisse aliquet semper nisl eget faucibus. Vivamus eleifend egestas libero, at aliquet erat sagittis ut. Nunc ornare pharetra velit, vitae pellentesque odio placerat id.
No break between paragraphs and, as you can see, the tabs disappear if you don't hard code them in! Plus, the formatting used to create this often does not work with LJ, and it comes out as one solid wall of text, or with breaks in odd places.
Instead, your story should look like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed tempor risus a erat malesuada sed laoreet mauris pellentesque. Phasellus dolor arcu, volutpat eu facilisis vel, lobortis vel dui. Nulla ut nibh sit amet lacus pellentesque tempus. In feugiat, eros ac congue posuere, felis mauris imperdiet metus, at vulputate sapien ante euismod nisl. Morbi lobortis hendrerit justo ac dapibus. Etiam at nibh metus. Morbi id vestibulum odio. Nullam faucibus vulputate nisl sed gravida. Vivamus sit amet elit dui, egestas molestie metus. Nulla a ornare orci. Nam nisi nisl, vehicula et imperdiet quis, accumsan tincidunt ipsum. Nunc scelerisque vulputate leo, vitae scelerisque elit semper sed. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Donec molestie rutrum est ac tristique. Sed aliquet, dolor a rhoncus pulvinar, justo nisl cursus magna.
Praesent sed nibh at odio elementum rutrum semper et nisi. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Phasellus interdum erat quis mi egestas mattis. Maecenas ut vehicula neque. Fusce sit amet nulla odio, eu convallis lectus. Suspendisse dolor felis, sollicitudin eget congue a, rutrum sit amet nulla. Etiam tristique scelerisque eros, sed scelerisque erat lobortis a. Curabitur arcu magna, sollicitudin ac auctor eu, auctor sed est. Suspendisse aliquet semper nisl eget faucibus. Vivamus eleifend egestas libero, at aliquet erat sagittis ut. Nunc ornare pharetra velit, vitae pellentesque odio placerat id.
No tabs, and breaks between the paragraphs. If you test post your story to LJ, and you do not have breaks between the paragraphs, see below for how to get these.
We understand that people consider the tabs and paragraph breaks a stylistic choice, and many choose to write using the first example and not the second. That's fine. However, for this exchange, you must format your story using the second example as your guide. If you choose to submit your story like the first example, and the formatting does not work in LJ, the mods will not fix it for you and will post the story as submitted.
5) You can submit your story to us as Word doc, or docx, or a text doc. If you submit in either doc or docx format, you must first do a test post to your LJ to make sure the story is correctly formatted before sending it to us. If you do not have a LJ, and cannot do a test post, you should submit your story as a text doc. If you have problems, email the mods and we will help.
The reason we are asking you to do a test post before submitting is because Word does some weird things with formatting - for example, we often receive stories in which Word does not format the paragraph breaks correctly. It looks fine in Word, but when copied and pasted into LJ for posting, there are no paragraph breaks and it all comes out as one big paragraph. Unfortunately the mods don’t have time to fix multiple stories’ formatting, so we’d like the stories to be correctly formatted before you send to us.
If you find you have the paragraph break problem, you can fix it with a find and replace all. Here is how you do it:
If you have other issues with formatting, feel free to ask the mods. We will do our best to help. If the problem persists, it would probably be best to submit your story as a plain text doc.
6) If your story is over 10k words, it will not fit in one LJ post. If it is up to 3 parts/chapters, just send it as one document, with chapter/part breaks clearly indicated in the document.
If it is longer than 3 parts/chapters, please send it to us in multiple parts, clearly labeled as such. For example, “Story Title, chapter/part 1”, “Story Title, chapter/part 2”, and so on.
If your story is longer than 3 parts/chapters and you do not send it in multiple parts, the mods will post it at the Dreamwidth mirror comm, as one long story, or we will break it into parts at our discretion.
7) If you write your story in Word or another word processing program, make sure to turn off Smart Quotes - that is, the curly quotes as opposed to the straight ones. When posted to LJ, the smart quotes come across as gibberish characters (as do apostrophes, em dashes, etc).
8) If you submit a story to us that is formatted incorrectly, we will return it to you for fixing. You are responsible for making sure your story is in a readable format.
We know this all sounds like a lot! But thank you so much for doing the formatting. It will make posting go much smoother, and ensure that your story is formatted in the way you prefer.