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Lately the approvers have noticed a few bad habits coming through with fic submissions. So, I'd like to take a moment to reiterate what needs to happen before submitting a fic and what can happen once we look at it.
1) Please review the rules/guidelines on the home page for what is and isn't allowed to be submitted. We've gotten a few fic-lets that don't even begin to qualify for the 400 word minimum. If you're submitting that short of a fic/chapter, it might be best to wait until it can be combined with another fic/chapter.
2) Proper punctuation, grammar, spelling, etc. This is a biggie in my book. We're running into a lot of fics that have things like:
"I told her to sit down." He said loudly.
It should read:
"I told her to sit down," he said loudly.
If you have more than one person talking, each person gets their own paragraph. Even if some obscure rule says it's okay to have two people talking in one paragraph, it's easier for the readers to have them separated. So please do so.
Also, do more than a spell check before submitting. Often words that are technically correct, aren't the words you were looking for. Things like "they're" versus "their" can make all the difference to what you're trying to convey.
3) Spacing.
Some people like to write using html coding for paragraph breaks. If you do this AND type like you would in any word processing program, our fanfic program thinks of them as extra line breaks and we get way too much space between paragraphs.
On the other hand, there are a few submissions that are coming through without any space between paragraphs. That's just as difficult to read as the too much.
Before hitting submit, please hit the preview button and see what the fic looks like. It's a simple and very helpful thing to do.
Now a little about the approval process.
We aren't betas. We don't read every word of every fic/chapter that gets submitted. I can only speak on what *I* do, but I believe it's pretty close to what the others do too.
1) I scan for formatting issues. Is there too little or too much space between paragraphs? Are there unnatural (i.e. forced) line breaks as if someone were using a typewriter instead of a word processor?
2) I scan for dialogue issues. This, for me, is a biggie. It's a simple fix and something that as readers and writers, should be ingrained into our brains. Commas, quotation marks, capital letters, etc. There are a number of helpful websites if you need them.
Blue Book of Grammar
Owl Handouts: Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
Grammar Wench
3) I scan for big typos and misspellings, primarily character names.
If I find any of these issues to be a problem, i.e. more than one example of any or all, then I send a 'no letter' that states some of the problems and request the author fix the specifics and review the rest of their work before resubmitting. Then the fic/chapter gets deleted from the approval queue.
Yep, that's right, we delete whatever gets rejected so that when the fic is fixed, there isn't an issue with inadvertently approving the wrong version. This means that if you get a no letter, we can't send you what you wrote. You should be saving your stories on your hard drive or a thumb drive or a disk of some kind. This prevents authors from having to re-create from scratch whatever they wrote directly into the submission system, plus it allows the authors to keep clean copies in case the site blows up as it has done in the past.
For anyone that's gotten a 'no letter', please understand, it doesn't mean we hated the fic or that you're an awful writer. It just means that you have a little work to be done before it meets our basic standards of approval. Make the fixes, review the rest of your story and then resubmit. If you have a beta, ask them to help out. If you don't have a beta, get one. They'll be the best thing you've done as a writer.
I know that with 4 or 5 of us doing the approving, not every approval will be identical. What I ask for in fixes may not be a huge deal for the next approver, but we are trying to resolve these inconsistencies among ourselves. So please make the changes the approver asks for, don't just resubmit and hope that someone else gets to your story before the original rejecter does.
'kay? Good. Keep on writing. :D
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