And now, a word from our sponsor ...

[bubosquared]

Or archivist, as the case may be. I've been working on revamping and updating the RS-X archive, and ARGH! My eyes! Okay, so you've written a story. Good for you. You wanna post it to a list, and submit it to the list archive. Great, that's what they're there for. However, a few things to keep in mind about formatting:

For the love of all that is holy, people, please use paragraphs. Praragraphs are your friends. Learn them, use them, love them. And use blank lines in between them instead of single line breaks and indents. First of all, that looks really shitty in email, and secondly, I use a macro to code the stories, and it turns these kind of stories into one big paragraph unless I put extra work in it. Make my life, and that of your readers, easier, and just don't.

Save your story as a text file, then cut and paste into the body of an email. Do not, I repeat not use attachments. Ever, at all. They just get discarded on RS-X, anyway. Don't c&p from a word document, becuase a lot of us have our email clients set to convert things to pure text, and that screws up both the formatting and things like "smart quotes", and all we see is a bunch of gibberish. The same goes for HTML email. Not only does it come out looking like crap on my end, it's also a lot bigger than a pure text email of the same size. Be mindful of other people's bandwith.

And on a non-formatting note, if your story starts with "[He] sobbed into his pillow," you will not only decimate your reader base, but you'll also make your archivist recoil in horror and have to wash her brain out with Lysol.

Please, I beg of you, have some mercy, here.

Comments

[katemonkey.livejournal.com]

word.

as a fellow archivist.

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I think we need a support group. Or a big punchbag to take things out on.

forgive the (stupid) question, but...

[shihadchick.livejournal.com]

what exactly do you mean by a 'blank' line? Like... a line where you just space across the enter way instead of doing a carriage return, or what? ... I ask because I've been trying to get something to actually have some semblance of line breaks and no matter what I do, I end up with One Giant Paragraph. And it's been driving me MAD, so... yeah.

(well aware sound like total non-computer savvy person. no longer care. *proudly wears dunces cap* ;) )

Re: forgive the (stupid) question, but...

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Like hitting "enter" twice. Like this:

:) what program are you using? I can prolly help.

Re: forgive the (stupid) question, but...

[shihadchick.livejournal.com]

*sobs* that's what I was doing!! ... ah, it's only (*insert multiple curses*) ffn; I've been trying to upload something, if I have in html, despite looking FINE in explorer/netscape/whatever, it turns into One Giant Paragraph, whereas if I leave it in text, my line breaks miraculously reappear, but (natually) my italics get eaten. I'd given up, but I saw this and thought, "well, maybe there's something that I've never known about that I could do different" that might help, but... spose not. I have a funny feeling it's probably due to ffn being a pain in the ARSE, anyway. but thanks for the offer, Melle.

Re: forgive the (stupid) question, but...

[bubosquared.livejournal.com]

Hm. Wanna send me the html file you're trying to upload? I can have a look at it and see what's wrong. minerva@femgeeks.net :)