Formatting Your Stories

[alyse]

Stories are starting to trickle in now (yay! for people who are early ::g::) and we've already had some questions, so I thought it would be a good time to clarify what we need in terms of formatting, meta information in headers etc. to make our lives that much easier.

Meta Information

For your headers, please include the following information:

Title:
Author: -- we'll take it out and put in Santa for posting but we need the field to update when the reveal happens
Recipient: -- important
Pairing: -- please give all pairing info or, if it's gen, just say 'gen' here. If it's 'gen but if you squint it could be shippy' then put that here (with the pairing) as well and we'll list the story in the masterlist under both
Rating:
Disclaimer:
Author's Notes: -- not essential unless you want to include them. If you want to keep some information back, for example beta readers who may give away who you are before the reveal, please note that.
Summary:

Any other notes are optional although I'm bound to have forgotten something important ::g::

Story Length

As you all know, for this exchange your story should be at least 1,000 words long but there is no upper limit. Not even the sky ::g::

However, LJ disagrees - it has a maximum post length of a certain number of characters, which translates into around about 11,500 words, depending on how many big words you like to use.

So in terms of posting, if stories are two to three LJ posts long (so up to around 33,000 words) we tend post to LJ in parts and then edit all of those posts put in all of the hyperlinks. However, once you get longer than 3 parts it gets to be a huge pain, especially if there are a lot of long stories and we have to post loads of stories a day and my brain slowly dies with the linking and the editing and the editing and the linking. So, if it's been longer than that, we've whacked it up on my webspace and linked to it from the community.

We're doing the same this year, so if you would like to make our lives tremendously easier, please:

- check the length of your story. If it's around 11,000 words or more, please make sure it fits into one LJ post (perhaps by posting it privately to your LJ)

- if it doesn't fit into one post, please decide where you would like to split it and either send it to us in two parts or clearly mark where you would like the split to happen. If you leave it to us, we could put it somewhere you don't want ::g:: And by clearly, I mean 'Al's scrolling through the text file and can see it like, right there, in flashing neon or at least with lots of white space because she is occasionally slow on the uptake'

- if it needs splitting more than once, please indicate each split

- if it needs splitting more than twice, forget about the splitting just send it to us as one file, formatted for LJ, and we'll worry about the formatting for webpage thing.

Formatting

I've had some questions along the lines of 'what do you mean by formatting for LJ?' I'm going to shamelessly crib from the answer I sent ::g::

All 'formatted for LJ' means is that the file is more or less plain text (just typing) and that you use html tags for any special formatting like bold (<b>bold</b> or <strong>bold</strong>), italics (<i>italics</i>) or to emphasise words (<em>emphasise</em>). You also use code for people's LJ names (<lj user="alyse"> for example) or community names (<lj comm="sga_santa">) rather than getting LJ to do that for you when you post.

So what we mean by 'formatted for LJ' is 'send us a plain text document, with any fancy schmancy formatting you want already coded up in html'. If you send us a document with the formatting just in the document, with no html coding, it gets posted as plain text and you will, unfortunately, lose any formatting you want.

Please do not use < or > to indicate telepathy or asides or thoughts or anything else unless you know how to use the html character codes for those symbols. That's because that's the symbol that browsers use to let them know that an instruction is coming on how to present the information, and you will lose anything between those two symbols as browsers will interpret it as a note, not something to show.

Please also be aware of the smart quotes issue in Word, which doesn't render well in html. If you're having any problems, I'd advise saving your file in plain text, without line breaks and allowing character substitution if necessary. If that sounds like goobledegook to you, then just send us the Word document, coded up with those markers, and we'll save as plain text before we post anyway :)

File Types

Which brings me to the last point - what file types can we accept.

Between the two of us, we can handle the following formats:

- plain text (*.txt) - this is by far and away our preferred option
- Word docs (*.doc)
- open office format (*.odt)
- by giving us access to your file on googledocs

What we cannot handle is *.docx files. That's a Word 2007 and above proprietary format, and I only have Word 2003 (entirely legally, I may add! Hence no need to pay extra money for features I'm not interested in and I really don't want to mess about with installing add ons to let me read files you can easily save in another format).

Sorry if that sounds cranky, but while I use Word, I'm kind of tired of their whole 'trying to take over the world thing' they've got going on and my hoop jumping is reserved for official carnival days ::g::

Any questions?

Comments

[x-varda-x.livejournal.com]

That's wonderful! Thanks :D

Pictures?

[(Anonymous)]

Are we allowed to include pictures? I drew some art for my fic which I would like to share. Not to imbed it in the story or have the actual picture on screen or anything, but as a URL link to the pic in an author's note at the end maybe?

Thanks!

Re: Pictures?

[alyse]

Yep, just send them to us with the story and an indication of where in the story you want it to go and I'll upload it to my LJ scrapbook so that the URL doesn't give the author away :) And it's perfectly permissible to have it in the story as well - we've done that before :)

Re: Pictures?

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks! I was wondering about that, cos my ID is very obvious in the URLs...

My pics are NSFW, so I would prefer just having the links, but I'll give you all the info when I submit :)

[snowglow1275.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry, I've never done any formatting before. Just checking, the word I want to italicize goes between the and ? And this will all be translated when you post it to LJ? Also, my story will have to be in two posts so when I send it in plain text format would it be better to leave a huge blank space than try to say 'please break here' in bold? Sorry if this seems ignorant but I am a complete dunce when it comes to these things.

[alyse]

Just checking, the word I want to italicize goes between the and ?

Yes ::g:: Which is why the tags disappeared in your comment and the 'and' became italics.

White space would be better for me, as it's more clearly seen than a single comment in bold when you're scrolling down the document, looking for where you copy to and from.

[snowglow1275.livejournal.com]

*facepalm* Thanks.

[alyse]

::g:: I suspect I'll overtake you in the number of facepalm moments before the fest is over.

[dossier.livejournal.com]

thanks for this, I was just preparing to go digging around in last year's posts!

[(Anonymous)]

How many stories can we submit? I wrote one, but then got a bunny for another one, which I'll also have finished before deadline. Can I submit them both for my recipient?

(choosing to remain anonymous in case recipient sees..)

[alyse]

You have to submit one but other than that, there's no upper limit. We've had some lucky recipients get more than one story from their assigned author in the past :)

[taste-is-sweet.livejournal.com]

Just want to thank you for this. :D I'm so excited about seeing all the stories! Of course, at the moment I'm even more excited about actually finishing mine. That'd be really, really nice.

But I will get it done come hell or high water. ::salutes::

[starry-haze.livejournal.com]

Hello! I hope this isn't a silly question. Do you want us to use <br> for line breaks, or do we only need to do all the HTML formatting besides line breaks? Thanks in advance! =)

[alyse]

There's no need to put in br tags. When we say 'format for LJ' we really do just mean 'format it like you would if you were posting it to LJ yourself' :)

[linziday.livejournal.com]

Sorry, this is stupid and I know others have also tried to clarify, but I want to make sure I have it right.

So let's say I want to italicize the word Rodney. So I would write Rodney

?

[linziday.livejournal.com]

Oh! It did it. Okay, then. Question answered. :D

[gottalovev.livejournal.com]

hi! I usually work with googledocs and all of my document is LJ ready in it with the coding and all... but I know how fussy it can be when we save into word and .txt so I did tests.

I cut/pasted from googledocs to a private LJ entry and all is FINE. I downloaded the file to my computer in .txt and it changed all of the < brakets by << so when I did a test again, no dice. gah. I have Microsoft Word 2002, would that do if I send a .doc? or do you want access to the googledoc file?

*pulls hairs*

[alyse]

It's worked and I've got it all coded up :)

[alyse]

Hi there.

LJ isn't sending notifications at the moment, but I've got your mail and done as you've asked, and I'm going to screen this comment so it doesn't give away who you are :)

[(Anonymous)]

Very thrilled about your answer above regarding the fic!

:)

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, also: how about .rtf? Sorry; I'm occasionally slow.

[alyse]

We can handle rtf if needed.

[theeverdream.livejournal.com]

Are we allowed to thank our betas by name?

[alyse]

If you want to hold any information back after the reveal then just let us know, but there's no obligation to keep the names of your betas back. It's really only if you think that they'll give away who you are.

[theeverdream.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info :):)