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Story Submission

Scope

Any short story, novel, parody or essay set in the Star Trek Universe is adequate, no matter whether it deals with established or with new characters.

Please note that I will not accept the following types of stories: cross-overs of Star Trek and other (science) fiction, out-of-character stories such as "slash fiction" or stories that otherwise don't comply with the philosophy of Star Trek. I will reject material with explicit sexual content and excessive violence at my discretion. I also reserve the right to decline stories that I simply don't like.

I am reluctant to post stories with the notice "to be continued", unless you can promise me for sure that you will be able to finish it. If you are writing a multi-part story, send me as much of it as you consider as final. Send only stuff that you consider as final.

Spelling & grammar

Please check your language before submitting a story. I reserve the right to correct at least the definite errors I find. I will, however, turn down your submission if the story needs guesswork to be rendered understandable. In particular, I don't feel like correcting your errors if you write endless sentences always continuing with "and", if you don't bother to mark speech with quotation marks, if you don't begin names with a capital letter, if you don't use the canon spelling of names, if you vary the spelling of names, or if there are just too many incomprehensible words. Sorry, but I'm not your spell checker.

Regarding my rather unsophisticated English, I'm not in a position to tell you much about proper spelling and grammar. But there are some very common mistakes that are not recognized by the Winword spell checker and can be found in large numbers in almost every story submitted to me. These include confusions of "there/their/they're", "your/you're", "its/it's", "lets/let's", "whose/who's" and more examples along these lines. A peculiarity I have noticed in most works is excessive capitalizing of nouns for which I see no reason (well, unless you're writing in German). Please write "an officer with a phaser" instead of "an Officer with a Phaser". Finally, many authors could use more commas, particularly in speech. It should be "Fire at will, Mr. Worf", not "Fire at will Mr. Worf".

Format & layout

Choosing the correct file format and settings is of utmost importance. I accept only plain text with no line breaks within paragraphs, Winword 6.0/RTF, or HTML without or with global CSS formats. Optionally PDF for screenplays in standard format. In case of text files, you have to make sure that, if you have "word wrap" enabled, the editor doesn't leave permanent line breaks. Otherwise they would mess up the HTML and I would have to remove every single of them manually! For the same reason:

Never embed the story text into your e-mail body!

Always use a proper paragraph break (hit Return to create a "pi" break in Winword or <p></p> in HTML), never a double line break.

Never save a file as HTML in Winword!

I'm not joking when I tell you that in order to clean up an ill- or over-formatted file with extra line breaks or with Winword pseudo-CSS I would need to edit the source code of each single paragraph manually, and there is no way I will do such slave labor.

If you are using Winword, you should save me work and use as few special characters as possible. For instance, there should be only the basic quotation marks and apostrophes/inverted commas, not an opening/left and a different closing/right version thereof. Also, better use separate characters for "..." and "--" just as in this text.

Except for the aforementioned screenplays, all stories will appear in the EAS standard layout. Indicate where you would like to have a horizontal ruler or insert an illustration. I may decide to split the pages if the HTML file size gets too large. You can tell yourself where you would like to have a page break. 150k or 21,000 words is my recommended upper limit, 50k or 7,000 words the lower limit for one page (unless your entire story is shorter than that).

Supplements

Illustrations are welcome, original artwork is preferred. I would like to keep the image sizes moderate and embed them into the text body. I will make all the necessary adjustments if you send me image files.

I would be glad if you could also send me a catch phrase and perhaps a summary.

Legal stuff

Finally, please make sure that you are authorized to have the story posted (for instance, if it is taking part in a contest at the same time, or if you need co-authors or other publishers to agree). Add credits where necessary (a global disclaimer that Star Trek belongs to Paramount is not necessary in my view, but I will include it).

 

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	Last modified: 10 Apr 2012  http://fiction.ex-astris-scientia.org/story_submission.htm