April Submission Blitz – Reformatting Fun

There’s sarcasm to that title. I really do prefer venues that request the standard format for submissions. Otherwise, I can sometimes spend a half hour or more completely reorganizing a manuscript to match unusual formatting demands (like I did today and yesterday). I’ll do this with shorter stories but with longer ones, it has to be a very tempting call for submissions for me to bother making the effort. Consistency is a lovely thing.

I’m amazed what some venues will ask for when they are offering little to no compensation. There are demands that really make me scratch my head. One publisher looking for submissions and offering a token payment mentioned in their guidelines that they expected submissions to be polished and print-ready, stressing that if they noted any spelling or grammatical errors, they would not review the submission for inclusion in the anthology. This, when the prior sentence in their guidelines contained a glaring grammatical error. It’s no surprise they want the stories to come in thoroughly edited. Apparently they don’t hold themselves to the same standards as submitting writers.

*Sigh* – I spent all day finishing up my taxes and it has left me cranky. Hopefully, I’ll be in a better mood for tomorrow’s submission.