What makes our Editors happy?

[Uncle Bob]

Cranking up my first story in over ten years; then, it dawned on me. What style of Paragraph punctuation will make the editors happy? Indent 3 spaces or a half inch tab? Forget indention and line skip?

After such a long time for myself, I figured this would be a good noobie question.

Maybe a guideline from the submissions department?

[Anna]

I'm not planning to be an editor, but I WILL be the publisher and the one doing the layout - so I guess this is mine to answer.

My preference is for there to be no indentation and a line skipped between paragraphs. This makes it ever so much easier when layout is prepared.

To make it easier for everyone all around, make sure that italics and bold text are used where you want them, and not surrounded by special characters like _underscoring_, *asterisks*, or #number signs#. If stories are saved and submitted in .rtf format, then almost everyone's word processing program can read them and the formatting will be retained.

[Uncle Bob]

To continue in this vein -

What do you want in the way of indicating a dragons speech in the rider's mind? ::This?:: This? or what?

[Anna]

Italics.

And likewise for speech from the rider to the dragon when the rider isn't speaking out loud.

[Chantal]

Uncle Bob et al--For speech between rider and dragon, I want italics.

Basically, when you send a story to me, text should be formatted exactly as it would be in a novel you buy in a store. So that means no :: ::, no _word_, no ~word~ or anything like that. Generally, the only special formatting you will see in novels is italics.

If you want to clarify whether the rider is thinking to his dragon or vice-versa, use an attribution, such as: It's cold out, today, Jerith complained to T'ran.

In professionally published books, no one ever uses special characters, and I don't see any reason why we should need to, either. Besides, italics is so much easier to remember than all those formatting symbols. (g)

And saving the stories as .rtf is an excellent way to go. I'm all for it. *busily starts writing up submission guidelines*

[Thom]

Should we use italics for other forms of communication as well, such as dolphins speaking to dolphineers (without going into the mechanics of it), or sign language?

[Anna]

This timeline has the telepathic dolphins, so yes - italics for that. As for sign language... I would prefer that it be portrayed as normal dialogue, with the lead-ins making it clear that it's not verbalization.

[Hope]

I'd like to add that the thing that would make me happiest would be getting story submissions sooner rather than later. One of the coolest parts of editing is getting to read the stories first!!!