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First submission rejected, looking for editor

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SexyTermiteStack

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Joined
Jun 17, 2018
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5
My first submission was rejected due to spelling and punctuation or formatting errors. I think. The rejection message is quite vague.

I rarely use spellcheckers, they're not good at switching between languages. The built in one in the forum, that's checking this as I type it, is confused because this isnt dutch, so it's just flagging 90% of what I type. There might be some accidental switching between US English and UK English.

As for the formatting or punctuation, I've got no idea. It would help if the rejection message said which paragraph or paragraphs have problems.

The rejection message said to have a volunteer editor look at it, so here we are.

It's a fairly vanilla husband wife story, nothing fancy.
 
Suggest you post a few more details about the story in order to get a response. What genre, how many words, stuff like that. Some won’t touch certain categories, and some won’t want to help if it’s too big.
 
SexyTermiteStack said:
My first submission was rejected due to spelling and punctuation or formatting errors. I think. The rejection message is quite vague.

I rarely use spellcheckers, they're not good at switching between languages. The built in one in the forum, that's checking this as I type it, is confused because this isnt dutch, so it's just flagging 90% of what I type. There might be some accidental switching between US English and UK English.

As for the formatting or punctuation, I've got no idea. It would help if the rejection message said which paragraph or paragraphs have problems.

The rejection message said to have a volunteer editor look at it, so here we are.

It's a fairly vanilla husband wife story, nothing fancy.
Click to expand...

What exactly did the rejection message say?
 
electricblue66 said:
Sounds like the default grammar/spelling/formatting rejection note.

OP - it's a generic, standardised response. You won't get anything specific to your story.
Click to expand...

It would be nice if it quoted the first two or three words of a problematic alinea, so you know where to look. Then it's easier to figure out what's wrong and I'd have an idea what needs fixing in the rest of the story. Especially for the formatting.

It's 2113 words according to openoffice. Story is, as I said before, simple husband wife stuff, nothing that would scare anyone away. It might not float your particular boat but that's not what an editor is for.
 
Here's the problem with rejections without hints: there are only 4 editors volunteering this month to work with writers according to this thread - http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1480365

One of them only wants to work with fantasy stories. One of them has a decent sized list of categories they won't touch and another category they prefer not to work with. That leaves two editors and one of them is working with ten stories, so I understand that they're not willing to work with more writers at the moment.

If writers don't know who to turn to, they're going to need a hint when rejections happen. We are the unpaid content generators for a website that makes money from ads. I think we deserve a little rope.
 
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PenLightStories said:
Here's the problem with rejections without hints: there are only 4 editors volunteering this month to work with writers according to this thread - http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1480365

One of them only wants to work with fantasy stories. One of them has a decent sized list of categories they won't touch and another category they prefer not to work with. That leaves two editors and one of them is working with ten stories, so I understand that they're not willing to work with more writers at the moment.

If writers don't know who to turn to, they're going to need a hint when rejections happen. We are the unpaid content generators for a website that makes money from ads. I think we deserve a little rope.
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You're expecting too much from the site, and too little of yourself. I know this doesn't sound very nice, so I'm sorry, but Laurel isn't here to teach you how to write.
 
PenLightStories said:
Here's the problem with rejections without hints: there are only 4 editors volunteering this month to work with writers according to this thread - http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1480365
Click to expand...

This is not the site's program of volunteer editors--it's not the system the site rejection notices are guiding authors to. The URL you cite is a fix some site users have stepped up to because authors trying to use the site's volunteer editor program are having trouble getting any responses. There is a site volunteer program that an author can try if they have patience and have a history of winning lotteries. Even though there are only a few registering to give help on the URL you provide, though, that's unfortunately the best bet here for getting help. It's not really their fault that their support is limited.
 
Penlight, there are many more editors around than are listed on that thread. I have edited 2 stories in the last week.
 
NotWise said:
You're expecting too much from the site, and too little of yourself. I know this doesn't sound very nice, so I'm sorry, but Laurel isn't here to teach you how to write.
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It's not that difficult to paste in the first three words of an example of a problematic alinea in the rejection notice. Nobody is asking for handholding.
 
SexyTermiteStack said:
It's not that difficult to paste in the first three words of an example of a problematic alinea in the rejection notice. Nobody is asking for handholding.
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It is when you are the lone admissions editor on the site, reviewing 100 or more daily submissions, 365 days a year.
 
KeithD said:
It is when you are the lone admissions editor on the site, reviewing 100 or more daily submissions, 365 days a year.
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So, he/she opens it, reads it till he/she sees something that makes it unsuitable for submission. Then clicks the 'rejection' button, pastes in the standard rejection, pastes in the two categories that the story failed at, then presses send.

How is pasting in three more words the straw that breaks the camels back?
 
SexyTermiteStack said:
So, he/she opens it, reads it till he/she sees something that makes it unsuitable for submission. Then clicks the 'rejection' button, pastes in the standard rejection, pastes in the two categories that the story failed at, then presses send.

How is pasting in three more words the straw that breaks the camels back?
Click to expand...

You seem to be having trouble comprehending how hard it is for one person (it's a woman here) to process through something in the excess of 100 submissions every day of the year. Perhaps you need to send a check to help make a deeper look into your own submission over everyone else's possible.

I think the real issue is in calling it a rejection when it's only been looked at deep enough to suspect there might be something wrong with it. I think the new author's control panel may use better language to indicate that there may be a problem and for you to either confirm there isn't or rewrite to get rid of a problem. The only other practical fix is to somehow limit the number of submissions coming in every day of the year.

Or, of course you could submit somewhere else that will service your wants better. That might involve you needing to send a check.
 
KeithD said:
You seem to be having trouble comprehending how hard it is for one person (it's a woman here) to process through something in the excess of 100 submissions every day of the year. Perhaps you need to send a check to help make a deeper look into your own submission over everyone else's possible.

I think the real issue is in calling it a rejection when it's only been looked at deep enough to suspect there might be something wrong with it. I think the new author's control panel may use better language to indicate that there may be a problem and for you to either confirm there isn't or rewrite to get rid of a problem. The only other practical fix is to somehow limit the number of submissions coming in every day of the year.

Or, of course you could submit somewhere else that will service your wants better. That might involve you needing to send a check.
Click to expand...

Could you expand on that and enlighten us?
 
SexyTermiteStack said:
How is pasting in three more words the straw that breaks the camels back?
Click to expand...

"Three more words" is usually not adequate to explain the problem, and probably would move a lot of authors to argue. Laurel's been doing this daily for twenty years. By now she has to know how little information she needs to give and how much becomes counter productive.
 
I'm back off vacation and have cleared most of my editing backlog and can take on a couple more stories if necessary.
 
SexyTermiteStack said:
My first submission was rejected due to spelling and punctuation or formatting errors. I think. The rejection message is quite vague.

I rarely use spellcheckers, they're not good at switching between languages.
Click to expand...

MS Word does it pretty well. Select text, then Tools -> Language and choose the language you want it to use for spell-checking. You can set different parts of one document as different languages; I've been using this for something that has side-by-side German with English translation.

The built in one in the forum, that's checking this as I type it, is confused because this isnt dutch, so it's just flagging 90% of what I type.
Click to expand...

I don't think the forum has a built-in spell-checker, and if it did, there's no reason why it'd expect Dutch. That's most likely your browser, not the forum.
 
Bramblethorn said:
I don't think the forum has a built-in spell-checker, and if it did, there's no reason why it'd expect Dutch. That's most likely your browser, not the forum.
Click to expand...

There is a spellchecker on forum posts. It just highlighted "spellchecker." It sometimes insists that I use British spellings, despite not being very close to the UK, geographically or historically, then sometimes it doesn't. Right now it thinks that "favour" is misspelled. Other times it thinks that "flavor" is misspelled.

I doubt that has anything to do with Lit, since the forum uses third party software.
 
I've sent to someone for review, it was mostly a lot of ...nt instead of ...n't and the dialogue layout.

The spellchecker here is probably browser related and because the installation is in Dutch, it's checking for Dutch spelling. English is my second language. Technically third.

I looked around in the settings for openoffice and turned the spellchecker on. Spelling should be good now. Found one or two that the spellchecker didnt see too.

The dialogue layout will take time to fix.

And a thank you to all three people who messaged me, offering to review the story.
edit: and a tiny moment of silence for my email account, who choked on it's own attempt at being secure and locked me (the only user) out.
 
Just in case this is it....

When I first started I got a lot off those rejections too. Turned out when I was copy and pasting things in from word, or not using 2 returns in word, the lit site would read it all as one GIANT paragraph.

Once I went in and fixed the returns and kept one line of dialogue to one paragraph everything started going through just fine.

Hope that helps!
 
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