Question about story submission

[YummyTiger]

Hello, not really sure where to ask this question. I am sure most of the volunteer editors would know since they have submitted stories, so I hope you don't mind me posting here. I am attempting to submit my first story as a txt file. When I click view on the submission page it displays my story but displays it like this:

I awoke to the brain curdling ring of my doorbell and the first thing to pop into
my mind was, ‘That had best not be a fucking solicitor!’ I considered bringing my
baseball bat with me as I stumbled to the door. The moron continued to ring
the buzzer
and I yanked the door open, ready to unleash devastation. The sight of Taylor
standing
beside a bunch of boxes left me slack-jawed.

Instead of this:

I awoke to the brain curdling ring of my doorbell and the first thing to pop into
my mind was, ‘That had best not be a fucking solicitor!’ I considered bringing my
baseball bat with me as I stumbled to the door. The moron continued to ring the buzzer
and I yanked the door open, ready to unleash devastation. The sight of Taylor standing
beside a bunch of boxes left me slack-jawed.

It adds some wierd line breaks. It looks fine in the upload panel and also when I copied and pasted to this post (I added those broken line breaks to show you what I meant). I am wondering if it is just because the view submission area is narrower? Has anyone else noticed this? I wanted to verify that it would look normal again before I submitted.

Thanks for your help!

 

[meg1]

if it doesn't look right, i wouldn't submit it.

have you tried copy/paste directly into the submission window? that's really the safest, since you get to preview.....i normally do .txt submission, but i don't get a preview of my story.

 

[YummyTiger]

I tried pasting it into the submission window and it looked fine there, just not once I hit preview.

 

[chargergirl]

if it doesn't look right, i wouldn't submit it.

have you tried copy/paste directly into the submission window? that's really the safest, since you get to preview.....i normally do .txt submission, but i don't get a preview of my story.

that's strange, Meg. Every time I submit .txt I'm always able to preview. Weirdness.... and I wholeheartedly agree. Don't submit if it looks funky.

I've never had it come up looking odd like that, either. I've also gone the copy/paste route.

 

[meg1]

I've never submited except on this Vista computer and I've always thought that had something to do with it.

pm Laurel and tell her the proble you are having, or pm her the link to this site. That way if nothing else, she will be able to keep a look out for it and check formatting before posting. She really does work with submitters, so don't be afraid.

 

[freshface]

Did you write the story in NotePad or WordPad? Sometimes they do unexpected things with line breaks that might be carried over. If it is in NotePad, you might try highlighting the whole story and then choosing Word Wrap from the Format menu.

Weird Harold is the resident expert on computer related strangeness on this site. He might be able to offer a better solution if you ask him.

As a longer term solution, OpenOffice is a free, open source program with a Word equivelent. Pasting it into a word processor might make it easier to fix the formatting problem. I agree that you should fix it before submitting it.

Good luck.

 

[evanslily]

That looks to me as though you wrote it in Word and then pasted it straight across. As freshface says, sometimes some odd line breaks can turn up that way.

What I do--and this probably seems very long winded, but it works--is to cut and past my Word document into Notepad without Word wrap being on. And then I cut and paste my Notepad document into the box on the submissions page. I'm sure there are easier ways, but that's something that works for me.

 

[AsylumSeeker]

Hello, not really sure where to ask this question. I am sure most of the volunteer editors would know since they have submitted stories, so I hope you don't mind me posting here. I am attempting to submit my first story as a txt file. When I click view on the submission page it displays my story but displays it like this:

I awoke to the brain curdling ring of my doorbell and the first thing to pop into
my mind was, ‘That had best not be a fucking solicitor!’ I considered bringing my
baseball bat with me as I stumbled to the door. The moron continued to ring
the buzzer
and I yanked the door open, ready to unleash devastation. The sight of Taylor
standing
beside a bunch of boxes left me slack-jawed.

Instead of this:

I awoke to the brain curdling ring of my doorbell and the first thing to pop into
my mind was, ‘That had best not be a fucking solicitor!’ I considered bringing my
baseball bat with me as I stumbled to the door. The moron continued to ring the buzzer
and I yanked the door open, ready to unleash devastation. The sight of Taylor standing
beside a bunch of boxes left me slack-jawed.

It adds some wierd line breaks. It looks fine in the upload panel and also when I copied and pasted to this post (I added those broken line breaks to show you what I meant). I am wondering if it is just because the view submission area is narrower? Has anyone else noticed this? I wanted to verify that it would look normal again before I submitted.

Thanks for your help!

Paste it into a PM to me along with an email address to return it to. I work with a writer where there are really weird events like this in his stories that I have to fight with, but I'll do it for you <wink>. I'm in a good mood. Based on when I get it I'll return it quickly, if you are so inclined. Other than that I can offer no tips.

 

[YummyTiger]

Thanks for everyone's help, I got it to work (I think). Originally, I wrote the story in Word and then saved it as a txt file. I then tried uploading that file and pasting from that file. Based on the comments here, I tried to simply copy and paste from the word document and it appears to have worked fine. The problem must have been the line breaks Word put in when I saved it to txt.

Anyways, thanks again!