Story format and illustrations

[MarlowBunny]

My Earth Day contest entry is set in a real location and includes actual historical events. I think the story stands on its own without that information, but I have pictorial evidence and aerial photography that illustrate the relative positions of things. The setting is very beautiful.

Is it possible or desirable to include pictures along with a story that is not in the "Illustrated" category? Would that annoy readers downloading via modems or something? Is it just pointless?

Also, I sometimes see italic and bold and paragraph indenting. I have submitted some stories in rich text, but they are always plain ASCII when they show up. How do you get formatting through the editors? Should I bother?

 

[sr71plt]

Is it even possible to have illustrations except in that specific category?

I used cut and past from Word into the dialogue box and the <i> / </i> html code and it works fine. Don't know about indents and would like to see what the code is for that if someone knows. I don't use bold in a story--neither do mainstream publishers. But if I did, the <b> / </b> code would work in the simple cut and paste method.

 

[Darkniciad]

It's not unheard of for images to be included in stories outside the illustrated category, but all examples I know of are of things such as graphs and tables.

One thing you have to keep in mind is this, from the FAQ:

- Like all other submissions on Literotica, images must be your original work - i.e. photographs that you yourself took, or paintings or drawings that you yourself created. Please do not submit photos or other images you have found elsewhere.

So, unless you have a plane, or a good friend who does, those aerial shots are probably out of bounds.

In my opinion, scenery images aren't going to enhance your story much. Due to the way Lit formats stories, anything but a very small image is going to take up a whole section of the page, forcing the reader to scroll past it to continue the story. Unless those nature images are absolutely stunning, they're probably going to annoy readers more than anything.