Story formatting guide. You can send me stories in any which format, I can usually cope. But if you want to help me the most, you'll send them in the format that I will have to convert them to if they aren't in that format. The format I need is plain ascii text with line breaks (also called "text with line breaks" or MS Dos text with line breaks). The lines should be 79 characters per line or less (that's how wide some terminals are). 72 or 75 characters per line would be better. If you're using Word, then Save-As filename.txt and make the "Save File as Type" have the format "Text with Line Breaks". Don't try to control the layout and format of the text; the browser will ignore what you want anyway. To check what you've done, load it into your browser. If it doesn't look OK to you, it won't look OK to anyone else either! The first three lines The first three lines are used to control how the story is displayed in the Library or Bookshelf. Line 1 is the story title. Lower case looks a lot better than capital letters. Something like: A tale of two cities or Sense and sensibility Line 2 is the by line. You can also put an email address here if you like. By Jane Doe, Jane.Doe@gandalf.net Line 3 is a summary of the story, and it's what I'll use as a teaser, so people can decide whether they want to download and read the story. I realise it's hard to describe a story in one line, but if you don't do it, I will. Don't do it on two lines, the software I did to make the menus, only looks at that third line for the teaser. If you're doing HTML, then make the first three lines look like this: That's because browsers will ignore what's there, but Sandra will still pick it up. Accented characters Many languages need characters that aren't in the lower 128 character set. How should that be done? Well, it's very simple. The file will be displayed by browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer, so if it looks OK in those, then it's OK, and if it doesn't look OK in those, then it isn't OK. So make a few trials before you start; make some little files and see how your browser displays them. Grammar Writing with good grammar makes it easier to read. If your grammar and spelling is too bad, readers simply won't be able to understand what you're saying. ftp://ftp.asstr.org/pub/Interesting_Reading/Celestial_Grammar.txt ftp://ftp.asstr.org/pub/Interesting_Reading/Advanced_Celestial_Grammar.txt How to send things to me If you go to http://www.thevalkyrie.com/members/upload.htm you'll see a whole bunch of ways, including email it to me.