A word on manuscript format

[tehdux0r]

Everyone has their preferences on how they like to write all of their drafts. Some like to use fancy word processors like Microsoft Word so they can use it for planning and outlining as well as writing; I personally like Scrivener for Mac OSX because of the extra features. Some prefer simpler programs like Wordpad or Textedit, just so they can get

Comments

[silvermask]

I found a dux0r!

[tehdux0r]

And that is how you are snuck upon by a silvermask!

[entropius]

What surprised me the most about this is that halfway through reading your description, I realized that you are, yes, in fact talking about physical pieces of paper rather than an electronic format.

Do you know what LaTeX is? It's a typesetting format used almost everywhere in the sciences (because you can typeset math with it), but it's powerful and flexible enough for pretty much any other use ever. It's sort of html-like, in that it's not WYSIWYG: you dump your text, along with some instructions on what to do with your text -- into a file, and then compile it to make a shiny document.

But the key idea is that the stuff in a LaTeX file is descriptive, not prescriptive: rather than saying "Make this in 24-point font at the top of a new page, in bold", you go "\chapter{The Mirror of Galadriel}". Instead of putting a running head on it, you do "\author{Duck Rogers}" and "\title{Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Glabrezus}" at the top. Either the base LaTeX language, or a style file you use, knows what this means and does the Right Thing

[tehdux0r]

I feel a little sheepish in not pointing out that I was talking about the physical medium of manuscript. For literary magazines, electronic submissions are accepted as well as hard-copy, but it all depends on the publisher and the publication format