Fan Fiction

Directions for Use of the Fan Fiction Form

You MUST read these instructions.

Failure to follow the directions here will result in your fiction being deleted. Mistakes made because you ignored the rules are your responsibility, and will not be corrected by administration. (Problems arising from bugs in this software, or from unavoidable issues (like a change in ISP) will, of course, be dealt with.)

Author Name:

Fill in your name. The database keys off this value; if you've written more than one story, and you want them all to be listed when someone hits the 'more by this author' link, you have to write/spell it the same every time.

Email:

Again, this is a keyed field in the database. Change your email address, or list a different one from what you listed last time, and your stories will not be listed together. (If your email address changes, and you can no longer access an address you filed earlier stories under, send us a note - we'll fix this.)

Title:

Try not to use unfriendly characters in your titles. (Anything that requires an ampersand (&) to print on the web is 'unfriendly'.)

The filename gets built from your name (first 12 characters) and the current date and time (12 characters). As long as you don't submit more than one story every second, you should be okay.

Series Name:

If the series already exists, you MUST choose it from the popup menu. If it doesn't exist, you can add it to the New Series box. If you choose a series name that already exists, you'll be asked to try again.

Body:

Here is where your story goes. There are a number of things to keep in mind:

  • The maximum size of a POST argument is 32k. That means that if your story is bigger than about 30k (to allow some space for author name, email, title, date, etc), you need to break it up. How and where you do this is up to you. Failure to do this (if it's necessary) will result in a truncated story. (Or possibly no story at all; I can't remember what happens when the field is too big.) 32k is a lot of text; the vast majority of stories are MUCH shorter than that.

  • Any HTML code you add to your story will be stripped out by this form. This is as much to protect the readers from bad coding as it is to protect the server from malicious tampering. This doesn't mean that you have no formatting options, however. We've added pseudocode, similar to what you'd find in a UBB-type forum, to allow some basic formatting. You'll find the full list of options below.

  • The majority of the funky characters that get created by word processors will be converted to web-readable characters... but I might have missed a few. It's your job, as author, to use the preview and make sure that the story looks as you want it to look BEFORE SUBMITTING IT. We will ignore emails that say "oops, my story doesn't look right; can you change this and that and the other?" You will have a preview screen to see exactly what others will see when you post your story; it's your responsibility to actually use it.

  • Line breaks will be inserted automatically. Hit return in your submission, and you'll get a line break in your story. (This means that if you inserted hard returns in the story you wrote BEFORE you submitted it in places that AREN'T the end of lines, those same hard returns will show up in your posted story).

Other Fields:

Your story will be dated (in UTC) at the time you submit it. You have no control over this. There are some other fields that are generated automatically like this... if, by some strange twist, something that you didn't write yourself looks totally wrong, drop us a line; we'll fix it.

Pseudocode:

Here's what's availble to you, formatting-wise:

Italics: To italicize a block of text, place a [i] before it and a [/i] after it.

Bold: To make text bold, place a [b] before it and a [/b] after it.

Paragraph Indent: To indent a paragraph, simply place a [indent] at the start of it. (Do NOT hit return after this code; if you do, the indent will be invisible on the line ABOVE the paragraph.)

Horizontal Rule: To place a horizontal rule in your story, simply place a [hr] on a line by itself in the location you'd like the rule to appear.

Any other questions? Send us some mail; if it's not answered here, or in the Fiction Guidelines, we'll be happy to answer it.

~ You have reached your journey's end ~