Author Guide

A sentence in inverted commas ends with a comma if it is followed by a speech tag or attribute - he said or she said or Jane remarked for example.

Well you may have problems with the commas but that's our standard and the way we will be (and have been) loading and validating items so if people want their submissions loaded in a timely manner I'd recommend doing it as per our suggestions. Besides, these aren't legal documents, the vast majority of which are tortuous to read, so the argument you make is irrelevant.

Februs,
I think you just answered my Contact Us submission too. If you want me to resubmit, please advise.

Wow! I've been dealing with editors and publishers for the past year. This does help with authors who aren't familiar with every aspect of writing. I'd like to offer a few of my own that I've learned over the years.

When writing dialogue for a character who might be old world, don't use a mix of contractions and regular words.

"I have been on this earth for quite some time, young man."
I've been on this earth for quite some time, young man."

Pick one for this character and stick to it.

When someone is shouting a question, it's quite all right to use !? at the end of the sentence.

"What the hell are you talking about, John!? I never said that!"

The M hyphen:

This is used when the following word will be 'with force.' In MS-Word it's like this:

"I never saw them coming it was so—damn dark."

This would sound like: DAMN dark.

It can also be used when someone is cut off by another person.

"I never saw them coming it was so—"

"Oh, don't give me that bunk!" Maggie snapped."

You have to hit two "" and delete the first one for that one.

This doesn't show up in LSF as it does in MS-Word, it shows as a single, but evidently flopsy and Februs know what I'm doing with it and leave it there.

The three periods . . . and the four periods ....

Someone may pause for a moment when speaking like this:

"I really liked her, but when she . . . I just didn't' think it was right."

Someone may just quite speaking:

"I really liked her, but when she...."

"It's okay, I understand."

A person thinking in a story:

I don't know what the heck this is, Ian thought to himself.
Well, who else would he be thinking to but himself? Ian thought, should end it.
Also, no quotes when a person is in thought.

Writing for the LSF has done me a world of good. My short stories for any anthologies I submit to have been given high marks. Lord knows I'm far from a Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but I've made my name known throughout many parts of the world. If writers follow the guidelines set in LSF's author guide, you can't go wrong. I'm not trying to butter anyone up either. It's very true.

There is a right way to do this and a wrong way. Arguing with the LSF administrators isn't the way to go. I have two published novels and many short stories in anthologies. How I write here, and how I write elsewhere is basically the same. When all else fails, follow directions. I was told that in a most embarrassing way by a literary agent.

B

You have to bear in mind that whatever gets submitted to us is going to be loaded to the server as a plain text file. On top of that the text is ultimately going to be displayed through a web browser which needs to know in advance which character set is being used and subsequently won't display any characters which aren't part of the set. What this means is that items such as em-dashes or anything else which isn't represented within plain text isn't going to survive conversion. We do automatically convert some of these such as the em-dash (I believe into 2 hyphens) but others will simply get discarded.

Ellipses with spaces in between or consisting of more than 4 full stops/periods both get converted to three dots with any spaces removed (see section on layout & formatting)

I believe Word uses a pre-composed triple-dot glyph rather than 3 full stops/periods but those get automatically converted during the loading process.

Please expound?

Feel free to expound, but please do it in private via popup message instead of taking this thread off topic any further.

Parts of the guide simply shows the correct use of English and other parts indicate the standards we have adopted for the LSF.

... which SHOULD be adopted as the standards for the correct use of English. If it's good enough for the LSF, it should be good enough for the English-speaking (-writing?) world.

Flopsy and Februs, didn't mean to step on anyone's toes and, believe me, I wasn't complaining. I just wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem LOL.....

B