davewriter

What is everyone's secret to posting longer works of fiction, non-fiction, etc., into the Submit section of this site for acceptance or rejection of publication?

I've had a lot of short stories and novels on hand (and on disk) for quite some time, so what I do is select the disk which contains the work I want to submit, boot it up in Microsoft Word, select the whole story/novel chapter from my document, right click and select "Copy." Sometimes I do this twice, three or even four times, to make sure it is copied. Then I come here and click on the trusty "submission box", right click and hit "Paste." It all shows up in there instantly.

Then I go through and separate paragraphs with a line (a must-do to make it readable on here,) then I use the original Word document as my guide to find which words to italicise, boldface or underline, so that my submission matches the original the best it can.

However, when I was posting my novel "Hollie Springwood" here, I, more often than not, had to edit my original and apply it to the submission, to make the chapter longer, or most often, to edit out unnecessary cliches I may have overlooked.

Now that I've shared my secret, let me hear from all of you. I'm just dying to know what you do. Thanks.

TimK

I open my document in OpenOffice.org Writer in one window, and I open gedit in another. (I do all my work on a Linux box.) I copy from OOWriter and paste into gedit. Then in gedit I replace all occurences of a single newline with two newlines (for double-spacing between paragraphs). I search in OOWriter for emphasized (i.e., underlined) pieces and put around them on the gedit side. Finally, I copy from gedit into the bulletin board. (I use the same procedure for any BB.)

One of these days, I'll write a script to convert automatically from OOWriter XML to BBCode. (All my documents are in standard manuscript format and use stylesheets.) But as it turns out, there's so little emphasized text in my documents, it hasn't yet been worth it.

-TimK