I am currently editing a science fiction anthology.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

And I'm totally astonished at how many do not know proper manuscript format. Oh, dear lord, it's not as though this was established a week ago last Thursday. It's been this way since the typewriter became the standard way of producing a manuscript.

For those of you who might want to submit something somewhere, here's a link to the very best information out there: https://www.shunn.net/format/story/

I'm amazed at how many stories I simply won't look at because they are not formatted correctly. Okay, so I'm not a complete jerk. I do email the author and tell them they need to resubmit after they've formatted properly and send them the link above. What's really astonishing is how many of these people claim to have been published lots of times. Really? I wonder. Larger markets than mine would probably just ignore an improperly formatted submission and they'd never know why.

Other than that, I really love being an editor.

[druidity33]

1. Thanks for that...

I'm currently attempting to configure speech to text on my computer... in the hopes that i can adequately get these ideas out of my head. Typing is difficult for me.

[werdna]

2. Please let us know -

- when it is published; where we can get it.

You say "science fiction", but that covers a lot of ground. Might you be willing to divulge the focus and intent of your endeavors?

[hunter]

3. Word processors come and go. Plain text files are forever.

In high school, and when I started college, we typed everything.

I remember a lot of literal cut-and-paste work. I'd make a copy of my pasted together final draft on the best Xerox machine available so I wouldn't be turning in a document that would fall apart as someone was reading it. Some people with more resources than I had would hire someone to retype their papers.

My mom forced me and my siblings take typing in middle school and she expected us to type our own school work. She bought us our own typewriters when we went off to college.

Then I started writing on a computer terminal using vi. Magic.

After vi all was chaos, with too many competing word processors and computer operating systems. That's how I fell in love with plain text files. Those worked on any respectable computer that hosted a simple text editor.

Now I use Markdown for all my writing. It's easily converted to other document formats and works on any computer text editor.

I've always fancied myself a writer. Alas, I now figure some kind of innate language processing difficulty has always gotten in the way, which explains all the speech therapy I had as a kid and my later difficulties with my university English department, who only granted me my minor with great reluctance, and only because of my persistence.

My true inner voice doesn't speak English. All the other voices in my head do speak English. When I'm in a bad place, off my meds or my meds off me, the voices will become actual hallucinations. Most of these voices are not nice so I ignore all of them them for the sake of my sanity and well being.

Aside from all that, my mom used to be a world-class typist and she sometimes worked as a ghost writer. She could take cardboard boxes full of crap -- scribbled notes, ephemera, cassette tape ramblings, recollections, and interviews -- and turn it all into a polished manuscript ready for the publisher using little more than her favorite pens, stacks of yellow legal pads, and her IBM electric typewriter.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. My daughter is a director in LA

She says you would be astonished at how many people submit scripts in the wrong format or just really badly edited.

When spell check came along, I thought that would be the end of the need for editors......I was so wrong.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

5. I'm not surprised.

Script formatting is MUCH trickier, the little I know about that.

Spell check doesn't catch if you've correctly spelled the wrong word, or written there when it should be their, and so on.

Plus, what would-be self-publishers don't understand is that there is all kinds of different editing, not just correcting the spelling. If you want to self-publish, good for you, but hire an actual professional to look over your work.