Enough to make a girl go crazy…
Today I came across a link to a post by Nayad Monroe, a slushreader at Clarkesworld Magazine about submissions to the magazine. It’s an excellent post and contains a lot of really good information about how to properly submit your manuscript for submission which, as the slushreader pointed out, should be common sense by now. As Clarkesworld is one of my favorite magazines, I will definitely be using this post to guide my future submissions. Everything this woman says to do, I will do because you should always follow the guidelines of a magazine.
This is where the driving me crazy part comes in.
When I was working for the Crab Orchard Review I also handled hundreds of submissions and read as a first reader for many of them. I cannot recall a *single* short story that was submitted in New Courier. My best guess for this is that because literary journals deal with poetry and fiction, and since poetry looks really wonky when printed up in Courier, Times New Roman became the preference. Regardless, I far, far, far prefer the way Times New Roman looks–for poetry and fiction–and thus I tend to submit everything in that font. I understand the advantages to Courier: as a monospaced font it’s easier to spot errors, but I also don’t want to be the single New Couriered story when I submit to the Missouri Review. The easy thing to do of course is to just change the font when submitting to the different types of magazines, and here’s where the second crazy moment comes in.
Neoffice is the devil. At first it just liked to italicize huge chunks of text for no reason. They fixed that bug, so now instead of italics, I have paragraphs of all caps. Or a page of gibberish. I have discovered that the best way to circumvent this issue is to save in Neoffice, open the file in Textedit, and save again. However since the problems usually arise when the file is subsequently opened in Microsoft Word, posts like these from editors to whom I have submitted recently, start to make me paranoid. What if the problems aren’t fixed. What if this post is written specifically to me, the weird girl who uses Times New Roman, all caps, gibberish, and italics just to annoy editors?
Speaking of editors, Ms. Monroe requests that cover letters be addressed to the editor by name. Here’s where I tend to disagree. I know that Clarkesworld has slushreaders and I don’t know which one will inevitably be reading my story. As she points out, listing everyone by name is awkward, and so I tend to opt for the generic “Dear Editors”. This habit also stems from submissions to literary magazines since half the time you don’t know who the editor is because the website is out of date. Nothing like submitting to an editor by name only to discover a few weeks later that the person in question doesn’t work at that university anymore.
Anyway, despite my neuroticism, I do love when editors post things like this because I do really care about what each editor’s personal preferences are. If Ms. Monroe wants me to address everything to Mr. Clarke or to flying, prancing, magic pony, I’ll do it. I know it doesn’t really make a difference in the decision making process because the story is everything, but I don’t want to be the person whose cover letter and/or submission is read aloud to others in an office somewhere as the best example of what *not* to do.
…Not that I know of any readers who have ever done that…