Went back to some of my oldest drafts the other day and they almost poked my eyes out with that Classic Manuscript Format of theirs.* Brutal assault on my best instincts for appealing visual style.
I’d done as the experts advised when I started to write stories for submission to online magazines, and made myself a nice little template following all the rules.
Then I found that each site had its own rules. None of them suited mine. Many of them seemed like editorial examples of “power corrupts,” so they could enjoy a bit of harassment before they got to sneer at your offering.
One space after punctuation, please irked me the most.
Now I must expend some of my precious creative energies on restoring all my previously-published work to my preferences of form before I can even start working on revisions, if needed, to the prose. You need to understand my toxic relationship with Microsoft Word to fully appreciate the trauma.
This is why Substack greatly sootheth my soul. My own parlor, and I get to pick the chintz on the sofa. You get to judge the meal.
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I've given up trying to get anything written that suits me. Formatting is so far down my list I never think about it.
I'm not a stickler, but I do appreciate some attention to protocol: mainly because it just grates having to wade through poorly formatted text: I spent my entire professional career tidying up documents for public consumption - and actually earned a lot of money and a decent index-linked final salary pension turning sloppiness into sense:
SORRY!