I know, I know!

Who really wants another post from BitterEpiphany swooning over a piece of software that the site is running? Well, you probably don't, but I promise it will save you time (as well as me) and it's worth a read through.

A few days ago, my good friend MadameSnape and I borrowed Rita's Quick Quotes Quill and spent several hours penning the most relevant and detailed explainations we could think of for each and every rejection reason and we're hoping it helps.

If you are so inclined to take a quick visit to the sites Troubleshooter, you will find a new one called My Chapter Was Rejected. Clicking through will take you to a page asking you if you have read your validator note or not - now you may think it's not necessary but, trust me, it is. From there, you get a list of all of the possible rejection reasons and, match the validator note to the one on the list.

If, for example, your chapter was rejected for a formatting issue, you'll find this:

The big one :)

This violation plaugues nearly 50% of the chapters submitted on any given day and, odds are, one of your chapters has probably been rejected for a formatting issue before.

The first, and most common formatting issue is not abiding by proper spacing. If you are looking for a reference of what a properly formatted story looks like, you will find several chapters posted by the staff in an effort to explain various aspects of the Terms of Service under the penname "Staff." These stories are all spaced and separated in a TOS compliant manner.

As a general rule, paragraphs and character speech should be separated by two strokes of the Enter key and, if you wish to create a page break, instead of using symbols like this:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

...use a handy bit of HTML called a "horizontal rule" - a straight horizontal line that stretches fully across a page and adjusts to templates, screen resolutions, and other viewing settings to ensure that your page break will not stretch the page out in the way a character string (shown above) would be inclined to do. The horizontal rule is shown below and you can call it up simply by entering the following in your chapter:

<hr>

---

Lastly, the less common formatting issues. Some authors, particularly those using programs like WordPad, may find that their text is compressed to a thin column with unusually large returns between these short lines of text - almost as though the entry were double spaced.

Now, I know, this wasn't quite as fun or embarassing as nightmares about validating, but nevertheless, it's important :)