Oops

Quote of the Day: "Shake shake, shake shake-a shake it."
--Metro Station, Shake It

Just a quick post today, about paying attention to guidelines. As some of you may know I've been working on a World of Warcraft themed short story for a contest they're running. Unfortunately, I made a very big, very rookie mistake. I didn't read the instructions correctly.

They have a length restriction for submissions...makes sense, right? Otherwise who knows what sort of massive stories people would send them. It says 3000-7000 characters. So I, used to having my length restrictions come in words, assumed it said words. Just skipped right over that "characters" part, and wrote a solid story of about 4100 words. Then when I went to submit it it wouldn't fit in the little online box they have, and I discovered my mistake.

If anyone is curious, my story is 22000 characters. Oops.

That's not a cuttable amount of material. I thought briefly about going through and axing just about everything in there except for the one brief initial scene it was built around, but then I realized I'd have a crappy story. And a crappy story is just as likely to get published as one three times as long as it's supposed to be.

So I've settled on breaking it into parts and submitting them separately (the European website says this is okay, and the U.S. one is mum about it, so hey...maybe they'll still read it) in the spirit of my mantra: "Write good fiction and the rest will come."

The moral of the story is read instructions carefully, especially when dealing with a market you're not used to, because you never know when someone will do something crazy like put their length limits in characters instead of words.