Frustration

"Still my guitar gently weeps..."
--The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Alright, I know I already posted about this once, but the situation has now deteriorated to the point of making me quite exasperated, so I'm posting again.

This summer the World of Warcraft website began accepting submissions for the online publication of WoW based short stories. This seemed like a great opportunity to me, especially as I had a pretty good idea of what I might want to do with one, so I jumped on it and started writing.

Now, after a whole summer spent working on this short story (not exclusively or intensively mind you, but still a lot of time put in) I'm having to scrap it completely because the submission directions were unclear.

I posted previously that rather than a 7500 word short story they wanted a 7500 character one. That was a mistake on my part, and rather frustrating overall, but I managed to break my story up into four parts that worked pretty coherently and I felt like the submission still would have been good.

Then this weekend I finally went to submit it and discovered that for some reason, the 7500 character limit was also wrong. They're only accepting submissions of up to 3000 characters.

After struggling with their online submission system for awhile trying to figure out why it wasn't working as advertised, I finally gave up. Splitting my story up into 3000 character chunks would mean it would be in 8 parts, and frankly, it's just not that divisible.

If anyone's curious, this blog post is over 2200 characters. I'm pretty sure that 3000 characters is not a short story, it's a short-short story. Boo to Blizzard and their confusing guidelines.

The moral of the story, I guess, is to be careful about submitting to unknown markets, even if they seem like they should be well-managed. Even large corporate entities may fall pretty flat when venturing into unknown territory, and you should be aware of that.

Personally, I like the story I wrote and I'm happy I wrote it. I may try to find another venue to share it on (there are plenty of WoW sites that accept fanfic) because I think it's pretty good, so it's not as if my work was wasted.

But I'm still frustrated as hell.

%*!(*@ Blizzard....