Wednesday 1 August 2012

Rules for Writers

Raven reports that she has been receiving some good manuscripts and she plans to spend the weekend looking through them. The problem is that one submission has already had to be rejected because of content. Folks, the rules are very simple: No schoolgirls, or any other character under the age of 18. It's a pity that this has had to be done, as the story was pretty good by all accounts, but the new business is still very small and does not have the resources to fight any legal actions.

To avoid any more problems here are the simple, easy to understand rules of the house:

Any legal theme will be considered and a work of historical fiction will be received  with the same enthusiasm as your sexy memoirs. A novel length manuscript should be between 50,000 and 80,000 words, but we will consider novelettes of between 20,000 and 40,0000 words. Short stories should be in the 4,0000 to 8,0000 word range.

Please use double quotation marks for speech, and single ones for quotes within speech. Foreign words and whatever needs to be emphasised should be done in italics. Please keep your formatting to an absolute minimum, with no headers, footers or page breaks inserted into the manuscript.

Your manuscript must be submitted as either a Word or RTF document.

The following is non-negotiable:

1. No character under the age of 18. In fact, don't even refer to people under that age at all, and that includes ancillary characters. Just pretend that young people do not exist.

2. No rape. You can use pseudo rape if you wish, where the "victim" is shown to be consenting in some way. How you show that consent is up to you, but the decision on its acceptability is up to us and our lawyers.

3. No incest. We will consider pseudo incest, between step relatives.

3. No bestiality.

4. No skat.

5. No branding or other permanent damage. How's that for easy? Off you go!

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