We've had our first disqualifications and it's already too many! We hates this!
Your manuscript must be readable which means I have to be able to open it and the words can't be gibberish.
Three manuscripts didn't meet that criteria today.
If you don't work in Word you've GOT to make sure that when you send a .doc that it will cross platforms. I know a lot of you hate Word. That's fine. Just make sure I can read what you send when I open it in Word.
And double check the size of your .doc file. Anything that's over 2MB probably has something wrong. My word processing program rejects it as too big to open--that makes it unreadable. A manuscript for a contest like this should NOT have graphic files in it. No pictures, no diagrams, nothing.
When something is unreadable, we try a couple alternate forms of opening and converting. We don't just throw it away after one try. If you get an email saying your entry was discarded, it's not cause we just threw in the towel after one attempt.
If your entry is disqualified, I will email you to tell you. Right now we're sorting, and uploading to DropBox. We're going in chrono order so if you entered at the last minute, you won't hear anything for awhile. (As of tonight, we've done half the entries--if you entered before 3/10/12 you would have heard from us)
8 comments:
Midnight on 3/16/12 isn't here yet.
Hi Otin - the previous post from today has a typo that says the contest closed on 3/16, but it actually closed 3/15 as stated in the original announcement.
Thank you! I don't think I was eligible anyway. I have an agent for another story.
The contest closed at the end of the day on 3/15.I took entries at 11:59pm.
I forgot that I usually say 11:59pm not midnight for the close of contests for JUST this reason.
I consulted the NIST (Nat'l Inst Standards & Tech) and the definition of "midnight" is still murky. With the 24 hour clock, both 24:00 and 00:00 are referred to as midnight. No wonder, Janet, you choose not to use the word. Okay, enough geeking for a Friday night.
Thank you for doing this. It's amazing and inspiring. I hope you find something excellent in the pile.
Janet,
Are you going to do a sort of 'Top 50/ 20/ 10' before you announce the winner? Or are you solely going to announce who wins on April 24th? Just curious.
Krysten, such is my wrath today, I was thinking of announcing a list of people who don't know how to format a manuscript.
However.
I don't know if we'll do finalists.
Keep your eye on this blog for posts if we do.
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