Style Manual

How to send a text
Divisions within a text
Spelling and Grammar

Quotation marks
Speech tags
Suspension Points
Dash
Emphasis

How to send a text to Bewildering Stories

Many of our contributors send submissions that are a pleasure to read and work with. And everyone might like to know what happens to their files when they’re processed for publication on line.

Let’s say your submission is in a word processor file that’s formatted for printing on paper, as though you were going to stuff the hardcopy into an envelope and mail it somewhere. Since Bewildering Stories accepts submissions only by e-mail, you send it as an attachment.

If you don’t know how to save a file in rich text format (RTF) or you forget and send a normal file, don’t worry about it; we’ll probably be able to open it.

What should a typical submission look like? (click here)

Here’s what the Editor does to your document:

Duplicates the original file by copy-pasting it into a relatively little-known but sleek word processor for the Mac: Mariner Write.
Changes the font to Verdana 14-point for easy reading. Bewildering Stories prescribes fonts only in headers and footers and a few other places; otherwise the fonts are those of the readers’ browser preferences.
Removes all extraneous formatting such as headers, footers, page numbers, hard page breaks, linefeeds, tabs, and weird spacings.
Makes the entire text flush left. The margins must be “flush left, ragged right”; line justification in submissions has caused Bad Things to happen.
Removes any first-line indentation in all paragraphs.
Removes double spacing within paragraphs.
Adds double spacing between paragraphs.

Next, the Editor simplifies the appearance of the text itself by:

Marking up boldface and italics. Boldface is normally used only for headers and subtitles; we do not use it for emphasis. The boldface in this page is not an exception because the page consists mostly of lists. Italics have to be marked up by use of the italics, emphasis and cite tags.
Running a spell check. If English is not your first language, please tell us and we’ll make a special effort to help; otherwise we’ll return badly-spelled texts for a rewrite or, more likely, decline to consider them.
Proofreading the punctuation. N.B. Full dashes (—) should be two short dashes (--); anything else may be garbled in transmission. See the section on “em-dash,” below.

The most important thing in your submission is the words. Artwork may add to them, but anything else is liable to distract your readers. And that especially includes such things as punctuation. These guidelines are the result of editorial experience and are intended to help us avoid errors and to help you achieve a seamless visual presentation.

Punctuation is the copy editor’s nightmare. Sad to say, some of the submissions we receive might bring their contributors fame and fortune, but the punctuation is so sloppy that publishers wouldn’t give it a second glance: the text would cost publishers too much to correct.

Text Divisions

Our standard separator: To separate your text into “mini-chapters,” so to speak, simply type three spaced asterisks ( * * * ) as a separate paragraph. Please leave it flush left and let the copy editor center it.

Numbering: We advise against numbering sections unless absolutely necessary. Two of our regular contributors dote on numbered sections. It’s hard to see why: numbers add very little, and both of those contributors have been known to lose count. Sometimes writers forget to remove page numbers, which can easily be confused with section numbers.

If you absolutely must number the sections, please type an Arabic numeral, e.g. “1” or a Roman numeral, e.g. “II”; please use no punctuation. Each number should appear as a separate paragraph. Please leave it flush left along with the rest of the document, otherwise it may be overlooked. The copy editor will center it.

The horizontal rule: Bewildering Stories uses the horizontal rule very rarely. It may separate footnotes or bibliographies from the body of a text, and it may appear in headers or lists on index pages, but that’s about all.

If you feel you must use the horizontal rule, please explain why, but we’ll probably insist on a less obtrusive workaround.

Spelling and Grammar

Bewildering Stories respects both British and American usage. Contributors may use either or both. However, the following rules are ironclad and apply to all texts regardless of origin:

It’s = “it is”; its = the possessive case of “it.” (Honestly, you’d be dumbfounded at the number of very talented writers who don’t know that.)
Either “gray” or “grey” is acceptable, but not both.
Either “okay” or “OK” is considered standard. Anything else will be changed to “okay.”
“United States” may be abbreviated as “U.S.” but not as “US”; it’s an abbreviation, not an acronym. However, “USA,” without punctuation, is okay. Likewise, “United Nations” may be abbreviated as “U.N.” but not as “UN,” for the same reasons.
Names used in direct address are set off by commas, for example:
- “Joe, is that you?” “Hello, Joe.”
- “Hello, darkness, my old friend.”
However, if you’re Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel, you can write it any way you want.

Punctuation

Bewildering Stories likes innovative writing. However, we draw the line at punctuation. We like to dress up nicely and put on an attractive appearance.

Some poets use no punctuation at all; that’s okay. Otherwise, punctuation is a poor place for innovation. Commas that merely indicate line breaks in a poem will probably cause the work to be rejected.

Quotation marks

Plain and “smart” quotes: We like to think that printer’s quotes and apostrophes help give Bewildering Stories the kind of professional appearance a literary webzine ought to strive for. True, such elegance takes work, but we consider it a courtesy and a favor to our contributors.

You do not have to supply the “smart” quotes yourself. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. The copy editor can change “straight” quotes to “curly” quotes with one pass of a Mariner Write macro.

Placing quotation marks:

Please put double quotation marks after periods and commas.
Single quotation marks go right after the words or punctuation. For example: “Did he say ‘Help!’? I thought he said ‘Kelp’,” George mused, all at sea.
We will use British punctuation at the author’s request. British usage of quotation marks is the opposite of North American style. Some authors use single quotes to indicate interior monologue; that option is, of course, not available in British style, and we discourage the use of double quotes for interior monologue.
The placing of quotation marks in computer programming and e-mail is special usage, not standard.

Attributions: If the attribution follows the quotation, it is set off by a comma unless there is some other punctuation. Use lower case unless the attribution begins with a proper name. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things...”

Speech tags: A “speech tag” precedes, follows, or is inserted within a direct quote. It identifies the speaker and contains a speech verb, for example: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things...”

A speech verb is one like “to say, to ask, to tell, to reply, to shout, to whisper, to yell, to cry, to snort, to hiss, to mumble” and so on, far into the night.
Paradoxically, the verb “to speak” is not a “speech verb” for the purposes of speech tags. It is an ordinary verb of action and has to be set off by a full stop or a colon, for example:
The prophet spoke: “If you’re planning to buy a new car, make sure it eats hay.”

Attributions with ordinary action verbs such as “to laugh, to nod, to yawn,” etc. are considered implied speech tags. They are set off as a separate sentence from the direct quote, for example:
George laughed. “I’d cry if this weren’t so funny.”

Suspension points

When to use them: These are normally used to indicate an ellipsis in a quotation or an interrupted thought. To indicate an interruption, please use three points only, with no spacing between them or after the preceding word, e.g. “Wait...” Felix began as the taxi zoomed by.

Suspension points often indicate a pause initiated by the speaker. To indicate an interruption by someone else, the most common usage is an n-dash and a closing quote, e.g. “You don’t mean-” “No, I don’t.”

When not to use them: Please do not use them where a full stop, comma, semicolon, colon or even nothing at all is called for. Suspension points are punctuation, not a substitute for it.

Some contributors like to use more than three periods in suspension points. We’ve even seen them take up entire lines, as though the writer had fallen asleep on the key. Please don’t do that! They’ll all be reduced to three or deleted, if they’re superfluous.

Em-dash

The en-dash (-) is used mostly as a linking hyphen to spell certain words, e.g. “en-dash,” “co-operate.” Full dashes or em-dash — like this — indicate an apposition or insertion with no particular emphasis.

Please do not use the em-dash in your text; in RTF, Microsoft Word may change it to capital N. The copy editor probably won’t be able to catch all instances of the error, but your readers will and they will not like it. Instead, use two en-dashes ( -- ) with a space before and after. If we see any, we’ll reformat all of them as full dashes.

Reminder: full dashes normally come in bracketed pairs. If only one full dash is used, some other punctuation is usually called for, such as a colon.

Emphasis

Our authors frequently like to show that certain words — especially in dialogue — carry special emphasis. That’s fine with us. There are two ways to do it:

The easy way. If you prefer, you may send italics or even boldface, but since we don’t use the “strong” emphasis tag, boldface will be changed to italics with the tag.

If you wish, you may put asterisks fore and aft, e.g. “What are you *doing*?!” It will appear as “What are you doing?!” The asterisks are intended to make things easy for our contributors.

Contributors often use full caps for emphasis. We’ll make an exception and leave them as is provided there are no more than about three or four words in a row. After that, we’ll probably change them to lower-case emphasis; full caps quickly become very hard to read.
The hard way. Use HTML code, e.g. “What are you doing?!”

Please do not use HTML unless you’re adept at it. For example, the , and <CITE> tags affect computerized text vocalizers for the visually impaired, and the tags themselves may be subject to special formatting in the style sheet.

We once received a story that used the angle brackets < and > as fancy quotation marks. The first occurrence of < turned the entire text into an HTML tag. It converted to full caps, and the document looked like a giant telegram.

We like to think our coding is pretty sleek. Please do not send files in HTML unless they contain fancy visual effects. Otherwise we’ll just display everything as plain text and convert it to our style.

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