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Post by Jeremiah Peacekeeper on Aug 17, 2013 10:13:36 GMT -5
"Your story could not be uploaded. Please try again later." This is what I've been getting for the past two months after trying to submit the same short story into the Times. I've tried using simple formatting. I've tried different titles. I've switched browsers, computers, laptops, AdBlock versus no AdBlock... I submitted it originally the same way I had my other three stories that got accepted, but no luck. I also submitted a bug report and got a pretty automated response. I originally thought this was from all the traffic for issue no. 600, but now... not so much. I'm starting to lose hope. I've put the short story in spoilers below in all of its raw-html. Could one of you help a fellow writer out, hopefully pointing out where I've messed up? It would be MUCH appreciated! Tales From Elysian Fields: A Modern ScauderwelschRedacted 2014 It's 3,600 words, and the maximum is 4,000. Maybe I should trim it a little? Jeremiah
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Post by Jeremiah Peacekeeper on Aug 17, 2013 10:16:06 GMT -5
Hmm. I guess the brackets are what's used here (NTWF) instead of the angle brackets. Does that mean I've used it correctly for the submission form, since they eat up the angle brackets? Yeah, I'm stumped.
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Post by Coaster on Aug 17, 2013 12:30:31 GMT -5
Not sure if this could be part of the problem or not (since I haven't tried submitting a story before ._.), but have you tried replacing any ——— (dashes) with ---- (regular hyphens) and any instances of “ or ” (angled quotation marks) with " (standard in text files), and the same for single quotes (into ')? Basically any symbol that isn't standard text format?
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Post by Jeremiah Peacekeeper on Aug 17, 2013 12:46:44 GMT -5
I believe I tried it once in a fit of desperation, but I don't believe I fixed all of the symbols you mentioned. (Thanks for that, by the way!) Do you know of any programs that could convert it all into standard text, or would I have to do it manually? (I have no problems with that, but, you know, time consumption...) The symbols above are the same as the stories I submitted in May (which got in), but if something updated in the system without my knowledge of it, I suppose this could be the problem. Dead gum!
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Post by Coaster on Aug 17, 2013 13:01:23 GMT -5
Well, several Word-style programs have a "replace all" function (at least OpenOffice Writer does; I'm guessing Word does too) so that you can type the character or phrase to replace, what to replace it with, and it'll apply it across the whole document.
But if it hasn't been a problem before, there's probably something else, like a word that gets blocked by the filters as profanity and really makes no sense as to why it would be blocked by the filters.
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Post by Jeremiah Peacekeeper on Aug 24, 2013 15:33:44 GMT -5
Still receiving the same message. Any more suggestions?
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Post by Bianca <3 on Aug 24, 2013 21:38:56 GMT -5
I'm just throwing out a suggestion, but when you submit it, do you put spaces between the paragraphs, or does it look like it does above? Because maybe it's the space formatting.
Try adding spaces between the paragraphs/dialogue lines. However, if you do that, it may end up being more than 4000 words... I would suggest adding spaces first, trying to submit, and then maybe slimming it down a bit?
Again, this is just an idea. I'm assuming the issue is somewhere in the piece itself considering that it won't submit on different computers and browsers.
Also, you mentioned something about brackets... the NT needs the square brackets for html, like [ ] Just making sure!
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Post by Jeremiah Peacekeeper on Aug 25, 2013 11:42:40 GMT -5
Oh, my Gandhi. I had actually been putting five spaces before each paragraph (I don't know why it didn't show up here), so I guess I did the opposite of what you suggested, Bianca, but I got rid of the five spaces and IT WORKED! It's never done that before, but anyway, THANK YOU very much! And, of course, thank you, too, Rob & Obi! You both saved me!
Your story, "Tales From Elysian Fields: A Modern Scauderwelsch", has been submitted successfully!
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