The Never-ending FAQ: Tools and Tradecraft

 

We’ve had quite a few questions come in lately that aren’t about the craft of writing fiction per se, but rather about our choices of software and tools. For example:

Q: Why do you insist that submissions must be in .docx, .doc, or .rtf file format?

A: Because loathe it or hate it, Microsoft Word is the de facto industry standard for word processing.

It’s not our preferred program by a long shot. It’s simply what we must use in order to make the process of publishing fiction work somewhat smoothly. Stories sent to us in other file formats cause problems. 

Behind the scenes, our slush pile team makes extensive use of Google Docs to share and comment on submissions. Google Docs tolerates Word and Word-compatible files fairly well, but routinely projectile vomits when fed things like .odt or .wpd files. 

The latter is just a bit sad. I have a longstanding fondness for WordPerfect. During my most productive period as a writer of fiction, WordPerfect 5.0 was my tool of choice, and I loved it. It was fast, simple, and unlike Word, only did exactly what I wanted it to do. When I was using WordPerfect, I was routinely producing 3,000 publishable words daily.

That, however, was a long time ago. Thirty years ago the WordPerfect Corporation was acquired by Novell, who subsequently sold the IP off to Corel, and ever since Corel has been keeping WordPerfect alive and on the market, but with each revision it’s just a little slower, a little clumsier, and just generally, a little less useful.

We still keep WordPerfect installed on one of the systems around here, for much the same reason as we still have one machine that has a Zip drive installed, another that has a QIC-80 tape drive, and one that has a plethora of different-sized floppy disk drives. (I did finally get rid of everything with an 8" drive, though.) Backwards compatibility is sometimes not merely useful, but absolutely necessary. For example, right now we’re working with the estate of a writer who was very successful from the 1970s through the 1990s, and still active into the early 2000s, who left behind a large number of original and/or unpublished manuscripts, all in XyWrite III file format.

XyWrite III was the word processor of choice for publishing industry professionals, for a while, mainly because XyWrite III files were compatible with the mainframe typesetting systems of the day. But thirty years ago the makers of XyWrite entered into a disastrous joint-development deal with IBM, which led to a failed merger with Lotus, which led to the IP being acquired by yet another company, which tried to keep the product alive but went out of business in 2003… 

Do you begin to see a pattern here?

Fortunately, one of the quirky little features that still lives on in the current version of WordPerfect is the ability to read XyWrite III files and to export them to somewhat more modern file formats. So as far as this writer’s estate project goes, WordPerfect has been a lifesaver.

But as a general rule: don’t send us .wpd or other obscure-format files. They just give us headaches, and when we have headaches, we get grumpy and irritable, and we don’t buy stories.

Any more questions?

~brb

Categories: The Never-ending FAQ