#rebelsandfools writing

[rebelsandfools]

Hello. How do I submit a story for the digital Blake's 7 fanzine?

Hi!

The short answer is - you send the file to us via email!

For all details and the submission email address, see our submission requirements FAQ page (specifically under "Written Submissions" - "How do I submit..." & "What additional information..."), here: https://rebelsandfools.tumblr.com/subrequirements

If you run into any issues or something is unclear, feel free to send another ask!

[rebelsandfools]

Collaborations!

This is the long promised clarification post for collaborations with regards to the zine.

What is a collaboration?

When a writer has an artist doing art for their fic, or an artist has a writer write something for their art OR if two artists/writers work on something together - for example two complimentary drawings, or a two-part fic.

Can I do that for the zine?

Yes!

But...?

The collaboration goes into the same zine. That means, by the time the end of July rolls around, I need to have all elements of the collaboration ready to go, for example both the art and the fic. This doesn’t mean that you cannot be inspired by something in the published zine and create something based on it after the fact with the permission of the original creator, but for the purpose of the zine, a collaboration is a work by several people that goes into the same issue of the zine, and therefore needs to be put together before its publication (naturally!).

Okay, so how do I do this?

You will need to arrange this mostly on your own with your collaborator. Three options:

1) You already talked to someone privately, and all is set, and all you need to do is get all parts of the collaboration to me on time.

2) Make a post to the #rebelsandfools tag, or the general #blake’s 7 tag looking for a collaborator. Don’t spoil your thing (especially don’t post it/bits of it! especially not art!), but give some detail, especially of things that might put people off (e.g. the pairing, character death, triggers and squicks). I will see it and reblog it to this zine tumblr.

3) Let me know in the 100% sign-up form and I will include you in a collective tumblr post for interested parties to find.

There is no guarantee that you will get a collaborator this way - in particular as we are also short on artists - so if your work absolutely needs a collaborator, you might have to put some effort into finding one on your own.

I found someone! Now what?

It’s in your hands now. Talk to them. Seriously, communication is key. I do not have the time to chase after your collaborators for you. Get everything together between yourself for the deadline, and submit!

As you submit, especially if you do it separately, let me know what belongs together so it won’t end up spread all over the zine! Ideally submit more or less at the same time, or have one of you handle the submissions for all parts at once. 

[rebelsandfools]

I have been working on a few contributions for the last Zine. They are not quite finished yet but I just wanted to ask, if I have more than one contribution should I send them on one email or separately, I was not sure which would be better for you. Thanks

Hi! Hurray, we're looking forward to receiving them when they're done! As for the emails, generally one email per contributor is preferrable to an email per submission, so we can have all your submissions in one place. The only reason why it might be better to send separate emails would be if your files are quite large (complex pieces of art etc.), as there may be limits to how much you can attach to a single email. So if you run into technical issues, several emails is always an option!

And, as always, if you have any concerns that any message/email may have been lost, don't hesitate to ping us for confirmation. Sometimes it simply takes a few days to get around to things, but we don't want anything to go lost or unanswered.

[rebelsandfools]

Submission Requirements: Written Submissions

Before reading this post, make sure you’ve read the GENERAL INFO post, as well as the SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: GENERAL post.

If your submission also has visual components (i.e. images), also refer to the SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: VISUAL SUBMISSIONS post.

GENERAL

File formats: .doc(x), .odt, .html or .txt. No pre-formatted pdfs!

The absolute maximum wordcount limit is 15.000 words. This is less than last issue, but I have found that even fics at around 10k are long for a zine, so I would like to avoid having too many super-long works.

Your work can be as short as you like. A 100-word drabble? Hell, a 7 word story? Your choice.

All submissions should be stand-alone / self-contained. That is, they should not reference any works outside of the zine, work in previous issues of the zine, nor should they require the reader to go elsewhere to find sequels / conclusions.  The idea is that the content can be enjoyed by someone who has only access to that single issue of R&F.

Meta data - please fill out the following template and submit it with your written submission. I ended up chasing these last issue, so I would like to avoid having to do that this time. This template is for fanfiction, as this is likely to be the most common written submission. If yours isn’t fanfic, still try to fill in as much of the template as possible:

\textbf{Title:} YOUR TITLE HERE

\textbf{Author:} YOUR AUTHOR NAME HERE (make sure it is the same as your credits name)

\textbf{Rating:} YOUR RATING HERE

\textbf{Word Count:} YOUR WORD COUNT HERE

\textbf{Pairing:} YOUR PAIRING HERE IF APPLICABLE (if not, put: Gen // you have the option to use “undisclosed” if you don’t want to reveal the pairing or lack thereof in the header)

\textbf{Warning:} YOUR WARNING HERE

\textbf{Summary:} YOUR SUMMARY HERE

\textbf{Author’s Note:} YOUR AUTHOR’S NOTE HERE (this is optional)

WARNINGS AND RATINGS

Ratings:

You have the following options for rating your submission:

General - Teen - Adult - Explicit

Please err on the side of caution. “Adult” should be used for strong violence only, any sexual explicit content falls under “Explicit”.

Yes, please also aim to rate non-fic written submissions like meta, especially if you think it might be anything other than “General”.

Warnings:

We’re adopting AO3′s warning system: No Warnings Apply, Graphic Violence, Rape/Non-Con , Major Character Death, Underage

You are absolutely required to warn for strong graphic violence (i.e. violence above what is common for the show itself; approaching and including gore) and rape (this includes dubious consent; again, err on the side of caution).

Major Character Death: As this is B7 and we skew *dark* by default, you are required to warn for (Major) Character Death only if the dying is the narrative (I’m thinking of terminal illness stories here, for example) or in the case of suicide (in this case, warn for suicide, not just MCD). In other cases, warning for MCD is left at your discretion. If you write PGP fic and half the characters are dead before the fic even starts, you don’t need to warn.

Underage: You are not allowed to submit underage fic to the zine for legal reasons. However, you might still find the warning necessary if you discuss character’s childhood in pieces of meta. In this case, please do make use of the warning.

Except for in the required cases, warning is left at your discretion. You also have the option to indicate that you haven’t warned for spoiler reasons (again, except for the required cases).

FANFIC

In addition to the meta data above, please also indicate which season your fic is set in (PWB, S1, S2, S3, S4, PGP, or AU) when you submit.

DONT’s:

explicit underage fics for legal reasons (that is, no fics that feature explicit sex scenes between underaged characters or adults and underaged individuals)

RPF (let’s keep it in-universe only, though you may write B7 actors!AUs to your heart’s content)

All fic should be self-contained (no first parts, no sequels (though open endings are fine if you opt for one as artistic choice)). If your fic is part of a pre-existing series (say if I were to write something in my ace!Avon ‘verse), it needs to be comprehensible for someone who has never read any of the other works and might not want to go off and read any more of them.

If your fic comes with art, I need the art in separate files, as well as an indication where it (roughly) goes in the story if necessary. (Also reference the VISUAL SUBMISSION requirements for these cases.)

META

Any theme goes. There is also no need to be pairing-neutral. But please make use of warnings where applicable.

As with fanfic, the meta should be self-contained. It must not rely on previously published work to be understandable.

You can be as speculative or evidence-based as you like.

You may include quotes from transcripts and screencaps as evidence as needed, but I require any images as separate files (also no gifs for obvious reasons).

OTHER WRITTEN SUBMISSIONS

Poems and similar should fit on one page.

Fic and zine reviews need to give full credit: give at least the title of the work, the author/editor/publisher, and where to find it in the case of individual fics.

Images very welcome but need to be submitted as separate files. (See VISUAL SUBMISSION requirements for more details.)

Remember the short fic recs? We should do those again. You can refer to issue 1 to see how they work.

[rebelsandfools]

Hallo. Keen to get sending you some stuff!! Just wanted to check, Id offered a fanfic and was just wondering if this was still okay or if there's anything else that you'd like too?

Fanfiction is always good, as is other stuff. We currently have more fic than anything else, so if you have meta, reviews, art, crafts etc, I’d happy to take those - but remember, you are not limited to a single submission! So submit away whatever you have.

As you are on anon, I’m not sure who you are, so if you wanted to check whether your fic specifically is appropriate for the zine etc, could you email me on the editorial email? There are few restrictions, but with some type of fic I might advise you to publish as standalone to allow your fic to really shine (generally, but not limited to, very long fic - I’ve noticed from my own zine reading that these are more likely to be skipped in a multi-story zine - or fic that might grow into a series).

[rebelsandfools]

Does the layout system you're using allow for em dashes? If I'm composing in Google Docs and insert each em dash as a special character, will that cause problems on your end? Is there a better solution? (I've been using double hyphens, but it looks ugly and I'd rather not.)

Keep using double hyphens! The layouting software will turn them into em dashes automatically, as that is the way these special characters are expressed in the code. (At any rate I will check that they end up as em dashes. I tend to overuse dashes in my own writing, so I know I’ve encountered similar problems.)

But if you already have em dashes as special characters in your writing, don’t worry either. You needn’t change anything. It’s a simple thing to fix via search and replace.

[rebelsandfools]

Is there a wordcount limit to fic submitted? Because I'm writing something, but I'm worried that it'll be too long

There is a loose wordcount limit of about 20k. I won’t turn your fic away if you’re slightly over, but anything much longer than that probably works better as a stand-alone fic on AO3 or something than within the zine. (I know the feeling, though!)

You can also find all information on submissions in the submission requirements post (which I know looks long and complicated, but might be worth bookmarking for reference).

[rebelsandfools]

Writer Information

This is an important announcement for anyone wishing to use apostrophes and quotation marks in their writing (which is probably going to be everyone, let’s be realistic).

I have decided to use LaTeX to layout the zine, because it takes care of a lot of the messy stuff automatically, such as positioning images, and produces a really neat look (I always liked the look of the Oblique Publications fic pdfs, and am aiming for something like it). LaTeX is a markup system, similar to HTML. LaTeX has, however, a big drawback (aside from not automatically doing italics, but I can deal with that):

If you copy-paste standard quotation marks and apostrophes, they aren’t rendered correctly. I can replace them automatically for the whole zine, which is easier than asking you to write it in LaTeX format. For that to work, however, I absolutely need you to stick to the standard quotation marks and apostrophes, i.e. these: “Blake,” Avon said, holding up Blake’s book that wasn’t supposed to be on the flight deck. (Stupid sentence for demonstration purposes of the fact that there are apostrophes/quotation marks everywhere.) The point is that depending on which language settings you have and which writing software you use, quotation marks may be rendered differently (or you might even get stuff like Blake`s (don’t!) or <<Blake,>> Avon said.) - if you write in Word, just having the language set to English and writing it out like you would on tumblr should do the trick.

I don’t think this is necessarily going to be a problem for everyone (in fact it might not be for most of you), but something important to keep in mind especially if you’re working with a writing software that is not set to English by default.

Tl;dr: Stick to normal English quotation marks and apostrophes, please.

See under the cut for details why this is in case anyone is interested in the process.

Ordinarily, you would type a sentence like this, and this is what I need you to do for the automatic replacement to work:

“Blake,” Avon said, holding up Blake’s book that wasn’t supposed to be on the flight deck.

LaTeX, ultimately, needs it like this:

``Blake,’‘ Avon said, holding up Blake’s book that wasn’t supposed to be on the flight deck.

That is two grave accents before the dialog and two apostrophes after, as well as generally “straight” apostrophes also for genitive and contractions, but even tumblr won’t let me do that. This, and only this, will render the signs as we are used to in the finished pdf.

I can run a text search + replace on the “wrong” quotation marks and replace them with the right ones. If everyone uses the normal quotations, I need to do this once for the whole zine and have only three rounds (before dialogue, after dialogue and single apostrophes) of replacements. If, however, every fic has different quotation marks, that complicates things immensely, so let’s aim not to do that!