OSG Library Submission Guidelines

The purpose of One Small Garden's Library is to preserve original poetry, fan fiction, and similar literary works which have been submitted to the One Small Garden librarian or the OSG messageboard.
Consistent with the community guidelines, all submissions must be family friendly (suitable for all ages).

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Editorial Guidelines ~ How to Submit ~ Categories ~ Language
Technical Suggestions ~ Serial Pieces ~ The Editing Process

Editorial Guidelines

Only items which have been posted on the Potting Shed boards may be submitted.

Submissions must be original works written by a messageboard poster.

Submissions must fit within the general G-rated approach of the board (see note on language below).

The Library is, with limited exceptions, intended for short stories, fan fiction, essays and poetry (see categories below). Generally speaking, reviews, reports and similar items are not intended to be the focus. Items of this sort may be submitted, but may or may not be included at the librarian's discretion.

Fan fiction should add something new to the tale it is about, but be relatively in sync with the original world, not just a simple re-telling of a portion of the story, nor so changed that the characters and world are unrecognizable. For instance, if it is LOTR fiction, the focus of the tale should be Tolkien's events or characters.

All nonfiction must be related to news, events, or plans regarding One Small Garden or organic gardening. Examples: memoirs of your volunteer experiences at an OSG event, poems about one of our gardens. A recap of the latest LOTR convention belongs on our "Potting Shed" forum, but generally will not be archived as creative writing.

Before submitting a serial story, the author needs to commit to finishing it. Unfinished and abandoned partial tales will eventually be removed at the discretion of the librarian.

Items of exceptionally poor quality will not be included. The authors may resubmit after checking their spelling, grammar, etc. if they would like. Standard use of capitalization is encouraged. "Chatspeak" items are not acceptable.

As this site is intended to be an archive of the OSG community, "post and run" writings from unknown posters may be withdrawn from the archives at a later date if that individual does not proceed on to become a part of the community. Anyone just looking to 'get stuff on the net' is politely redirected to

Fanfiction.net

You may have noticed that little of these relate to some kind of editorial approval on quality of writing. This editor rarely presumes to make that kind of judgement of others' work. As long as the submission fits the guidelines, and makes sense, it probably belongs here. To leave feedback or reviews of other's work, post your thoughts on our messageboard. Readers are welcome to make their own judgements of what they like. Currently, the main exception to this is the Mary-Sue Romance. If you are unsure if your work may be a Mary-Sue, or are unfamiliar with this genre, you may want to check our humorous LOTR Mary-Sue Litmus Test (hosted at the LOTRfanclub Scrapbook) before submitting your work.
Mary-Sues, PWP (plot, what plot?), slash, random chatty nonsense, overly graphic works, suicidal/excessivly depressive or "Real-person fic" involving actors or other persons are not accepted.

Please remember to run a spell-checker on your work. The editor/librarian will not be making detailed corrections to your spelling or grammar - what you submit is what the world of One Small Garden will read.

How To Submit

1. Post your work on our messageboard.
This is sufficient.

2. Submit by email.
(word document attachment).

Include at the top of your email:

Author's messageboard name or "handle".
Title of the work.
Suggested category (Poetry/Short Story, etc. see categories below)
If it is an installment work with multiple chapters, number them.
If you are using italics, they will not survive - I convert all works to plain text. Put asterisks *like this* around italicized portions and I will re-italicize them for you.

Feel free to send in your own work, as well as alerting me to work that others have posted. Continuing stories must be sent by their author with identification of which chapter it is so I can be sure to have them in order. Multi-installment works are usually collected off of the boards but if installments are missing, the author is responsible for submitting them. Serial tales must eventually be finished or they will be removed.

Submitting corrections: If you've corrected or updated an item that is already archived, simply submit the new version and include a note that says exactly what it is replacing (the more specific, the better).
Please do not assume the librarian will be able to remember and find a particular paragraph in "that story." Tell who you are, what the title is, etc.

Language

Submissions to the archive must fit within the spirit of the G-rated boards and be acceptable reading for a "family friendly" site. However, it's OK to make adjustments to pieces that are caught up in the natural inflexibility of the language filters on the boards. For example:

The riders emerged as from the pits of **** to **** the life out of the air.
The riders emerged as from the pits of hell to suck the life out of the air.

Technical Suggestions

Stories should have clearly defined paragraphs with an empty line between paragraphs (not just an indent). Shorter paragraphs read better on the web, so consider breaking up longer paragraphs.

Many posters use Microsoft Word to compose their poetry and fan fiction. While this program has useful features such as spell-checking, it also has the tendency to add formatting which does not translate well when pasted into an email message. Some of the things that Word will often do automatically when you type include:

Turning straight quotes [" "] into curly quotes [“ ”]
Turning straight apostrophes [' '] into curly apostrophe [‘ ’]
Turning double dash [--] into a long dash [—]
Turning three dots [...] into an ellipse […]

These features in Word are useful when creating attractive text for print purposes, but are problematic for email or web. When these items are copied and pasted into an email message, they tend to turn into garbage characters, and the editor has to guess what the characters were supposed to be. This adds a lot of work at this end. To avoid this, you may:

Within your Word document, use the option "Save as" and then select "Text Only". This will turn the special formatting into straight formatting.
You can turn off these features in your preferences in Microsoft Word. Go to "Tools" then "AutoCorrect." Then under "Autoformat as you type," uncheck all the options in "Replace as you type". And under "AutoFormat" uncheck all the options in "Replace"

Installment (Serial) Pieces

If you are submitting a multi-chapter story, the chapters must be numbered, with or without titles.

If you are submitting a diary/journal, real or fictional, the submissions need numbers just like chapters of a story do. It must be sequential and not just a diary date.

Feel free to make suggestions regarding the organization of segments and whether you want each one named, dated, numbered, etc. in the menu.

The story must eventually have a conclusion.

Unfinished and abandoned tales may eventually be removed. Tales that have been removed may be resubmitted in finished form, or with a firm commitment to complete it in a reasonable amount of time.

About the Editing Process

The OSG Library is an unofficial archive that is added to as time permits, so be patient, but also feel free to send a reminder if you think something may have slipped by. There is no staff to check on the accuracy of the site. If you see mistakes, or links that don't work, please send an email. Many thanks to the LOTRfanclub Scrapbook for sharing their submissions guidelines.

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