Please Read the Rules!
Recently, we’ve had a spateâ€"a small spate, but a spate nonethelessâ€"of stories that have been categorized as ‘General’, despite the fact that the stories feature pairings.
Please remember that the story categories specifically refer to the pairings (or lack thereof) in your story. If, therefore, your story has one or more relationships in it, you can’t categorize it under ‘General.’ General is for stories with no pairings. If your story contains ship (het) pairings, it should be in the ‘Ship Pairings’ category, with the particular pairing (or ‘multiple relationships’) as the sub-category. The same with stories with slash (homosexual) pairings. Stories that have both het and slash should be categorized under ‘Cross Genre’.
All the categories are explained in detail in the site Rules, which is the reason for my pleading headline above. Knowing where to slot your story ahead of time will mean we don’t have to send it back to you, asking for it to be placed in the proper category. :)
And while we’re on the subject, lately almost half the stories in the validation queue have had redundant information in the text of their stories, which is contrary to Rule Nine. Such information includes (but is not limited to):
---Author’s Name
---Disclaimer
---Rating Information
---Story Title
---Chapter Heading
---Feedback Requests
Please note that all of the above is always automatically included on every story page in the archive. In the case of feedback, the reader is invited to leave a comment at the end of every chapter or story.
Including information contrary to Rule Nine in your story ultimately is a waste of both your time and oursâ€"yours for including it, when we’ll either remove it ourselves or ask you to, and ours for having to take the time to remove it and to inform you that we’ve done so, or to request that you do the same. As with category information, everything you shouldn’t include in your story is explained in detail in the Rules.
It has honestly gotten to the point where I’ve been considering rejecting stories on the basis that the writer has apparently not read the Rules, without actually reading the stories to see if they even fit the archive’s minimum standards. Obviously I don’t want to do that, but we’ve been spending far too much time lately on such stories, which could be better spent validating still more fic. :)
