If you want your stories to be archived at LancerLovers or at Lancer FanFiction, please email the archive teams direct and send a copy (preferably in Word):
LANCER FANFICTION
GENERAL SUBMISSIONS GUIDANCE FOR BOTH ARCHIVES
Below you’ll find some notes on what the two archives will accept, with some advice on formatting documents. Please read it before sending us your stories.
Note: The authors in the external links are not archived here. Their author pages on the Lancer Gateway are a simply list of their Lancer stories for the reader’s convenience. The submission guidelines do not apply to those stories.
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Archiving deadlines and updates
Both archives use the Lancer Gateway update to publicise the stories archived each month – the Gateway posts its updates on the last Sunday of the month.
Submission deadlines: please send your documents one week before. This allows us to check and format stories before the update. If you miss the deadline, we can’t guarantee to have time to include your stories and they may have to wait until the following month’s update.
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What do we archive?
Poems, cross-overs with other series, alternate universe (AU), satire etc. are all welcome – but no slash (explicit consensual sex between two women or two men). If your story has adult material or graphic violence etc, label it as such, please, to help your readers make an informed choice. Both LancerLovers and Lancer FanFiction archive completed stories only, so no WIPs. If you have stories in a series do let us know what you want the series to be called. Where possible, your stories will be listed in their series, so it’s important we have a series title.
DO tell us if your story is an episode tag, or a crossover with another western, an AU of some sort. We will probably catch this ourselves, but we can’t guarantee it.
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Fanfiction Ethics
As most of you know, fanfic can’t be copyrighted because someone else owns the characters, concept and everything else Lancer. Most TV programmes owners (even those of currently running shows) tend to turn a blind eye to fanfic because it enhances fan interest in the show. It’s also likely to be protected by the ‘fair use’ doctrine, because it’s seen as transformative of the original material. So a copyright notice intended to protect your original content carries no legal weight whatsoever and really isn’t necessary since the world of fanfic seems to run pretty well on the honour system of “shadow” copyright. That doesn’t mean stories can’t be plagiarised, unfortunately. But your name [or other personal identifier] and date on the story can show another website owner that a duplicate story submitted to them later has been plagiarised. We will remove the stories of an author against whom an act of clear plagiarism has been proved, of course. However, remember that even in profic, ideas and titles can’t be copyrighted, and what we’re talking about here isn’t a common idea or theme but wholesale copying.
The archive doesn’t own your story once it’s posted–you do. If you want to rewrite a story and resubmit it, that’s fine. If you want a story deleted, that’s no problem if you’re sole author. Things get more complicated if the story is jointly authored. If one author of such a story wants her name removed, we can do that. We won’t remove the story entirely unless each contributing author emails us giving permission for the story to be taken down – in other words, a work will not normally be removed from the site due to conflict between the various writers. In no circumstance will we get involved in a dispute between authors or remove a story from the site at the request of anyone but the author of that work except in a proven case of plagiarism.
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Formatting Your Story
1. There is a lot to say on this, but the principle is keep it simple and be consistent about things like spacing, or fonts, or gaps between text sections etc. First and most important point: FIND SOMEONE TO BETA YOUR STORY before you send it for archiving and ask them to look for spelling, grammar and formatting errors. We will correct spelling/grammar errors where we see them, but we can’t guarantee to catch everything.
2. You can send documents in Word or Rich Text. We’ll take pdfs only after discussion and only if you can provide compressed versions (they’re darn big files, otherwise!)
3. It doesn’t matter what font you use, as the website software converts it to the default for each archive, but please try to keep the text all one size.
4. DO NOT use indents – either with tabs or (worse!) lots of spaces to start your paragraphs. The website style will just strip them out.
5. DO NOT use indents or lots of spaces or change the left hand margin in order to centre text. DO use the centre-text command on your toolbar.
6. DO be consistent about how you finish off your paragraphs. Hit the ‘Enter’ button twice at the end of every paragraph (this closes the paragraph and manually gives you a space before the next one starts) or hit the ‘enter’ button once and use automatic paragraph spacing. Either works, as the WordPress software copes. Don’t hop from automatic spacing to manual and back to automatic again, though—and yes, that has happened.
7. DO NOT use a manual line break between paragraphs (that is: Shift-Enter) because WordPress will read it as not having paragraphs at all. Hello, great wall of text….
8. DO put your chapter headings in bold type.
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Dealing with white spaces in the text
9. Long stories need spacing between chapters, and within an individual chapter, between different sections. Otherwise the text all smooshes together and becomes more difficult—and tiring!—to read. Often too, the space between sections (in particular) indicate to the reader that time has passed before the next bit of story, or a change of scene, or that the point of view character has changed (maybe from Scott’s PoV to Johnny’s). White space is an important tool for a writer to help ensure the reader gets the text in a way that helps with the storytelling, and cuts any possible confusion.
10. In Word, these spaces are created by hitting the Enter key two or three times, leaving empty ‘lines’ between sections or between chapters. WordPress does not like this. It can’t see anything in those empty lines, so closes them up. To get white spaces into text, we have to force WordPress to think there’s something in the space.
Spaces between sections within the same chapter
11. DO create the space by putting in a line of asterisks, like this:
DO NOT use indents or lots of spaces or change the left hand margin in order to centre your line of asterisks. DO use the centre-text command on your toolbar.
Spaces between chapters in multi-chaptered stories
12 DO remember to put your chapter header in bold (so Chapter One not Chapter One).
13 DO create white space between the end of one chapter and the start of another by putting one period (full stop) into a line between the two chapters. Like this:
Not perfect, but the single period/full stop isn’t too obtrusive and you get the white space.
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If you have any problems, then don’t hesitate to email us:
LANCER FANFICTION
Lancer Fiction Gateway 