Once your story has been written, you have saved it in the proper format, and you have added appropriate classification information, it is ready to be submitted. You may want to consider the matters discussed below, then submit your story via e-mail.
There has been increasing concern over one's fanfic being discovered by co-workers, family, or other people who may know the author. When a story is posted on Gossamer, it has effectively been published. Hundreds of people visit the new stories page in the first day alone. Many of them will read the story and some may download a copy of it. If the author's real name was included anywhere in the e-mail Gossamer received, it will be included in the posted story.
Once the story has been posted with the author's name, it has been published--regardless of whether we post a revision without the name at a later date. It is also time-consuming for us to re-archive an author's stories. For these reasons, we request that you decide whether to attach your real life identity to your stories before sending them to any forum on the Internet. There are many free e-mail providers which can afford you some measure of privacy. We recommend using a pseudonymous account on one of these providers. This will allow you to receive feedback for your stories without revealing your identity.
NOTE: Author name changes are treated with the same priority as all other revisions. If you don't want your name on the story, don't send it to us with your name in the first place!
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Gossamer places no value judgments whatsoever on the stories which have been submitted. In fact, we do not normally read submissions. The service which Gossamer provides is simply a public archive. Gossamer is, in many ways, a library for fan fiction. All types of stories are accepted with only the following technical restrictions:
- The story must be fictional. - The story must be about fictional characters, not real people. - The story must in some way relate to the television show The X-Files or one of its characters. - The story must not criticize other stories (e.g., MSTings of fanfic.) - The story must not be political commentary (e.g., the characters are only used to forward a political agenda.) - The story must not plagiarize any other source.
We do NOT limit submissions based on moral judgments about their content. Authors are asked to rate their stories using a modified version of the Motion Picture Association of America's (MPAA) rating system:
G The story is suitable for young children to read. PG The story may contain some curse words, violence, and/or sexual hints, but nothing graphic. R The story may contain a significant amount of profanity, graphic sex, graphic gore, and/or explicit violence. It considers topics and/or has descriptions that may not be suitable for younger readers. NC-17 The story contains EXTREMELY graphic violence, gore, and/or sex. It considers topics and has descriptions that may even be disturbing for adults.
The author may also choose to provide no rating or explicitly mark the story "Not Rated." Gossamer does not audit the ratings which authors have chosen, nor does Gossamer modify the ratings of stories without the author's consent. Readers are warned that because this information is considered the author's responsibility, it may be incomplete or inaccurate.
Gossamer has had several different archivists over the years, and the methods we employ to avoid improperly archiving stories are not exact. Thus, there may be stories on the archives which do not belong. We also route stories to the appropriate Gossamer archives based on the classification information provided by the author. The decision as to where a story should be archived or whether it should be archived at all belongs solely to Gossamer.
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Gossamer reserves the right to edit non-story text included with any story. This includes, but is not limited to:
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Here is a checklist of items to verify before you submit your story to Gossamer:
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When you're done with all of the above and you have a plain text file ready to either attach to an e-mail message or cut-and-paste into a message, send your story to the appropriate submissions address.
| Send revisions of previously-archived stories to: |
revisions@gossamer.org
|
| Send all other submissions to the normal submissions address: |
submit@gossamer.org
|
Create an e-mail message with a subject line in the form "Title by Author" or "Title (1/2) by Author". For example, "Scully, and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Annie Mouse" is a good subject line. Then choose one of the methods below to include your story with your e-mail message. Please only send one story per e-mail, except under the circumstances explained below.
1. Text of story in body of e-mail message
We do not recommend this method of submission. Copying and pasting out of a word processor can result in smart formatting being "preserved" or transformed by the mail program into odd characters that cannot be corrected on our end. Format-wise, this is the riskiest way to submit your story. Copying and pasting of text is the primary cause of long-line/short-line disease and the appearance of strange symbols within the text.
If you chose this method of submission, please save a text copy of your story in your word processor of choice, then reopen and copy/paste the text version.
NOTE FOR YAHOO! WEB CLIENT USERS: If you copy/paste your story into the Yahoo! web interface, please do not wrap your story to 70 characters per line. Under the standard setup, the Yahoo! web client does a hard wrap at 55 characters, and pasting a file wrapped at 70 characters will result in formatting issues (long-line/short-line disease).
NOTE FOR AOL USERS: Files copied and pasted into the AOL client must be wrapped at 70 characters or less. AOL uses a non-standard form of MIME encoding which does an exact hard wrap slightly above 70 characters per line. An exact hard wrap means that the line is wrapped without regard to whether that wrap will break words across lines. Many submissions from AOL users are unacceptable due to this problem.
2. Single text file attached to an e-mail (one story per e-mail)
This is our recommended method of submission. When a story is saved as text, wrapped at 70 characters and attached to an e-mail, there is a very high chance that it will survive intact and be acceptable.
NOTE FOR AOL USERS: Although unwrapped files may survive other ISPs/e-mail clients, unwrapped text files will not survive AOL due to the AOL MIME encoding issue described above. AOL does an exact hard wrap on an attached text file as well as the e-mail itself. Attached files that are not wrapped by the author prior to submission will be unacceptable.
3. Multiple text files attached to a single e-mail (one story per e-mail)
When Gossamer receives an e-mail, all files attached to that e-mail are automatically written to a single file. Please do not submit multiple stories by attaching them to a single e-mail. This is only acceptable for a single story split across multiple files, and we request that you state that multiple files are attached.
4. Single text file within a zip (compressed) file
This method of submission is acceptable at any time, and recommended for those submitting novel-length stories. Gossamer can accept .zip but cannot accept files that were compressed using other methods such as .sit (a Mac compression scheme.)
5. Multiple text files within a zip file
This method of submission is acceptable at any time, and is recommended for those submitting a novel-length story divided into multiple files. It is also the ONLY METHOD via which to submit multiple stories in one e-mail. Please make sure that all story parts or individual stories have distinct filenames, preferably the story name and, if applicable, part number (storytitle1.txt, storytitle2.txt or myfirststorytitle.txt, mysecondstorytitle.txt). Gossamer can accept .zip files but cannot accept other types of compressed files such as Mac .sit format.
6. Ephemeralfic.org author interface (file upload)
If you have consistently failed at submitting your story via one of the methods above, AND know that your file is in text format, you can attempt to submit it via the Ephemeral file upload function. Make sure that the checkbox allowing submission to Gossamer is checked, and that you receive an automated acceptance letter from Gossamer. The e-mail connection between Ephemeral and Gossamer has not been reliable over the past year, so if you do not receive an automated acceptance, resubmit it via e-mail.
You will receive an automatic confirmation that your story has been received. This message will indicate whether your story was accepted or rejected by the "pre-screening" process. Pre-screening is performed automatically by a program. This program identifies word processor documents and binary files, filters certain high-ASCII characters and special e-mail features (such as quoted-printable) out of the message, and saves it as a file for a Gossamer volunteer to pick up later. Since the program uses the provided subject line as the filename, it is very important that the subject of your message be of the form "Title by Author" or "Title (1/2) by Author". If you're interested, here is an example submission acceptance letter and an example submission rejection letter.
Direct submissions are given precedence over copies of stories that we receive through other sources unless the copy that was directly submitted has a formatting problem that one of the other copies does not. It takes a while to archive stories, so your story may not appear for several weeks. Please be patient.