Submission Guidelines for Mountain Talk Newsletter

Dear subscribers,
we welcome all submissions but as there are more subscribers than editors we ask that you submit your stories/announcements etc in a plain format that reduces the labour involved in putting the newsletter to print. We also set these guidelines as a way to reduce the paper used to print out people's submissions. So large poster ads and the like are not considered as practical submissions.

• As we use our own font for the newsletter there's no need to use a special font of your own. Yours will be modified, so using a standard font to start with saves some confusion. 
• We also like to avoid the appearance of SHOUTING so we ask that only words needing SPECIAL emphasis be in 'titlecase'. In other cases normal capitalisation rules should apply: Proper nouns, place names, starting a sentence, titles of events, books or other media etc.
• Please give your story or announcement a heading that we can use (probably done in bold) so we aren't left trying to make one up.
• Try to keep dates well formed. eg. Rather than writing "Come join us in June for a great Saturday evening with music and food till late in the night. We want to see you on the 20th..." Instead try "Come join us on Saturday the 20th of June from 7:30 till late..." so that people can easily pinpoint *when* your event is taking place and, of course, *where*. Often good as a header for the story as well: "Markets on Sat, 20th of June".

So, your checklist:

• Plaintext paragraphs
• limit your use of ALLCAPS (titlecase)
• clear, well formed dates
• distinct locational information
• no large images/posters unless you're happy with them being reduced in size, this [often] makes text on such posters illegible.
• contact name(s) & number(s) - or electronic contact info etc, if contact details are not required, eg. for a story or artwork, you can opt for "name withheld" but we do like to know where all of our submissions come from and may choose not to publish a submission if the lack of identity and nature of the submission are issues for us. In the case of fictional submissions, art, stories etc, then pseudonyms (pen names) mean people can, at least, discuss a certain author's contributions.

When you're done creating your literary masterpiece please send it to us at
announce@elandsonline.info or use our Contact page

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