I knew when I wrote an entry for my formatting blog about sentence spacing that I would probably make some people upset. I just didn't expect to hear about it so soon.

Three or four hours after posting it, I was at Hopleaf to see an excellent reading series called This Much Is True. (This is part of my campaign to visit all the reading series I can, so I can meet new writers, promote Tuesday Funk, and get ideas for promoting it.) In the line at the bar I ran into one of the producers of yet another local reading series, a fine one that will remain nameless, who said to me right off the bat, "I saw your post about two spaces at the end of a sentence today. I HATE TWO SPACES AT THE END OF A SENTENCE. I edit lawyers all day and they all do it, and I have to fix it, and it drives me crazy."

Which only underscores my contention that sentence spacing is the most contentious aspect of the bizarrely contentious issue of manuscript formatting. Or should that be italicizes?

Since we're only, let's see, a decade into the 21st century now, I figured it was probably past time to revisit my essay on "Proper Manuscript Format." I've revised it a couple of times in the past, but with all the changes in submission standards over the past decade a major overhaul was in order.

Some hardliners may be upset with me for ceding some ground, but I haven't changed the way I format a manuscript. I do acknowledge other valid schools of thought, though.

I've written a fuller explanation of the revisions over at my formatting blog. I hope you'll check out the updated formatting guide itself and let me know what you think. Does it go too far? Not far enough? Or do you agree?

Dear correspondent who just forwarded me the same email he sent two days ago:

I understand that you are impatient for a response. However, I receive more email about format questions than I can deal with quickly, and just because I haven't responded immediately does not mean I am ignoring your questions. I will get to yours after I've answered earlier messages.

In the meantime, please refrain from getting so impatient that you repeatedly forward the same message to me. If you can't wait more than two days for a response from me, how on earth are you going to deal with the slow wait for a response from a publisher?

Love,
The Formatting Grump

For well over a decade my manuscript formatting guide "Proper Manuscript Format" has been available online, with the result that I've fielded hundreds of questions on the subject from writers around the English-speaking world. For years now I've wanted to share those letters and my responses to them online, on the theory that for every question I receive there are probably ten times as many writers with the same question who don't email and would find the discussion helpful.

I've finally done somthing about it. My new, low-volume blog FLOG will feature my answers to readers' (and writers'!) questions about manuscript formatting, both newly received and mined from my email archives. Come on over and argue with us.

Hey there, all you WordPerfect users aspiring to write short fiction! For you maligned folks and you folks only, I've added a new feature to my inexplicably popular manuscript formatting instructions.

I created a set of WordPerfect templates and macros that let you easily create a properly formatted short story manuscript and update the word count as you type with a simple keyboard shortcut.

Downloading, installation, and usage instructions here.

(For you eager users of Microsoft Word, I'll get to you soon. I'm far more comfortable in WordPerfect, which I've been using faithfully ever since version 4.0 for DOS, and even so, the programming and page-building took quite a bit longer than I expected.)