Hyperquestion, hyperanswer
A reader (I'm never sure whether to identify people by name when they send me questions 'n' stuff) asks how one would submit a hypertext story to SH. Another good question. I'll try and remember to cover that in our new revised more extensive guidelines. But I'll also cover it here.
If you have a website, the process is simple:
- Wait 'til we reopen to subs in January. : )
- Post your hyperfiction to the web, in a new directory on your site, with no links to it.
- Make sure there are really no links to it. Don't make it publicly accessible, or we can't consider it. (Note, btw, that if your piece contains a link to another site, and you or we follow that link, your piece's URL may end up in the other site's referrer list. And sometimes referrer lists are made public, and bots follow those links and index them. So if you're linking elsewhere, you probably ought to use any of various systems to ensure that well-behaved bots won't index these pages. If you don't know how to do this, look for information on robots.txt files online, or ask us.)
- If you really want to be careful, password-protect the directory. If you have the capability to do this, it's probably a good idea, but not essential.
- Submit the URL of a good starting page for your piece to us. Follow our regular submission guidelines, only instead of the text of the story, paste in the URL. If you password-protected the directory, provide the username and password. Also, please mention in your cover letter that the piece is not publicly accessible, so we won't have to worry about that.
If you don't have a website, there are various options, but it gets messy. Query us. Probably the simplest approach would involve creating a zip or tar archive and sending it to us; there may also be options involving presenting the piece as plain text (with notes indicating links and such). But again, query before trying these options.
Hope that helps.