I am disappointed to discover that the first chapter of Path is three quarters of a page inconveniently too long. Too long for what, you say? Such a good question. Too long for the extremely precise requirements laid out by this conference I’m going to. Do they ask for a specific word count? Oh no. A specific page length. They say cheerily, ‘ten pages only, even if it falls off in the middle of a chapter’. To which I blinked a bit and said, Okay… thinking, That’s fine. My chapters are short. But it turns out, the first one? Not that short. Which, you know, fine. But dude. Three quarters of a page. That’s just untidy.
And I know there’s at least a few of you out there eyeing me sidelong and thinking, Margins. Font. Paragraph spacing. But just… no. Okay? For one thing, all those things are prescribed. And, to be perfectly fair, there is slightly more creative fiddling one can do with less chance of being detected but… they asked for ten pages within these guidelines, and that is what I’m going to give them. And it’s their own fault if they’re left wishing they knew what happened next. At least it doesn’t break in the middle of a sentence. Huh. Maybe I should add a little more space to the front page so it does. That’ll teach them to ask for page length.
Honestly. Page length. What if your writing happens to be dialogue heavy? Just for example. They’re not being forced to read extra words, they’ll have to make do with less words. And it’s not like they’re the ones printing it or…
Okay I am going to stop muttering and my breath and pacing around because… well it’s difficult to pace with a laptop and when people catch me muttering to myself they tend to try to make me stop working and go out where the sunlight is and you know I’m against that. Also it may be raining. I mean, it could be. So, you know, safer in here.
Kandace Mavrick
Paul McLaughlan
platform thing 
Kaitlin
09/05/2012
It’s (your situation, not your article) weird, and arbitrary, and more than a little frustrating. I’m not entirely sure who you’re talking about – a publisher? A professor? An editor? In any case, it’s hard to figure out sometimes, but people do have their reasons for what they do. Sometimes, they’re incredibly stupid and random reasons, but sometimes there is a method to the madness.
Keep pushing through, and you’ll probably figure it out eventually.
Kandace Mavrick
09/05/2012
In this case it’s for a manuscript critique at a conference. I’m figuring they just have time constraints and only want to work with a limited amount of text. It’s just weird to me that they wouldn’t then specify a word count which would be a more accurate predictor of what they received than a number of pages…
I have this little fantasy where all publishers want the same formatting and layout and so on and you only have to do it once… Of course this is the same little fantasy place where publishers fall upon my work with cries of glee and… yeah, you get the idea 🙂