submitting 1st story - need some technical help with MS-WORD

[Ruby]

Question#1
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I'm about to submit my first story and I have such a dumb-ass problem with MS-Word that it's a bit embarrassing to ask about it. I'm running MS-Word 2000 running on WinXP. I can't exactly go ask my conservative neighbors for help with this.

No kidding. I have the same problem. :-) Seriously.....

I intially used to delineate my chapters by running "====" across the page to get a long bold line. Well WORD sometimes would do me a favor (I guess) and turn these into solid lines. After a while WORD would insert these on its own after a variable number of lines on a page. What the ...? It made no sense.

Worse, there appears to be no way to delete them. I can go to options and display the paragraph and tab symbols, but no symbols show up indicating what the extra bold lines are. And like I said, no way to delete them either.

So, if someone knows what's going on, please HELP!!!
I can send the file if you're willing to look at it.
I could use someone to review/edit my story anyway, if anyone's interested. I've looked at it a hundred times and it's a blur to me at this point. It's a fairly light piece, with some f/f content (my favorite!).

Blame it on the autoformmating feature. Stupid word thinks it knows what you want.

Goto Format at the top of the menu.
Then AutoFormat
at the bottom right, click on options.

This is where all the hidden and automatic formatting is accomplished.
Unclick the options you don't want and make sure you unclick them in all the possible screens. This will keep the --- or === or ___ from becoming lines.

To get rid of them once they are in there, save the document as TEXT only. This wipes out the special characters.
Then re-open and save again as word if you want word formats.

When submitting to the Library, I submit in text. This gives you an idea of what it will look like on the screen.

Text can be quite evil and if you haven't inserted tabs or paragraph marks between paragraphs you can have one messy story.

I have split the story into 6 chapters. Do I send 6 separates files, or does the person receiving stories do the work of splitting the file?

I submitted in one monster file and the webmaster split up the chapters for me.

Hope this helps,

Ruby