My technique, which seems to work, is as follows:

Write the story in MAS Word. I get to make use of all teh fancy
spellcheck andf grammar check hah!) tools. Plus I can export to html in
a snap if ever I decide to do so.

When sending to Email, I copy and paste to notepad, and *then* copy and
paste to Email. That way I force it to appear only with vbalid ascii
characters, and none of those horrible ==90 (or whatever) bits that make
a story unreadable.

I've noticed that a lot of people have problems getting their fanfics
wordwrapped to 70-80 characters per line -- I personally favor 70-75
chars/line, myself -- so I thought I would mention two programs which

can let

you freely edit in soft-wrapped form (i.e., no hard returns at the end

of each

line) AND allows you to save documents which are hard-wrapped (i.e.,

hard

returns at the ned of each line) to any number of characters you

specify.

 For people with Macintoshes, try a freeware program called "BBEDIT

Lite".

 For people with PCs, try a program called "TextPad".The program is

shareware

but I believe that the word-wrap feature is fully functional.   Check

the help

document under the term "word wrap".

To get either of these programs, go to the URL:
       http://www.shareware.com/

  For "BBEDIT Lite", specify "Macintosh" software and use the search

term

"bbedit lite".

  For "TextPad", specify "Windows" software and use the search term
"Textpad".

The search results will show you where you can download the programs.

I'm

pretty sure that these programs are also available in the AOL (and

other

commercial network or university) shareware libraries.

Since both these programs produce documents in basic ASCII text, all

you have

to do is cut-and-paste into your email program.  This way, you improve
readability and you don't have to worry how your readers' email

programs are

displaying your story.

I hope you guys find this info helpful.  I love reading fanfics but

badly

word-wrapped stories drive me crazy!  My vision is bad enough as it

is....

^_^;

----------------------------------------------------
madamhydra@aol.com    /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/:E

http://members.aol.com/madamhydra/index.html