This is a bit more basic/mechanical than our usual topics on this thread, but I have a question:
I just replaced the prologue of my alternate history with an obituary--that of the Important Personage whose premature death is where my world's history first departs from that of the one we're all living in. Incidentally, I hated killing that prologue, since it was very prettily written. I came closer to channeling Patrick O'Brian than I'm normally capable of, and I kept re-reading it to gloat over my elegant turns of phrase. However, I realized that it was more than the reader needs to know about events happening 25 years before the main action of the story, featuring a character who never appears again for the very good reason that he's dead.
So I cut the affecting death scene and just wrote a one-sentence obituary (one sentence because in my world the guy dies too young to become that Important of a Personage). And I'm proud of my google-fu in tracking down a newspaper for the town where he died and in figuring out how to word a period-appropriate obituary. But I don't know how to format the darn thing. Should I still have "PROLOGUE" as the section header? Right now it's something like this:
From the PERIODICAL of PLACE, DATE
OBITUARY
The obituary itself, which is one longish sentence about the guy, how old he was, where he died, and what of.
Does that sound right for manuscript formatting? I'm sure it'll look different in the actual book if I'm so fortunate as to sell it, but that's not my problem.