Submissions Guidelines:
Short Form
Do you have a story, poem, essay or article you’d like to send us? We’ll be glad to consider it.
Our official motto is “Proofreading never ends.”
Have you proofread the text? Is it just the way you want it? If you’re still having second thoughts, keep working on it.If it’s ready, then proofread it again — backwards, sentence by sentence. Your spellchecker can’t catch homophones such as “there” for “they’re” or “their” and “it’s” for “its” or vice-versa; nor can it catch erroneous or missing punctuation.
Does your tense, action-packed story contain the naughty “f-” or “s-” words? Delete or replace them; they’re not allowed.
Are any of the paragraphs a bit long, say about ten lines? If so, split them up. The editor takes our “long road” guideline very seriously and will apply it as needed. We much prefer that you do it yourself.
Now, is your word processor file all ready to be printed out on paper? Double spacing? Centered headers? Footers with page numbers? Paragraphs painstakingly indented by a tab, in manual-typewriter style?
Okay, now make a duplicate of your print-on-paper file and delete all that junk! We do not want to see it! We want plain vanilla, and our Sample Page shows what it looks like. Our Style Manual summarizes what goes into editing a file.
Ready to send? Okay, save a copy of your file in RTF (rich text format) and send it as an attachment. Exception: if you use WordPerfect, send a plain .wpd file; WordPerfect’s RTF garbles text and can’t be trusted. Our Contact page has more about preferred file formats.
Our e-address can be found at the bottom of the Submissions page or at the top of the Contact page. We’d put it here, but we want you to see those pages, too.
Best of luck. And now return to the Submissions guidelines; they can be a real eye-opener.
Copyright © 2009 by Bewildering Stories.
