Submissions

The gist of this page is: “Please send us something, we’ll be glad to consider it. If we have to ask for a rewrite, these are the most likely reasons.”

A mailto link for submissions can be found at the end of this page. Veteran contributors may go to it directly or to the Contact page. If you are a new contributor, please familiarize yourself with the contents of this page first.

Important reminders:

Please inquire if you do not receive:
an acknowledgement within three days.
a decision within five weeks.

This page is long because it compiles years of experience. And yet, despite appearances, sending a submission to Bewildering Stories is as easy as can be. Click here for the Submissions Guidelines: Short Form.

Page last updated: March 6, 2010

Page Index
Everything in blue is an internal link or anchor link.
General info What we do Standard Procedure Preview procedure Description tag Priorities and Genres Length Tables of Contents Links Incomplete stories Excerpts Synopses Esthetics: No, Yes, Maybe		Format and Style: Normal Special Emphasis Titles Footnotes Spelling Paragraphing Fonts Links Changes		Other Information Confirmations and Waiting Time Names Duplications Parodies and Pastiches Simultaneous submissions Multiple submissions Reprints Mail Letters Terms and conditions Bewildering Press Notice to publishers Withdrawals and unpersons
How to send a file to Bewildering Stories What should a typical submission look like?

All links within the text open either hypertext notes or a new window, so you won’t lose your place.

What we do

Bewildering Stories is a weekly webzine (or “e-zine”) devoted to speculative and experimental writing. All genres are welcome in both fiction and non-fiction. We publish novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, drama, articles, essays, reviews, graphic art and music.

We’re not just an electronic magazine; we’re a meeting place and, at times, an on-line seminar. We welcome discussion of anything published in Bewildering Stories or elsewhere.

• Our forum provides an opportunity for informal conversations with our editors, contributors, and readers.
• The official Challenge appears regularly in the Departments. It poses questions about stories or non-fiction in current or past issues.
• The Critics’ Corner appears occasionally in the Departments. It features articles and essays on writing.

Anything appearing in Bewildering Stories is open to discussion. Readers and authors are all invited to participate.

Standard Procedure

1. Please send only one submission in any e-mail. Exception: a bio sketch and photo may accompany a submission.
2. E-mail the submission to the Managing Editor. He may reply directly, but he normally forwards the submission to the Coordinating Editor.
3. The Coordinating Editor sends you an acknowledgment and forwards the submission to a review reader.
4. If the Coordinating Editor agrees with the reviewer’s evaluation, he may send an acceptance notice directly or confer with the Managing Editor.
5. If the submission is accepted, the Managing Editor notifies you of its place on the official schedule. If it isn’t accepted, we’ll tell you why.
6. You may send revisions as entire files up to the time our customary Preview Notice is sent, a few days before the work is to appear on line. After that, revisions must be made by quoting the original sentence or line and indicating the change. Extensive revisions made after the Preview notice is sent may be cause for rescheduling or reconsideration.

   Review readers are not proofreaders; they read for content and assume that the mechanics — spelling, punctuation and grammar — will be correct. If any errors are noticed, we’ll call your attention to them in our critiques.

   Proofreading begins when the preview notices are sent. If the proofreaders discover too many errors to be noted and corrected promptly, we’ll have to reschedule the work and ask you to make the changes. That happens rarely, but it has happened.

Preview procedure: Congratulations. Your work has been accepted and you have finally received the Preview notice, which constitutes your “page proof.” Now what? Please click here to see the Preview “checklist.” It will open in a new window, so you won’t lose your place.

All files have a “description” meta-tag. It is not visible in the document on line, but it is very important: it is quoted by search engines on the Net as well as the one in our “All Issues” department.

Heretofore, the editor supplied a description meta-tag for all submissions that did not have one. The practice was intended as a favor to our contributors, but it is time-consuming, and sometimes the editor simply doesn’t know what to say. That's why poems are described simply as “poem” and some description tags have been left blank.

Contributors must supply a description tag for each prose work, otherwise the tag will be left blank. Descriptions may be supplied for chapters within a serialized work, but that’s optional. Poems are probably best described simply as “poem.”

The description must consist of one sentence or a fragment no longer than 30 words. Examples of the style of description meta-tags can be found in our Sample Page and the short introductions in any Readers’ Guide.

Priorities and Genres

Bewildering Stories invites unconventional writing in all genres — prose, poetry and drama — on all subjects in fiction and non-fiction, particularly:

• science fiction, including accounts of alternate histories past, present and future
• fantasy
• mainstream fiction
• reviews and review articles, which may deal with real or imaginary books, plays, and films on any subject
• real or fictional interviews, biographies, or memoirs
• non-fiction articles, essays, and interviews
• (invent your own)

We also welcome submissions in languages other than English. However, all such submissions must be accompanied by an English translation. If the original can be fairly presented along with the translation, we’ll try to include it. Please let the editors take care of the formatting.

We presume that any translations we receive are the author’s unless we’re told otherwise. All translations are the property of the translator.

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Length

We make no restrictions as to length. We like to keep works as compact as possible, but we also think our frequency of publication makes serials attractive and keeps readers coming back.

Tables of Contents: Since issue 280, each page of serialized works and of 3-part works within a single issue has been headed by a Table of Contents. It may be a drop-down menu or, if the work has long chapter titles, it may be a separate page that opens in a new window. A Table of Contents often allows readers to view serial installments before the installments formally appear in a regular issue.

Our maximum page length is 3,000 words excluding headers and footers. Here are the arrangements we normally use:

length	installments	issues
up to 3,000 words 3,000-6,000 words 6,000-9,000 words over 9,000 words	1 2 3 4 or more	in one issue in the same issue in one to three issues in two or more issues

Exceptions: the 3,000-word page limit does not apply to letters, story contests, excerpts, or texts in a language other than English. However, contest entries and excerpts are limited to 9,000 words; that is, they won’t be serialized.

Serials appearing in three or more issues should be accompanied by a synopsis that gives a general overview of the story and allows readers to start without searching for the beginning. Ideally, a synopsis introduces the main character or characters to new readers and states the problem without summarizing the plot or giving away the ending.

For examples, please consult novels such as euhal allen’s The Bridge, II, and Tala Bar’s The King’s Daughter. We also encourage synopses in related short stories even when they are not part of a serial, e.g. Robert L. Sellers Jr., “Posse.”

If the content constitutes negative length, we’ll let you know. Imaginary lengths may pose formatting problems.

Links:

• Copyright lines link to the author’s biography, if available, and bibliography.
• Multiple installments link forward and backward within an issue.
• Multiple-issue installments can sometimes be read in advance; follow the Table of Contents, which cross-links to all installments.

Incomplete stories and serials: We used to consider and publish works in progress. In view of our backlog we can no longer do so.

We will publish Excerpts as a Department, not in a fiction or non-fiction category. Excerpts are offered as a favor to our veteran contributors and normally constitute free advertising for novels in print.

Excerpts are not subject to our 3,000-word page limit; we like to keep the excerpt all on one page. However, it may not exceed 9,000 words, which is the limit for any title in one issue. Strongly recommended: cover art, links to vendors, and the bibliographical information normally included in our book reviews. Click here for an example of an excerpt.

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Esthetics

The gist of this section is: We print works that make sense, that don’t use naughty words or unnecessary violence, and that we like.

We at Bewildering Stories make few rules about what we like: we love to be surprised. However, we are aware of our limitations. First we’ll list what we don’t like and then what we do.

We do not want to publish:

• Naughty words and scenes:
  • Naughty words: obscene, scatological or excessively vituperative language in any context. Use of the “f-” and “s-” words is strictly prohibited. We also frown upon abbreviating them. Workarounds always improve the text.
  • Sex is limited to what our Publisher feels comfortable with. And that basically boils down to: “Nothing that can’t be done out in the street without frightening the horses.”
• Sentimentality: gratuitous violence and blood & gore;
  collections of proverbs or moral precepts with no demonstrated application in the form of fiction or non-fiction, including poetry.
• Irrelevance:
  • “Vignettes,” namely writing that is purely descriptive or narrative — even in dialogue — and that has no point beyond itself. A vignette is to a photograph as a story is to a film, or as a single scene is to a stage play.
  • Stories that end with “But it was all a dream” or any variation thereof. Of course we do not object to dream sequences in fiction, but we do object to stories that logically cancel themselves out. Dreams are a mode of interpreting reality, not reality itself.
  • Stories in which the narrator dies.
• Fan fiction: We cannot consider — regardless of merit — fiction that uses trademarked or copywrited character names or titles. Thus, we can’t print things like Star Trek spoofs featuring Capt. Kirk or Mr. Spock, etc. Likewise, we cannot print fiction in which real, living people are characters. Exception: political satire. However, we must quote two of our unofficial mottoes: “Any story based on current events is out of date before it’s written,” and Stendhal’s famous adage: “Politics in a novel is like a pistol shot in a concert.”

In short, bewildering stories are fine, but not offensive or inconsequential or illegal ones.

In returning submissions for rewriting we often have occasion to refer to the advice given in some important articles. They are listed in a linked index in “The Writer’s Craft” and the articles are worth reading for their own sake.

And now, since we are “Bewildering” stories, here are examples of writing we’d be glad to publish:

• Naughty words and scenes:
  • Naughty words: a study of the cultural significance of swear words in any language.
  • Sex: stories in which sexuality is constructive and central to the plot and characterization.
• Sentimentality:
  • Violence or injury that has a meaning, as in Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
  • Proverbs, aphorisms or maxims that serve as the basis of a story or poem that illustrates their meaning and application; for example: a collection of Martian proverbs accompanied by an exegesis that is either scholarly, humorous or both.
• Irrelevance: an explication of a chapter of a story, or a fragment of a real or imaginary manuscript accompanied by an elucidation of its meaning.

What about borderline cases? What if a submission could be made acceptable by simply deleting or changing a few things? This is a knotty problem, because authors vary widely. Some are grateful for all the help we can give them; others cherish their every jot and tittle, and there’s everything in between.

Normally we’ll ask you to make any changes necessary, or you can let us do it. We do try to correct details we think any author would have caught on further proofreading, but we don’t make changes that alter the meaning of the text. If you find that a passage is missing from your work when it appears, it was lost in transmission. Please let us know immediately what it is, and we’ll insert it.

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Format and Style

Normal Text: We consider texts received by e-mail only. We prefer to receive works in plain text or in an attachment in RTF (rich text format), whichever is easier for you. Anything “made on a Mac” is probably okay. However, please note:

Problematic files:

Microsoft Word .xml files. “.doc” files are okay. “docx” files will be converted to “.doc” format. Please, no fancy annotations such as with “track changes”; they’ll be lost in transmission.

WordPerfect files can be opened by NeoOffice, which we have. Please send regular .wpd files, not RTF; WordPerfect’s RTF is very non-standard and garbles things like accented letters.

Adobe Acrobat may be used for submissions you can’t send in plain text, but as a general practice it seems like a waste of bandwidth and more trouble than it’s worth.

Please see our Style Manual and Sample Page for notes about ways to make e-mailing easy.

If you want special formatting, please describe it in a preliminary note. Special formatting includes non-standard punctuation and spellings; in short, anything that differs from our Style Manual.

• Emphasis: There are a number of ways to indicate emphasis.

  • You may italicize words for emphasis or other reasons in your text.

  • If you don’t use italics, you may indicate emphasis by enclosing a word in asterisks, *thus*. The editors will add italics, emphasis or cite tags as the context requires.

    The asterisk option is intended as a convenience to contributors who send text as e-mail rather than as an attachment and don’t have RTF as an option in their mailer.

    We’re just trying to make things easy for you. If you’re familiar with HTML and know the difference between the tags <i>, <em> and <cite>, feel free to use them. All three tags format as italics, but they may have special conditions in the style sheet, and they are read differently by text-vocalizing software.

  • In our standard style, underlining and boldface have special uses. Underlining is reserved for links; boldface is normally used for list items, titles and subtitles. We do not use underlining or boldface for emphasis. If emphatic statements are underlined or boldfaced in your text, they will be converted to italics. If you want idiosyncratic underlining and boldface, you may ask for it, but we probably won’t agree to it.

  • If anything must be all in capital letters, as when a character is shouting, e.g. “WHAT?” the word should probably be italicized as well. Please keep in mind that more than a few words in full caps or italics are hard to read. A whole line of text in full caps is unacceptable; we’ll have to talk about other ways of formatting it.

• Titles:

  • We indicate titles of novels and other stand-alone works by means of the <cite> tag.
  • Only acronyms may appear in full caps in our titles.
  • We use standard North American capitalization.
  • Foreign language titles are capitalized in old MLA style according to the language.
  • Many authors seem to consider titles a necessary evil; that may explain why one-word titles are all the fashion these days. And yet titles can be very important. While the lone personal pronoun Them is very effective as a film title, it is an exception; a title that consists only of a single common part of speech will almost certainly be non-descript and unattractive. Not only does it risk duplication of earlier titles at Bewildering Stories, which would be unfortunate, it will be very hard to search for, even if the prospective reader knows who the author is.

• Footnotes; Hypertext: Bibliographies are okay. They are added at the end of a work. We use old MLA style. If you prefer modern MLA style, we’ll use that.

  Footnotes are a huge annoyance to both readers and editors; please do not use them. If you must, then the footnotes are ipso facto as important as the main text.

  Remember that a page on line is not the same as a page in print. If readers jump to the bottom of a page, they will find their place again only with great difficulty — if they even try.

  However, explanatory notes can be important and do have their place. The editor will insist on making them hypertext notes. If the notes are too long for alert boxes, they can be included on an auxiliary page that can be opened in a new window at the first occurrence of a note.

Spelling and punctuation: The editor usually runs a spell-check and cleans up punctuation as best he can, and the Review Board is especially vigilant concerning the quality of texts. Please see our style manual. We go out of our way to help contributors writing in English as a second language, particularly with spelling, syntax, and idiomatic usage.

Paragraphing: Please insert a blank line between prose paragraphs and no line breaks within them. If paragraphs are run together, we will try to separate them, but the result may not be what was intended.

Please do not indent the first line of paragraphs. Paragraph indents make handwritten manuscripts as well as double- and single-spaced typescripts more readable, but they are not necessary in our style; the editor will have to remove all the indentations.

Many contributors use tabs to make paragraph indents. That practice is baffling indeed: can manual typewriters be found anywhere outside of museums and dusty attics any more?

“It’s a long road that has no turning.” Please bear in mind that a paragraph is harder to read on line than on paper. After about ten lines, readers begin to lose their place, and they’ll find it a real chore to read uninterrupted text that fills more than half a screen.

If a paragraph is too long, the editor will make new paragraphs at likely points. If you feel you must insist on paragraphs more suited to papyrus or clay bricks, for some unfathomable reason, tell the editor. You’ll be reminded that long-winded texts discourage on-line readers and put you at a big disadvantage.

However, we aren’t unreasonable; we would hate to lose an exceptional work just because the author preferred the conventions of 19th-century novels to those of the Internet.

Now, what if the preceding had been all one paragraph? Would you have even started to read it? We do not think so.

Fonts: As a rule, Bewildering Stories specifies formats but not fonts; the pages are displayed in the fonts assigned by the preferences of your Net browser. In submissions, please do not specify fancy fonts; not all readers can see them. If a special font is necessary for part of the work, please specify it in a preliminary note. Such special effects may best be handled by graphics linked to the main document. Click here for an example.

Links:

• Internal links, such as for graphics, are welcome. If you request a link to your personal website or to your e-mail address, we will be happy to include it. Or both, if you wish. We use code for the @ in e-mail addresses to discourage spambots. It may or may not work, but it’s worth a try.

• Links to other websites may be used routinely in non-fiction; we’ll make sure they open in a new window. However, we will not include links to other websites in fiction unless we agree it’s absolutely necessary.

Audio files: We welcome audio versions of submissions. Please send them to the Publisher only after the work has been accepted. Our preferred audio format is mp3.

Illustrations: If you have illustrations for your stories, or just some bewildering graphics, we would probably love to include them.

Changes: Please remember that the texts that appear in Bewildering Stories are almost always more correct than the authors’ own copies. Also, on-line texts are dynamic, unlike those in print: if you wish to make further changes after your work appears, just tell us what they are and we’ll see to it.

Exception: We can’t accept revisions so extensive that they require replacing an entire file or set of files after they have officially appeared on line. It’s better to resubmit the work afresh and withdraw the earlier one.

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Other Information

Confirmation and waiting time: Please do not re-send something you’ve already sent unless it’s a revision.

• If you haven’t received an acknowledgement within three days, please inquire; e-mail does sometimes go astray.
• If you haven’t received a decision within four weeks of acknowledgement, please inquire.

In thankfully rare cases we make suggestions but receive no reply. The contributor’s e-mail account is either neglected or inaccessible. Some contributors have spam filters that have blocked e-mail from every account we use, and then they wonder why they haven’t heard from us. There’s not a lot we can do for them.

We’d like to publish everything immediately or be able to tell you exactly when something will appear, but the days are long past when we could do that. Nor can we publish everything strictly in the order in which it’s received: making up each issue is an intricate process involving primarily readability, which requires controlling issue length. Please see the guidelines in Bewildering Info.

If you’d like to know when your story will appear, you can consult “In Times to Come”: it is listed as the “Schedule” in the home page menu, and it also has a link in the Readers’ Guides. “In Times to Come” lists titles coming up in the next five issues. Or you can e-mail the editor; he may be able to give you an estimate, but if the queue is very long, maybe not.

Names:

• Name and address: Please include your name and e-mail address. Your e-mail address will be published only if you specifically request it.

  No new author may use exactly the same name as one already appearing in our Biographies & Bibliographies. For example: “Don Webb” is the managing editor. The contributor “Don J. Webb” is the real Don Webb; he graciously consented to using his middle initial to ensure distinction.

• Pen names:

  • Everything in Bewildering Stories must have a title and a byline. Or, in departmental pages, the author must at least be readily identifiable. “Anonymous” — or variations on it — is not a name; it is the equivalent of a blank byline.

    If you don’t supply a name, we’ll make up a pen name for you. It may be something like Spud’s fanciful concoctions, so you’re probably better off making up one of your own. We’ll accept one-word pen names only if they’re unique, e.g. “Crystalwizard.”

  • Only the first byline you use will be “functional”; that is, we will not create a new Biography and Bibliography for each new pen name, even if you eventually change your mind and decide to use your real name. Everything by the same person goes into the same bibliography regardless of byline.

    The name in your first byline is the name that will appear in your Biography. You may use other pen names — or even your real name — in subsequent works or in e-mail; however, we’ll become hopelessly confused: it’s already hard enough to keep track of the mail. And while you may update your bio, the name in the bio title and index is permanent. Just letting you know. Choose carefully.

Simultaneous submissions will be considered. Bewildering Stories pays no attention to what other publications do. If we hear that a submission has been accepted elsewhere, we say “Congratulations” and, if we accept it, we publish it anyway unless we’re told not to. Likewise, Bewildering Stories does not require that simultaneous submissions be withdrawn from consideration by other publications.

As protection for our contributors, third parties have no standing at Bewildering Stories; that is, the author alone may submit or withdraw a work. Please see also “Notice to Publishers,” below.

Multiple submissions (more than one submission at a time, preferably in separate e-mails) are okay for poetry. However, more than one short story or flash fiction submission at a time from the same author causes problems for our Coordinating Editor. The review readers can’t be asked to read all the submissions at once; therefore which do they read first? We prefer that the author decide. Please send prose submissions one at a time, after receiving a decision from our Coordinating Editor or Managing Editor.

Reprints: We may accept reprints as long as the authors own the rights to them. If any other publication owns exclusive rights, we cannot reprint it.

• If you add a note at the end of your manuscript telling us when and where a work was previously published, we’ll include the citation in an author’s note at the end. Please include it in the manuscript; otherwise we’ll certainly forget about it.
• We won’t mention any changes you may have made from a previous edition unless you add an author’s note to that effect at the end of the manuscript.

Hyperfiction: For hyperfiction, we prefer that you send in a group of linked HTML documents. We will most likely not accept any other format, unfortunately. It takes time to link up everything.

Letters: Correspondence is welcome:

• We like to publish feedback and letters of general interest in our Letters department. We edit mail to make sure it includes nothing personal, only topics of interest to readers of Bewildering Stories. We do not include newsletters or material that more properly belongs on a personal blog.

• Your name will appear on the correspondence unless you request otherwise. If the message is obviously suitable for publication, we’ll contact you only if we have questions.

  As mentioned earlier, your e-mail address will not be included on our pages or in correspondence unless you specifically request it. Exception: We welcome “fan mail” and will gladly forward it to the author of your choice. The entire message, including your e-mail address, goes to the author, whom we encourage to reply directly to you. We do not normally publish such letters. And we forward only the first communication from a reader to an author; after that, any further contact is up to them.

Duplications and plagiarism: We may not be able to detect plagiarism, but readers may very well do so. Any that can be proven will be removed from the website.

Parodies: If your submission is a parody, please cite the author and title of the object of the parody; not all readers may be familiar with it.

Pastiches: Bewildering Stories does not accept pastiches. They do have their place, as an article in our Writer’s Guide indicates, but we do not want to get into hair-splitting arguments over what’s pastiche and what’s plagiarism.

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Terms and Conditions

• We purchase (with no payment but our gratitude) one-time nonexclusive electronic rights for the works we accept. If your story is a reprint, we purchase (payment, again, consists of our thanks) nonexclusive electronic reprint rights. All works published in Bewildering Stories remain the property of the original author(s).

  Exception: Discussions — namely pages featuring text from more than one contributor — become the property of Bewildering Stories. Contributors to discussions can propose minor editorial corrections but cannot withdraw their participation entirely once it has officially appeared in a regular or special issue. However, any participant in a discussion remains free to use his or her own text elsewhere without encumbrance.

• If you would like to modify or remove your work at any time, please send a note to Bewildering Stories, and we will take care of it as soon as possible. “Possible” implies limits; please see “Withdrawals and unpersons,” below.

Bewildering Press publishes new texts. Works published by Bewildering Press must either have appeared in Bewildering Stories or at least come from a veteran contributor to Bewildering Stories.

A veteran contributor is one who has published at least one work in Bewildering Stories or has one listed on the official schedule. The work in Bewildering Stories can be anything but a standard review such as of a book or film; it need not be the manuscript submitted to Bewildering Press.

“BwP” may also publish anything from Bewildering Stories in anthologies or as separate books. If your work is chosen, we’ll ask your permission, of course, and we will ask you to approve the page proofs before publication.

Notice to publishers: Book publishers sometimes purchase the rights to works that have appeared in Bewildering Stories.

As consideration, we would appreciate publishers’ including the usual citation on their acknowledgements page to the effect: “(title) first appeared in Bewildering Stories” in the event that we were the first to publish the work. If a date is required for anything appearing before about Year 3 of Bewildering Stories, the issue number and year will have to suffice.

Withdrawals and unpersons:

Occasionally publishers’ contracts require that the stories be withdrawn from our website. We applaud the authors’ success and are willing to comply to the extent possible. It goes without saying that Bewildering Stories cannot consider withdrawal requests from third parties; we will honor only explicit requests made by the authors themselves.

In the case of long serials — especially novels and novellas — we can remove the title from the bibliography on the author’s bio page and substitute a withdrawal notice for the regular synopsis. But that’s the most we can do.

The same principle applies to multiple titles. We can remove titles from our authors’ bibliographies, but we cannot remove a whole list of works from the the issues in which they appear.

It’s a matter of practicality: Bewildering Stories is not a blog; we would have to suspend publication for a month while the managing editor revised many pages to remove all traces of the works. Even hiring an assistant — at the author’s expense — would not be feasible.

The same principle applies to “unpersons,” to borrow a term from George Orwell’s 1984. On thankfully very rare occasions, authors have asked to be “vaporized” (ibid.), i.e. to have all traces of their existence removed from Bewildering Stories. No, sorry, that is not humanly possible. The most we can do is replace the bio sketch and bibliography with “Withdrawn at the author’s request” and remove the person’s name from our Biographies index.

Please see also: “How to send a file to Bewildering Stories”

Now, please use this link to send us your Bewildering Story!

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