Swill Magazine - Submit! - Fiction For The Ill Literate - Literary Fiction, Noir, Pulp Fiction, Short Stories

^{Return to}^{Home Page
Literary Fiction, Noir, Pulp Fiction, Short Stories}

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

The submission period for Issue 5 is now closed. If you submitted to Issue 5 and have not received a response, you are welcome to send an e-mail.

We intend to begin reading for Issue 6 in September 2010. So if you've checked out the samples here, or better yet read an issue or more,and think you've got a story we'd like, send us your work, or whatever other gift you think we might enjoy, AFTER SEPTEMBER 1. If you like what you've read here but your writing is a different style, submit. Yeah we like pulp/noir, but we like other stuff too, as will become apparent when Issue 5 is published this summer. Read the earlier issues - we are opposed to limits.

We like stories where things actually happen, stories where someone might die.

We also like it when the jokes are funny.

We don't like Literature with a capital L. We do like literary fiction: we happen to think it includes the work of James Ellroy and Harlan Ellison.

Mainly what we like are stories. Not symbols and themes and extensive descriptive passages, not paint-by-numbers well-structured tripe that fails to excite. We prefer the Shakespeare approach to existentialism: question the meaning of life, then litter the stage with corpses.

Payment is two copies of the issue in which you are published. We don't make any money on this, neither do you. But we like the stories we publish, and we send free copies to people we like/respect/worship. Including Harlan Ellison, who recommended one of the stories from issue 3 ("Dead Boys," by Gene Hines) to Ellen Datlow for consideration in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Which means issue 4 was sent to Harlan Ellison and Ellen Datlow and anyone else we added to our network in the meantime. Our circulation isn't huge, but it includes some names that matter.

Oh, and when you do sub, we like attachments as .doc or .rtf files. Most of the stories we've run have been under 5000 words, but we've published up to 10,000 words. If you want a response to your submission, include contact information in the attachment. Also, we especially dislike that horrid Office 07 version of Word, so if you've been suckered into buying it, please save your file in a different format before sending it to us, or we'll have to borrow someone else's computer to open the damn thing. Fuck Microsoft.

Simultaneous submissions are fine; anything printed elsewhere, online or off, is not.

Excelsior!

^{Return to}^{Home Page
Literary Fiction, Noir, Pulp Fiction, Short Stories}