Recently I went through the Writer’s Market, the famous directory of magazines and newspapers accepting freelance submissions. It was…educational. In case Splarks.com ever becomes an independent small press, I’ve drafted listing in the Writer’s Market.
Email: [email protected].
We review unsolicited submissions quarterly. During these times, we crowd into our hip, overpriced loft office and feast on trendy takeout and wine from a country you probably can’t identify on a map. We read your submission aloud and point out all your editing errors. If we can’t find any, we’ll make some up so that everyone else in the room will admire our sharp eye. Then we will denounce your work as loathsome tripe and invent derogatory terms to apply to your writing technique. On slower months, we go to the rooftop garden and bring an easel and charcoal pencils. We then sketch the loser we imagine you are, based on your banal attempts at writing. Invariably, your portrait will resemble a crazy cat lady, a dour parking lot attendant, or creepy children’s television show host. Finally, we will build a little fire in our sink or the rooftop fire pit and ceremoniously toss in the crumpled pages of your manuscript, evoking the ghost of James Joyce as we do so.
Nonfiction: We love confessionals and memoirs, as they help us further analyze your pathetic approach to living. We are particularly interested in your failure of a love life, high school trauma from which you have not yet recovered, and your quaint loss of religious faith. We love hearing about the Self as a Lame Stereotype, which is likely all you’re capable of writing.
Fiction: Send us genre fiction with the hero or heroine thinly disguised as you. Please spell “heroine” wrong; it amuses us. Unlike those other literary magazines that claim to accept only the best contemporary fiction, we take only crap since no one can write well, except for us. Go on, send us your hackneyed blathering.
Poetry: Please don’t send rhyming poetry typical of greeting cards–it’s too easy to criticize. Challenge us! Try to really touch our non-existent hearts and make us feel something. That’s always so precious.
Tips: Don’t query us about the status of your manuscript or ask when the next issue will be published. Please refer back to this entry for the answers, which are “We burned it in the sink, and then Pablo drunkenly puked on the ashes,” or “As nothing meets our standards for quality literature, the journal will not be published. Again.”
(Okay, okay, Splarks would never be so harsh, though some publishers in the Writer’s Market might be. Did read see all that stuff we’d have to do? That’s a lot of work. We would read your submission, then send you a thank you note and a reminder that we are far too lazy to have a publishing company. We’d also never evoke the ghost of James Joyce because then we would have to tell him how much we loathed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school, which we chose from the teacher’s selection because it was the shortest volume and we regretted our choice very much. Apparently, the memory of this choice caused us to start speaking in the third person. Royal We are sorry about that.)
