Writers guidelines updated

A slight change has been made to the last guidelines update (from January). M-Brane SF no longer considers reprints. While I haven't (knowingly) published very many, I used to be open to them. But, alas, no more. Also, we now acquire First World English Rights rather than First North American Serial Rights, and we are serious about the "First" part of that phrase. Evidently some writers (or at least one that I know of so far) find it acceptable to shop the same story around to different zines and actually contract for "First" rights more than once, without ever mentioning previous publication. Here this is frowned upon, and is actually downright dangerous to one's prospects of getting published anywhere else since I am an email away from about 1000 other genre press editors nearly all of whom would take a similarly dim view of such chicanery. Other than the fact that I now consider previously published work dead to me unless you are the Second Coming of Samuel Delany (or Delany himself), I am as easy to work with and writer-friendly as ever.  The guidelines now read as follows:

UPDATED 7/19/10

to change advice on REPRINTS from "Maybe. Query." to "No."

First, the bullet points. I'll elaborate on them somewhat below.

GENRE: Science fiction (any variety)

NOT: Horror and fantasy unless it has a strong science fictional underpinning; not into paranormal/occult; In Search Of...type myths-and-monsters stuff, UFOs, ghosts, Big Foots, Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, chupacabras, etc.

WORD COUNT: no lower or upper limit, though be advised that I'm not the biggest fan of "flash" fiction

SIMUL-SUBS: Yeah, sure, who cares? Just let me know that it is one.

MULTI-SUBS: Ditto

REPRINTS: No.

E-SUBS: Only. I'll not look at paper mail (and won't even give out an address for such).

SUBMISSION FORMAT: Standard mss format is just great, though I don't really care so long as it's readable. All submissions should be sent to mbranesf@gmail.com as anattachment in .doc or .docx or .rtf form.

If you want to know more about my biases before dashing off your mss, continue reading below....

Genre: I've been getting a lot of straight-up horror and dark fantasy submissions lately. While I may welcome elements of these genres, the stories still need to be somehow science fictional. In other words, the speculative or weird elements should be grounded in some kind of development of science, technology, or society that has (at least within the context of the story) a rational basis. No magic or wizardry or supernatural evil, please. As for specifically what sorts of sf I like best, it's hard to pin down. My mood changes over time. Lately, I am not as excited as I once was about space opera and epic galactic empire stories. On the other hand, small-scale character-focused stories set in such a milieu might work. I have seen scores of stories during the past year focused on the shenanigans of university professors and their students (usually involving time travel or some other secret lab project). I'd like to not see so many of those in 2010, thanks. And time travel in general, even without professors, is wearing me out.

Nowadays, I like hard sf with strong characters and softer sf with a literary bent. Weirdness is great if not supernatural in its origin. I like most of the "punk" subgenres fairly well as long as there's a story supporting the aesthetic. M-Brane has been characterized by at least a couple of readers as dystopian. If true, it's not deliberate; hopeful, positive-outlook tales are welcome, too, and I am personally very technophilic. M-Brane SF is open to fiction with queer/LGBT content. Also, this zine is not aimed at children, so adult language and erotic content is not excluded when it makes sense in a story.

Payment is still a paltry $10.00 flat per story paid on publication, with an option of taking instead a subscription to the PDF edition of the zine. For this meager fee, I ask for First World English Rights with all remaining rights reverting to the writer upon publication. Payments are made exclusively by Pay Pal.

Reprints: Consideration of reprints has been ruined for everyone.

Artwork:

I'm not offering any payment for art at this time. But I'll look at it and consider publishing it. I can offer some fairly good exposure for it on the blog as well.

NON-FICTION

I have not yet published much of this, but I would still like to see some. I am interested in thoughtful pieces about sf authors and books, interviews and scholarly criticism. I am not currently offering payment for non-fiction, but any that I take for the magazine will also get published on the M-Braneblog.

A note on manuscript format:

I run a "green" operation. I don't print anything. No paper or ink are killed in reading stories for M-Brane. I do all of my slush reading on my screen, and every submission I receive ends up getting reformatted into a style that suits me best for this, which is why I don't care much about manuscript format. If I accept your story for publication, however, I may ask you to repair your document if it's formatted in web style with no indents and double spaces between paragraphs and if it resists for some reason easy reformatting on my end. I've been getting docs lately that have been causing me a lot of work in manually removing formatting weirdnesses. M-Brane looks like a traditional book with paragraph indentations, and with double spaces between paragraphs used only when there is a scene break.

Submissions glitch!

Writers: I have discovered that two writers submitted stories to me during September that I somehow did not receive, nor could I find any record of correspondence with them between the date the submission was sent and the date that they queried me about the status of their submission. I suspect that a day or so of my email was lost in the aether somehow. I recently cleared out the slush pile and have no pending submissions dated later than about the last week of December. So, if you a writer who has submitted a story to M-Brane SF before late December and feel that I have not responded, please email me at mbranesf at gmail dot com, and I will look into it. My response time is admittedly a bit erratic, ranging from same-day to perhaps three weeks, but it is never three or four months. So something is wrong if you have been waiting that long.

Writers guidelines updated

I put up a revised version of the M-Brane guidelines today, and I'll copy it below. Not much has changed but I tried to clarify a little bit where my taste in stories is nowadays.

UPDATED 1/1/10

First, the bullet points. I'll elaborate on them somewhat below.

GENRE: Science fiction (any variety)

NOT: Horror and fantasy unless it has a strong science fictional underpinning; paranormal/occult; In Seach Of...type myths-and-monsters stuff, UFOs, ghosts, Big Foots, Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, chupacabras, etc.

WORD COUNT: no lower or upper limit, though be advised that I'm not the biggest fan of "flash" fiction

SIMUL-SUBS: Yeah, sure, who cares?

MULTI-SUBS: Ditto

REPRINTS: Maybe. Query about it.

E-SUBS: Only. I'll not look at paper mail (and won't even give out an address for such).

SUBMISSION FORMAT: Standard mss format is just great, though I don't really care so long as it's readable. All submissions should be sent to mbranesf@gmail.com as anattachment in .doc or .docx or .rtf form.

If you want to know more about my biases before dashing off your mss, continue reading below....

Genre: I've been getting a lot of straight-up horror and dark fantasy submissions lately. While I may welcome elements of these genres, the stories still need to be somehow science fictional. In other words, the speculative or weird elements should be grounded in some kind of development of science, technology, or society that has (at least within the context of the story) a rational basis. No magic or wizardry or supernatural evil, please. As for specifically what sorts of sf I like best, it's hard to pin down. My mood changes over time. Lately, I am not as excited as I once was about space opera and epic galactic empire stories. On the other hand, small-scale character-focused stories set in such a milieu might work. I  have seen scores of stories during the past year focused on the shenanigans of university professors and their students (usually involving time travel or some other secret lab project). I'd like to not see so many of those in 2010, thanks. And time travel in general, even without professors, is wearing me out.

Nowadays, I like hard sf with strong characters and softer sf with a literary bent. Weirdness is great if not supernatural in its origin. I like most of the "punk" subgenres fairly well as long as there's a story supporting the aesthetic. M-Brane has been characterized by at least a couple of readers as dystopian. If true, it's not deliberate; hopeful, positive-outlook tales are welcome, too, and I am personally very technophilic. M-Brane SF is open to fiction with queer/LGBT content. Also, this zine is not aimed at children, so adult language and erotic content is not excluded when it makes sense in a story.

Payment is still a paltry $10.00 flat per story paid on publication, with an option of taking instead a subscription to the PDF edition of the zine. For this meager fee, I ask for First North American Serial Rights, with all remaining rights reverting to the writer upon publication. Payments are made by Pay Pal.

Reprints: I will consider reprints, but query me about it first. I probably will not offer cash payment for reprints, however. Compensation will instead be the PDF subscription option.

Artwork:

I'm not offering any payment for art at this time. But I'll look at it and consider publishing it. I can offer some fairly good exposure for it on the blog as well.

NON-FICTION

I have not yet published much of this, but I would still like to see some. I am interested in thoughtful pieces about sf authors and books, interviews and scholarly criticism. I am not currently offering payment for non-fiction, but any that I take for the magazine will also get published on the M-Braneblog.

A note on manuscript format:

I run a "green" operation. I don't print anything. No paper or ink are killed in reading stories for M-Brane. I do all of my slush reading on my screen, and every submission I receive ends up getting reformatted into a style that suits me best for this, which is why I don't care much about manuscript format. If I accept your story for publication, however, I may ask you repair your document if it's formatted in web style with no indents and double spaces between paragraphs and if it resists for some reason easy reformatting on my end. I've been getting docs lately that have been causing me a lot of work in manually removing formatting weirdnesses. M-Brane looks like a traditional book with paragraph indentations, and with double spaces between paragraphs used only when there is a scene break.

Some writer-related miscellany

Today I offered publication to a few writers for stories in upcoming issues, mostly in #9 and a couple for #10. As I get contracts back, I'll add links for anyone who provides the info to the M-Brane writers list (right-hand column, down below my profile and the archive). I already added a link to Mari Kurisato, whose eerie tale "Lurker" is forthcoming in issue #9. She is a writer and a visual artist who has a pretty fancy site nowadays. Her story caused me to spend some time on Wikipedia learning about hikikomori. I also realized that I had neglected to add Neil Colquhoun, whose short story "Machine" is coming in issue #8. He's on the list now, so go check out his blog, because there is all kinds of interesting stuff there. 

As writers who have received rejection notes from me lately know, I have had to take the unfortunate step of going to a generic form reply on those and have dispensed entirely with making specific, personalized comments on these stories as I used to always do. I sort of had a love/hate relationship with those notes anyway: I loved communicating individually with the writers, especially if I thought I had something to say that might help them or their stories...but I also hated saying "no" and having to explain why, especially in cases where the story was just fine but just not one that I wanted for some inarticulable reason. A few days ago, I had a stack of about two dozen rejections that needed to go out and I finally just said "screw it, they're getting a form letter." That cut away at least a couple hours from the process for me, time dearly needed. So if you're one of those writers reading this post now, sorry, but that's how it is now with the current, larger volume of mss coming in.

While I'm talking about rejections, I want to say that in the time I have edited M-Brane I have not one time ever received any sort of unprofessional or rude reply to a rejection from a writer. I read all the time on Twitter and on publishing blogs a lot of anecdotes from editors and agents talking about crazy behavior from writers. I'm very happy that people who want to publish in M-Brane don't act like that, and I hope that this new level of impersonality that I am creating with the form rejection doesn't change that.

Response time on submissions

In my writers' guidelines on "Page 2", I state that I try to answer submissions quickly, certainly in not more than two weeks.  I made an amendment to that today asking writers to cut me some slack on that for the near term.  I am concerned that I have issues booked too far ahead. Issue #3 releases tomorrow (or perhaps later today), but I am fully stocked for #4 and #5, probably for #6, probably for #7, and I have plugged a couple of things into #8 already. So I might need to give myself a bit longer with stories that are in the "maybe-to-probably" accepted category after the first reading. I will probably still be able to be pretty rapid with rejects. I don't think anyone has a submission sitting with me longer than maybe a week right now, but if it gets past two weeks, then know that the chances that I am considering it for publication might actually be greater, but that it also might be a in a larger pool of "good" stories under evaluation. I'm just getting more submissions nowadays than I was in the first couple months, and I need to be careful not to find myself scheduled out so far that a newly-accepted piece can't see publication for a year. It would be unfair to the writer, and rather tedious for me. I remain confident that I can manage all this without having to resort to having periods where M-Brane is closed to submissions or has "reading periods."  I don't dig it when other zines do that.  I understand why they do it, but I don't want it to be my practice.