Tagguidelines

Before we can start soliciting manuscripts, we need to write our guidelines. We've already nattered on just a bit about what we might we looking for. This post is about what goes in the guidelines more generally.

We plan to spend some time looking over other magazine's guidelines, to get a better idea of what they cover. And, of course, we've looked over many, many guidelines over the years, in the course of submitting our own stories, so we've got some idea. But still.

Here's a first pass as to what we think a set of guidelines needs to cover:

1. What we want. This will talk about what kinds of stories we want.
2. How to submit it. This will talk about manuscript format and what tool to use to submit it.
3. What we'll pay. We're hoping to pay pro rates, but there will be budget constrains that might affect that.
4. What rights we want. For a web magazine we'll want first internet rights, exclusive for a period of time. We may want other rights, if we have a plan for them (maybe a yearly paper anthology?), but we'll make a point of not scooping up rights we don't have a plan to use.

We started with the title of our magazine; just the title did not make it clear what sort of stories we might want to publish.

There are some hints there. If liches are involved, there probably needs to be magic or sorcery or wizardry. (But actual liches are certainly not required!) If elegance is involved, well something in the story ought to be elegant. (Check this blog in the future for perhaps an extensive discussion of what elegant means to us in this context, but expect that sophstication, high culture and the like might be included.)

Most important, of course, the story should be something we want to read, and that we think other people will want to read.

As we were talking about it, one of us mentioned something that we thought would be cool: epic stories. As a possible example, Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi. It was explicitly an anthology of "epic" stories, none of them over 10k words. (We don't actually own a copy. One of us was following its creation, blogged about by the various people involved in the early 2000s, and there was a single copy at one booth at probably the 2004 WorldCon in Boston, but there weren't any copies for sale, and we never ended up getting one.)