Guidelines

Here are a few guidelines to review before you submit your work. These are not comprehensive guidelines, but we feel these will help you determine whether your work is ready for submission.

Fiction

Make sure you have followed all the basic principles for a good story: characters and setting have depth;, engage the readers' senses; utilize description and body language to provide information to the reader (basic physical descriptions can tell us a lot, don't ignore them, incorporate a character's physical self frequently to make him/her real to the reader); plot, dialog and characters are believable; the characters struggle and grow (in longer works, anyway); pick a point of view and stick with it; pick a tense and stick with it; make sure your systems (technology, magic, psionics, government, etc.) are cohesive, have their own rules, and relate to the world; passage of time should be clear; research any aspects you are not personally familiar with (survival skills, deterioration rates, historical details, scientific details, belief system tenets, etc.

Also, please make sure you follow the basic conventions of fiction writing: change paragraphs with changes in speaker when writing dialog; internal speech or thoughts are italicized; foreign words are italicized; five-space indent at the beginning of paragraphs, etc.

Do not submit a synopsis or sample chapters only; we only review complete submissions. File formats: .rtf or .txt preferred, .doc, .wpd, .odt accepted.

Art

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is a good place to start. If your work is illustrative, make sure sufficient details are included to tell us the story you intend. If your work is "fine art" or abstract in some way, make sure it is suggestive of some concept or invites the viewer to speculate about what the work may represent. Solid blocks of color or random brushstrokes are not appropriate for this venue. If your work is serial, be sure each frame contributes to the story, the characters, the pace and the venue of the story it tells.

File formats: .jpg, .gif, .tif, .bmp accepted. If your file is larger than 10MB, please do not attach to the email, but request instruction on where to send your file.

Music

A professional level of expertise in performance and in production value is expected. Lyrics should be clear, any distortion should be deliberate and add to the story.

File formats: .mp3 preferred.

Video

Again, an professional level of expertise in performance and in production value is expected. Do not submit a "treatment" in the hopes we will give you millions of dollars to produce a high-production value movie. Your submission should be the finished product you wish to have sold. Please do not submit treatments, samples or anything less than a final, finished producgt.

File formats: non-proprietary preferred, query if you are unsure if your format is acceptable. If your file is larger than 10MB, please do not attach to the email, but request instruction on where to send your file.