Writers' Guidelines for The Blue Penny Quarterly
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The New River Special Notice: Please note that Fiction Submissions are not accepted during August, November, February, and May, to give us time to read the many submissions we're now receiving. But: don't let that stop you from submitting at other times! We're interested in reading your work.
Our goal at Blue Penny is to bring high-quality literary writing into the electronic communities and to provide good writers greater exposure using the best of the technologies available to us in a creative, yet dignified manner. We accept primarily literary short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. We are interested in working with beginning as well as established writers, and are strongly interested in work that presents a global perspective. Some of our contributors include Canadian Richard Cumyn, New Yorker writer Deborah Eisenberg, Atlantic Monthly contributor Edward Falco, Romanian poet Ioana Ieronim in translation, and Guggenheim winner Robert Sward.
Terms: BPQ and The New River are interested in the one-time use of the electronic rights to your work. Publication will also count as use of the First North American Serial Rights if your piece is previously unpublished, just like any other magazine. Stories may not be reprinted by anyone else without your permission--you're also welcome to reprint your story elsewhere, though we do ask that you cite BPQ as the place it was first published. We are exploring options for bringing stories published in BPQ to print, and will contact you for your permission in the event your work is chosen for print publication. The magazine is copyrighted as a whole, and the copyrights for the individual works return to the authors and artists. Though our readership is hard to trace, we estimate 5 to 7 thousand people see each issue of BPQ in one format or another, and that number is growing. At this point in time we are unable to offer financial compensation for the use of every accepted work. However, we now offer cash prizes for accepted works, and hope to soon have the funds to compensate every writer. You should know that the magazine is in place as a service to readers and writers and for the promotion of literature in an increasingly commercialized Internet. We do prefer electronic submissions. However: submissions should not be sent via Cafe Blue. Submit with a cover letter. But don't try to sell us the story. Tell us who you are, where you've published before (if anywhere), and that you read the magazine.
Our response time varies between 1 week and up to four months, I'm afraid. We're doing our best to respond within two month's time--please bear with us. We like to give each manuscript careful consideration, and are receiving a great deal each week. We do accept simultaneous submissions--however we do request that you inform us immediately if the work is accepted elsewhere. We also expect that if we confirm acceptance of the manuscript with you, it will not be withdrawn in favor of another publication at a later date. Don't query for fiction or poetry. Just send it on in. Submissions via regular mail are accepted at:
The Blue Penny Quarterly, (This address may change without notice--email to dlawson@ebbs.english.vt.edu for the current address.) Don't forget the SASE if you want your work back--manuscripts without these or an email address for response are discarded. Disposable manuscripts are fine, but you should include a self-adressed, stamped envelope. Please do not send submissions for The New River to this address--see below.
I accept works in a variety of traditions and styles, and am interested in traditional realism as well as more experimental formats; a good story sets its own rules. Translations are also welcome. Novel excerpts are considered if they are self-contained. I'm not particularly interested in genre work, unless the work in some way transcends its genre. Ideally, we'd like stories to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 words, but that's not set in stone. We're open to shorter and some longer works, but I believe a very long story may be more appropriate for a printed magazine. Kindly submit only one story at a time. Fiction and non-fiction is edited by Doug Lawson, me, and can be sent electronically to dlawson@ebbs.english.vt.edu. Please send the manuscript as part of the body of email, and not as an attached file--files tend to get misplaced too easily on this overcrowded hard drive, and may result in me not being able to respond to your submission.
We welcome a variety of forms and themes-- except for inspirational verse, randomness jury- rigged to back up literary theory, and therapeutic journalism. We value the wild and well made. Poetry is edited now by Browning Porter, who writes "I'll publish anything that makes me glad I took the time to read it, but I'll also let it slip that I'm partial to irony (if it's served WARM) and music. I read poems out loud and if they feel good in the mouth, in the ear, in the chest -- I'm halfway there. "I've always hated it when editors list things they do NOT want to see; no matter how much I might agree with their aesthetics, I think such negativity gets things off on the wrong foot. So send me any kind of poem you love to write -- I ask only that you not hold out on me. No skimping. Send me me your absolute top shelf best stuff. Don't save it for someplace more prestigious -- and you know what I mean. If I don't like your best stuff, well, to hell with me, but if I DO, I promise you that you won't regret that your masterpiece made its debut in this Blue Penny Quarterly." Submissions can be sent to him directly at bporter@comet.net. For the quickest response, Poetry should be sent via email.
The New River is a revolving archive of hypertext and hypermedia literature and art, produced by Virginia Tech in conjunction with BPQ, edited by Edward Falco. Ed writes "I'm interested in receiving submissions of original and unpublished hypertext and hypermedia. I would like to see lyric and narrative art that exploits the computer as a site for creative work. Since The New River will be a web-based archive, work produced in HTML is preferred. However, stand-alone hypertext/media will also be considered--to be published, perhaps, as work available for downloading."
If you have access to a server, upload the work and send the URL.
Please keep all links local to the materials in the project. Edward Falco E-mail Address: efalco@vt.edu
For futher information on BPQ, you'll find our listing in the Novel and Short Story Writers' Market. Please feel free to contact us at our email address if we can help clarify any questions for you, and comments are also always welcome. I hope to hear from you.
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