If Our Good Side is Something You Care to Be On
–Submission Pointers–
Ah, welcome.
You, my immediate friend, have just landed on the most important page in the entirety of Defenestrationism.net .
Forget about our flagship “the Art of Throwing People Out Windows“,
ignore “A Passionate Defense of the Existence of Unicorns“,
even more than our “Prisoner Narratives“,
this page is the most important one.
Because you are researching publications before you submit to them, and we admire that.
Keep it going– check out:
Masthead: Meet the Editors
Books and Bonafides
and published work by our submission readers:
Paul-Newell Reaves, Tara Campbell and Chantelle Tibbs.
Many of these pointers are specific to our publication; most are vital to every submission you will ever send in the future; and some are just plain silly flights of fancy. We like to be fancy.
I can’t solve all your problems, though, so you are responsible for deciding which tips to follow, and which to leave alone.
Since your manuscript already follows all of our concrete and very specific guidelines, these pointers are for the submission itself.
An email to
pnrenterprizes@gmail.com
should be drafted, content-edited, proofread, reread four or five more times,
and only then sent.
The subject line must include the name of the contest you are submitting to.
The body of the email should be your cover letter.
If you don’t know what that should be, start it by saying hello to us.
Here is an example of an optimal cover letter (spoiler alert, this one is quite silly).
At this point, you may have learned the lesson of these lengthy-to-a-hilarious degree pointers pages. Submission is not copy, paste, submit. Research the platforms and publications, and, having now found many a match for your piece, you really do have a solid chance of getting published. Believe in yourself. Because we do, too. And whatever you do, don’t stop (Thomas Sayers Ellis said that. Clever little play on words).
Attached to the email, we will find your downloadable manuscript.
The title of your submission should appear at the beginning of the name of the file you are submitting. Wait, that’s confusing. Here:
Consider your manuscript lodged deep in a folder of one or three hundred other submissions. We have taken bullet notes on your work during our initial read-through, and as we begin rereading, attempting to locate the manuscripts that stood out most, we scan the file names in this folder.
We must scan through this very long folder, vividly picturing what we remember in your story we so badly want to reread. We haven’t the patience– for our frenzy and read-lust for your specific manuscript is bulging our veins and gaping our jaws– to preview each document as we scroll through the hundreds. We must… reread… Your document… now… (gurgling noise as we slump over in exhaustion on the keyboard)
Hmm. That didn’t overly clarify anything. Whatever, the important part is that we can download your document.
Although we have the capacity to open almost any document format, if you’re getting weird on us with the format– rarely a bad thing, getting weird– consider attaching documents in more than one format. (Anyone remember Word Perfect?– now that software was a joy to write in.)
Since you have already read the contest guidelines, you know why we can’t use PDF formats.
That is about all we explicitly ask for in your submission to Defenestrationism.net . We will consider anything else you choose to include– be it your third-person bio, publication history or lack-there-of, number of teeth your great-niece lost this week, or photographs of yesterday’s breakfast (oh dear, please don’t send that last one)– but the tips above are the elements we most concern ourselves with,
if our Good Side is Something You Care to Be On.
Back to the Contest Guidelines:
!Short Story Contest!
FLASH SUITE Contest
Lengthy Poem Contest
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