Hi, authors!

You’re getting this email because you signed up on The Deadlands’ website for author updates and here we are! Isn’t it exciting?

These emails will be infrequent, but will hopefully be of use to you. This time around, I wanted to give you a behind the scenes peek at submissions over at The Deadlands. Since we opened, I’ve read 1516 submissions, and have accepted 18 of them. The quality of submissions has been a challenge, because on the whole, stories are just so good—there have been some I’ve had to pass on that have been hard to let go. Elise, why let go?! We simply cannot publish everything.

For those of you who knew my editing style at Shimmer (may she rest in peace), I’m trying to mix things up a little bit this time. I’m learning how flash works for me, and how flash can work for The Deadlands. I’m much more open to shorter works here than I was at Shimmer, because shorter works mean we can publish more stories overall.

That means a story 5k words long will probably be a harder sell here. Other hard sells include: stories that are funny (I’ve seen so many of them), haunted house stories (I’ve seen so, so many of them), stories that begin with someone waking up (probably forever the hardest thing to sell to me), and stories that don’t include death. Weird, right? The Deadlands is a publication about death, so let’s explore it. And that doesn’t mean only grim or sad stories. The Deadlands absolutely encompasses angels, heaven, and also the potential peace and relief of letting go.

A note on reprints: I will update the guidelines to reflect this as well, but I’m seeing a lot of very recent stories submitted as reprints. Our preference is always going to be for slightly older stories. If a story came out in the last three years, your chances are probably slim. Stories that are not online would be a super thing to submit—if fewer people have gotten the chance to read it, we want to change that. We want to share those stories and make it happen.

I hope you’re enjoying The Deadlands so far—we’re three issues in, and we have so much else to explore. In the coming months, we’re going to explore fairy tales, myths, desolate roads, run-down garages, night skies, and the passage of a figure who probably touched your life, too. I can’t wait to share these stories with you!

Since I've got you here, be sure to come by the site today to check out Issue #3's nonfiction offering, October's Ghost, from Caitlyn Paxson. Next week, we've got another poem and this issue's Ask a Necromancer!

Submission numbers:
​Poetry: no outstanding submissions, next open period begins: Aug 1
Fiction: everything before July 18 is read/responded to (if no response, story is in a second-read pile)
Nonfiction: everything before July 19 is read/responded to (if no response, story is in second-read pile)

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Elise
aka E. Catherine Tobler
Editor, The Deadlands

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