Archives: calls for submission

Partying with [not] Playboy, writing with BARE magazine

For reasons that require (I hope) no explanation, I’ve been reading a lot about sex lately. All kinds of things–poetry, feminist criticism, Medium articles of sex tips, and articles about consent and building a consent culture.

Lately I discovered this older but perennial “Top Ten Party Commandments” from…well, not actually from Playboy. The site is a parody. But as “the ultimate guide to a consensual good time,” this list isn’t just a joke.

And when I say perennial, I mean it–rules #2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 could just as easily be guidelines for Cunning Linguists. I mean, actually, they’re in the guidelines. It’s not often I get to be on the same page as (parody) Playboy!

Anyway, by looking up the source of Commandment #7, “Love All Bodies,” I discovered Skidmore College’s student-run erotic lit magazine, BARE.

I’m not sure if the magazine is still running (its Twitter account hasn’t been updated since 2014, its Facebook page since 2019, and its WordPress has ‘Fall 2015’ as a header). But like the ‘Playboy’ Party Commandments, its message is perennial–at least as long as people continue having and/or writing about sex, which I don’t see coming to an end anytime soon.

For instance, there’s so much good stuff on their prompts page–which I also feel might be a sister to the Cunning Linguists guidelines. Just check out these ideas from them:

• Write about any sexual feeling you have had – lust, desire, etc… and where in your body you feel like it stems from – avoid clichés – when you feel pleasure of course it radiates from your pelvis, but do you feel an uplifting in your sternum? Does the top of your head tingle?
• Have you ever felt angered by someone’s reaction to your sexuality? VENT! Write down your reasoning! This is your chance to make them aware, and help them understand!
• Have you ever felt confined by your sexuality? Why? How? Imagine the moment that you break free and what it would be like?
• What’s the best sexual experience you ever had? What’s the worst? Develop the context of the situation – characters, emotional background, setting – draw people into the story
• Make lists
• Write short sentences or very long, allow your sentences to communicate how you’re feeling in the moment you’re writing about.
• Write in diary entries
• Write a letter to someone else
• Make metaphors – writing about sex or sexuality does not have to be described in literal sexual terms – does sex make you think of something else? Use that action or moment to describe sex or your sexuality Ex: a tennis match, a flower blooming (very cliché example)
• Write instructions for someone else on how to do something sexual, or how live a certain lifestyle that you have experience with – Ex: ‘How to be a Lesbian at Skidmore, How to have a threesome with your two best friends’
• Write “a day in the life of” Ex: “A Day In the Life of a Trans Man”
• Write a conversation – via text, email, AIM or real dialogue that conveys something important – let the words speak for themselves
• Don’t be afraid to be funny, sex is funny, people respond well to funny
• Don’t be afraid of poetry – it doesn’t have to rhyme or be cliché – play with word choice, punctuation, alignment, and spacing. Make sure the words you use count because you will use less of them than you do in prose.

Do you ever see an idea you’ve been acting on for years suddenly put into words and feel ridiculous for not spotting it before? That’s my feeling when I read “VENT!” Yes! So much fruitful writing can stem from venting–from digging into your emotions, exposing them, telling the world, in the words of Kazuo Ishiguro, “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

Or maybe from the opposite of venting–if writing about the best sex you ever had is the opposite of venting? But there can be anger in pleasure, a sense of justice, and there can be joy in a good vent session. (In any event, I’m sticking a pin in a potential anthology call titled The Best Sex of Their Lives).

This isn’t just what I want to write but what I want to read, too. When I feel an energy, and urgency behind the writer’s voice, I lean in toward their story to listen more closely. When a story asks me how it feels, when it tells me something I thought only I had felt, it wins its way into my memory and heart forever.

Avoid clichés. Vent. What’s the best sexual experience you’ve ever had?

This is the way it feels to me. Does it feel this way to you?

I think this post is turning into a sort of found-poetry ars poetica.

What about you? Which of these would you like to write, or read? Do you have your own suggestion for a prompt or guideline? A rule? A party tip?

Maybe leave it in the comments. Or, although I’m not sure if BARE is taking submissions on these topics anymore, the New Smut Project certainly is. Or share it on your own blog, or in a story you submit somewhere else, self-publish. But share it.

The world needs more honest, thoughtful sex talk, and I’m always up for reading it.

Why your story was rejected: Tales from the slush pile

Just over year ago, the New Smut Project opened to submissions for Erato. We had room to publish pieces from up to 50 authors. We received submissions from over 300.

Stories we accepted including science-fiction prose poetry about a polyamorous triad on a diplomatic mission, a kinky story written entirely in dialogue, hilarious historical fiction, sexy novel excerpts, and translations from Spanish. We found beautiful pieces that subverted expectations, played with tropes, and celebrated many variations of gender expression and sexual preferences.

But then we had to reject all the rest. Understandably, “We didn’t have enough room to fit this is” isn’t the most satisfying explanation for a writer whose story has been rejected. Why, you want to know, did we strive to make room for some, but not for others?

Here are some observations from my reading of the slushpile. While Erato is an erotic flash fiction anthology, I think many ideas hold across forms and genres. I hope they will prove useful for writers, for readers wondering what happens behind the scenes, and for other editors (especially newish ones like us) who might feel less alone.

The #1 thing you can do to improve your acceptance rate is to read the submission guidelines. The guidelines are there for a reason. (I have a future blog post in my drafts meditating on what we put in the guidelines, why, and how they worked out.) If your story doesn’t fit the call, send it to where it will fit instead.

If your story does fit the call, please use the file format the guidelines request, include the info in your cover letter that we ask for, and use the subject line we suggest so your email doesn’t get eaten by the spam filter.

This isn’t a matter of editors seeking docile authors to boss around. The authors I’ve been most grateful for as an NSP editor are the ones who ask questions, make suggestions, and call me out when I slip up. They help me improve, and they do that by being engaged and helping me achieve the goals we both share. Following the guidelines is a quick way to show you are engaged, that you care, that you’re vibing with the editors’ goals. Plus, seriously, the spam filter eats stuff, take the lifeline I throw you in the form of a recommended subject line.

The #2 tactic to improve your odds of acceptance is to proofread/self-edit, not just for the absence of typos, but for vividness, clarity, coherence, a sense of giving a damn and having something to say. Hunt down your pleonasms. Make sure each sentence is interesting. A typo won’t sink an otherwise great story, although I do calculate necessary copyediting time, and a story that requires a lot of effort to be made readable needs a lot of awesome to outweigh that. A story draft with widespread infelicity, whatever its promise, should be nurtured before it reaches my desk–by the author, a beta reader, fellow workshop participants, a hired copyeditor, someone.

Despite my love of well-written sentences, however, our initial rejection decisions mostly came about from content, not style.

• Failure one: The story wasn’t erotica or erotic. We specifically said “submissions should be arousing” to drive this idea home. Yet we received pieces that were excellent examples of other genres–including horror stories so accomplished that co-editors had to leave each other content warnings in our submission notes so nobody read one during lunch or before bed. I’ll just say that I didn’t expect serial killers to appear in response to my call for submissions for a “sex-positive” anthology with numerous pastel cover art mockups. I suppose the thought process here might have been “well, I won’t self-reject,” and I respect that. In theory. In practice, sometimes you have to self-reject to save yourself and the editors’ time, not to mention peace of mind and/or stomach.
• To say nothing of the serial rapist stories, by which I mean both stories about serial rapists and certain authors who sent multiple stories about rapists, and a few stories about underage characters, none of which we did, could, or wanted to accept. And our guidelines made this clear, even if the surrounding pastel covers of smiling adults didn’t (hint: they did).*

Yeah, nonconsensually receiving stories about nonconsensual sex is a trip. Moving on, more unsubtle failures to read or follow the guidelines:

• We had a few people send stories way over 2,000 words, or more than 3 stories–multiple authors sent four pieces “because they’re short.” Dude, this is a call for flash fiction, they’re meant to be. A surprising number of people failed to write the story’s title in the subject line as we asked, although they did write “Submission” as we asked. Go figure. And some sent PDFs or Pages files even though we offered a smorgasbord of options I can actually open on my non-Mac and edit (if I ever accept a story that’s only available in PDF, I can tell you I am not the person doing the work of getting it into a copyeditable format).
• We didn’t think our guidelines for a sex-positive erotica anthology would have to explicitly suggest “try writing sex between characters who actually like each other” and/or “try writing sex between characters who actually like having sex.” So another unexpectedly common reason we rejected stories was because they were about people having sex they didn’t enjoy with people they didn’t like–or one or the other; either on its own was enough to sink a story for our purposes. And I’m not talking about “enemies to lovers” jaunts; these lacked the passion (or the character growth, which to be fair is hard to achieve in <2,000 words, though not impossible). Instead, they just left me with a sort of grimy ennui. I felt less sexy for reading them. The opposite of the Erato experience.
  • So is it, as my girlfriend said when I complained to him, “so hard to write enthusiastically consenting adults doing sexy things?” I think the problem is people try to inject “conflict” because they believe a story needs to have it. And despising the person you’re with does create conflict. But what a story really needs is tension, which can arise from many sources**–such as the pull of desire. As a reader, I love to be moved by the thrill of discovery (something stories of people with Playboy’s idea of a perfect body having mechanically perfect PIV sex lack, for that matter). And effective suspense in erotica may come less from will they/won’t they and more from when and how will they? Overall, then, interpersonal conflict is not the only option, nor, for our purposes, the best. Especially when our guidelines suggested other sources of conflict, like “two lovers vs. one’s arousal nonconcordance”!
  • The other thing is, some “conflict” left us wondering if the characters wouldn’t have been better off if they hadn’t tried to have sex in the first place. NOT the best fit for a sex-positive anthology! (By “sex positive” we at NSP don’t mean sex is always positive, but that we are interested in exploring the ways and times when sex is a positive force in people’s lives. This can include stories where characters reclaim their sexuality after previous traumatic experiences, like Annabeth Leong’s “Return to Rope” in Between the Shores.) Some of the stories we received seemed to carry the message “sexual desire is bad and you’ll be punished for it.” Yeah, no thanks. Literary sex does not have to be bad. Enjoying yourself is not something only mindless plebes do.
• Numerous stories, despite our body-positive guidelines, were based on the idea that a huge cock on its own is sexy, and the absence of one is tragic. Similar if a little less strident were the representations of flat stomachs, washboard abs, and large breasts (but not too large, lest the woman they’re attached to also become large). Does any of this actually work for people? I mean, no shame; certainly the erotica I read and write has been known to revisit particular fantasies with only moderate variations. But Erato is for people who got bored of these particular fantasies of “perfect” bodies, or were never into or included in them in the first place.
• You’ll likely be rejected if you think it’s cool to send a feminist-identified erotica call a story where the male protagonist only identifies his female sex partners by their hair colors.
• Or if the writing is, as they say, “visually oriented” but you seem never to have actually looked at a flesh-and-blood woman in your life. Much less imagined what it’s like to be one. No, our bodies (cis or trans), minds, and/or social roles don’t work like that — however much you might wish they did.
• When writing erotica, remember you’re competing with visual porn: a story that’s a list of actions without sensory detail, characterization, or emotional stakes (not necessarily romantic), so that we could be watching just anyone have sex, isn’t an improvement on going to the many websites where we can literally watch just about anyone having sex.

Other problems showed up long before we even read the attached story:

• You don’t need to explain your story in the cover letter (except in rare cases where the call for submissions asks you to do that). It’s a 2,000-word story; we don’t need to pre-game by reading another 250 words of summary or explanation of your symbolism…or, awkwardly, autobiography where you explain the heroine isn’t precisely your ex-girlfriend but does share her initials and hair color and maybe a few more identifiable details… Editing erotica is a fraught area of pseudo-intimacy anyway, and some authorial background information is helpful (“This is an #OwnVoices piece because like the main character, I have fibromyalgia”; “When not writing bondage erotica, I’m a rigger for Cirque du Soleil”), but don’t make it weird with TMI. Especially TMI about a third party who doesn’t know you’re writing to us about her (yeah, it’s usually a her).
• Not a cause for rejection on its own, but a tip: You don’t need to include the copyright symbol in your cover letter or at the beginning or end of your story.
• A few people spelled the anthology’s title as Erota. I don’t blame them for a slip of the fingers, but I do wonder why they didn’t proofread before hitting “send,” or didn’t copy & paste our own spelling from the guidelines, my usual technique. I also recommend doing this for the editors’ names, which for Erato submitters who did this prevented the embarrassment of writing to “Mr” anyone (we have no Mr.s on our editorial team; meanwhile, “Sirs and Madams” doesn’t cover the full range of genders). “Dear Alex Mill and T.C. Mill” is perfectly fine, and more polite than “Dear Mr. T.C. Mill and Mr. Alex Freeman” actually!
• A weak story title can be redone, a bland title may become memorable if it’s attached to a fantastic story, and frankly we saw some amazing titles that went over terrible stories. But there were also some pieces I predicted I’d reject just from the title, and proved correct. And there were two or three pennames I just flat-out said NO to. You should sound like a writer and not a cartoon character. Not least for the sake of the people adjacent to you on the Table of Contents.
• You only need to list 2-3 previous publications in your cover letter–the most recent, the best, and/or those most similar to the place you’re submitting to now. Since this is flash fiction, it’s possible to send a list of publications longer than the actual submission. But it won’t do you any good.

Okay, past the cover letter, let’s talk about my own favorite aspect of stories: style…or lack thereof. Stories that were consistently nongrammatical worked as prose poetry. But we did read some pieces with issues like:

• Point of View, often using too distant or inconsistent a POV. Most readers expect one POV per scene, and especially in flash fiction most stories only need one POV (though we published some submissions that skillfully used multiple!). What you want to avoid is a jarring “head hop” effect where we can never tell whose perspective a given sentence is from, or a POV so distant we can’t really get a feel for the people or events. It’s difficult to make a pure omniscient narrator work in the 21st century–not impossible, but an uphill battle. And the lower slopes are littered with the fallen bodies of those who tried.
  • Yeah, as I often say as well as demonstrate, metaphors are a realm of potentially great reward and certainly great risk.
• Dialogue: if it’s wooden, hard to follow, tagged distractingly, tagged confusingly, or so poorly punctuated it’ll take your copyeditor an hour to fix your story, rejection becomes likely.
• Showing vs telling: especially finding a balance–too much of either can make a story boring, either vague or deathly slow-paced.
• Tone: lots of different tones can be erotic–humorous, bawdy, romantic, wistful, thoughtful, urgent, curious, even frustrated or bittersweet. But others just aren’t. Even when characters liked each other and enjoyed the sex they had, the author sometimes didn’t seem to feel that way. Their tone of arch smugness sneered at the characters for daring to be sexual (especially while old, or fat, or otherwise marginalized). Contemptuous =/= sexy. Neither do whiny, egotistical, or contagiously miserable.
• There were also stories where word choice was all over the place so that we couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be feeling. Victorianisms alongside neologisms alongside “betwixt her buxom tatas.” Yes, laughter is sexy, but see also what I said above about being a writer and not a cartoon character.
• Speaking of probably unintentional hilarity, we spotted malapropisms suggesting a bad relationship with the Muse of Langauge or with one’s beta reader. Rye smiles, the peeks of her breasts, and so on in that vain (sic). Slip-ups happen to the best of us; I’ve been known to type “there” when I mean “their” because my brain knows better but my fingers don’t. Even so.
• One or two stories were so overwritten it took teamwork, and guesswork, to figure out what they were depicting. After answering “What’s this author on about?” the next question usually was “Why couldn’t they just say that?”
• Other stories were so underwritten that the proverbial Ikea manual was sexier.

Meet my new crush. Let’s pretend he’s asking “So honey, what are you wearing?’ in the image to the right, and for bonus points, let’s pretend I photoshopped the booklet he’s holding to have ERATO’s cover. And of course his honey is wearing many shades of beige.

• Again, a typo, even on the first page, won’t get you automatically rejected. But I observed many stories we rejected for other reasons had typos on the first page. Might not be a coincidence.

Length is an especially live issue with flash fiction, but these snarls also appear in short stories, novels, essays, even poems:

• Your story was too long, even if it was within the guidelines: too slow-paced, pleonastic, padded, or meandering to an unclear destination.
  • I’m not sure we accepted any story that began with a “how we met” summary.  Some include brief “how we met” flashbacks that I think work quite well, but they tend to open with immediate action, a strong image, a line of dialogue, something that connects with the reader.
  • With respect to Salinger, and those who enjoy starting with the David Copperfield crap (it certainly has its place in longer stories!)–skip it here.
  • One secret recipe–-and my not-so-platonic Platonic Ideal of submissions–is to start the story at the sex (or in the middle of the sex, or in a breather between sex). We can figure out who these people are and why they’re in bed together as we proceed.
    • Generally speaking, the reader who turns to erotic flash fiction is in search of friction-inducing hotness now. So opening with a meet cute 5 years before the lust blossoms doesn’t work for them. (Again, flashing back to one can work, though.)
    • Then again, I often start my stories in the midst of a sex scene and they *still* grow to 4,000 or 5,000 words long.  Flash fiction is, indeed, hard.
• On the flip side, your story was too short: it failed to expand on interesting events, to add characterization or feeling. Not evocative. You made a flash fiction by writing the synopsis of a longer story–and people don’t often read synopses for fun. In general, and in my humble opinion, flash is too short for much summary: what I love about it is its reliance on vivid scenes.
• OR you made a flash fiction by chopping off the first few thousand words of a longer story–I think opening in media res is rewarding when done well, but it’s also a challenge. For some stories we thought the writing was great and not overwritten, but we still scratched our heads at the context or lack thereof. One reason I like stories that open with characters in bed is because it’s pretty clear what they’re doing and how they got there (they liked each other and wanted to be–right?).

And then we rejected some stories for failures of personal taste.

• Everybody’s id is different. Plus we were balancing the joys and dismays of 3 co-editors and the anticipated tastes of Erato’s readers. I’m so grateful to my co-editors for the balance they provided; if I picked every piece I liked, the tone of the anthology would have ended up more bittersweet with some candy-fluff whiplash.
• This is to say: a story can be quite good and still be rejected for subjective reasons.
• And everyone’s idea of a buzzkill is different.
• And yet…if you inject a paragraph about the protagonist’s mother or child in the midst of a sex scene and you’re getting lots of rejections, I’d suggest deleting that paragraph. It will only help.

Also, a story can never stand on its own in a slushpile full of hundreds of stories.

• Most painful were the wonderful stories that happened to cover the exact same topic in the same way as three other equally or more wonderful stories.
• And then at least ten people sent in versions of something we didn’t care for–what is up with sex robots? (We did publish a story about android sex, but it was about two characters connecting, not one character interacting with a flashy sex toy. And it’s not like we didn’t accept excellent stories about masturbation either! But authors who included sex robots got distracted by the shiny toy and generally failed to tell us anything new or interesting about sex. It didn’t help that the sex robots tended to step out from the pages of Playboy and enact bog-standard fantasies.)
• Meanwhile I discovered some pairings were unexpectedly rare–NB/NB I realized might be thinner on the ground, but we also had very, very few NB/M pairings compared to NB/F ones. Also some premises, settings, and kinks didn’t show up as anticipated. I don’t think this is something you could determine going by published works, because I believe some get published disproportionately–maybe because editors are so pleased to finally see some. And hey, I’ve been the token femdom writer before, so I kind of get it.

Here is probably the most controversial reason for rejection (or maybe it isn’t but it puts me in a spitfire mood): This story of yours is actually quite good and interesting. But the other piece(s) you submitted to our call were horrible, either in terms of craft failure or especially because they revealed a weird (mis)understanding of how to write sex–or write about women or gay or black or disabled people. And it made us not want to work with you.

Rejections aren’t personal. In Erato’s crowded field, I had to reject people I’m friendly with and authors whose stories I’ve read elsewhere and admired. No editor accepts your work just to be nice to you (and tell that to your imposter syndrome if it claims otherwise!). But if I have to say no to people I like, I’m very much not inclined to accept stories from people I don’t get the impression really like me. There’s some stuff it’s just rude to send a queer woman who asked for “sex positive, body positive” and consensual sex stories. Even here, though, it’s most importantly a matter of business: I try to include authors I can trust to promote the anthology without saying something flat-out against the spirit of it!

I don’t need to agree with authors on everything, and there are times I’ve benefitted from pushback or a new perspective. But that helpful pushback generally doesn’t come from the person who sent us one really good story and one story from the POV of a self-confessed rapist. Or sex killer. Or just a whiny misogynist.

(It’s not that I identify the author with these characters; I’m happy to trust they’re very different in person! But if the author thinks these stories fit the pastel-covered, sex-positive feminist-identified anthology, or doesn’t care…you see my problem.)

***

This blog post based on my experience co-editing Erato is far too long to itself be submitted to Erato–at least if I take the guidelines seriously. As I should. But these thoughts have been simmering the past year (in between other life stuff, and personal tragedy and transformation, plus the actual editing and construction of the anthology). I think it’s time to share them with curious readers and writers who they may help!

Also…I’m not saying a new call for submissions will be appearing from NSP soon, but…if you’re a champion breath-holder, you could give it a try.

Endnotes:

*Regarding noncon, I came across an interesting stat: Lonnie Barbach, editing The Erotic Edge in 1993, observed “Of the stories submitted by men, almost twenty percent dealt with [rape and forced sex]. The protagonists of these stories, usually male authority figures–judges, policemen, and teachers–use the power of their positions to get women to submit sexually. Only one woman wrote a story based on coercive sex. I included none of these stories because I believe without the consent of both parties, the sexual experience is really about coercion or violence, neither of which is compatible with eros.”

Barbach puts it well, though in my experience the gender breakdown is rather different. Women write nonconsent fantasies as well (which is perfectly fine), and sometimes even submit them to publications that have asked not to see them (less fine, and painfully ironic). I also remember receiving a story during our first calls for Heart, Body, Soul and Between the Shores, written by a man about, iirc, a policewoman using her authority to force sexual submission. A session or two of a gender studies course might fruitfully explore what’s going on there, and I like femdom, but what I don’t like is getting nonconsensual stories when I have explicitly expressed that I will not consider publishing them.

I wonder if Barbach’s guidelines included a message to the effect of “all characters must express their consent”–perhaps not, since it was almost 20 years ago, before I think “affirmative consent” became a catchphrase, and she might not have anticipated the particular responses she got. Even so, let’s just say you should probably take it as a given that no erotica market wants to publish stories about nonconsensual sex (maybe they can’t for legal/distribution-related reasons). Dubcon, edgy roleplay, and similar realms of fantasy are usually, in my experience, described explicitly as something the market is good with seeing if it’s something they’re able to publish.

**My intuition that “conflict” is not actually necessary to a story received unexpected backup in Henry Lein’s essay for SFWA, which observes “conflict” is a development of modern Western literary criticism. As a counterexample, Eastern storytelling makes use of a four-act structure based not on conflict or tension but on harmonizing elements and incorporating revelations.

Another counterexample is poetry, which holds the reader’s attention but not by using conflict or leaving you in suspense about the ending (at least not as suspense is generally considered). Flash fiction shades into prose poetry, so the techniques and structures likely work for both. At least they do for this one reader.

Anthologies I dream of editing

Maybe it’s the full flush of our submissions period (260+ authors have sent us a truly uncountable number of stories, and there’s still a week to send more in!). Maybe it’s quarantine. But I keep coming up with ideas for erotica anthologies.

Reading submissions has shown some interesting gaps in the genre. That and spending my downtime browsing Reddit–specifically subs like AITA and relationship advice ones–has made me once again aware of how desperately we need better narratives about sex.

• Also, the fact that we have more wonderful submissions than we can ever fit into one anthology is inspiring me to think of Erato II already. There are some alterations to the guidelines that would make short-short fiction more competitive, but basically everything in our Easy Sells category will remain a priority.
• One thing I can’t get enough of in NSP submissions or anywhere else? Pegging. The one thing I haven’t found an anthology 100% focused on? Pegging! (An exception is the Turning the Tables anthology from Storm Moon press, which was great, but came out several years ago and only contains four stories.) So what do I want to edit? An anthology of the best pegging erotica! I don’t think it’ll be a New Smut Project title necessarily (the focus is narrow for NSP, which aims for ambitiously inclusive anthologies), but maybe a project of my own? Accordingly, I’ve added a list for my MailChimp newsletter specifically to send out alerts about anthologies I’m editing. You can subscribe here.
• All those cyborg and sex robot stories we received in the first flush of Erato submissions had the editorial team and our friends brainstorming about what makes a good instance of that subgenre. And, hey, He, She and It and The Silver Metal Lover both turned me on… Anyway, my partner and I struck upon the most important part of any anthology: an excruciatingly punny title. AI <3 U is maybe coming to some bookstore somewhere near you at some point in the future, but at least now the title is burned into your memory.
• Speaking of science fiction, Erato has received a lot of awesome F/F spec fic. Enough that one could put together a strong anthology of just that. And has anyone? Sapphics in Space? Again, the focus is a little narrow for NSP, but it might be a good choice for someone to pitch to a publisher who does themed F/F anthologies, like Bold Strokes Books or Cleis Press. That someone doesn’t have to be me, and if you take this idea and run with it, it’s a gift, not a theft.
• My co-editor Guinevere Chase asks only two things: “couples with different libidos, making it work with lots of love and understanding and excitement and creativity” and “authors making love to the language like their characters are making love on the page”. For that second topic, I haven’t yet come up with a concise brief or pitch–Guinevere’s is really good on its own–but I do have the title: Cunning Linguists.
• As for couples with different libidos–okay, here the Reddit reading is getting to me. Straight people, among others, desperately need to be more creative. I don’t mean swinging-from-the-ceiling kink extravaganzas (I don’t not mean that either), but just a realization that intimacy other than “penetration to mutual orgasm” does count as sex! Enter Alternative Options, a spiritual sequel/younger sister to Between the Shores, which will feature couples who enjoy “nontraditional” sex or kink because things like vaginismus, erectile dysfunction, mixed libidos, lowered ability to orgasm as a side effect of medications like antidepressants, fear of pregnancy, the reality of how arousal works for many people, etc. make the “penetration to mutual orgasm” model a poor fit. And/or just because they don’t like that model. I’m not a huge fan myself, and I like it less and less by the day as I (productivate on Reddit’s misery subs) see how being trapped in it makes people miserable for little good reason.
• I’d want the final antho to be inclusive of all genders & sexualities, with each story subverting the Norm (though the Norm itself more or less assumes a cisgender heterosexual couple, it’s not like LGBTQIA+ people aren’t also expected to conform to it–“Which one of you is the man,” etc. By which they mean “Surely the long-haired vegetable never wears the strap-on” [click through for full quote from Mae Martin’s routine]. As a longish-haired vegetable myself, I resent that). So this antho can include a nonbinary person and their male partner where one of them has erectile dysfunction, or an F/F story where one or both partners take an antidepressant that makes orgasm less likely, or vice-versa for either of those pairings & concepts, along with a F/M couple where her arousal nonconcordance means she’s not wet or ready enough for penetration but still wants to enjoy intimacy and pleasure. Stuff that can affect you even if you’re not aiming for PIV (or penetration at all).
• Speaking of subverting norms, I remember Alex Freeman and I once brainstormed an NSP anthology of Billionaire Erotica for the Rest of Us–basically anything but maledom billionaire/femsub ingenue pairings. Has the time for that passed? Or might it come again?
• Anyway, by this point I’m just spitballing with no intended follow-up, but speaking more of breaking rules: a collection of 35 short stories (not necessarily erotica) that each depict a heroine breaking one of The Rules (or a rule from its many sequels) would be on my to-read list SO FAST. Not all of the stories would be happy–some of The Rules actually are good advice, like “Don’t expect a man to change” or “Don’t date a married man” or “Love only those who love you”. But they’d all be absolutely fascinating. And I really want to be a fly on the wall when someone breaks Rule 31, “Don’t discuss The Rules with your therapist.
• (That rule is such a red flag that a red flag parade just broke social distancing orders to march down my street.)
• On the one hand, I’m not 100% sure how one would break rule #1 and be “A creature like any other,” but apparently a “Creature Unlike Any Other” is “always stylish, smiling, fit and feminine” which…doesn’t exactly break any molds. Maybe a story about a frumpy, grumpy, but goodhearted tomboy who makes friends with other women who share her interests? “We ARE like other girls, and that’s okay”?

Wow, when I write it all out like that it is quite a list. What do you think? Would you want to read one of these anthologies, or write for one, or edit one?

For updates on any of these projects–which might not come for a while, since editing Erato is still my first priority, plus my day-job copyediting–you can sign up for the New Smut Project newsletter, if they turn out to be NSP projects. OR for any anthos I edit in the future, wherever they come out from, you can subscribe to my newsletter specifically for updates on “Anthologies Edited by T.C. Mill”. Neither are going to bombard your inbox frequently, but you might get some good news in times to come.

Conversely, do you want to edit or claim some of these ideas? I’d appreciate it if you dropped a line letting me know! And maybe you’d be interested in having a slush reader and copyeditor on your team? tc dot mill at yahoo dot com — I’d love to hear from you!

(Though, not to be greedy, but I’m a bit territorial over Erato II for obvious reasons, as well as Alternative Options, Cunning Linguists [Guinevere should have first dibs on editing those concepts] and Best Pegging Erotica. Not that I don’t want to read someone else’s take on an anthology that overlaps with the ideas–Erato was created partially because I loved flash anthologies like Five-Minute Erotica, and I want to edit a pegging erotica antho in part because I have trouble finding as much pegging erotica as I want. But I’m also going to be doing those myself, almost certainly, in the next few years. Knock on wood, bow to the alter of the Muse, etc.)

Happy Valentine’s Day! Please submit to me!

No, I’m not talking to my partner (who doesn’t need to be asked to submit to me <3) but rather to the talented erotic writers of the world: the New Smut Project is compiling our third anthology, and seeking breathtaking flash fiction!

Stories can be in any genre or setting–contemporary, historical, other worlds, time travel…  Whether your characters find satisfaction through BDSM, fetish, or vanilla encounters, in long-term romances or one-night stands, it’s all good. This is an erotic collection, so submissions should be arousing. But how explicitly you want to portray the sex, and what counts as sex, is entirely up to you – be as blunt or as oblique, straightforward or experimental, as you like.

No limits on the gender or number of participants. We DO want to see stories that are inclusive, sex-positive, feminist, and that offer positive portrayals of LGBTQA+, kinky, and poly characters. We want to publish stories by #OwnVoices authors and about characters from around the world, from diverse racial and class backgrounds, of diverse body types, abilities, and ages. All characters must be of legal age and express their consent. Safer sex practices are awesome. Details of realistic sexuality, from arousal nonconcordance to stubbing your toe as you (try to) pad sensuously across the bedroom, will be received with delight.

I’m serious about the arousal nonconcordance, friends. I read Come As You Are and cannot shut up about it. If you submit a story about arousal nonconcordance and I publish it (and believe me, I will try to) I am going to find Emily Nagoski’s (virtual) address and hammer on her (virtual) door to tell her about it.

I’ll also be especially excited to publish #OwnVoices stories celebrating trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people; stories exploring non-penetrative sex (for any reason: vaginismus, personal preference, trauma history, a spirit of experimentation); and stories in historical settings from around the world (we’ve received some great speculative fiction and contemporary so far, and even some time travel, but I think there’s definitely room for some good historical treatments). Ultimately, anything that knocks my socks off will be embraced, and frankly what I’m going to fall in love with next is probably something I haven’t even thought of.

The other thing that sets stories about at this length is their voice and narrative style. Particularly, writing that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s. Metaphors are regions of great risk as well as great reward. Prose poetry welcome; rhyming poetry will have a harder time.

My fangirling above is in the singular first person, but Erato is also co-edited by Alex Freeman and Guenivere Chase. I don’t think they disagree with my preferences but they certainly have their own as well :D.

The full submission guidelines are here on our Tumblr blog.

I’ve also made posts on Twitter  (where unfortunately you can’t edit Tweets to correct typos…) and Facebook. You’d be sweet to share them.

Erato’s deadline can be tracked and submission response times reported at Duotrope and Literarium.

And Erato has a Goodreads page— it’s not too early to add to your “To Read” shelf!

Further updates will be sent out through the New Smut Project’s newsletter.

I’m still experimenting with potential cover art, but here are some options to set the mood…including someone very special to me on the far left <3. Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day eve, I’m allowed to be sappy!

Music for making love to ghosts

A Walt Whitman poem says, “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

I’ve always misheard that as “To die is luckier than any of us know, and stranger.”

Because how could it not be?

I don’t pretend to have any insight into what an actual afterlife might be like, but when I’m writing ghosts, I try to keep its potential strangeness in mind. Not in a bad way, necessarily; it could be a lucky and fortunate strangeness. But I’m pretty sure sex with ghosts would be something very different from sex with human beings. A matter of odd geometries and invisible contours, the texture and taste of a non-biological intimacy. It would have to be at least a little scary, and probably wistful too.

A song that perfectly captures this mixture of whimsy and weirdness–incidentally, the perfect soundtrack to Bodies of Ghosts, even though it wasn’t released until after I had completed and submitted the story to Mofo–is Seeming’s “Phantom Limb”:

Incidentally, Seeming also has a song called “Stranger” that makes the process of becoming different sound pretty lucky (though it’s much more about life than death). And at times weirdly, wonderfully erotic.

And if you’re looking for inspiration for Mofo’s current call, Apocalypse (how would you fuck if the world was ending?), you might want to check out “Goodnight London.”

Read Bodies of Ghosts free:

Mofo Website

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo

Nook

Get Haunted:

Mofo Website

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo

Erotic Flash Fiction Publishers: A Non-Exhaustive List

Update September 2021: I’m delighted to see this list is still getting pageviews! Many of these publishers are still operating, though not all. There have also been new publishers opening–one in particular being my own micropress, The New Smut Project, which accepts flash for many of our anthologies and recently released an all-flash anthology, Erato. One day I will do a more thorough update of this page. In the meantime, I hope it proves useful to you as a place to start!

Sometimes you just want to skip to the good parts. Because you’re impatient. Because you’re revved up and ready to go. Because sometimes instant gratification is sexier than any tease.

Because when a story is focused on a single idea, act, or scene, it has room to explore more depths than a bigger piece with a lot to cover. Because a brief story honed to a knife’s edge of eroticism can haunt you longer than a novel. Because a flash fic can be the written equivalent of a porn gif, and we fucking love those.

Because stories are stories, and we fucking love those, and the shorter the stories are the more we can devour.

This goes for writers as much as readers. I love to write flash fiction for the same reasons I love reading it, in all my impatient, curious, prying, pulsing, greedy glory.

So this list of Erotic Flash Fiction publishers is meant to appeal to both readers and writers. It’ll talk a bit about the style of each publication, and then provide information for submitting to it. It’s based on my personal notes. Erotic short fiction is a fast-moving market, with new places opening every year and some classics shutting their doors far too soon. These are all open to read and/or submit to at the time of this post’s publication. In the interests of full disclosure (and yeah, a bit of self-promotion), I’ll mention if I’ve been published at a particular market, but don’t read anything into this. I mean, the places that have published me are fucking awesome and you should totally check them out. But check out the others, too.

Some markets pay money, and some pay only in exposure. All accept stories <1000 words, but some also accept and even prefer longer short stories. Some also take poetry. Many publications showcase erotic fiction alongside art, photography, and video, so be forewarned not all linked sites are SFW. In fact, assume that they’re not.

Bright Desire: Among its feminist, sex-positive subscriber content, Bright Desire posts fiction about once a month. The editor says, “I’m looking for stories that are more than just a sex scene. Blow-by-blow accounts of sex are boring. I want to see stories with interesting scenarios and fascinating characters; stories that explore the issues and emotions surrounding sex.”

Payment is $15 for flash fiction <500 words, $25 for short fiction 500-2000 words. Full guidelines are here: http://brightdesire.com/tour/writers-and-contributors/

I’ve sold three stories to Bright Desire:  “Her Perfume” (f/f),“For Myself” (masturbation),  and”If You Were My Lover” (hard to classify).

For the Girls: High-quality short and flash fiction featured once a month. “[S]uccinct, erotic pieces that successfully get an idea across in a small number of words. Cleverness is encouraged, as is out-and-out dirty hotness.” Also, “Stories can cover any topic, however it must be erotic in nature, relatively explicit, sex positive and be written expressly for female readers. Female protagonists are preferred.”

Payment is $15 for flash fiction from 300-500 words and $25 for erotic fiction up to 2000 words. The guidelines are very similar to Bright Desire (both are edited by Ms. Naughty), but they are different websites.  Full guidelines are here: http://www.forthegirls.com/writers.html

Bust: There’s nothing quite like getting your smut in a glossy magazine, in between interviews with trailblazing women, fashion photography, and articles on everything from pop culture to feminist wedding planning. Bust’s “One-Handed Read” section features cliche-busting hotness between 800-900 words (stories longer than 900 words are accepted, but will be cut down to size during their thorough editing process). Pay numbers aren’t listed in the website but from the experience of writers who have worked with them (including yrs truly), it’s a $50 gig, plus a gorgeous and thought-provoking contributor’s copy.

Details for writing for Bust–not only erotic flash but nonfiction articles as well–are here: http://bust.com/info/submit.html

My femdom story “Breakfast Time” appeared in the August/September 2016 issue. 

Nerve: How does one begin to describe Nerve? Check out their Fiction and Experiences tabs for the erotic, bold, and intriguing.

If you’ve got work of your own to share, Nerve takes 300-2500 words through their Nerve Writers Network membership application. Pay is $300 provided the article gets 40,000 unique visitors in a month. Writers should also provide an image to which they have the rights to post alongside the story.

I appeared in Nerve in October 2015 with “A Tender Thing,” another femdom piece.

Aotearotica: This print journal offers “a clever, modern and stylish erotica and work exploring sex, sexuality or gender expression, with a preference for a distinct New Zealand flavour. ”

Payment is NZD$50 and a contributor’s copy for fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, art or graphic narratives. Written work <3000 words. To submit or order a copy, see: http://aotearotica.co.nz/

Peach Fuzz: A print zine combining illustrations (paintings, comics, digital graphics, and more–though photoshoots are done in-house) with writing that need not be “strictly sexual in nature, anything pertaining to the human condition will be considered. We want your smutty editorials, erotic flash fiction, research-based articles, thoughtful op-eds, long verse poetry, and haikus about your first butt plug.”

Pay is $20 for 500-1500 words, $30 for 1500+ words (including research-based articles). For details and to order copies, see: https://www.peachfuzzmag.com/submit

Lascivity: With the tagline “Refined Perversion,” this website offers erotica as well as nonfiction guides to everything from cleaning sex toys to slapping your lover safely and true stories.

Pay: unknown (likely exposure). To read or submit, see:  http://www.lascivity.co.uk/contribute/

Omnia Vanitas Review: I can’t put it better than they do themselves:

“Send us your work : your sexiest, silkiest, naughtiest work : your full manuscripts : your short stories : your poetry : your love letters you ought to have burned : your multi-media projects with thought-provoking titles : your naughty pictures : your movies : your website, so we can become bedfellows.

 Send us YOU. 

I want bodies on paper.”

However, this appears to be an unpaid credit (except for exposure on the website) and there is a reading fee for stories longer than 5,000 words. This is what makes me think of it as a market mainly for short-short fiction. For more information and to read the online issues: https://www.omniavanitasreview.com/submit

Circlet Microfiction: This publisher of erotic science fiction and fantasy publishes short-short stories of 250-1000 on its blog. “Microfictions should be sex-positive. literary quality, and although they may be explicit should be tastefully written.” Their focus is on sf/f more than horror, but they do publish a special round of stories around Halloween. Pay is $5 per microfiction. For submission guidelines, see: http://www.circlet.com/writers-guidelines/

I’ve had several microfictions published on Circlet’s website. You can read them here. 

Cliterature Journal: This erotic journal with a timeless title releases issues on themes including everything from “Voice” to “Technology” to “Sisterhood” to “Patriarchy.” They take submissions of prose, poetry, and nonfiction up to 10 pages. Compensation is exposure. See guidelines: https://cliteraturejournal.com/submit/

Cliterature: A similar title but different aesthetic, this website publishes fiction not in issues but in tagged categories. Check ’em out: http://www.cliterature.org/content/submissions  (Like the other Cliterature, compensation is in exposure, though no length guidelines are given)

Math Magazine: If you’re having algebra flashbacks, fear not: this is a “playful & provocative print quarterly for adults” out of Brooklyn. The deliberately bland cover is a tribute to old-time porn that had to be discreet on the newstand.

If you’re having algebra flashbacks, and it’s turning you on, maybe you should write for them. But submissions need not be arithmetically inclined. In any event, check Math out here: https://www.math-mag.com/

Body Parts Magazine: Eros and Thanatos combine in this magazine that embraces the speculative, the surreal, the erotic, the horrific. They publish flash fiction as well as short stories up to 8,000 words, plus essays, interviews, artwork, and photography. Take note of their issue themes–Alchemy, Grave Robbing, Metempsychosis, and more–and view their submission guidelines here: http://www.bodypartsmagazine.com/submissions.html  Payment goes from $5-$20 depending on category and length.

Bare Back Magazine: Their mission statement says “The human back is a reflection of the soul.  It is our vision that, a back that is bare tells a story, is strong, and is sexy.  It is our mission to feature stories, poetry and art that reflects this vision.” They have online archives of both fiction and poetry. Pay is $3 per story for stories from 800-2000 words; $1 per poem. Guidelines here: http://www.barebackmag.com/submissions

Honeydew Erotic Review: This deliciously named magazine releases themed issues of work that’s “hard, …dark (grey), and we like it pretty damn spicy.” Feminist and LGBTQ welcome.  Also, though they like it “dark,” “Happy endings are good.” Length of story not specified, so long as there’s a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Compensation is $5 per story. See details: https://honeydewtingle.wordpress.com/submissions/

Pink Litter: Editor Misty Rampart says, “Our project is an attempt to marry what some might call “beautiful” and what still others might call “obscene.” ” Both poetry and flash fiction are accepted. Payment appears to be through exposure, facilitated by a 30 word author bio with social networking links, which should be included in your submission. https://pinklitter.wordpress.com/guidelines/

Horror Sleaze Trash: This website combines videos and poems, stories, interviews, reviews, art/photography. You can also buy a hat.

Send that in (the stories and so on, not a hat), along with an author bio. Re: compensation, “I cant pay you cause no cunt ever paid me.” Check them out at: http://www.horrorsleazetrash.com/submissions/ 

Heather: A digital, tri-annual literary magazine publishing fiction & flash fiction, prose poetry, creative non-fiction, digital art. Erotica should be female-focused. “Heather is your friend. Heather is your girlfriend. Heather is your girlfriend’s girlfriend. Heather is leaning against the wall at your neighbor’s house party. Heather is next to you in bed, naked.” Submit here: https://heather.submittable.com/submit

Please note two things: first, the website for Heather is http://www.hthrprss.com/ (the other Heather Magazine is “an Australian online publication championing women in music.” Which is also awesome). Second, the editor-in-chief’s name is Kelsey, not Heather.

Erotic Review: A nonprofit “literary lifestyle publication about sex and sexuality aimed at sophisticated, intelligent readers” that’s been running since 1995. The website is just its latest incarnation, and publishes reviews, articles, and videos alongside fiction. As a nonprofit, it’s an unpaid publication credit. See guidelines at: “http://eroticreviewmagazine.com/contributor-guidelines/

Upcoming stories

My cup overfloweth. Contracts are signed, edits are underway, and I just discovered that I’ll be sharing the tables of contents in two upcoming anthologies with some very excellent people.

Your cup might overflow as well, dear reader, because in each of these anthologies I have two stories.

In MoFo’s third anthology, Religion (originally Sacrilege), my stories are kind of different from each other, but between them cover plenty of my Roman Catholic influences.

“Deliver Us” is about what happens when you get exposed to bondage through B-movies about exorcisms, and your girlfriend is an ex-Catholic who once wanted to be a priest.

(When your boyfriend did become a priest and you want to rescue him from his decision, you get A Last Touch of Grace. Comparing that story in 2016 to these stories in 2017 probably reveals something interesting about my spiritual journey.)

“Annunciation” is a semi-autobiographical novella in flash about growing up queer in the Catholic Church. Novella in flash might be a slight exaggeration, but I’ve recently fallen in love with the form and its cousins after reading Sylvia Brownrigg’s Pages for You—even if I didn’t manage a “true” novella of the appropriate length and independence of the composite flash pieces, it was fun experiment. The format might also be influenced by the 5 + 1 fanfiction genre, in which case we have “Five times I* believed lies the Church told me about gender and sexuality and one time I figured it out,” I guess, or maybe “Five times I really missed the fact that I was queer and the realization(s) that put me right.” Not only was “Annunciation” fascinating to write (I said these stories “covered a lot of my Roman Catholic influences,” but what I learned most is how much is left to uncover), I also got a little angry. In “Deliver Us,” too. That seemed to fit MoFo’s call, which includes “a preference for Catholicism—the eroticism and hypocrisy are built right in.”

The narrator of “Annunciation” first identifies the androgynously-illustrated Gabriel as female, “So to me, the Annunciation was always a matter of two women together in a bedroom. “

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“She knew what he’d brought”: Updates 4/19/17

The paperback of MoFo Pub’s Wanderlust anthology is now available from Amazon. That gorgeous cover will look great on your shelves (something about photography and hot pink lettering does things to me, okay?) and even better open in your lap. While you read it. Which you’ll thank yourself for.

This is the one featuring my story “Soft, Rough.”

But the MoFo goodness doesn’t stop there. “My Body is a Haunted House”–an f/f story that takes its title from C.S. Lewis, yes really–will be one of the stories in Hotel, the second volume of the Mofo Pubs Presents series. The ebook is currently available for preorder before its June 25th release.

If reading these stories gets your imagination going, MoFo has two current calls for submissions: Religion, closing April 30, and Haunted, closing August 5. Speaking, I guess, of C.S. Lewis and haunted houses (okay, I modified his quote–originally in A Grief  Observed, he compared his body to an empty house. The larger point stands. The larger point being that grief is a bodily experience as much as an emotional one, and also I hold nothing sacred).

Best Women’s Erotica of the Year Author Interviews

I just realized how much I have to catch up on, posting-wise, from those long and dreary months I spent without a website. And there’s a whole sob story about what else was going on that getting the new website up wasn’t a priority for me, but who needs to hear that? Sob stories aren’t that sexy.

Well, they can be.

Eroticism and grief, loss, and tragedy are kind of a thing for me. Hauntings–supernatural or psychological–appear again and again. I’m struck by the kind of intimacy you can or can’t have with the past, what forever eludes your touch. There’s also the intensity, the whole-body experience of each emotion, idea, and sensation. It’s why Shakespeare’s tragedies are so beautiful. It’s also why grieving people may suddenly find themselves powerful. The grief story that resonates most strongly with me is: “I just went and stood there, sort of trying out my anger against theirs, I guess. And mine won.”

Or as the narrator of “Phone Call, 3 a.m.” puts it:

Grief and fear are rare aphrodisiacs. Deep mourning isn’t, and depression certainly isn’t. Anxiety makes you clammy and numb inside or makes you let loose recklessly. In my experience merely anxious sex has always felt somehow cheap. But grief unlocks something. Maybe it strikes so deep that it gives us permission to feel. It excuses us. Or makes us so desperate that we’ll have anything in place of the loss.

Anyway, what I was getting to when I started this post is that I forgot to share here when my author interview went up on Best Women’s Erotica of the Year’s Tumblr page. On the other hand, waiting until now to post about it means I can share the complete set of author interviews from all 21 contributors; you’ll find them under the tag for Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 2. They’re all fascinating, and I think you’ll love the chance to hear about the inspirations for these stories, read each author’s favorite lines, and find out what’s coming next!

If you’re interested in being part of the series yourself, the call for Volume 4 is up, seeking themes of “outsiders and risk.”

New Release–Wanderlust: a Literary Erotica Anthology

“Turn-ons include well-placed commas, devastating allusions, ten-dollar words, social commentary, moral ambiguity, alliteration.” As soon as I read the description on the website of MoFo Pubs, I knew this was somewhere I wanted to submit (fiction, that is).

The best turn-ons, the kind that weave the strongest spell, are those that engage your brain as well as your body, that serve up sensuality with flair. Such is what I try to deliver. I don’t see “literary erotica” as an oxymoron. For all the beliefs, emotions, sensations, anxieties, and rites of passage surrounding sex, it’s a strong contender for the most literary of topics. It certainly beats out taxes, though not necessarily death…

…and it may tie with travel. Discovering new places, or leaving the old ones behind; a hunger for different sights or sounds or tastes; short transactions or deeper exchanges with strangers you might never see again. And then there’s the logistics: carrying your baggage or finding somewhere to put it or forgetting it entirely, hoping your transportation doesn’t come to a halting crash, considering the sense of relief you might feel it it does–there’s a lot going on and going into your average case of Wanderlust.

I’m very excited to be part of this anthology for my first publication of 2017.

Read an excerpt from my story, “Soft, Rough,” under the cut

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