Submissions

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Wilde Oats is a magazine which celebrates the lives of gay and bisexual men through well-crafted stories, articles, rants and art.

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Scroll down for submission guidelines; go here to see deadlines for the next issues.

Submissions may be sent here.

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Fiction

We’re interested in well written gay/bisexual male-centered fiction with original plots and characters.

We can’t pay for stories at this time, but we are happy to provide a link to your Web site; include a brief biography to help publicize your work; and provide ‘buy buttons’ to published work in Amazon, Barnes & Noble or other online publishers. We are here to encourage new writers and to give established writers a place where they can experiment. To help you submit the sort of work we want, we have provided a few details below.

As with any publication, the best way to get a feeling for the kind of stories we want to publish is to read them in our current issue or in the archives.

Please submit all stories as Word file attachments (preferably in .doc format rather than .rtf) or OpenOffice attachments (.odt format), with a cover e-mail giving us your name, your pen name if you use one, and the title and word count of the story. Please use “Wilde Oats Submission” as the subject line of your e-mail. Stories should be formatted in single-spacing, with a single line space between paragraphs and with no paragraph indent. Please submit only one story with your e-mail. All submissions should be addressed to the editor.

We encourage you to send us a brief biographical note, twenty-five words more or less, which we will set as a footnote to your contribution. In submitting that biographical note, you warrant that it is true and accurate, and you authorize its publication. We are happy to provide a link with your story or article to your Web site, and request that you reciprocate with a link to ours.

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Stories should:

Not exceed 10,000 words.   If you’ve written something great that exceeds this limit, we will consider serializing your story (see below)

Be well written and original. Please do not submit a story written by someone else as your own; that reflects badly on you and can cause problems for all three parties: you, us, and the original author.

Be written in any genre – romance, humor, fantasy, horror, sci-fi, etc. – and focus to some extent on gay or male bisexual relationships, romantic or otherwise, and/or erotica.

If erotic, be definitely erotic rather than pornographic; that is, the story should lean toward romance or romantic sex rather than hard-core graphic action.

Have a central character or characters who are gay or bisexual men.

Be sympathetic in their treatment of gay/bisexual issues

Be fully copy-edited for spelling and grammar errors, typographical errors, plot holes, internal contradiction, and continuity issues. It is not an editor’s job to take care of these details; an editor works to help you tighten and polish your work, to find the right tone, the right word, the right turn of phrase – not to take care of your spelling problems or carelessness. If you have doubts about your spelling and/or grammar, please have the courtesy to ask a friend whose spelling and/or grammar is more reliable to beta read your work before you submit it.

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Stories should not:

Be fan fiction. Stories adapted from fan fiction are acceptable, but please make sure to change more than the characters’ names – the story must make sense outside its fandom context. Be mindful that fandoms are small worlds and our readers do not necessarily belong to the particular fandom that enthralls you.

Be part of a larger work unless the submission is a section that can stand alone.

Involve real people as characters. As much as we like Brad Pitt and Michael Phelps (and Robert Redford and Mark Spitz) we would prefer not to open the door one day to their lawyer serving process for a lawsuit.

Involve paedophilia, underage sex, incest, bestiality, or kink – and that includes BDSM, CBT, master/slave, torture, bodily functions, and fetishes. We realize that some men’s “sexy” is “kink” to others, and that not all sex occurs in loving, respectful relationships, but under no circumstances should such activities be graphically described or written in such a way as to imply that the author approves of them. If you think you’ve written a masterpiece, submit it. But . . .

Involve the sort of pizza delivery guy plot already so well provided in other neighborhoods of the Net. We want to engage our readers’ minds and emotions. If there is a sensual element also, that’s fine, but we will reject out of hand a story populated by cardboard figures created only to be pushed and pulled into various sexual positions (sometimes called “Plot? What plot?” writing).

Be longer than about 10,000 words unless you are submitting it as a serial (see below).

Appear in any other current publication. If we accept your story, we ask that you remove it from any archive, Web site, or live journal/blog where you may have previously posted it, for the duration of the issue of Wilde Oats where it appears, and replace it with a link to our magazine.

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Serials

We are happy to receive longer works that meet our general guidelines for consideration as serials. The total word count should not exceed novella length (50 to 80 thousand words), and it should divide naturally into no more than four installments. If you have written a work that fits these criteria, or are in the process of doing so, please submit the first installment complete, along with an outline of the remaining installments. We will review the first section and advise you as to whether we think it will be a good fit for us before we ask for the final sections.

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Articles and Reviews

Do you have a new angle on gay life that you want to share? A fresh take on romance, or erotica, or gay life in general? Do you want to review a new gay film or book or artist or musician? We are interested in stimulating non-fiction pieces as well as fiction. Non-fiction submissions should be under 2,000 words and follow the guidelines for fiction given above. Again, please submit them as Word file attachments (.doc format) or OpenOffice files (.odt format), with “Wilde Oats submission – non-fiction” in the subject line, and address them to the editor.

Wilde Oats maintains an interest in new writers and in new publications of established writers. To that end, we welcome books submitted to us as review copies, made available gratis as is the industry custom, although we cannot promise that all books received will be reviewed.

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Artwork

We want to include original art in every issue. We are interested in all visual formats: drawing, painting, cartoon, photography, photo manipulation, etc., but we cannot accept photographs or photo manipulations of real persons without a copy of the signed model release clearly indicating the model’s age as being 18 or older. Please contact the editor with details of what you propose to submit.

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Terms and Conditions

In submitting, you agree that your creation has not been previously published elsewhere, except on your own blog/live journal or Web site or as a workshop entry in an Internet discussion group.

You agree to assign Wilde Oats First Electronic Rights for a period of three months from the date of appearance. When the initial period has finished and a new issue of the zine has appeared, your work will be transferred to our archives, where it will remain accessible, unless you wish to have it removed. If you do not want your work to remain in our archive, you must notify us by e-mail.

If you have submitted your story to other publications at the same time as it is being considered by Wilde Oats, and it is published elsewhere before it appears on our site, you must advise us of that and withdraw your submission.

The editors of Wilde Oats may make minor spelling or grammatical corrections without contacting you. However, if we believe your story would benefit from more than minor corrections, we will contact you by e-mail; you agree that you will work with us to improve the story and that your responses to our queries and/or suggestions will be thoughtful and timely.

We, for our part, will contact you to advise you as to whether your submission has been accepted or not, to discuss any changes we think might be advisable, and to inform you as to when we expect to publish it if it is accepted. We will respond to enquiries as quickly as possible, but we remind you that our response may take some time if we are receiving many submissions or if we are in the last preparatory stages for a new issue.

Although we require exclusive First Electronic Rights to your work if it is accepted and published, copyright remains with you and it will be your responsibility to defend your copyright against infringement if that unhappily should occur.

Acceptance or rejection is the decision of the Editors and their notice of either is final. If your work is accepted, we will notify you and include a copy of these Terms and Conditions, which you must agree to by return e-mail before we can undertake to publish your work.