Ongoing Submissions: Bradburyesque Quarterly

Payment: Exposure Only

A few guidelines. Nothin’ fancy.

Bradburyesque Quarterly is an electronic magazine. Issues in print will not occur. Each issue will be electronically posted on or near November 2, February 2, May 2, and August 2, corresponding with the seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn.

Be revolutionary in our vainglorious day and age and give freely from what you’ve been given. Send your best stories to Bradburyesque Quarterly. Stories you think Ray Bradbury himself would love to read. Stories you think he may have wanted to write. Stories he may have collected as a boy growing up in Waukegan, in Tucson, in Los Angeles. Stories he would cherish, talk about, be inspired by.

In the great tradition of Ray Bradbury, write only for the love of writing, and don’t forget the speculative element in your tale! Bradbury redefined traditional ‘ghosts and gadgets’ Speculative Fiction to include warm vignettes of lost childhoods, ‘shaggy dog stories,’ dystopias disguising what was going on at the time, and sketches of bigger-than-life characters sometimes redeemable and sometimes not. Speculative Fiction speculates, asks questions, returns to shelved fears and terrors, challenges, disrupts, demands dynamism, entertains, and saves!

Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction will also be considered, and papers on Ray Bradbury will receive special notice.

It is the first sentence and the first paragraph of your work that the editor of Bradburyesque Quarterly will read and make his decision upon.

Send all work in the body of your email only (no attachments will be opened) and mail to

peekthemorpholux (at) yahoo (dot) com

or

mail your stories here!

being sure to use the following subject line:

BQ SUBMISSION: “Title” / Author’s Pen Name

Yes, you may simultaneously submit, multiple submit, and submit previously published work as long as you hold the copyright to that work. You can also send poetry, but unless you are as good as Sylvia Plath or T. S. Eliot, no free verse.

Try to use standard ms. formatting. Please do not submit stories in .docx or .pdf.Again, no attachments will be opened.

Submissions should be double-spaced with indented paragraphs with no extra space inserted between paragraphs.

Don’t underline material to be italicized. Use italics… and do remember to italicize the titles of books, films, and periodicals; and place quotes around story and essay titles.

Red flags for BQ are adverbs and ‘said-bookisms’ (aka dialogue tags). Use them very sparingly. ‘Said’ and ‘replied’ are most usually sufficient, and again, adverbs can make your reader stop and step out of the story to see if what is being said is matching with their own hearing of the tale. You never want your reader to disengage. Yes, yes. Ray Bradbury used adverbs and ‘said-bookisms.’ That still doesn’t make them easy to read. A story is much stronger when they are absent.

Story lengths should be no more than 7500 words, but may be as little as logically capable of telling a story. The editor has always had a strong preference for very short stories. Flash fiction is fine. So is Micro-Fiction. Instant Fiction? Sure. Send it along.

If you want to send a bio for inclusion with your submission, write it in third-person. And please don’t send 3-5 pages of your curriculum vitae with your story as an afterthought. Yes, these have been sent. Let your work speak for itself.

By the way, ‘Bradburyesque’ in no way means that your work must look, act, or sound like the mastery of Ray Bradbury–though if it does, that is fine and dandy.

And, above and beyond all, keep it ‘G’ rated! No innuendos. Rough stuff will be disregarded without comment. Remember that Poe, Bradbury, Hawthorne, Stevenson, Melville, and many other great writers wrote for children, often beneath the guise of writing for grown-ups. If ‘Bradburyesque’ can be defined, it means NO ADULTS ALLOWED!

BQ accepts submissions all year long for Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer issues. This means BQ is always looking for Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter stories. Unless you earmark your work for one of the four seasons (and holidays associated with them if applicable), the editor will decide the weather.

A final note: Despite the untruths academia has told you throughout the years, there is no difference between Genre Fiction and Literary Fiction. Either it’s great writing, or it isn’t. Bad fiction is routinely found in both “camps.” Great writing, however, knocks the socks off and provides the reader with hope, exhilaration, horror, terror, dread, joy, and tears!

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Thank you.

Look forward to your work.

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Bradburyesque Quarterly

‘ the very best stories out there ‘

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‘ Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ‘ ~ Ray Bradbury

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Bradbury’s 12 Tips for Writers

Don’t start out writing novels. They take too long. Begin your writing life instead by cranking out a hell of a lot of short stories, as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. I waited until the age of 30 to write my first novel, Fahrenheit 451. Worth waiting for, huh?
You may love ‘em, but you can’t be ‘em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to imitate your favorite writers, just as I imitated H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
Examine quality short stories. Read Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, and the lesser-known Nigel Kneale and John Collier. Anything in the New Yorker today doesn’t make my cut, since I find that their stories have no metaphor.
Stuff your head. To accumulate the intellectual building blocks of these metaphors, I recommend a course of bedtime reading: one short story, one poem (but Pope, Shakespeare, and Frost, not modern crap), and one essay. These essays should come from a diversity of fields, including archaeology, zoology, biology, philosophy, politics, and literature. At the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!
Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writerly ambitions? Call them up and fire them without delay.
Live in the library. Don’t live in your goddamn computers. I may not have gone to college, but my insatiable reading habits allowed me to graduate from the library at age 28.
Fall in love with movies. Preferably old ones.
Write with joy. In my mind, writing is not a serious business. If a story starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that doesn’t. I want you to envy me my joy.
Don’t plan on making money. I and my wife, who took a vow of poverty to marry me, hit 37 before we could afford a car (and I still never got around to picking up a license).
List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the former, and kill the latter — also by writing about them. Do the same with your fears.
Just type any old thing that comes into your head. I recommend word association to break down any creative blockages, since you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.
Remember, with writing, what you’re looking for is just one person to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, failing that, you’re looking for someone to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like people say.”
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Mission Statement

Bradburyesque Quarterly is not an organ of any particular group or demographic. It is, rather, a magazine of escape and entertainment. BQ aims at satisfying and spurring the interests of those world denizens inclined toward spiritual horrors and soteriological fantasies, dreams, visions, and nightmares. BQ is wedded to no doctrine except that of making propaganda against all who would seek to extirpate joy and the peace that passes understanding. There is something greater than self-consciousness; a higher growth. Join Bradburyesque Quarterly as we continue to discover the nuances of perfect communion with our Creator.

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BQ Copyright & Indemnity Clause

Copyrights of works found published on this site by Bradburyesque Quarterly belong to their perspective authors, immediately reverting to said authors upon publication. BQ and its publisher is in no way responsible for the appropriation of this material for unethical use elsewhere, nor can said publisher indemnify work appropriated in an unethical manner from BQ. For published pieces BQ asks for Electronic Publishing Rights, but these revert to the author upon publication. Bear in mind that after the work is published by BQ it can only be marketed as a reprint, which gives it a better chance to be published by a legitimate house in the story collection of an author (most houses want more than half reprints in collections), but limits the number of markets that will accept it (many markets want first-time work), and can reduce the pay rate the work can receive. BQ compensates with publishing credits (exposure) only, and is visible to the general public. By author request, any work published can be removed at any time.

[via: Bradburyesque Quarterly.

Category: Ongoing Submissions