OUTSHINE submission guidelines

Outshine

NOTE: @outshine is open to submissions, and actually in dire need of them. So send them in!

A Twitterzine for optimistic, near future prose poems. They’re flash length, and look ahead: why not call them flashforwards?

Submission guidelines:

What I’m looking for: prose poems of optimistic, near future SF that fit within the ‘tweet’ limits (check out Twitter); i.e. maximum 140 characters long.

• prose poem: what the heck is that? Well, anything you think it is. Write what you believe fits the bill and let the editor sort it out. Don’t limit yourself and feel free to push the boundaries, like, e.g.:

1. Haiku–written like this: Maybe a haiku/there in the twitterverse/would appear like this;
2. Prose rife with poetic elements both formal — such as rhyme, alliteration (which is easy to overdo!) and meter — and thematic such as syntax, tone and reference (images, symbols & metaphors);
3. Imbue it with a certain rhythm and a unique voice;
4. I’ll look at actual poetry, too (the boundary will be blurry, anyway);

• optimistic: anything with an (eventual) positive attitude or upbeat tone;
• near future: from next year up to about fifty years later;
• SF: ditto as in prose poem: write what you believe fits the bill and let the editor sort it out;

One submission per person per week: I’ll be publishing one prose poem per week, and will be checking the submissions once a week. Don’t feel limited: this means you can submit up to 52 prose poems a year. I prefer people submitting their best rather than people submitting at will then hoping something will stick.

Submit by email to shineanthology@gmail.com , in the body of the email (and yes: anything longer than 140 characters will be rejected: this is, after all, for Twitter);

Payment: 5 dollars per prose poem, payable through PayPal (don’t have a PayPal account? Either get one, or don’t submit), on publication.

Accepted prose poems will be published once a week on Wednesday on Twitter, here: OUTSHINE!

Bio: a published biography with author name will follow the published prose poem almost immediately. Bio must be shorter than 136 characters (as bio- will precede the actual biography). Hint: use a tinyurl to link to your website/blog/LJ or to your FaceBook/MySpace/Twitter account. [Edit]: as Gord Sellar mentioned in the first comment below, is.gd is an ever shorter url compressor.

UPDATE: Due to a number of humourous submissions I liked, I am making Saturday the day for funny pieces. Tentatively: that is, if I get *enough* humourous pieces then they will appear every Saturday; if I don’t get enough I prefer to *not* to publish rather than desperately clinging to schedule. Obviously, the Wednesday prose poems are a schedule I *do* intend to keep.

UPDATE 2: I have received a question about the rights @outshine is asking. Well, so far, none: I accepted tweets from submitters, published them on Twitter, and republished them on both the Shine and DayBreak Magazine websites. Otherwise, submitters are — as far as I’m concerned — free to republish their tweets (OK: ‘prose poems’) anywhere, anytime, and the rights revert to them rightaway. Why? Well, the moment someone likes a particular message on Twitter, it is ‘retweeted’ — a tweet starting with ‘RT @ XXX’, where XXX is the source. It is *the* common practice on Twitter, and as a Twitterzine publisher I can either state that people are not allowed to retweet @outshine’s prose poems — which obviously won’t work and is also counterproductive — or just let Twitter be Twitter.

Therefore I never asked for rights, or sent out an actual contract. Sorry about that, but even as the highest paying Twitter market — to the best of my knowledge, and do absolutely feel free to point me to a market that pays more than $5 a tweet: I’d be tempted to submit, myself — I simply don’t feel the need to put up a contract, define rights, and go through all the paperwork: even $5 a tweet isn’t worth my time on that.

But after almost a year I did get the question, so here’s my answer: I want *exclusive* Twitter rights for 6 weeks — hey, gotta drive a hard bargain — or the first retweet, whichever comes first (obviously, if you retweet your own submission, you’ve just liberated your own tweet, congratulations: it never happened before…;-). Otherwise, I want the *non-exclusive* rights to reprint your tweet at both the Shine website and the DayBreak Magazine website — things I’ve been doing for over six months already, sorry about that, but I just assume you want your pieces to be read as widely as possible, and assuming the average word is 6 characters, then including spaces [which Twitter does], I’m paying about 25 cents a word, which is in line with the top paying online markets like Tor.com and Subterranean Press. Only difference is that I am open to unsollicited submissions…;-).

On Mondays there will be the “Quote for the Monday” (QftM): this one will be the more serious, inspirational one;

On Tuesday there will be [#SoundBytes]: Paul Graham Raven’s music review tweets;

On Thrusday there will be [#SpitBalls]: Lucius Shephard’s movie review tweets;

On Fridays there will be the “Quote for the Friday” (QftF): this will be the more frivolous one;

On Sundays there will be [ShineComics]: David Alexander McDonald’s comics review tweets.