There’s a magazine called “Clarkesworld” that pays 10¢ a word for fantasy fiction. They have, on their website, a list of subjects that they no longer enjoy publishing. Having spent a larger part of College in fiction classes, I think this aptly sums up the fantasy-fiction writer genre.

(The following is an excerpt from Clarkesworldmagazine.com. I’ll use their wording because I don’t think anyone could improve upon it; however, I edited and rearranged some parts of it to increase the humorality of the whole thing.*)

“Though no particular setting, theme, or plot is anathema to us, the following are likely hard sells:
-Time travel.
-Stories in which the words “thou” or “thine” appear.
-Talking swords.
- Stories where the protagonist is either widely despised or widely admired simply because he or she is just so smart and/or strange.
-”Funny” stories that depend on, or even include, puns.
-Stories about rapist-murderer-cannibals.
-Sexy vampires, wanton werewolves, or lusty pirates
-Stories about young kids playing in some field and discovering ANYTHING. (a body, an alien craft, Excalibur, ANYTHING).
-Talking cats.”

My favorite part is that they hate puns. And I want to know what kind of talking objects they do publish stories about. ‘Cus I wrote a novel, and, it’s not the main character or anything, but it feature a toaster doing a soliloquy. Plus, it’s 400,000 pages long; so I figure I’ll make bank!

*Yes. I know I made that word up. But it doesn’t seem so weird after that list, now does it?

[To read the rest of the list or submission guidelines, go to this site:
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/submissions/ (July 22, 2008)]

Filed under: the Zaz!