Wishlists and Hard Sells for the Contest Reading Period

Submissions are now open for our 3rd annual After Happy Hour Contest! This year’s theme is “Animals” and it has the same percentage-based prize system as previous years. You can see the full details and send along your work on our Submittable page.

Before you do, though, the editors thought it would be nice to give a bit more guidance for submitters about what we’re looking for (or explicitly not looking for) when we review the work sent our way. These aren’t things necessarily specific to the contest period–they’re more general thoughts the editors have about some things we either want to get more of, get way too much of, or otherwise have thoughts about.

First, some general ones that apply across genres:

Wish Lists	Hard Sells
Work that resists oppressive social structures without being pandering or preachy, where the resistance is integral to the work Work that engages with otherness, marginalization, being othered, being marginalized, etc. More actual comics, graphic narratives, and mixed media storytelling in general	Poems about poetry, stories about writers, etc.–works that are meta in that kind of way “This happened to me once in college”–works about a mildly interesting experience that has little interest or meaning beyond the surface

The individual genre editors also had some thoughts to share.

For fiction:

Wish Lists	Hard Sells
More genre-bending fiction</li Stronger, more decisively genre works in general, as well as a wider variety of the genres (more mysteries, thrillers, horror, etc.) More experimentation with form and stories that tell narratives in nontraditional ways	Love and relationship stories with the typical girl meets boy tropes

For poetry:

Wish Lists	Hard Sells
More character poetry	Slashes 2-line stanzas Diary poetry–if it sounds like a journal entry with line breaks, we’re probably not interested Erasures–we simply do not publish these so this is a hard pass

For creative non-fiction:

Wish Lists	Hard Sells
More pieces that integrate researched facts in a creative/narrative piece with strong emotion More epistolary work	Anything over 10 pages

Hopefully this is helpful info for folks deciding what to sending along, either to the current contest or to any of our other future open calls!