"No good Southern fiction is complete without a dead mule."
For Fiction/Non-Fiction:
You've got a one thousand word limit. Put your Southern Legitimacy Statement [SLS] in your cover letter. What's an SLS? Read the Mule and you'll know.
ATTENTION: DO NO UPLOAD .DOC attachments. JUST COPY/PASTE YOUR WRITING AND SUBMIT PLAIN TEXT VIA THE TEXT BOX ON THE FORM.
ONCE AGAIN: Submit fiction and non-fiction in plain text via a text box on the form.
Fiction and Essay submissions are open date. Send us something decent and we'll get in touch with you as quick as a mule ploughing a field -- in other words, we might be slow but dammit we're steady.
POETRY: Read the specific poetry submission guidelines listed below.
Get your creativity engines tuned up, change your keyboard spark plugs and get your fiction oil changed. Rotate your poetic tires.
"No good Southern fiction is complete without a dead mule."
There’s no New South, there is only The South. Good, bad, lousy, wonderful.
No graphic violence or sex and no soft-porn. Please don’t waste our bandwidth.
Note of interest to our submitting public:
Submission to and acceptance by Dead Mule grants us first electronic and indefinite archive rights. All other rights revert to the author upon publication. Please credit Dead Mule as the first publisher if you reprint elsewhere; we like seeing our name in print, too.
Follow the Dead Mule on Facebook or Google+.
Call your grandmother, if she's still alive, and tell her "hello".
Flash Fiction
Size limit: 1000
One thousand word limit. Open call. Include your SLS* on the Cover Page.Single-space your document. No tabs, no paragraph indents. Double-space between paragraphs. Turn off Smart Quotes if you know how. THEN COPY/PASTE THE SUBMISSION INTO THE TEXT BOX ON THE FORM.
We want quality flash fiction. Suspend our belief. Make us laugh, wince, cry or chortle but make us feel something. At this time (March 2012 on) we have more than enough religious-themed writing than we need. No more church tales or conversion dialogs or preaching recalls, Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, Mormon, Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Born Again, Born to Run, Born too Late or other... Thank you.
ONE MORE TIME: Submit via a text box on the form.
Keep reading:
We don't pay writers. I pay for the hosting, format the stories and publish this journal out of my own pocket. When there is over $100 in CafePress sales receipts within a given quarter, I use that $$ to sponsor no entry fee Fiction Writing Contests.
Please do not include a "where published" list. We are not interested. Seriously, stop it, if we want to know more about you, we can use Google.
No *Southern Legitimacy Statement? NO acceptance. We won't even read your work. We will delete it.
See The Dead Mule and READ the Dead Mule to understand what we want.
**Please single-space the document and insert a double-space between paragraphs. If you haven't learned by now to turn off smart quotes in Word, take time to learn how to utilize your computer software accordingly. If your work is not formatted correctly, it will be dismissed and not considered for publication.
Creative Non-Fiction
Size limit: 1000
Short, sweet and concise. That's what will get you published in the Dead Mule's essay section. You must include your Southern Legitimacy Statement in your cover letter with the submission. If you aren't familiar with the SLS, then odds are, you're not familiar with the Dead Mule. One thousand words. If you're unsure as to format, try reading the fiction guidelines ...Check The Dead Mule submission page for details and also READ the Mule to get a feel for what we publish.
General rule of thumb: make it interesting. We don't mind controversial topics but tend to dismiss creative non-fiction which attempts to persuade the reader as to political opinion or lectures re: any certain one-sided religious dogma screed. If you want to push a certain agenda, think Stephen Colbert, not Newt Gingrich -- think satire, whatever side of the fence you're on... we just don't get enough of that here at the Mule. No more religious writing, please. No church stories or born-again tales of any doctrine.
Poetry
Size limit: 0
Non-conventional poetry -- the avant garde, non-traditional, random structural, fluxus verse, visual poetry and outside-the-poetic-box, if you push the boundaries of accepted structures -- then you may submit here via submishmash.All other poetry submissions should be sent to Helen Losse via the popular and most trusted gmail route as detailed on the http://www.deadmule.com/submission page.
For visual poetry (collages etc) please restrict your images to compressed .jpgs of moderate size. (72 dpi perhaps a 640x320 image?) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_poetry for clarification. When in doubt, send a message to us via submishmash. We do not currently accept audio files in this section.
This poetry submission area is separate from Helen Losse's poetry submissions and is not intended to replace her editorial decisions but mistakes have and will be made. We're only human. Do NOT submit via email AND submishmash with the same poetry.
So, basically, you are taking a chance when you submit here. Think of it as a Dead Mule Poetry Audition with judges who sit behind closed doors. Take a chance.