Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters — you have 15 days. Submissons for Monsters & Mormons are due no later than midnight (PDT) Friday, Oct. 1, to monsters@motleyvision.org. Please remember to go over the submissions guidelines one more time to make sure everything is in place before you submit.
If you have already submitted: awesome. Thanks so much.
If you are in process: best of luck finishing things up, and we very much look forward to reading whatever it is you’ve come up with.
If you haven’t even started yet: you know, it’s actually not too late. It’s entirely possible to write a short story in one evening. Now a better method would be to draft it this weekend, get a quick turnaround on some reader comments and revise it a couple of times the following weekend. But whatever path you take, decide to make the journey now. And get started. You just may surprise yourself (and, hopefully, us as well). But even if your story is terrible, well, what a marvelous learning experience for you!
A Motley Vision 
Will likely be a last minute submission, but mine is coming-WHEAT!
Okay, I’m hoping to get something pulled together by the deadline. Um, how hands on are you planning to be with editing submissions that you accept?
We’re counting on something from you, David.
Emily: Excellent question. The short answer is — it all depends on the story.
But let me also say this — we will accept stories that show a lot of potential but need a fair amount of work if we really like the story and have a sense that we can work with the author to hammer things out. If you don’t have time to put that third or fourth draft final polish on, send it in anyway.
But if a story is very polished and works well, we’re not going to ask for edits — especially not major ones — just to ask for edits. And we’re especially sensitive to not trying re-write stories in our image. I’m a big believer in letting authors work issues out.
Which isn’t to say that we can’t be very hands on, just to give some brief examples based on my observations:
Theric is very good at lasering in on sentence level issues and prodding writers to tighten the prose so it really sings as well as pointing out when characters are doing/saying things that aren’t quite right. And I’m quite good at helping solve issues of story flow and fixing dialogue. That’s not all that we bring to the table, of course — just what writers we have worked with (including critiquing each others’ work) have particularly liked about what we do.
The beauty of this anthology is that we’re looking for a range of styles and genres and both of us are widely read in genre and literary fiction so the goal will be to help the story fill the measure of its creation.
Thanks, William, that’s very helpful.
How are you doing in the visual artwork submissions department? I started working on something a while ago, and depending on how work goes I may be able to push and get it done in time.
Visual art would be great.
When will you announce the lineup for the anthology? The entries that got accepted I mean.
Excellent question, Graham.
It depends on how many total entries we receive — Theric and I need to have time to wade through them, although we’re almost all caught up with what we have received so far. It’s quite possible that we’ll announce another class of acceptances in mid-October and then the rest at the end of October or early November. But so much depends on how much comes in during this last week and what shape the entries are in and what genres they represent that I wouldn’t can’t say that that plan is set in stone. I will say, though, that we’ll continue to post updates at least every two weeks (if not more often) here at AMV over the next 8 weeks.