Please read the manual before play:
1. We want your video game lit, obviously. Check out any of our previous issues for examples of what we like. Pieces that live within virtual worlds. What non-player characters dream of when the heroes aren’t around. What happens after the world is saved. The unseen sentences hidden between the lines of code.
2. We like it short—2,000 words or fewer—and lyrical. Fiction, essays, and/or poetry (traditional or prose). If you’re writing flash/micro fiction or nonfiction (i.e., under 500 words), you may send up to three pieces. If you’re writing poems, send up to five.
3. Simultaneous submissions are encouraged. Just let us know if we should be congratulating you on having your work accepted elsewhere.
4. No previously published material, please. New work only.
5. There are no fees, and there is no pay. This goes for all submissions and everything we will publish.
6. Cartridge Lit acquires First North American Serial Rights. All copyright reverts back to the author upon publication. If your piece does someday get published elsewhere or anthologized or put into a book, it would be lovely if you referenced our prior publication.
7. We will respond to submissions as quickly as we can manage. We appreciate your patience. We try our best, but we are human, and we are busy, and there are few of us, and we do this just for the love of it, and sometimes we are playing video games when we could be working on this. You know what that's like, right?
GOOD LUCK.
Send up to five poems (traditional or prose poetry).
short nonfiction, send up to three pieces (each 500 words or fewer).
(Note: This category is for creative nonfiction. If your work is more of an article or column, maybe opinion-based and/or argumentative, please consider using the Airship category to submit it to our blog.)
For our blog, the Airship, we’re looking for contributors to write regular columns, or one-off pieces, or whatever else you might have in mind. Want to write a series of essays about games of a particular genre? Want to write a review of the latest literary-minded indie game? Want to interview writers who game and/or gamers who write? We want to read all of that and more.
Feel free to submit either a completed work as an attached Word doc or just a pitch in the "cover letter" text box.