#0092 Guidelines Are Suggestions, Right? Part Three
Please don’t get creative when it comes to these rules & regs either
Guidelines Are Suggestions, Right? WRONG.
In case you missed the basics (#0087), or some of the specifics (#0090), take a read. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Here are the links again:
Now for some more of the nitty-gritty I promised at the end of Part Two, such as:
Multiple submissions
Reprints
Translations
Timing
Place
AI
Fees
Multiple subs re: create-create and submit, submit to one place
Creative people don’t often stay in their own lane. Poets tell stories. Artists share words. These hyphenated creatives work in more than one category.
If you write creative nonfiction pieces yet dabble in sonnets and doodle single-panel comics, you might want to submit in more than one category of a call for submissions to one journal. Make sure the place says it allows multiple submissions. After defining the submission categories (art, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry), Inlandia Journal’s fall 2025 guidelines explicitly state:
That means you could potentially submit 12 times: 5 works of art, 1 creative nonfiction piece, 1 fiction story, and 5 poems.
If you want to try multiple subs at a journal that doesn’t specify? Ask before you submit to save yourself and the editor time and energy.
What about the hybrid, experimental work that might fall under more than one category? Please only submit to one category. (No fair to submit a poetry collage for poetry editors and art editors to evaluate.) If you don’t know which category your work belongs in? Coin flip… Kidding! Again, inquire before you submit.
Previously curated, er, published(?) re: reprints
Many places do not allow previously published work. But why? Lots of places want to be The First; that is, claim first publication. This notion used to be clearcut: printed in a journal, newspaper, magazine, anthology.
As the interwebs grew in the ’90s and aughts, and later we creatives were counseled to build a platform in the 2010s (IYKYK), things got complicated.
If you tweeted a haiku, was it published? If you posted a short story on your personal website, did that count? What about sharing a creative nonfiction piece to an online workshop?
Even now, many places do not clearly define what they mean when they say do not submit published work.
A solution to the conundrum came in 2023 from Rattle magazine editor Tim Green in a guest post for LitMag News. Instead of published, Green recommended the term curated. (I mentioned curated materials in another post [#0071] and linked to Green’s rethinking in a footnote.)
For submitters new to the idea, the Inlandia Journal fall 2025 guidelines define curated materials:
Previously curated works — in books, magazines, journals, anthologies, online or in print — by creators who have republication rights are okay to submit with proper attribution/credit.
That’s right! Submit your writing or art previously selected by other creative outlets to IJ for the chance to be published, er, curated, again.
Translations re: word wizardry from one language to another
Some literary journals specialize in publishing translated texts; but some places don’t want translated submissions.
Computerized translations can be clunky or stiff. It takes a talented mind to successfully transcribe, interpret, and transform poetry or prose originally written in one language into another. Such fluency combined with creativity can result in a remarkable collaboration between translator and writer.
Inlandia Journal fall 2025 guidelines explain what’s needed for a translated submission:
Translations are okay to submit with permission of both author and translator. Please include the English as well as native-language version of the work along with third-person bios for both author and translator.
🎶Time, time, time🎶 re: deadlines
Inlandia Journal’s fall 2025 call for submissions closes September 14th. At midnight. Pacific Daylight Time. Not on the 15th and not at midnight in the UK.
Please leave extra time to submit in anticipation of potential Submittable glitches, power outages, weather anomalies, nap attacks, family drama, dehydration leading to delirium, a murder of crows taking over your home, your mute clone from another timeline landing in your living room with a warning,1 etc., etc., etc.
I recommend lying: tell yourself the deadline is September 13th —Positive Thinking Day — to have a cushion.
Where oh where? Here not there re: submit to the right place
When I say to submit to the right place, I’m not talking about the perfect match of your Sam the Snail portrait with the Gastropod Mollusk Monthly Gazette.2 What I mean is the proper transit mechanism from your abode to the submission slush pile repository. Submittable? Google Forms? Email? Snail mail?
Here’s what Inlandia Journal specifies in the guidelines:
We accept submissions only through the Inlandia Institute’s Submittable portal. We will not consider mailed or emailed submissions.
Submit to IJ via Submittable. Pretty clear, right?
AI re: let’s not kill our creativity without accountability
Here’s what Inlandia Journal says about AI right now in the guidelines:
Do not submit AI-generated or AI-assisted work.
Before the November 2022 release of ChatGPT? AI wasn’t a conversation starter in (the majority of) the publishing world. For IJ and other publishing adventures under the Inlandia Institute umbrella, concern over AI came to the forefront in February 2023 when Clarkesworld abruptly closed its call for submissions after being bombarded with AI-generated stories.3
More than 2.5 years later, use of AI in workplaces, at school, and, yes, with creative writing and art endeavors scream from the headlines of traditional and new media: Is AI stealing your job? Will AI take away our kids’ education? Is AI more creative than you?
Who knows what scare mongering might appear next week or next month or next year with more advanced AI releases. Until then, please keep 2 things in mind.
1) Recast the headlines to focus on the people making the decisions.
Per Baratunde Thurston’s Life with Machines post “Why AI is NOT Taking Your Job or Doing Anything Itself,” do not allow the actors benefiting from AI to hide in the wording.
Here are three insightful examples from Thurston’s post about recasting passive voice and revising syntax and word choice to properly spotlight the power wielders:
“George Floyd was killed.” vs “Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd”;
“Black people earn less than…” instead of “Industries pay Black people less than white people”;
“Women are more likely to be killed by men” instead of “Men kill women…”
Suddenly the actor, the system, the accountability are right there in the sentence… Yahdon [Israel] taught me that language is never neutral, and there is a grammar to systems of oppression. When we put victims in the passive role, we unintentionally obscure power and responsibility.
2) Remember to remain as accessible as possible to all creatives.
Ableism is not only the dictionary definition of “discrimination or prejudice against individuals with disabilities” but also an (often unconscious) assumption that one person’s typical interaction with built and social environments applies to everyone. Lots of these ableist assumptions are baked into the publishing world, including submission guidelines banning AI-assisted work. Let’s look at 3 categories.
First: Do you ever let autocomplete finish the word you started typing? Or allow autocorrect to fix a typo as your fingers fly across the keyboard? How about run a spellcheck? Grammar check? All 4 are considered AI.
Ever take photos in portrait mode with your smartphone? Or clean up the background after taking a photo? What about applying filters? You’ve tapped into AI for those features.
Second: It’s okay to give your sore wrists a break and use talk to text (aka speech-to-text or voice typing), right? What about if you want to catch errors by listening to your written work read back to you — text to speech is okay, yeah? If you’re using foreign phrases you want to verify the meaning with a language translator, right? AI, AI, AI.
Mainstream digital art applications don’t include AI right? Actually, Canva markets its “magic” AI tools, and the Adobe suite (Photoshop, Illustrator) has integrated AI features. Probably lots of other art apps also include AI. (Procreate — at least right now — proclaims no AI.) Is DaVinci AI Image Generator or CreArt AI Image Generator so different from other digital art apps?
Third: Have you ever talked through an idea for a new writing project with a teacher? Or a group of other writers? Isn’t talking through the idea with AI as your sounding board the same?4
Have you ever considered hiring a book coach or developmental editor? Wouldn’t paying for an AI program trained to help writers outline their stories or give feedback scene by scene fall under the same umbrella?5
Accessibility Considerations: An oft-cited example of disability adaptation that helps all is curb cuts.6
Many of the innovations in the first and second categories were adaptive solutions to barriers faced by disabled people (often developed by those in the disabled community). Yet we all use, and take for granted, most of these accommodations. Though they are technically AI, publications don’t ban submitters from using them.7
The third category might seem a bit trickier at first glance. Some might argue that conversing with ChatGPT, with instantaneous reference to millions of craft books, is cheating. It’s not the typical way we learn the craft of writing.
But what about someone who is chronically ill so cannot regularly attend a teacher’s workshop? Or a neurodivergent person who often gets overwhelmed at a writers’ gathering? And what about the costs involved with workshops (conferences, retreats, etc.), when working-age disabled adults in the US are “twice as likely to live in poverty”?8
Finally, the trained AI writing assistants. Not cheap. But neither is a book coach or a developmental editor. Whether human or based on Large Language Models, these socioeconomically privileged options seem kinda unfair. Which leads to…
Fe(e), fi, fo fum re: pay to play vs no-fee submissions
I used to be opposed on principle to submission fees (unless submitting to a legitimate contest or receiving an annual subscription or the like with the fee). Pay to even be allowed to submit my work for possible publication? Seemed unfair and made me envision the big green meanies behind those policies thundering: “fee-faw-fum.”9
That was then.
With creative communities across the US upside down, in chaos, on fire, torn asunder because of nonsensical political posturing, I’m left sputtering.10
If places now need to rely on submission fees to continue publishing, I request the organizations share with potential submitters what happened to their funding to begin requiring submission fees. Show me the why behind the sub fee, and then I can see how the fee is another facet of the call to action against the crazy attacks on our creativity.
Gentle reminder, dear readers
Yes, we embrace rejection because it shows we’re trying to get to the next level with our creative self-expression goals. But in these fraught times, we need to share our writing and art rejections with each other.
Let’s join together as we strive for more. (Check out Wendy McNaughton’s DrawTogether Creative Action miniseries.)
Because creativity matters more than ever.
Choose any 2 from the list and write a micro lyrical essay (max 300 words) or flash fiction (max 500 words). Maybe for submission…
Should I grab that stack name?!
Here’s coverage via NPR’s website. Clarkesworld now has this statement in the submission guidelines in a gray box (original bold text emphasis):
“Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT
We will not consider any submissions translated, written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.”
During a virtual conference last month, I watched a presentation on “Voice AI Prompts To Get Started,” in which Tamra Artelia Martin, a college professor and bestselling author (under the pen name Auriella Skye) demonstrated how to talk with ChatGPT (instead of keyboarding prompts) to quickly develop scene-by-scene novel outlines and detailed character profiles.
A book coach named Ana del Valle, at the same virtual conference (but different day), presented “Plot Like a Pro: How to Use AI to Outline a Bestseller-Worthy Novel.” She gave a sneak peek at what she called her trained AI assistant (named Olivia) that helps writers outline. Del Valle mentioned other AI assistants she trained and touted that her AI programs “align” with US copyright law (whatever that means).
Curb cuts, the small ramps between street and sidewalk, became federally mandated as part of the American with Disabilities Act in 1990. An accommodation for wheelchair users, whose civil rights had previously been ignored in US law, curb cuts proved helpful for people with strollers, luggage, shopping carts, bikes, toddlers on unsteady legs, those with tired joints… all of us. It’s called the “curb-cut effect.”
With the exception of AI-generated artwork, which would be a whole other multipart post series.
National Council on Disability 2023 Progress Report:
“Although people with disabilities have higher costs of living due to disability-specific expenses and needs, people with disabilities consistently have poorer outcomes for employment, earnings, savings, and overall net wealth.
Working-age adults with disabilities remain employed at less than half the rate of people without disabilities and are twice as likely to live in poverty” (my bold text emphasis).
Defined as: “a bloodthirsty person : ogre.”
I was going to have links to lots of examples, but I’ll just say: RIF used to stand for Reading Is Fundamental. Now? Reduction In Force.