PLEASE NOTE: Sub­mis­sions to Writers’ Bloc are CLOSED.
Inform­a­tion on this page is for his­tor­ical pur­poses only.
New con­tent is no longer being pub­lished. Details here.
Thanks for your interest, and sorry for any inconvenience

Writers’ Bloc wel­comes — and indeed encour­ages — your sub­mis­sions in any medium:

• Writ­ing — fact or fic­tion, poetry or prose, ser­i­ous or humor­ous, long or short;
• Pho­to­graphy — col­our or black and white, con­crete or abstract;
• Graph­ics — drawn or designed, naive or experimental;
• Video — prefer­ably hos­ted on a video-sharing site;
• Links — rel­ev­ant sites, art­icles or quotes from around the web;
• Any­thing else — we’re open to sug­ges­tions, though we draw the line at express­ive mime.

Whatever you send, the one abso­lute con­stant MUST be that it either dir­ectly or obliquely con­cerns the art, arti­fice or grimy and unpleas­ant real­ity of put­ting pen to paper, fin­gers to key­board, marker pen to pub­lic con­veni­ence wall … well, you get the idea. If you’re not sure about your sub­ject, or want to dis­cuss it fur­ther, we wel­come cor­res­pond­ence — and what’s more, we’ll answer it too.

(And just a note here to pre­serve the editor’s san­ity. If you don’t observe the above require­ment — most likely because you haven’t even bothered to read these guidelines and taken a moment to grasp what the site is about — then you will open your­self to ridicule, finger-pointing and small chil­dren laugh­ing behind your back.)

Format­ting and sending

Please email your sub­mis­sions to editor at writers hyphen bloc dot net, enclos­ing the text in the body of the mes­sage rather than as an attach­ment. Please add a short biog, writ­ten in the third per­son, includ­ing a rel­ev­ant URL to any pres­ence else­where on the web (because all pub­li­city is good pub­li­city, though we can’t prom­ise you a deluge of vis­it­ors). No pro­file pho­tos please, as they’re both­er­some to the min­im­al­ism and clean lines of these pages.

Pre­vi­ously pub­lished work

With a title like Writers’ Bloc — even though it’s a dread­ful pun on suf­fer­ing from a lack of inspir­a­tion — it would be mean-spirited to insist that your work should not have appeared any­where else online or in print before you sub­mit it to us. We don’t care about that, and in fact we tend to sigh wear­ily when we see that rule in lit­er­ary magazines, espe­cially if they’re all about ‘dis­cov­er­ing the best new writ­ing’. All we ask is that you have retained the ori­ginal copy­right, since we don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes.

If it’s a new piece, how­ever, we’d be very grate­ful if you didn’t imme­di­ately pub­lish it on your own or any other site, but instead allowed it to appear on Writers’ Bloc first in order to encour­age vis­it­ors. Mer­cen­ary? Yes, of course, but we’re very new and we want the atten­tion all to ourselves. Such a pathetic human need.

Pay­ments

No, we don’t pay any­thing for sub­mis­sions. That would be crazy.

Copy­right

All rights to a piece of work remain with you, the author. Writers’ Bloc wouldn’t dream of tak­ing it. If we did, we prob­ably wouldn’t know what to do with it any­way, and would most likely end up los­ing it down the back of the sofa along with an ever-increasing num­ber of mis­laid Scrabble tiles.

Pub­lish­ers

You might be won­der­ing if pub­lish­ers are brows­ing this site, des­per­ately hunt­ing for the next big lit­er­ary sen­sa­tion. The Editor of Writers’ Bloc very much doubts it, and would like to gently advise you that he knows abso­lutely no one in ‘the pub­lish­ing game’, nor does he have any con­tacts who are in the least bit influ­en­tial in that field. Sorry. So if you’re sub­mit­ting your work here in the des­per­ate hope of being dis­covered, please think again. We would hate to dis­ap­point you.

Is that it?

Yes. If we go on any longer, we won’t feel like writ­ing any­thing. Oh. Damn.