This is the blog I publish over at Untitled Books, a literary website based in the UK that you all should check out. I’ll post all the blogs here, just in case you don’t wander that-a-way.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection prefers that you submit only one story at a time, or up to five poems at a time.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Seriously? You were thinking about sending two stories at once? Aren’t you the least bit grateful that we’re letting you send anything at all? If someone offered to let you urinate in their kitchen sink, would you respond by asking if you could do it twice? Just piss in the sink and go home. As for poems, they’re generally way shorter, so we can stomach two or three. But if you’re more into writing long poems, please just send one. Or better still, none. Or just stop writing them altogether. What about haikus? We love haikus.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection responds to all submissions within 1-3 months.”

Euphemism category: creating realistic expectations

Translation: Einstein, the smartest man ever to walk this Earth, was the first to realize that time is relative. Obviously, we at DailyRejection don’t count weekends as “time”, per se. And it isn’t as if we’re going to count the hours we spend sleeping. Likewise, time spent eating, cooking, lovemaking, reading, writing, and voiding waste cannot reasonably be considered “time”. “Time” shall be defined as any hours we spend at our desks, in our offices, actually looking through submissions. If you must have a hard number, you can expect a negative response to your submission in approximately 1-35 years, though keep in mind that the lifespan of the average literary journal in this economic and intellectual climate is far less than that. Similarly, most of our editors are already at death’s door, thanks in large part to having read your submissions.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection is happy to accept simultaneous submissions.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: This fantasy you’re entertaining, that more than one literary journal might accept your work, thus initiating some kind of heated bidding war between them, is highly adorable. It makes us want to tousle your hair and buy you a Beanie Baby.

Submission Guideline Statement: “Only previously unpublished works will be considered for publication in DailyRejection.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: Everybody’s band managed to open for Guns n’ Roses once, and odds are if you keep sending these Hail Mary passes to journals, some half-asleep editor will accidentally put the accepted sticker on your Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope. But one concert doesn’t make you Aerosmith, and one story doesn’t make you Fitzgerald. Write something else, you lazy ass. If we Google your submission and it comes up as already published in the Best American Short Fiction On the Subject of Flightless Birds of 1998, we will bring all our considerable influence to bear and ruin your career for ever (possibly by nominating you for a National Book Award).

Submission Guideline Statement: “To get a better grasp of whether or not we might like your work, please read through a few issues of DailyRejection before submitting.”

Euphemism category: shameless request for money

Translation: Nobody reads this magazine. Seriously. The editor hasn’t read it in years. It’s like, twelve people, now. And all of them are only doing it so they can submit something. Please, for the love of God, read a literary journal. Writers don’t matter when nobody’s a reader. Don’t you get that? Stop updating your Twitter and read a goddamn literary journal.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection regrets to inform you that we can no longer accept electronic submissions.”

Euphemism category: bid for mercy

Translation: What is wrong with you people? We thought putting that electronic submission page up on the website would make life easier, but as soon as we did it, you started sending us everything you’d ever written down in your entire lives. Grocery lists do not count as stories, nor do Dear John letters or (most) suicide notes. Whether or not the Excel spreadsheets were meant to be experimental or ironic, we found them impossibly dull.

Submission Guideline Statement: “DailyRejection requests a moderate reading fee for your submission.”

Euphemism category: shameless demand for money

Translation: Believe it or not, reading your stories is not a pleasure. The majority of your submissions make us wish that Homo Habilis had not developed the brain lateralization necessary to support a primitive cerebral analogue to Broca’s area, allowing for linguistic development in Homo Erectus and full-blown language in Homo Sapiens. The others make us wish we were dead. Our $50 reading fee ($5 per haiku) will not come anywhere close to paying for the years of therapy that our readers will require in order to recover from your submissions. Have you ever seen a Vietnam veteran who can’t relax, can’t sit still, can hardly stop shaking, because the traumatic events they experienced decades earlier still haunt their every waking moment? That’s what our readers are like. And they don’t get subsidized health care.

Submission Guideline Statement: “For all submissions, please ensure that your name appears on every page. Also, please number your pages.”

Euphemism category: you’re an idiot.

Translation: Please make sure none of your story is written in nonsense words, and that you have printed out the pages, rather than mailed us the computer itself. Stories written onto the surface of your monitor will not be accepted. Remember that the mailing address should go on the outside of the envelope, not the inside, and that when we request a word count, we mean the number of words in your story, not the number of words that you know. Also, it’s also worth noting that socks should be put on before shoes, and food goes in your mouth, not all over the table.

Submission Guideline Statement: “We look forward to reading your story.”

Euphemism category: stroking your ego

Translation: We don’t.