Issue 16 - August 2008

Submission Guidelines

Interested in submitting your work to us? Then read on to find out what we want and how we want it.

	Fiction: What we're after is well-written gay male fiction with original, interesting plots and characters. Sadly we can't afford to pay for stories we publish, but we are happy to publish a link to your own website and/or include a brief biography to help publicise your work. To help you submit the sort of work we want, here's a few more details: Stories should: be between 1,000 and 10,000 words long. (If you've written something great that's just over or under the limit, contact us and we'll talk about dividing or serialising it); be well written and original; be in any genre (romance, humour, fantasy, horror, sf to name but a few) but contain at least some reference to gay or male bisexual relationships (romantic or otherwise) and/or erotica; if erotic, definitely erotic rather than pornographic (ie lean towards romance or romantic sex rather than hard-core descriptions of the act); have a gay or bisexual character or characters central to the plot; be sympathetic in tone towards gay or bisexual men; be fully copy-edited for spelling and grammar errors, typos and plot holes or continuity issues. Stories should not: be fan fiction. Stories adapted from fan fiction are okay, but please make sure you change more than the names - the story needs to make sense outside its fandom context; involve real people. Much as we like Tom Cruise and Michael Phelps, we don't want to find them on our doorsteps clutching lawsuits; involve paedophilia or underage sex; involve incest of any kind; involve kink, including but not limited to bdsm, master/slave, torture, bodily functions and smelly feet (some man's 'kink' is another's 'sexy', so if you think you've written a masterpiece, submit anyway); be longer than 10,000 words (but see the first point under 'stories should' above); involve the kind of 'pizza delivery boy' gay porn that's already so well catered for on the net; appear in any current publication. If accepted, we ask that you remove your story from any archive, web site or live journal for the duration of the issue it appears in. The best way to understand the kind of stories we accept is to read them, in the current issue and in our archives. Please submit all stories as Word file attachments (preferably .doc rather than .rtf) or OpenOffice attachments (.odt) (it's free!) with a covering email giving your name, pen-name (if appropriate), and the title and word count of the story.  Please use 'Forbidden Fruit Submission' as the first part of your subject line. In order to fit with our house style, please submit all stories in single-line spacing, with a single line of space between paragraphs and no indent at the start of each paragraph.  Please send all submissions to the editor.
	Articles: Got a new angle on romance or erotica or gay life you want to share? Feel you can explain why women like gay stories so much? Want to review that new gay film or book you've just seen/read? We'll always be looking for stimulating non-fiction pieces up to 2,000 words long. If you'd like to contribute, and subject to the conditions for fiction listed above, please email your work as a Word file attachment (.doc)/Open Office (.odt)  with 'Forbidden Fruit submission' in the subject line, to the editor.
	Artwork: We'd like to include original artwork in every issue. This can be in any visual format - original drawing, painting, cartoon, photography, photo manipulation, etc etc but please, no real person manipulation unless you have the permission of the model. Please contact the editor with details of what you propose to submit.