Writers Guidelines For The Salt Lick Review
by Larry Gaffney

Reading period: For the spring issue—12 January, 3:00 p.m., until 16 March, 10:15 a.m. For the fall issue—30 July, 2:30 p.m., until 14 August, 9:45 a.m. Envelopes received at any other time will be spat upon and returned unopened.

Format: Six copies of each MS will be sent with a detachable cover page (use a paper clip…we prefer the colored, plastic-coated variety sold in the Levenger catalogue…we are especially fond of shamrock green); each cover page must have your contact information (name, address, phone number, most hated popular novelist). No other page of the MS can show any contact information. If you ignore this rule your MS will be slapped around and shredded.

A SASE for reply only must be included with your submission. It must be size ten. If the envelope is too small to contain our exquisitely printed rejection slip you will never learn the status of your MS (though after, say, thirty-seven months, you’ll probably figure it out). In addition, we will give your name and address to a group of roving soccer hooligans with whom we are acquainted. E-mail submissions will be infected with a raft of malevolent viruses and returned to you at once.

Reading time: between eighteen and thirty-seven months. Be patient; we will read your submission carefully. If you are lucky, we might return your MS with a few words of constructive criticism. Some of these words may seem harsh. One time we made Chuck Palahniuk cry. You’re a writer. Deal with it.

Poetry: It must never rhyme. If you send us rhyming poetry we will smear it with cat feces and return it to you in a window envelope.

Fiction: We have no interest in outworn conventions such as plot or characterization. We would like to see more stories in which animalcules dressed in Death Metal mufti trade witticisms in hyperspace.

In our view, a simultaneous submission is akin to the automated call from the satellite dish company that comes at the very moment we have settled in with our crème brulee. Anyone sending us a simultaneous submission will be placed on our blacklist. Forever.

Payment: Nothing, not even a copy. But if we publish your work you will be entitled to a three percent discount on a seven-year subscription. If you want a five-year subscription (our smallest package), you lose the discount. If you request anything smaller than a five-year subscription, we will cash your check, deny you the subscription, and publish your sniveling letter in a special supplement entitled “Bozos of the Literary World.”

What we look for: We are continuously astonished by such writers as Sutton LaRue, Perelandra Smythe, Chang Chow, Favonia Skorkovitch, Sara Stanberry Belcher, Gavin Popadopolous, Allyson Beckworth Dunkle, Aiiee Kabongo, and Jack Bron. Read the work of these masters. You can find their fictions and poems in back issues of The Salt Lick Review, available at prices that are climbing with the vertiginous thrust of a bull market.

If you think you get it, give us a try.