Please report response times to Duotrope, The Black Hole, and anywhere else that's relevant. Please also consult the Trabuco Road Forum for more insights regarding guidelines and submissions.

What Trabuco Road is Looking For

• Intelligent, literary-style fiction.
• Magical Realism, Surrealism, Slipstream, Dystopic Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction.
• Stories with strong, idiosyncratic settings and well-developed, true-ringing characters.
• Stories written in a "lighthanded" style.
• Stories that take risks and explore unusual territory.
• Stories up to 15,000 words in length. (I'm open to receiving flash-length submissions, but they're not my favorite.)
• Stories with both internal and external plot arcs.

What Trabuco Road is NOT Looking For

• Escapist fiction.
• Traditional high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery stories.
• Military space opera.
• Poetry, artwork, fan fiction, or reprints.
• Simultaneous submissions.
• Explicit sex.
• Gratuitous sex, profanity, or violence.
• Stories with an agenda.
• Cat stories.

Payment/Rights Purchased

• $0.05/word up to $109.
• Worldwide First Publication Rights.
• Exclusive rights for three months after date of publication.
• Right to keep story in online archive for at least one year.

How to Submit

• Submissions should be sent to: trabucoroad (at) gmail [dot] com.
• The subject line of the email should read "SUBMISSION: [Title]" with [Title] replaced by the title of your story.
• Stories should be sent in standard manuscript format (SMF). For TR, this means double-spaced, one-inch margins, 12-point Courier font, numbered pages, etc.
• Attach your story to the email as an .rtf file. Do not paste into the body of the email or send as a Word document.
• In your email, note any prior or upcoming publications.
• Expect a response within six weeks. Please do not query until six weeks have passed.
• Please wait at least seven days after a rejection before submitting again.

Things I'm Okay With that Other Editors Might Not Be:

1. Stories that trust and expect a lot from the reader.
2. Unusual voices.
3. Minimally sympathetic main characters.
4. Stories whose main strength lies in the evocative use of language.
5. Stories that come to a satsifying resting place even if they don't tie up all their loose ends.
6. Stories with busy (though not distracting) backdrops.
7. Stories that take (skillfully executed) left turns.
8. Brooding, wrenching stories with unhappy endings.
9. Well-written stories that alienate the reader.

Things I Particularly Dislike
These are practices that I tend to be even more sensitive to than most editors probably are.

• Stories that make the reader feel ungrounded, especially when they don't include setting details in the first paragraph (or thereabouts).
• Characters who lick or bite their lips.
• Characters who knit their brow or have furrowed brows.
• Comparing the taste of blood to that of copper.
• Comparing hair to any kind of pasta.
• Modifiers, especially adverbs.
• The words gingerly, moist, and topping (except in the British sense of "topping oneself" -- that's cool).
• Baroque styling (including the use of $10 words and "heightened" vocabularies).
• Informational/stilted/on-the-nose dialogue.
• Allusions to classical mythology.
• "Hooky", short first sentences that make "bold" statements.
• Black Hat vs. White Hat conflicts.
• Insufficient foreshadowing.
• Stories that are "clever" or "cute".
• Stock characters and stereotypes.

If you have any questions, please post them to the forum. Thanks for checking us out.

BK