CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS!

Suspending New Submissions Temporarily

Moxie regrets having to suspend submissions for the foreseeable future. We're sorry about that. We've been plowing through our inventory and expect to post at least a dozen new stories over the next few weeks. In the meantime, have a look at www.moxiemag.com for the stories that won first prize in our contest. We hope you'll enjoy them as much as we do!

Hello! And thanks for contacting Moxie!

We have been flooded with submissions since Writer's Market profiled Moxie and Writer's Digest named us one of the 25 best websites for authors. Winning a Maggie award for Best Cover and being pictured in the New York Times feature on brash new feminist magazines has added to the onslaught.

Despite all of this media attention, lack of advertiser support has forced us to suspend the print edition of Moxie. The last issue we printed, Ties that Bind, Bindings that Break, came out in February, 2001. We continue to expand moxiemag.com, which now includes hundreds of stories and gets tremendous traffic.

FEE FOR EDITORIAL SERVICES
As of April 1, there is a $10 fee for each submission to Moxie. You can use PayPal on our website or mail a check to cover the fee.

What this gets you is feedback on your work from Moxie's editorial posse, and, if your piece is accepted, professional editing as well as a writing credit in an established, award-winning magazine. It also automatically enters your piece in our new contest (see below).

CASH PRIZES - MOXIE CONTEST
Twice a year, Moxie will award a $100 cash prize to the authors of the:
-best fiction,
-best first-person narrative, and
-best poem published in the past six months.
Winners and their authors will be announced on Moxie's home page, which gets nearly 4,000 unique visitors/25,000 hits a week. The announcement will be linked to a special section of Moxie's site where winning pieces will be featured.

CRITERIA FOR ACCEPTANCE
-Does the piece exemplify or inspire moxie (courage, guts, daring)?
-Will it matter to women who are putting together lives that work?
-Does it embody a positive point? Will it inspire or embolden women?
-Will it make a difference to women who are putting together lives that work?
-Does it fit one of Moxie's online departments or themes?

ADVICE TO WRITERS
Moxie welcomes new writers, but we do not welcome spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting errors. Stories that are riddled with errors will be rejected without comment.

We make these suggestions:

-Run a spell check on your work before you send it to us.
-Look it over to see that each sentence begins with a capital letter.
-Read it out loud to see if words are missing or repeated.
-Check to make sure that the piece is either all in the present or all in the past tense.
-Put open quotes at the beginning of dialogue and close the quotes at the end.
-Eliminate stray spaces, extra line breaks, squiggles, and other mystery symbols.

We also welcome personal narratives, but we do not welcome journal entries. One way to distinguish between the two is to ask yourself if your piece has a beginning, middle, and end. Moxie is more than willing to publish writing that is raw in emotionality and unsophisticated in form as long as it is real. However, if it is simply a rant or a lament, it will not be accepted for publication.

Finally, is your work authentic and original or is it written according to a formula you got from a book or a class? If it is formulaic, it would be better to submit it somewhere else.

METHOD OF SUBMISSION: email only.
We do not accept queries, attachments, or snail mail.
-Paste the text into body of email and send it to emily@moxiemag.com.
-Put the title - just the title - in the subject line of your email.
-Put contact information on the piece. In addition to the title, include your name, address, phone number, and email address.
-Indicate whether it is fiction or non-fiction
-Indicate whether it is a simultaneous submission.
-Include a word count at the beginning of the piece.
-Make sure that you are using a font we can read...nothing smaller than 10 points, please. If you are using Arial, a common email font, make it 14 points.

Length: 500 - 2,000 words

Compensation:
-One copy of Ties that Bind, Bindings that Break (the last issue Moxie published on paper, now a collector's item),
-OR $10 (don't spend it all in one place).

PRACTICAL MATTERS
Remember, submit work online by emailing it to emily@moxiemag.com.

Follow up on your work. Nudge us (by email) in a couple of weeks. Be sure to put the title - again, just the title - of your submission in the subject line of your email so that we can look it up.

Finally, have fun, and watch for a big announcement about our first contest winners in October, 2002!


Emily Hancock
Editor in Chief
moxiemag.com