As explained in this issue’s Editorial,
II will metamorphose into an independent ezine, The Chimaera, from the next issue.
The Chimaera is a fabulous beast composed of disparate parts,
who breathed awful fire,
Three-headed, frightening, huge, swift-footed, strong,
One head a bright-eyed lion’s, one a goat’s
The third a snake’s, a mighty dragon-head.
(Hesiod, Theogony, II. 321-4 transl. Dorothea Wender)
With an eponym like that it is not surprising that this ezine seeks to publish a various assemblage of works: mainly Poetry, Satirical Verse and Prose, on a range of topics. We will publish anything that interests us and which we think will interest our readers. Writers are invited to submit work according to the following guidelines.
Submissions for the October Issue of The Chimaera may be sent now.
There is no set theme for poems or prose submitted to the October issue of The Chimaera — send in your best 1–5 poems, or one or more prose pieces, on whatever topic you like. But read the General Submission Guidelines first (below).
Although we are primarily a text-based literary and general electronic magazine, artists are invited to send in image submissions relating to the Chimaera and other fabulous beasts.
Submissions for The Chimaera October Issue must be received by Monday, September 17th, 2007.
Submissions: editor@the-chimaera.com
General Submission Guidelines
- The Chimaera will publish quarterly in January, April, July, and October, and seeks to present high-quality original work in the fields of poetry and prose.
- We are interested in all sorts of well-written poetry, including satirical and humorous verse.
- We are also interested in various sorts of prose relating to literature, culture, history or general social issues: critical prose, essays, causeries, reminiscences, polemics, historiography, biographies, review, fiction (stories complete in themselves of up to about 5000 words), and what have you. If you have an idea for a piece of writing but are unsure of what our response might be, ask us.
- Submission deadline dates and themes (if any) for the next issue will be specified in each current issue, but you may submit work at any time. If your submission is too late for the deadline date for one issue it will be placed in the batch for the next.
- In poetry, we are biased towards formalism, but by no means dismissive of vers libre. We are looking for original work which deals with a wide variety of issues and imagery, including that which might test or challenge boundaries, or disturb sensibilities. But it must be well executed. Please do not send us work which has not been extensively drafted, crafted and polished.
- Previous publication is not a problem as long as the previous publisher does not hold copyright. You must inform us of any previous publication when you submit. Posting to blogs or online workshops is not in our opinion publishing, so any such poems or other pieces are clearly eligible. We reserve the right to archive your work as part of this site, and with your specific consent to publish it in a print anthology later; but all other rights remain with the author.
- The person who submits work must be the original author.
- We accept simultaneous submissions, but please inform us immediately if the submission is accepted elsewhere.
- Poets should submit 1–5 poems; writers of prose, one or more prose pieces. Contributions should be sent in the body of an email, or as .doc or .rtf file attachments if necessary to preserve formatting: text contributions, whether poetry or prose, should be single-spaced. (Also see below on formatting and house style.)
- If you send your submission in a .doc or .rtf file attachment, please make your surname the first word of the filename, e.g. Smith_poems.doc. This makes it easier to file and sort submissions.
- Please include your surname and the word “Submission” in the subject line of your email, e.g. “McGonnagal Submission”.
- Visual arts contributions should be as .jpeg files and may be sent as attachments. Image submissions should be original work or cite relevant permissions from copyright owners.
- All contributors should include brief third person biographical details of up to five lines.
- We will attempt to acknowledge receipt of all submissions within three weeks of arrival.
- There is no payment for publication in The Chimaera.
Formatting: Line Breaks
We know you want to make things easy for us, and it will be easier for us to work with your contributed poems if you make each new line after the first with a line break rather than a paragraph break. In Word, use Shift+Enter instead of Enter. (Click the ¶ button to make the breaks visible.) When we convert the text for the Web, a Word line break becomes an HTML hard line break, which is what’s needed. Ending every line with a paragraph break results in each line becoming a (spaced) paragraph in HTML, and these then have to be changed. We’ll be grateful, and deeply impressed, if you make a single paragraph of the whole poem — with a double line break at the end of each stanza, strophe or other spaced division — or else make a paragraph for each such division.
Editorial Practice and House Style
The Editors will endeavour to preserve authors’ indents, strophe breaks, step-breaks, bold and italic style, and use of upper-case and lower-case letters. Authors’ font choices will not be preserved — unless they happen to coincide with the fonts chosen for the Web pages.
We will not wantonly remove or add punctuation, nor attempt to standardise (or standardize) to Australian/British or US spelling. Your British or Australian or Canadian or American spelling will remain. We may and probably will edit for consistency in minor typographical details such as em-dashes, en-dashes, quotation marks, and the placement of punctuation inside or outside closing quotes. In these matters, practice varies somewhat from publisher to publisher and country to country. With readers and contributors from all over, we won’t be able to match what everyone was taught as correct or normal, so we’ll probably just do what’s correct or normal for us.
