Here’s what Milk and Cookies Zine is all about!

For about a year now (no, seriously) we’ve been softly tossing around the idea of starting up a zine in Milk and Cookies Towers. And now, in summer 2011, we are finally opening submissions for our first ever issue, which we hope will appear sometime in the autmn. Ohmygod. So exciting.

What we aim to do with this wee publication is share stories by you guys, and interesting things you know about this city. What we’ll be providing in each issue ourselves are recipes (cookies are half of Milk and Cookies y’know) and a wee little cultural events guide to the city.

Our aim is to produce it quarterly, per season pretty much, and flog it back to y’all at all the events for the tender loving price of three euros.

Our submission guidelines are below, please read them, our publication team is four people wide so it’d be lovely if you could keep them in mind and make the process as easy for us as possible so we can bring you the best little book we can! Keep in mind the spirit of Milk & Cookies when you submit. Lots of other literary publications tell you to read their previous issues to get a feel for the kind of thing we’re looking for. Instead, we’re going to tell you to come to one of our events to get what we’re all about. We’re gonna try capture the feeling of M&C between the pages of a wee a5 book, want to help us try?

Submission guidelines for Milk and Cookies Zine

• Open to stories & in some cases, poetry, but the publication will be oriented mainly towards the short story. We love short, short stories. Our word limit is 2,000 but we’re always happy to recieve stories as short as 500, 200, even 6 words if you’re able.

• We aren’t going to tell you how to write a story: you get it, you’ve been with us before, begin it, middle it, end it, give it loads

• Write us a little letter saying who you are, you know, fancy writerly types call it a biography.

• In said e-mail, please put ‘Zine Submission’ in your subject bar, so we know what you’re talking about. If you’re writing a query, call it a query. You know.

• Maximum stories per submission is 2.

• Maximum poems per sumbission is 3 (again, the publication is story driven, however depending on the quality of the work itself poetry will pop up here and there)

• The reason for this limit, 2 stories/3 poems, is that there is only a small editorial team working behind each issue and we want to give each submission adequate care and attention. Only send your best work, work you’d be happy to see in print. A story told at an event goes into the air then only remains in memory – however, print is permanent! You cannot take it back once it’s been born! (Stories are for life, not just for Christmas)

• Other articles are more than welcome – again, subject matter is important! We want to know about the secret cultural places in Dublin, we want to know about literary and storytelling events, we want to know about places that do good cakes and tea, we want to know about things we don’t know already!

• Also, we want to know your stories and experiences of our Milk & Cookies events. Type us up a story you told, type us up the story of your first ever event, just share with us back some of the buzz you’ve had with us in times gone by! (aaahhh!)

• We’d also like to really sweetly ask you to make sure your submissions are in specific formats, just so we can definitely access them – .rtf .doc .docx .txt

• Previously published stories/poems are always welcome, however, and this is very important: if you have published your submission elsewhere before, please be sure that you retain copyright to the work by contacting the journal/magazine/whatever where it previously appeared. They might say no and if they do, behave yourself! Don’t get us in trouble! Publishing rights are complicated things!

• We will absolutely respond to and read all submissions, however, can’t offer feedback on every story/poem, like we said, there are only a few of us running the show!

• We’ll try and get back to everyone promptly, however, as with most literary and submission based magazines, we’ll probably take a while to let you know whether or not you’re in. Don’t worry, we won’t forget anybody, but if you’re worried about it feel absolutely free to follow us up with a little note asking how we’re getting along!

• Oh! And we’ll be accepting limited artwork per edition too, if your hand lends itself more to a pencil than a pen. All images will have to be black and white, cause sadly we aint got the pennies for coloured print just yet! We’ll need real high resolution images too, no photography unfortunately (not because we don’t like it, just because we havn’t got the resources to make photos look pretty in print just yet, if a time comes along however when we can facilitate photography you’ll know all about it!) Please send them in .jpg or .png!

• Also, and finally, we don’t accept any submissions via snailmail or in person at events! Keeps things neat and tidy, only e-mails please! Email beautiful things to:
  submissions@milkandcookiestories.org