Submissions

Misery Tourism will be holding a special Autofiction X Worldbuilding themed submission month from April 1st to April 30th. During that time we’ll only be accepting themed submissions. Please read the entire description below before submitting, so you’ll know exactly what to expect. Thanks!

This month, we’re doing a general call for autofiction, creative nonfiction, and articles, with a worldbuilding twist.  Here’s how it will work:

You submit a work of autofiction, CNF, or a non-fiction article (say, an essay on the ball that dung beetles roll around).  We will review  these submissions, accept the ones we like, and then … we will roll them all together like the dung beetle in the example and use them as inspiration for a fictional world’s FIRST AGE.  A brief summary of the world and its First Age will be available at the end of the submission period to all who had work accepted.

Here’s where it gets [more] crazy:  Each contributor who is accepted will receive, through the magic of a Secret Santa exchange, another contributor’s piece, which they must then use to create a work of pure imagination set in the fictional world.  This can be anything from an epic poem about one of the world’s legendary heroes, a fictionalized work of anthropology, an addition to the world’s bestiary, or whatever other insane shit you want.  The only stipulation is that it must use the original work as inspiration.

WOOOORLDSTAR!

Not only will we publish both the original [pseudo-]nonfiction pieces and the fantastical works they inspire on Misery Tourism, but we will also be creating a wiki dedicated to our new, collaborative universe.  The wiki will contain the synopsis of the First Age as well as all the worldbuilding content in an interconnected and editable form, so that the world can continue to grow long after the submission period has ended and all of the work is published.

The wiki will also open up the possibility for additional ages (with their own submission cycles and potentially different theming) to be added to the world in the future, though that will depend on the reception to the First Age and our capacity to continue giving a fuck.

Good luck, have fun.

Submission Guidelines

Here at Misery Tourism we understand that there is more wonderful, sad, and upsetting content out there than what we can find and create, so we’re looking for submissions.

Unfortunately, we don’t currently make any money from this site (save for selling the occasional copy of The Misery Index ), so we can’t afford to pay for content. However, we also won’t ask you to give up ownership of your work. We’re not looking for any form of exclusivity. If we publish a piece that you submit, you can still feel free to share it on your own site or submit it to other sites. We’ll also give you full credit for your work and include a link to your website (or whatever else you’d like to advertise).

Here are some examples of the kind of disturbed content we’re looking for:

• Weird, outsider works of fiction or poetry. Obviously, they should deal with human misery in some way, whether that means a highly personal memoir about mental illness, a poem about searching for the waterlogged dead post-Hurricane Katrina, or an Howardian gritty escapist fantasy about genocidal barbarians on Mars. Just remember, when all was said and done, Robert E. Howard blew his brains out in a hospital parking lot.

• Non-fiction articles and multimedia experiments. Do you consider yourself an expert on some highly specialized facet of agony? Did you write your doctoral dissertation on sexual assault in Renaissance Florence? Do you have 3,000 words about the culture of the Khmer Rouge that you need to share with the world? Have you made a beautiful multimedia collage out of 19th century lynching postcards? If so, hey, who else is going to give you an outlet?

• Games of all kinds. This website began as a place for us to publish our sick, offensive role-playing games, and we’d like to keep that tradition alive. We’re interested in both tabletop and electronic games. If you don’t want to share the full, finished product, we ask that you at least provide a demo of some kind and a write-up about the game’s content and what makes it outlandish or unpalatable.

• Other strange, terrible shit. Use your imagination.

Now, here’s what we’re not looking for:

• Porn. We’re not a porno site, and we don’t want your amateur smut. I don’t care how disgusting it is.

• Graphic snuff videos or pictures of real dead people. LiveLeak already exists and we’re not interested in becoming them. There are plenty of subreddits that specialize in this kind of content. Look at it this way: we’re interested in creative interpretations of human suffering, not the source material.

• Ideological thinkpieces. Listen, we all know pain is bad. It’s probably the first and most obvious truth of human existence. However, we’re not too interested in suggestions on how to bring it to an end for one simple reason: almost all such suggestions are birthed by subjective, biased minds. Or, in other words, our fantasies about how to make the world a better place are usually just a rewording of our political positions and personal prejudices. The internet is filled to overflowing with ideological echo chambers. If you’re a liberal or a conservative, a social justice aficionado or a men’s rights activist, I guarantee there is already a community out there that eagerly shares your opinions about how to make life gentler, prettier, and more comfortable. We’ll keep our distance. That said, we’re totally open to theorizing and attempts to offer insight into pathology and despair. We just don’t want answers, and we definitely don’t want talking points.

If you have something you’d like us to consider, you can email us at submissions@miserytourism.com. We promise to give all submissions due consideration, and we’ll do our best to get back to you promptly.