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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1077 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Remember that submission I had shortlisted? It got accepted!

Congratulations.

Um. No. Sorry. Accepted for what?

In the last couple years, I've had a pretty bad run of luck with open fiction submissions, after being fairly successful before that. I recently wrote an original piece for an anthology that got shortlisted, and now formally accepted. I'm pretty excited about it

Congrats! Did you do anything differently to improve or get back to form?

I'm going to try to avoid culture warring here, but I filtered my submission list pretty heavily. Most of the outlets I've worked with in the past are having a hard time right now.

A lot of them went full woke in 2020. This meant that unless you could assert some kind of special status, you got put on the bottom of the pile. This sucked for me because I can't claim a special status, and it sucked for the publisher because their existing readers stopped buying, and the new stable of authors didn't pull in the crowds that the publishers expected. The revenue loss meant they couldn't accept as many submissions, which lowered my odds even further.

Concurrently, the AI content tsunami over the last few years hit the industry like a freight train. Historically, the fact that writing takes more effort than reading shielded the industry from bad actors. Once generative text turned that convention on its head, it was almost impossible to get a signal through the noise. Bigger buyers had to shut down submissions for months as they figured out what to do with tens of thousands of nonsense manuscripts pouring in every day.

Thankfully, I've found a handful of publishers who are:

  1. Technically proficient enough to put basic filtering in place.
  2. Aggressively politically incorrect, but still left-coded enough that publishing with them doesn't brand me with a political scarlet letter.

It's a small market, so I probably won't get the chance to publish often, but low odds in a small market are better than zero odds in a big market.

I understand. Guess I can't ask who these non-woke publishers are, without infringing on your opsec?

I'm wondering why you are drawn to writing and getting published. Is it like, a need? Lately I've been feeling more and more of 'having something to say and needing to say it' but I'm crap at actually getting my thoughts across so that others can understand them. :I

I understand. Guess I can't ask who these non-woke publishers are, without infringing on your opsec?

Look for smaller publishers who release a lot of mil-sf.

I'm wondering why you are drawn to writing and getting published. Is it like, a need?

I like to entertain, and if I'm going to do it with my writing, I need an audience.

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