The Disappointed Housewife needs some early submissions!

I’m starting to build a small collection of pieces for The Disappointed Housewife, gang. A few friends and old acquaintances have kicked in some work, and I’m wondering if any of my loyal readers here at WTH would like to offer submissions now.

I’ve also mocked up the site on WordPress and put together submission guidelines and a mission statement for the journal. I’d love to run it past some beta-viewers, so volunteer in the comments and I’ll send you an invitation to have a look. I’ll be happy to consider any design changes that the template allows, though I think it’s looking pretty clean and easy to navigate right now.

If you volunteer, you’ll get a sneak peek at the content I’ve gathered so far. You’ll have a good taste of the journal’s offbeat slant.

So, I’m looking for fiction and essays of 1500 words or less (flash fiction is welcome), poetry in batches of up to five poems at a time, and any kind of mash-up piece you want to run up the flagpole. I have a category called “Faux forms & genres,” where you can also do fake reviews, Match.com profiles, résumés, furniture assembly instructions, baseball card facsimiles, or anything else that comes to mind. And remember, The Disappointed Housewife would like to see writing in photographs or drawings or video clips. You can record yourself reading your work, if you want, and we’d publish via SoundCloud, like I do with my original songs. A YouTube video of someone reading poetry in a Doo Doo Head mask is inevitable, I have to think.

I found an interesting Reddit thread, called Library of Babel, that’s right in the spirit of this journal. There you assemble words any way you like – cutting and pasting from the internet, free associating, randomly picking phrases from books, whatever – and make art out of it. Have a look for ideas: https://www.reddit.com/r/LibraryofBabel.

Send your submissions to me at thedisappointedhousewife(at)gmail(dot)com, pasting the text into the email. I’ll be reviewing material over the holidays to put together a strong launch sometime early in 2018.

By the way, I can envision giving contributors the option to publish their PayPal or Google Pay address with their work so they can receive micropayments from appreciative readers. (Here’s an easy way to send money via Gmail.)

The Disappointed Housewife might not be able to pay you, but happy patrons might be willing to drop a nice tip. What do you think?

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