FAQ

Our thoughts on:

Parallel submissions: You may submit work to us that you have simultaneously submitted to another publication.  Should your piece be accepted elsewhere, please notify us as soon as possible by sending an email to submissions@fourcornereduniverse.com with the word “Withdraw” in the subject line and your name and the name of your story in the body of the email.

Email Questions: It is fine for you to send us queries concerning the appropriateness of your pieces or publishing deadlines (provided you did not find your answer on the site or in our FAQ). We do not, however, enjoy being asked “can you please respond and let me know you received my story/correct my story/let me know if my story is worth finishing etc. As much as we enjoy instructing and editing your accepted pieces, we are not your English professors and we do not have the time to provide constructive criticism for everyone who asks. And please do not ask us for employment. This is a literary magazine in which we publish stories, poems, and essays. It is not a blog, nor do we have staff writers.

Reading Time: The Four-Cornered Universe publishes on the first of each month. Our reading periods generally extend from the first through the twenty-fifth of each month, with the last five or so days dedicated to editing and sending acceptance emails. Pieces received during the last few days of each month will generally not be considered for the following month’s issue. For example, if we receive a story on the 28th of May, it will most likely be considered with the June submissions for July’s issue.

Plagarism: No.  All content must be original work by the author.

Fanfiction: We do not accept fanfiction, sorry!  All characters must be the author’s original creations.

Sex, violence, cursing, etc.:  While we realize that all of these things are a part of the human experience and do not explicitly discourage their use IF they serve the story, please do not submit pieces with gratuitous descriptions of sexual acts or violence.

Type of stories we enjoy reading:  Fiction will be considered based on its style and content.  We do not want to impose restrictions on creativity by only accepting submissions that fit neatly into a certain genre.  We will consider everything from speculative fiction to horror to fantasy to general literary stories, provided that the story has a strong plot and it makes the reader think.  We often lean towards the humorous and satirical, and we always enjoy stories with a fantastical twist.

Author’s Rights: We are asking for One-time, Non-exclusive Electronic Rights only with this agreement being implicit on acceptance.  What this means:  we have the right to publish your work on our website.  After said publishing period is over (one month) your piece will be archived.  You may publish your piece elsewhere but if you sell or give Exclusive rights to another publication, you must let us know so we can take your piece out of our archives.

Basically – we don’t care if you publish your piece elsewhere.  But, some other publications can be stricter about this sort of thing, so you don’t want to tell them that you have not been published elsewhere when in fact your poem/story is already on the internet.  Bottom line: just let us know if you want your piece removed from the archives after your month is over!

If, for some reason, you are afraid that we are hovering eagerly over our keyboards, anticipating the thought of some tasty prose-morsel passing through our electronic clutches so we can snatch it and submit it somewhere under our names while giggling in a villain-like manner, don’t worry.  We are writers too, and we would not dream of stealing a fellow writer’s work.

Thanks for submitting and we look forward to reading your work!