Wishlist

The Wishlist

Note that the following are not intended to be prompts, but rather examples of the sorts of things, tonally and formally, we’d like to see in our submissions. Of course, the best way to figure out what we’re looking for is to check out the magazine.

Please feel free to share our Wishlist with your friends, teachers, family, workshop classmates, football team members, co-workers, and pets. Just make sure you attribute it to Artifice Magazine.

• A treasure map
• A story in musical notation
• 1 thing you might throw at a window, wrapped around a brick
• Something that includes a Greek chorus
• A timebomb, ticking or otherwise
• 5 photos with captions
• 3 pieces that will stump our graphic designer
• The contents of a specialists’ drawer
• 24 want ads
• 2 redactions
• A narrative in the form of a maze
• A maze in the form of a narrative
• An assortment of graphs
• 1 flowchart
• A series of sticky notes (we won’t limit you to Post-Its)
• 4 poems that use clipart/small pictures as punctuation
• 5 poems or stories in the form of equations
• 3 poems created by elliding words from Project Gutenburg, Wikipedia, US Weekly or People Magazine quotations (ellided words should be included, but struck through or x’d out)
• 1 poem cycle in which each poem in the cycle uses a different form
• 1 concrete poem
• 1 Literary/Horror/Western/Conspiracy story (that is, a story that’s all four at once)
• 3 poems created from tabloid articles via the cut-up method
• 4 labyrinths created using parentheses, footnotes, endnotes, etc
• 3 comics (.pdf format, please)
• 5 stories that involve pictures, not as illustrations, but as an integral part of the stories themselves
• 7 diagrams of horrible machines
• 3 stories or poems in the form of rules to an imaginary game
• 2 poems based in whole or in part on Akira Kurosawa movies
• 1 poem meant to be included in an errata
• 20-30 (at least!) drawings for a corner-of-the-magazine flipbook (Submit as .pdf; on acceptance, high res images will be needed)
• 1 book review collaboration between the reviewer and the reviewed
• 1 piece, any form, called “A Basic Guide to Science”
• 2 stories or poems that involve folding or cutting the paper on which they are printed
• 2 stories that require active reader participation
• 1 story in the form of a multiple-choice personality inventory, such as the MMPI
• 1 piece you’d tell a child not to put in their mouth
• 1 Schrödinger’s box
• 1 Nutrition Facts Label
• 1 bundle of hate mail tied with a ribbon
• 1 bundle of love letters tied with a shoelace
• Baby teeth
• 1 frozen dinner
• 1 audio cassette of yourself banging your face against a cake with squishy noises
• A wall
• A story told entirely in screenshots
• A piece that would require us to print in the gutter
• 4 pieces that require you to show your math
• A sad story with a pun in every sentence
• An untrustworthy biography
• 1 story of heroism ending with the word “sandwich”
• 1 police blotter
• 16 missed connections
• 2 ransom notes
• 2 responses to ransom notes
• 2 stories written in bad faith
• 4 stories, fictional or not, that would embarrass the author if we printed them
• 3 choose-your-own adventures
• 3 adventures you chose on your own
• 2 poems that require legal advice
• 2 poems that require bodyguards
• Proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
• 1 intellectual property rights minefield
• 1 story torn from a book-keeping badger
• 1 poem in anagrams
• 3 of the saddest sentences ever written
• 1 engaging Powerpoint presentation
• 3 poems that would make good pets
• 5 stories containing no characters
• 17 one-line poems
• 1 story in which the narrator passionately hates the reader, real or implied
• 1 “real” essay on the subject of “fake” essays
• 1 “fake” essay on the subject of “real” essays
• 3 stories starring historical personages
• 1 story designed for easy disassembly and transport
• 1 story torn from a bookkeeping ledger
• 1 geometrical proof
• 4 stories that involve giant animals in some way
• 3 poems or stories based on internet memes
• 1 ode written in code
• 6 detonated bombs
• 2 poems you wouldn’t show your mother
• 2 poems you wouldn’t show your father
• 1 poem in the form of restaurant orders called out by the expediter and shouted back by the line cooks
• 3 halves of a story
• 1 game code that unlocks a secret level
• 3 instants
• 3 instances
• A couple good jokes
• 1 story that is entirely true
• 1 story that is entirely truthful
• 1 story that is entirely “true”
• A dictionary in miniature
• An encyclopedia in miniature
• A thesaurus in miniature
• 2 fits
• 2 starts