Submissions

Misery Tourism is not accepting submissions at the moment. We’re currently focused on publishing all of the sick, beautiful work we accepted during our March and April submission calls. If you want to be the first to know when we begin taking submissions again, consider following us on twitter.

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.