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» Important Announcement Time! / 2-5-10

Hello submitting world,

After submissions closed on Friday, and we tallied up how many were submitted to each category, we discovered that we needed more creative non-fiction, challenge, and Draw Rites pieces. So we’ve decided to extend the deadline for those categories until Sunday, 8 May.

If you’ve got a piece lying around half-finished, if you’re terrible at making deadlines, then lift your hands and shout praises ’cause you got a grace period!

Give us your tired, your poor,
Your huddled artists yearning to submit to dotdotdash,
The strange artworks of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to us,
We lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Sj Finch’s
sign off
for dotdotdash





» Interesting Thoughts Competition – Judge’s Report / 31-3-10

The entries we received for the dotdotdash Interesting Thoughts Competition were amazingly diverse. It couldn’t have been more interesting to be a judge of this competition. So thank you to everyone who took the time to think about their personal concept of home, and to make each entry so wonderfully specific. There were some particularly poignant entries. One essay examined the constructed division between being a homemaker and being of an alternative sexuality; another delved into the author’s transitional past, her movement from country to country in snapshot paragraphs of where she lived, making home of those moments that become steps in one’s life narrative; still another examined transition more acutely, talking about the confusion of belonging both to the place you grew up and the place you end up.  



Rebecca Higgie’s winning essay is available in the link above and in the upcoming third issue of dotdotdash. 

Congratulations to Rebecca Higgie for her winning and intriguingly-titled essay, ‘The Cats, the Dream Catchers and Pengy-Wan Kenobi: The Invested Meanings of Home’. Rebecca’s entry was notable for its clear and simple message – that a home is what you make of a pile of bricks, the people you spend it with and their idiosyncrasies – and for its compelling narratorial argument, in which Rebecca traced out her personal family history, and the home she grew up in that they have recently put up for sale. ‘I will never be able to “come home” again,’ she reflects, ‘and neither will they.’ It is a commonplace notion of home perhaps, but one that Rebecca clearly and evocatively makes her own. 



Jasper Garner Gore’s essay is available in the link above.

Congratulations also to Jasper Garner Gore for his highly-commended essay, ‘Getting Settled’.

What struck me the most about Jasper’s essay was the very unique subject matter: that interstitial place when a backpacker decides to settle in and become a local resident, and the way that the person is treated differently in the process. No longer is everything transitional and inconsequential – the reality of being in this other place, this foreign land, begins to hit home. And respect for other people’s customs and existence grows. As Jasper says: ‘Establishing a home is a gesture, a contract, an expression of commitment that rarely goes unnoticed. And these homes, quavering and deliberate, offer a clue as to how closely a sense of legitimate existence can be wrapped up in a place and a gesture. In contexts where homes regularly appear and disappear, it is possible, sometimes, to see why they are established, and why they vanish.’ 

Thank you to everybody who entered our essay competition for Issue 3: Home. You guys made it a bittersweet joy to judge, as every piece was wonderful and deserving of being read. 

Thanks a mint!

Sj Finch





» dotdotdash Issue 3: Home – Available 1 April 2010 / 25-3-10




Cover artwork (top to bottom): Kinzi Kabadeh, ‘The Witch and the Prince’; Vicky Deeks, ‘Homesick II’; Erin Pearce, ‘Sticky Note II’; Kate Wilson, ‘Sticky II’; Vicky Deeks, ‘Homesick I’.

What can I expect from the third issue of dotdotdash? You crazy kids. You can expect short stories about articulate assassinations and strange men; poetry about shoelaces and red Lego policemen; creative non-fiction about remote homes and hot weather; art with tickling romances, impermanence and arrows on the street; collaborations between artists and writers in ponderous communion. Goats! And Post-it Notes.  

What do you want from me? You can purchase issue 3 here. Pre-orders are $13 plus postage. Or buy a ticket to our launch party for $15 and receive one for free. Or take advantage of our limited retrospective subscription offer, with which you can receive issue 1, issue 2 and issue 3 for the princely sum of $30 plus postage. 

I turn up my nose at your convoluted pricing structure and will wait until I can see your magazine on a shelf in a reputable bookstore. You can buy your copy of dotdotdash at the following stores in Perth and Melbourne.

I am not interested in dotdotdash unless I am in it. If you know what I mean. Then submit to our next issue! Entries for dotdotdash Issue 4: Antimatter close on 30 April 2010, so get in quick.





» Issue 4! Submissions open! / 22-2-10




Quick! Go check the submissions tab to the left. We’ve included a flowchart that tells you exacetedly what happens to your submission after you send it to us. We’ve also divided the submission information by category. Want to submit artworks, click on our artwork tab and follow the handy instructions, and so forth. Simplicity and clarity – that is what I, the website, am all about.

And now, finally(!), we’re ready to roll out the details of issue 4, the Science/Speculative fiction issue! We’ve lovingly named it Antimatter. We hope this name will appeal both to new writers of science fiction as a simple yet interesting concept, and to experienced science fiction writers as Antimatter has some pretty interesting and useful properties.

For those new and curious, here’s a news article telling you what antimatter is.

Here is me telling you that we’ll be pretty happy with any Speculative fiction related submissions, not just those that mention ‘antimatter’:

The Metallic Star-rise in Spaceships, Space-time Fabric Sewn by My Mother; Android Aliens Enslaving Humans, Hunting Humans, Mounting Humans on their Walls; Aliens are Our Friends; Hello Dystopia, How do you like Your Nuclear War? Black Hole, Two Sugar?; Time Machines Conspire, Human Bodies Sweat; It Came From Over There; Do Individuals Dream of Electric Sheeple? Psionics/ Nano-technology/ Secret Government Man/ Cyber-hacking Cyborgs and iPhones; Alternative Timelines and Sexualities; Steampunk Haircuts; Origami UFOs.

Feel free to ignore my incomplete and overly jokey paragraph. You can write about anything at all. Hard science fiction is quite welcome!

The challenge for our science fiction issue is to build your own world, diorama style. It doesn’t have to be the whole world. It can just be one scene, one room. You may use anything to build this world, even words, pictures, and people. Descriptions or 2D sketches of the world, though they can be used as physical building blocks (i.e. A building made from paper with the words ‘futuristic’ on it) of the diorama, cannot be all that the diorama consists of. Be inventive! Be artful! Invent any world you want. Artistic freedom ahoy!

Submissions for all genres (including Draw Rites) close April 30th.

Cheers,

The dotdotdash website

 

PS Upcoming themes after this next issue will be food-related and music-related.

PPS Thanks again to everyone who submitted to the Home issue. You guys keep us alive and we’re really grateful for that. We should have contacted you already about your submission/s, and if not, then we will in the next few days.





» Submissions (excluding Draw Rites) close today! / 15-1-10

Thank you to everybody for submitting thus far! We're looking forward to reading your entries next week. Until then, please keep in mind that:

  1. Postal submissions will be accepted so long as they are postmarked by 15 January 2010; and
  2. Electronic submissions will be accepted up until 5pm today. That's 5pm Western Australian Standard Time (+8 hours GMT).

Cheers,

the dotdotdash team





» Draw Rites, take two: open for business / 10-1-10





Draw Rites started out as a collaborative workshop for artists and writers to meet up and work on a project together. This resulted in the five collaborative projects published in Issue 2: Ugly.

After some backstage whispering, Draw Rites submissions for Issue 3: Home are now open! To get your entry in, follow these steps:

  1. Send your project as an attachment to with ‘Draw Rites Submission’ in the subject line.
  2. Writing can be submitted in DOC format, and images in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format. However, if writing and art is combined in the one format (e.g. Erin Pearce and Mel Pearce’s ‘Debris’), please ensure that you keep a copy of the original document in case alterations to the text are necessary. Please also keep in mind that the dimensions of a single page of dotdotdash are 200x265mm (or 2480x3248 pixels at 300 dpi).
  3. Include the following information in the body of your email for both participants:

Name
Published name (if different to the above)
Email address
Postal address, including state and postcode
Phone number

  1. State the title of the work. As you can see from the examples above, some projects carry a single title (e.g. ‘The Lady’) and others carry individual titles for the artwork and text along with a single unifying title (e.g. ‘Cry me a Mirror’, with ‘Psychosomatic’ by Steph Moriarty and ‘Waiting for Hot Water’ and ‘Wasting Hot Water’ by Cielito Marbus). We don’t mind which way you go, so long as it’s clearly stated here.
  2. Send your project by 5pm, Sunday 31 January 2010.

Rules, conditions and clarifications

  1. Please ensure that the author’s and artist’s names are not present on the works themselves so that work may be judged anonymously.
  2. There is a limit of three entries per person (i.e. a person may only participate in and submit up to three projects).
  3. dotdotdash reserves the right to publish your work on the website and in the magazine. The copyright remains with you.
  4. The extent to which the text and images are integrated is entirely up to you and your partner. Works like ‘Debris’ and ‘Small Accidents’ were submitted to us exactly as you see it here; others like ‘Cry Me a Mirror’ were submitted as separate components (i.e. The text in its own Word document), with page layout determined by our designer – in other words, some works are conceived from the get-go as a unity and others are conceived as a set of complements. Both kinds of collaborations are equally valid in our eyes and we are happy to consider all of them.
  5. If you would like to participate in Draw Rites but you haven’t got a partner, head over to the Facebook page and announce yourself! We’ll try to hook you up. If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact .