2. Accept all submissions from everybody and pay well for them. Keep the submission address secret, however. Give clues that make no sense.

3. Soften the sting of your rejections by rebranding them as acceptances with terms. Make the terms impossible.
Hint: Use fairy tales as inspiration. “Fetch me the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

4. Give each submission a number. Use a random number generator to select the accepted works.

5. Only accept work that has already appeared in those high-falutin’, hoity-toity, Pushcart perused print journals. Hint: Backdate your issue so it looks like you found them first.

6. Use the same ideas that made Angry Birds a sensation. Let your readers launch criticisms at the works in an attempt to destroy them.

7. Create an issue in the style of a 12 year old girl focused on unicorns, cute boys, and menstruation.
Warning: Reject all submissions containing sparkly vampires involved in sexual affairs with human girls 1/10th their age. And Justin Bieber.

8. Create the “All Rejection Letter” issue. Use the rejected rejections to reject the rejected work.
Warning: Don’t inadvertently reject the accepted rejections.

9. Use your Facebook and Twitter connections to help choose the work to include.
Hint: Only mention the title of each work, since no one has an attention span anymore anyway. In fact, this item is way too long. Sorry.

10. Accept everything, and I mean everything, I send you. Even angsty emails.

2. Write a list of what’s wrong with everyone else.

3. Pick a feature of a famous person’s face and describe it in 500 words. For example, Michele Bachmann’s eyes.

4. Take a shot every time you write a sensory detail.

5. If you’re right-handed, write a story with your left hand. If you’re ambidextrous, try using your toes.

6. Write an ode to your credit card. For verisimilitude, include the number and expiration date. (You may send it to me and I’ll provide a free critique.)

7. Write a letter full of death threats to a celebrity. Be extra creative! (For even more fun, email it!)

8. Write a short story entirely in dialogue. Use only Pig Latin.

9. If that toilet could talk, what would it say?

10. Since there’s no such thing as a new story, paraphrase your favorite work.

“Cute,” she thinks.
She walks on. A heavy man with a combover and a tight white polyester suit steps in her path, stopping her progress down the row of the pet shop.

“May I help you, miss,” he says, for all the world sounding like Jeeves, but in every other possible way not resembling Steven Fry at all.

“Uh… no thanks.” She steps back. He loves garlic and onions, she thinks, his breath is foul.

“Are you perhaps looking for a new companion, miss? We have all varieties here. A phoenix, perhaps?”

“No, I’m just browsing.” She turns away, tries to escape him down a side row. She sees that she’s ended up precisely where she does not want to be. The dragon aisle. Her eyes tear up in spite of her attempt to not think about Bob.

“Ah, I see you like dragons. May I say you have sublime taste, miss.” It’s not just his breath, but his body odor that nauseates her further. She wants to run, but she’s stuck, held still by an unexpected wave of grief.

“For a lady of your discernment, may I suggest a pygmy dragon?”

He reaches into a cage and pulls out a tiny, red, sleeping beast, the size of a kitten.

“I can’t. Put it away. It’s t..t.too soon.” She stutters, she gasps. “I told mom, I told her. It’s only been a day. I can’t do this.” She backs into a cage, frightening a winged monkey into shrieks.

“I have to go.” She staggers back, finds her way to the main aisle, and staring at her feet, walks out as quickly as she can, tear blind.

This is not the first rodeo for Charlie, oh no. He’s tried this before. It was Enid, that other time. He tried walking during the day when no people were around. And it was fine, except he was discovered again and again and again. Gentler days. When he was discovered then, people returned him to his point of origin. Maybe those were kinder days, or maybe it was his home address being painted on his stand, but he always ended up back where he started.

Not this time. He knows if he’s caught now, he won’t be treated so kindly. But he’s determined. He knows what he wants. Who he wants.

He met her weeks ago. She was visiting her friend, next door. Her red hair flowed over her shoulders. Her green eyes twinkled. It was love, and he needed to be hers, oh yes. His ceramic heart palpitated, felt as though it would thump out of the hard wall of his painted chest. He sent her a photo, taken in the dark, risking a flash. Himself, holding a flower. He heard nothing back, but then why would he?

It’s almost dawn, but he’s nearly there. He risks the stalking cats, he ignores the bleary eyed businessmen in their BMWs as he walks the last few feet to her cottage, her gorgeous garden, her porch.

He’s come prepared, has Charlie. He pulled up an armful of daffodils. He cradles them, he stands at her door. He waits for her to step outside and see his smile, sense his love for her, his colleen.

He freezes. He waits. He stills his beating heart.

She opens the door. She sees him and stops. She stares.

He can’t even look at her, she’s that beautiful. He wants to be her gnome forever. He smiles as he watches an ant crawl over his foot. At last she speaks, she says,
“Gloria? There’s a fucking gnome on my porch. It’s freaking me out. I don’t know what you were thinking, putting it here, but I want it gone when I come home. Freak.”

Just stop. You’re thinking. “Oh, it’s a bit of fiction about a sentient dog. The dog probably talks and goes all Lassie, or Old Yeller. Or Benji, and shit.” No, I don’t.

What I do is sleep. And I have maybe four exciting things happen to me each day. Food, mailman, my person, walk. Oh, and then food again.

You know what I’d do if I had your hands? I’d go rip into the bag of dogfood. No, I’d open the drawer and eat the cookies. And then I’d open the refrigerator. And I’d drink all your beer, oh yes I would. But I can’t open the fridge, much less a can of beer. All the best things are undogcessible.

I want you to come home. I want steak. I want any human food, really. I want you to get on the floor and eat out of my bowl for a change. I will pretend not to watch, but I will, and I want to lick you on your face.

Elephant. Okay. I’ve gone too far. I do that. He makes this hand gesture when I go too far, he holds his thumb and index finger an inch or so apart. “You’ve gone this much too far, ” it means.

Lola, that’s what I’ll call the elephant, it seems she’s pressing her toe against my chest. It’s been there for a week. Okay, this doesn’t make sense, I’ll start again.

There was this spot on my skin. On my breast. Above my heart. And this got me wondering, is it possible the deep thoughts I have that I shouldn’t have, can they physically manifest? Did a spot coalesce on the skin above my heart because I’ve thought things I don’t dare confess?

The elephant Lola seems to think so. She started by pointing an accusing, but blunt digit at my heart.

I went to the doctor. I never go to the doctor, but Lola, she pointed and I was afraid. I’ve never had thoughts like this before, never had a spot like this. Elephants, do they get dangerous spots? Do they have thoughts, unconfessed thoughts, that they shouldn’t have?

50/50, my doctor said. He whipped me back, stuck me with a needle, and whisked away the tiny elephant toe print in seconds. “You’ll hear from us in a week,” he said as he rushed out to keep the door from hitting him in the ass.

I’ve been waiting and Lola has been pressing her toe into my heart.

I could use some new hides. Yes, I know these are new, but they’re too small. I’d have to stitch them together to do anything with them, and you know how much I hate sewing. Look, grab that piece of coal, I’ll show you how you can hunt down a big animal.

Whaddya mean, I’m backseat hunting again?

Is the vapor lucky? It can move with the whim of the breeze,
and the dirt, the muck that it mixed with as ice is left earthbound.

Being water first, that gets messy,
and boy, does that grime get mixed in. Seems like it’ll never
break free. Some gets pulled into the earth, sucked up by
the greedy seed pods, some drips down into the sewer.
Some lucky droplets do evaporate, straight away.

Sometimes, when it’s cold at night, freezing,
the water vapor remembers being solid.
It coats the windshield of your car
and becomes frost. The vapor, now ice,
longs for a chance to melt as you turn on your defroster,
and, for a time, be water.

/* This program pulls from a database containing the collected wisdom of me, June, and tweets it without any need for me to be involved, beyond intially collecting my wisdom and typing it up, turning it into characters, which are in turn turned into numbers, which are stored on a hard drive in a computer physically located far away from me in another state. Maybe California.*/

mysql_connect("localhost", "junebot", "juNe1sHeRe") or die(‘June, your code did not connect to your database. Probably you have the wrong host, or username, or password. Buck up and try again.’);

mysql_select_db("databaseForTheJuneBot") or die(‘June, I can not find the database. Probably you typoed the name. I know you do that sometimes. Check and see.’);

/*
Now that my program can connect to that computer in California, it can pull out, at random, a set of numbers and translate them back into letters and convert them back into my wise quip. This could be anything, like:

If I don’t understand what you’ve written, it’s not always my fault for lacking understanding, it’s your fault for explaining poorly.

Highlight of my day: spotted a motorcycle with sidecar. Low point: there wasn’t a cat riding in it.

*/

$result = mysql_query ("SELECT * FROM thingsJuneSays ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1");

/* One day I tweeted, "I am lonely." No one responded. */

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){

/* I thought for sure someone would say something to me about that. But no one did. */

$tweet = "$row[tweet]";

/* Then I tried, "Is anyone listening?" */

sendTweet($tweet);

/* I got back three answers. Two of them said, "No." One said, "I’m listening, June." */

} function sendTweet($msg){

/* We started talking. Well, tweeting. Is tweeting talking? I don’t think so. I thought so at the time. */

$username = ‘JuneBuggy’;

/* I wondered if it meant something. Because he was funny, and clever. We had so much in common. I fell in love with him. */

$password = ‘JuneBotPassword’;

/* I never told him. But I think he knew. */

$url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;

/* One day he just went quiet. No more tweets. Nothing. */

$curl_handle = curl_init();

/* I kept waiting for him to come back. I haunted Twitter. I tweeted really stupid things, hoping he was around and would respond. I tweeted remarks that were special between us. Nothing. */

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");

/* It hurt. It still hurts. */

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);

/* And then he came back. But he didn’t tweet to me. Other people, but not me.*/

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

/* I know why.*/

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

/* Because I did tell him. I know I said I didn’t, but I did. I told him. He thanked me. He THANKED me.*/

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$msg");

/* And the next day he was gone. */

curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");

/* I didn’t admit that I told him earlier because it’s difficult to confess that. I knew at the time I shouldn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t want that. He wanted to play. */

$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);

/* Earlier today he tweeted me. */

curl_close($curl_handle);

/* It was just a silly joke. */

if (empty($buffer)) {

/* But I ache. And I can’t go through this again. */

echo ‘Oh, it did not work out. Again, you probably typoed. Check that first.’;

/* Now I won’t have to. */

} else {
echo ‘June, great job! Your JuneBot has tweeted something you would say. No one will know it was the JuneBot. You may now step away from the twitter.’;
} }

?>