Note From The Editor
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by Ben Brown | originally published on 2000-10-16

It has come to our attention, all of a sudden and sort of like having a flashlight shone in your eyes in the middle of the night, that people have been abusing our current submission policy. Our submission policy is, you submit a piece to McSweeney's, you get rejected, and you send us both the original piece and the rejection letter from a representative of McSweeney's.

Oh,

We also allowed potential authors, in the case of a very long rejection process, to write their very own, customized rejection letter and send that along to us. The condition, however, was that the rejection letter would have to be funnier that the original piece. I'm sad to say that this never happened, and I'm sadder to say that we are so lazy that we published the pieces anyway.

Not anymore!

I am hereby revising the Über submission policy. This is very serious, and actually reflects the new submission policy. All old submission policies are null and void.

From this day forward, submissions must be accompanied by a real live rejection letter from McSweeney's. You cannot write your own. Submissions may also be accompanied by a sexual favor to one of the current staff members -- not Nate, because he quit. We may also occasionally solicit a piece from certain authors of extraordinary talent, and you may not complain about the unfairness of this. If you do, we'll hunt you down and read early 19th century British literature to you because we like it and you probably don't. In the case where you do actually like 19th century British literature, we will read something else.

We will also consider submissions which are stories of one sort or another which feature Über staff as characters. One act plays, short stories, novellas, screen plays, etc. will be considered. The criteria for actual publication is cruel and arbitrary, but you will be notified, shortly after having submitted the piece, of its chances.

We would really like to see essays about something you thought was funny, but later realized how unfunny it was. We will publish as many of these as we recieve. Also, lists of funny words starting with the letter P will be posted, for the most part, unedited.

Thank you, that is all.

Ben Brown is very serious

Ben Brown is very serious