Questions, answered

Two ways in. Any member can invite you — they each have 5 codes to give, and can ask for more, so ask someone who has one spare and you're straight through. Otherwise write us two lines: what you're reading right now, and a Thumb Story of up to 160 characters to a single word we hand you at random. It's the same form the club writes in, it takes a minute, and it tells us far more than a paragraph about why you'd like to join. We're growing slowly and on purpose, so a yes may take an issue or two. The Workshop opens to new members on 1 December: apply now, and if it's a yes you'll hear straight away and get your invite code that morning.

Nothing. Joining is free, and so is everything you can do here — writing, reading, submitting, and being published in the Magazine.

No. Some months the word lands and some months it doesn't; nothing is owed either way. A prompt will be there again next month.

No. This place only works if a person was actually there. Fix your commas with whatever you like — just don't hand us something you didn't write. You confirm the writing is yours every time you submit. The same goes for us: every illustration in the Magazine is made by a person.

It stays yours. Submitting lets the club read it in the Workshop and lets the editors consider it for the Magazine — nothing else. You can withdraw a piece while its issue is still open, and nothing is published under any name without your consent.

Yes, and you choose per piece. Pen names are a first-class way to sign work, not a workaround — and nothing is published under any name without your consent.

Two ways in: the editors read the month's submissions and curate a selection, and members elect one Club's Choice. Both happen with the writing read blind.

The editors may edit it with you. You'll get an email when the piece comes to you, with a date to reply by. On the piece's page you'll see their notes, their suggestions with the old words struck through and the new ones beside them, and any small corrections marked. Accept or decline each suggestion, answer the notes, change anything yourself, then send it back or approve it. Nothing is published until you approve, and other members never see any of it.

Because that's the month the issue gets made in. The editors read everything blind, members spend their votes, the issue is edited, and the whole thing is set as an ePub and a PDF. You won't be waiting on all of it to hear back, though: judging closes about ten days after the deadline, and that's when the bylines come back in the Workshop. The Magazine issue itself goes out at the end of that second month.

Yes — everything, prose and poetry included. Drafts save as you go, so a piece started on the bus can be finished at a desk, or the other way round.

Yes. Writing here can run adult in register, so membership is 18 and over.

English, with Spanish alongside it. Every piece is submitted, read, judged and published in English, because that is the language all of us can read. If you think in Spanish, write in it: translate the piece into English yourself, using whatever helps, then attach the Spanish original and we show it beside the English exactly as you wrote it. Those are the two languages for now; more will follow as the team grows to read them, and no date is promised. We don't translate anything — and if that ever changed, we'd ask you before your work was translated.

Write to hello@unsolicitedmusings.org and a person will read it — questions, problems, a piece you want taken down, or anything the rest of this page didn't answer.