Welcome. You may be here because your work was rejected, or maybe you are about to submit and wish to armor yourself against rejection.
Rejection does not mean your work is bad. It just means that for one reason or another, it does not fit the terrifying, absurd, grotesque, and otherworldly aesthetic we summon.
1. It’s Nostalgic Instead of Strange
Ah yes, the wistful reminiscence. The yearning for summers past, the distant lover, the sepia-toned memory of an old café in a city that no longer knows your name. Beautiful? Maybe. Kinpaurak? Absolutely not.
2. It Just Doesn’t Fit Our Themes
Look, sometimes a piece is good–but it just doesn’t fit Kinpaurak. We have a very particular brand.
How do you know if your piece fits?
We label our previously published works at the bottom with one (or more) of the following themes:
- Sublimity
- Absurdity
- Esotericism
What this means for your rejected piece:
If you’re unsure why we passed, look at our previous works and how they’re labeled. This can help you determine where your piece might have missed the mark. If it doesn’t resonate with sublimity, absurdity, or esotericism, it probably wasn’t the right fit.
3. stereotypes and clichés
Aliens dissecting cows, cults chanting in candlelight, these aren’t terrifying, they’re tired. Kinpaurak doesn’t deal in reheated horror. If you summon something, let it be strange. Let it be something we haven’t met yet.
Kinpaurak rejects work that leans on clichés like, for example, demonic possession, haunted dolls, or cryptic Latin simply for atmosphere, just as we avoid reductive portrayals of queerness, religion, and philosophy that rely on familiar binaries. If your work invokes the occult, the monstrous, or the unknowable, it should interrogate these ideas rather than recycle them.
4. It’s Just Sad, and Nothing Else
We enjoy suffering as much as the next abyssal entity, but Kinpaurak does not publish pieces that are merely sad.
5. We Have Read This Before, why is it the same?
Tread carefully.
—> Ask yourself: Am I implementing revisions properly? Steadily? Carefully?
6. You’re Lecturing Us, and We Don’t Like That
Congratulations, you read a book about an obscure historical figure. You wrote a piece about them. And now, we, the reader, must be subjected to a history lesson disguised as poetry.
—>If your work could double as a Wikipedia entry with enjambment, we are not interested.
7. You Told Us It’s Weird Instead of Making It Weird
If your work says things like “this was all very strange” or “I could feel the dreamlike unreality”—congratulations, you just described something without actually making it feel weird. Stop telling us the work is bizarre and just let it be bizarre.
8. Your writing is just bad.
We publish absurdity—but only polished absurdity.
9. we will rarely publish Science Fiction.
We are not, nor have we ever been, a science fiction magazine. We are not interested in your intergalactic federations, your android uprisings, your space operas, your dystopian futures where everyone has a barcode on their forehead and emotions are outlawed. If your piece contains robots, AI overlords, spaceships, time travelers, or dystopian megacities ruled by a shadow government, we will likely reject it.
However, if you really think your sci-fi is good enough to transcend the genre, you can try.
Final Notes
If we rejected your work, it does not mean it was bad. Except when it does.
We do not publish historical biographies, inspirational poetry, or things that could be printed in a magazine called Gentle Reflections or Moments in Time.
Now, go forth. Write something that horrifies, delights, and confuses us in equal measure. We eagerly await your next attempt.
kinpaurak 