"On The Premises": contest-based quarterly magazine

It looks like a damn fine contest, that's what.

I can't see a thing wrong with it. I want to show their contest guidelines off to everyone I know and say, "See? That's how it should be done."

In short: Quarterly themed short story contest (max 5K words), no fee, no rights grab, blind judging, cash prize. The entire contents of the magazine will be contest winners (give or take a few unpaid guest works), so one might as well think of this as a paying market with very high standards to fill its very few slots.

First contest kicks off Oct. 15 premise announcement and Jan 1-31 submission window.

Of especial interest: "How To Win":

Marc Raibert, an expert on technical writing, says, “Almost all good writing starts out bad,” and, “Good writing is bad writing that was rewritten.” We couldn’t agree more. So if you want to win one of our contests, we suggest freeing yourself from the prison of high expectations and writing a first draft that’s really crappy. Then rewrite it, get it critiqued, rewrite it again, get it critiqued again, etc. Keep rewriting until you’ve got something that really shines. We’re giving you around 90 days for each contest. That’s enough time for several rewrites, in our experience.

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I like these people.

I couldn't think of a more appropriate place to announce this, so, here it is in Writing Short Fiction. If anyone can think of a better place, I'm all ears. I thought about B&BC, but although I'd like to show this to the people on scam-watch as an example of the ideal contest guidelines, so that nobody falls for anything that's much less, I'm not asking for a background check.

Of course, now that I've ranted and raved about 'em, someone (I'm betting JamesARitchie ;-)) will march right up and show me the nasty hidden clause I missed. Ego can be a right b!tch sometimes.