Writer's Guidelines:

We strongly encourage you to read Gray Areas before submitting. It will be painfully obvious to us if you don't and we are often rude to people who submit articles that clearly have NOTHING to do with our focus. We get hundreds of idiotic articles a month and we find being pleasant to these people merely brings more articles which are useless. By contrast, we accept about half of the articles sent in from people who have seen the magazine. You can order a sample issue for $8 from: Gray Areas, Inc., 5838 W. Olive Ave C-105 PMB 624 Glendale AZ 85302 USA.

If you do not send us a self-addressed stamped envelope with sufficient postage to return your article we might throw it away. A great deal of what we are sent comes postage due with no SASE. If it's amazing we'll spring for the stamp to tell you we'd like to run it. Don't hold your breath. We try to be fair if the article is any good at all but unusable by us and often tell writers who send SASE's where else they might be able to sell it to or how to change it to make it publishable.

We have an average lag to hit print of about a year. Therefore, articles which are time-dated and involve current events are usually of no interest. In general we print articles in the order received, but we have been known to push back articles if something AMAZING turns up.

We do not pay for articles other than with a byline, masthead listing and 5 copies of the issue the article appears in. If your friends tell you otherwise, they are lying. We do not work with writers who try to change our terms. Go fund your own small press magazine. You'll find you probably won't be able to pay yourself or anybody else either.

We offer the only place in print where you can express any point of view. We print a great deal of articles we disagree with and we do not edit the words or ideas of writers other than to change cursewords from "fuck" to "f---". We routinely print articles that run up to 22 pages each. If it's great, we'll make space for it. Please do not send us fluff pieces that run 250 words or 1000 words. Write us everything you know on the subject instead.

We are not interested in poems, fiction, short stories, novels, etc. We are not interested in interviews which excerpt quotes and string them together with opinions. If we run an interview, it is done in a straight q&a format comparable to those run in Playboy. In general, we do most of the interviews ourselves and look to freelancers for articles and opinion pieces.

We publish any article that makes the publisher cry when she reads it. We publish any article that sends a chill up our spine. But, in general, we are not interested in subjects like democracy, religion, or the millions of topics other magazines cover. We explore the following subjects in almost every issue and from every possible facet: drugs, sex, copyrights, piracy, computer crimes, music, prison and sentencing, etc.

We also publish reviews but these must be brief and must follow our format. We don't care that you wish to rave about some product for three pages. We get thousands of products. If you cannot say it in a few sentences, then send it to someone else. We also do not send products to reviewers nor may you use our name to order products. We have been burned too many times.

We are not here to hold your hand. Writers who phone us (a HUGE no-no) and/or send us dozens of letters asking when they will hit print either never hit print or hit print once and we decline to work with them again. Writers who send us unsolicited pieces are usually answered immediately (often the same day) and if we tell you we are printing it and give you an idea when then there is NO WAY that it will appear any earlier. If you MUST bug us about your article, send an SASE.

Don't bother to send us your resume. If and when we hire people we will give preference to those already working for us and people we knew before we were famous. It's unlikely we will EVER have to run a help wanted ad.

Tips that make us love you and be biased towards your article:

We prefer receiving it on disk. We use IBM compatibles but can have Mac disks transferred. Please send a hard copy too so we can retain your formatting.

Please use only one space after each sentence if you supply a disk. Computer pages use one space. Typewriters use two. It takes HOURS to take spaces out of people's articles. It is probably the worst part of running a magazine.

Finally, please do not send us (or ANY magazine you are querying) your social security number. There is no reason for us to have it and it can be used by hackers (who have gone so far as to steal our trash) to impersonate you. We prefer NOT to receive querys via email as our email is sometimes deleted before we can see it. Almost all other magazines have had their email hacked too. Especially the ones that take your credit card numbers online. They just don't tell you so.