Writing For The Blade & Beyond: Submission Guidelines

Everything you need to know before you submit to our publication

Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash

Updated 10/03/22 — Catagories added to the ‘What we want to see’ list

Thank you for thinking about writing for The Blade & Beyond! There are many, many publications on Medium so we appreciate you considering sending us your work.

First, take a look around and read stories we’ve published to get a feel for what we like (but let’s be honest, you’ve already done that!) As long as what you want to say hasn’t already been fully covered previously, we’re interested to read it. Just because we focus on a somewhat small niche doesn’t mean there isn't always more that can be said.

What we want to see:

• Non-fiction
• Personal essays of experience with self-harm, whether about yourself or someone close to you. We do place an emphasis on recovery, so make there’s a fairly happy ending.
• Don’t worry if that happy ending isn’t a complete about-turn of ‘and I’ve never had a bad day since!’, we’re looking for real stories and that rarely happens in life.
• Explorations of self-harm in media — books, movies, music, tell us all about it! We aren’t looking for reviews per se, so much as…