Diving In: Laying The Grounds
Guide and paths for contributors.
Here at The Cetaceans, we are all embraces energy from aspired and creative writers to be a part of our community. Listed are expectations of what impression we would like to leave to the community and our readers:
- We are a community of like-minded writers that views the world as how we want to, not as how it is.
- We are a collection of people that embraces negative energy, instead of throwing them out the window.
- We are a reflection of individuals who understand lemonades are to be enjoyed, not to fuss about.
The Guide in Brief*
Join us as contributors.
For you to publish your stories on The Cetaceans, we encourage you to join our team of contributors. We welcome and encourage contributors of all background, shapes and sizes to express their thoughts and channel their energy into beautiful stories.
Join us by simply send an e-mail to thecetaceans@gmail.com and give around 200-word pitch about who you are and what makes you angry. You also need to have a personal Medium account.
Only after you are added to our list of contributors, you are able to publish your stories on behalf of The Cetaceans**. For every story you are working on, you should comply to the general guidelines below.
Submitting your stories.
The Cetaceans are open to new submissions to expand our community and promote personally crafted stories. These are the list of general guidelines that we would like our contributors to keep in mind:
- The story should be original and raw. We encourage you channel your own anger in your own writing in a way that you think is beautiful. Please revisit our prologue to align yourself with what we want to deliver.
- You are free to take your stories in any of these following forms: essays, proses, diaries, open letters, or poems. Lists or steps are frowned-upon.
- Leave your audience in awe. We are about channeling bitterness and anger in a beautiful way, a rule of thumb: you should be able to imagine yourself walking out and dropping a mic as your audience stops reading.
- We want our readers to be engaged not only by the writing, but also by the imagery. We encourage your story to have a high quality picture at the beginning before the title starts. We recommend Unsplash for high quality free photographs, but don’t forget to acknowledge the artist in the description just under the picture. If no picture is present, we will assign one which we think would be most suitable.
- Lastly, we feel like this is already quite obvious, but no stories should imply racism, sexism, homophobia, and extreme hate speech. We will not draw a line on this, as we trust you to do that yourself.
Stories which would be submitted will gone through finalisation by our editor(s) to check compliance to the guidelines then queued for publishing**.
To be featured.
The Cetaceans will also be featuring stories from all across Medium. Our “Floating” page will feature stories from renowned writers and suggestions which comes from you. To suggest stories, kindly e-mail us.
For featured stories, the topics are a little bit more specific. We understand that there are millions of incredible stories virtually circling around the site, and we would like our features focused to be consistent with our message.
Featured stories will revolve around these topics:
- Self
- Health
- Family
- Sexuality
- Future
We choose these as we feel that most of what we want to deliver from our featured page roots from issues revolving these topics.
A team of editor(s) will hand-picked stories from the said range of topics to be featured on our “Floating” page on a routine weekly basis.
Justifying Ourselves.
Because just like you, we are just people trying our hard to make sense of everything. Sometimes, making sense does not need to be a lot of work. Sometimes, one just need to let things out of their guts to be able to feel again.
The Cetaceans aims to be an aggregate of those emotions. Those that we couldn’t comprehend but wish to overcome. This is for the soft edges on the rough walls, because we believe everything can and should be vigorously explained and expressed.
We are looking forward to find ourselves among you.
*These guidelines are subject to minor changes in the future. Changes would be seldom in nature, but wise to be expected. Latest edit: 23 October 2017.
**Contributions would all be voluntary. Therefore in the mean time, no financial incentives would be offered to contributors. We are about focusing on ideas and thoughts without the notion of being necessitated. However, we hope that there would be room for The Cetaceans to grow.
For further inquiries, feel welcome to reach us at thecetaceans@gmail.com
