The list below is an updated version of Artifice’s original wishlist for issue 1, archived here.

The following are not prompts, but rather examples of the sorts of things, tonally and formally, we’d like to receive.

• 1 mistranslation

• 2 concrete poems that require the use of mirrors

• 5 stories without characters

• 1 phenomenology

• 7 manifestos

• 2 stories that include images, not as illustrations, but as integral parts of the stories themselves

• 1 Heian-period pillow book

• 2 stories or poems that require folding or cutting the paper on which they are printed

• 2 ransom notes

• 2 responses to ransom notes

• 3 stories or poems in the form of rules to an imaginary game

• 1 story in musical notation

• the Voynich manuscript, decoded

• 1 collaborative essay in the form of tracked changes to a shared document

• 30-40 drawings for a corner-of-the-magazine flip book

• 2 poems that require legal advice

• 2 poems that require bodyguards

• 2 stories written in bad faith

• 1 distich

• 2 monostichs

• 1 mathematical proof

• 5 field recordings

• 7 diagrams of horrible machines

• 3 of the saddest sentences ever written

• 1 treasure map to a real-world object hidden by the author

• 1 narrative in the form of a maze

• 1 maze in the form of a narrative

• 3 IP-rights minefields

• 1 threat to national security

• 1 story that requires us to print in the gutter

• The contents of a specialist’s drawer

• 5 poems or stories in the form of equations

• 1 time bomb, ticking or otherwise

• 10 calls for moratoria

• 10 calls to arms

• Answers to the riddles in The Exeter Book

• 1 story designed for easy disassembly and transport

• 3 show bibles for unaired sitcoms

• 1 ode written in code

• 15 aphorisms

• 24 want ads

• 2 contradictions

• 2 contraindications

• 1 piece you’d tell a child not to put in its mouth

• 3 comics

• 4 labyrinths created using parentheses, footnotes, endnotes, etc.

• 1 bundle of hate mail tied with a shoelace

• 1 bundle of love letters tied with a licorice lace

• 1 story told entirely in screenshots

• Something that will stump our graphic designer

• Something that includes a Greek chorus

• Addenda to Minima Moralia 

• 3 choose-your-own adventures

• 3 adventures you chose on your own

• 4 pieces that require you to show your math

• 1 invitation to an invitation-only bacchanal

• 1 poem in anagrams

• 1 poem in charts

• 1 story in novels

• 2 stories or essays that require active reader participation

• 1 “real” essay on the subject of “fake” essays

• 1 “fake” essay on the subject of “real” essays

• 3 poems that would make good pets

• 3 stories starring historical personages

• 3 instants

• 3 instances

• A couple good jokes

• 1 story that is entirely true

• 1 story that is entirely truthful

• 1 story that is entirely “true”

• A dictionary in miniature

• An encyclopedia in miniature

• A thesaurus in miniature

• 2 fits

• 2 starts

We are uninterested in:

• work produced in whole or in part by artificial intelligence