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You should read some Kaleidotrope today.

Restless dreams wake you in the dead of night to an "Apostrophe for the Monstrous" by @jduckwriter.bsky.social. kaleidotrope.net/summer-2026/...

I still have a couple hundred submissions left to read.

If Kaleidotrope had submissions readers other than myself, I would be much more likely to ask for content warnings in cover letters.

Yeah, trigger or content warnings I absolutely understand. I personally don't need them, and as yet don't include them in Kaleidotrope, but they make a lot more sense than a plot synopsis.

See, everybody? No need to worry! 😜

Some writers don't send *any* cover letter, which honestly, is even weirder.

This is literally all you ever need to do, unless a magazine explicitly indicates otherwise, if you're genuinely overthinking it or worried you're including too much or too little in your cover letter.

Yeah, a quick plot synopsis is probably useful, even necessary, if you're submitting a *novel* to a publisher, and I suspect a lot of people are just not making that distinction, assuming all editors need the same things.

If somebody wrote a story about a space trucker who becomes a vampire on the long haul to Ganymede—not a real example, but one anybody's free to use—because it had deep biographical connection to them, then yes, that's something I'd want in a cover letter. But not if it's just describing the plot. 😀

A thin veneer of plausible professionalism, that's all I ask! 😜

Pretty much all I'm looking for in a cover letter is something like "Hi, my name is This, I'm from Here, and I'm submitting a story called 'This.' I can totally act like a normal human being, and here's a couple other places where my stories have appeared hopefully as proof. Thank you." 😀

Are there magazines that specifically ask for elevator-pitch plot synopses in the cover letter?

You might get published using AI. It won't improve your chances, though. You might as well actually write.

I not infrequently think about raising Kaleidotrope's per word pay rate. Of course, I also wonder just how many more submissions I'd received then...

I don't mind (polite, friendly, brief) replies to rejection letters, but at the same time they're really unnecessary, and I would take care if an editor or magazine specifically (politely, friendly, briefly) asks writers not to send them, as I know some do. 😀

There was, several years ago, very briefly a podcast also called Kaleidotrope. (No relation. And I got there a decade-plus earlier.) What's weird is, I don't think any of their listeners have ever accidentally found Kaleidotrope the zine, or vice versa. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Okay, now I think I'm a little more than halfway done.

I think some writers might be surprised, even disheartened, to learn how quickly most editors stop reading their story before rejecting it.

I'm definitely going to have to amend the response times in Kaleidotrope's guidelines. I'm getting to everything as quickly as I can, but it's likely going to be at least a couple of weeks, not a couple of days, before everybody has heard back from me.