Written by The Specusphere | 01 February 2011

Entries are now CLOSED to The Specusphere's first anthology.

You may still be interested in an update we published in February.

We have had to do a bit of fine-tuning to our guidelines.

Indigenous myths
It has been brought to our attention that using Indigenous oral history as a means of conveying a story for the Myths and Legends anthology may constitute an appropriation of Aboriginal intellectual property rights. At present, the legal framework does not cover Indigenous oral traditions; however, there is a view that Aboriginal culture holds a type of copyright over their traditions in a way similar to how Native Title works

Further, in Indigenous communities, the telling of stories is a right given to particular and qualified individuals. The re-telling of these stories by unauthorised outsiders may be offensive to customary beliefs

I'm not going to get into the detail here, nor will I be debating the legalities or morality of the matter, suffice it to say that The Specusphere team has decided that you will need to seek permission from an Indigenous body before we will accept your submission, or be an Aboriginal authorised to disseminate the story.

Alternatively, you can change the story so much that all vestiges of the Indigenous part of the tale is removed. If we cannot detect an Aboriginal myth in the story, then we can hardly reject it on that basis. This aboriginality extends to all extant indigenous cultures.

Cut-off date
The original cut-off date for the anthology was May 31st. This date has been amended to 'open'.

We will not have an end date until such time as we see an end in sight. The reason for this is that we want to produce a high quality anthology, and to do that we will be holding out for high quality submissions that satisfy the demanding requirements set by the editorial team.

Submissions
So far we have received 19 submissions.

We have tentatively accepted 2, and both have been tagged for further author/editor interaction.

1 is being considered for 'incubation', ie, it needs a total re-write but the editors have seen a story lurking in its depths and will work with the author to try and bring that story out.

3 submissions were rejected because they did not meet certain basic criteria. Please make sure you understand the guidelines and that your manuscript is properly formatted and spell-checked.