Answers to Questions & Accustations, Including Submission Guidelines & How to Contact Us
About Johnny America
Johnny America is a large rabbit who lives in a bungalow on the Moon between two rivers of wine (one red, one white). He is the also namesake of this website of fiction, humor, and other miscellany and of the Johnny America print zine that’s published about twice a year by the Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society (ISSN 1553-9177).
Johnny America spends most of his days lounging against a low crater, fishing rod in paw. Some afternoons he helps plow the cheese fields—to earn extra money for carrots—but usually he’s in the valley cut by the Mercer and Mancini Rivers, idling. The fish on the Moon are constantly drunk and easy to catch. They look almost exactly like bass but taste of marmalade and cinnamon.
From time to time Johnny casts his line toward Earth, slides down the filament, and calls a meeting of the Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society. The meetings are typically pot-luck affairs. Johnny contributes wine and Moon cheese, which is lighter than Earth cheese because gravity is not so greedy there. Emily brings delicious Scotch and tiramisu; Jonathan offers tonic, gin, and vegetable korma. Patrick supplies bourbon, Coca-Cola, and crawfish gumbo. When Aaron arrives, the party really hops—he brings still more Scotch, plus buckets of extra-crispy chicken, since his kitchen is very small and he doesn’t care for cooking. Others bring other things too numerous to enumerate. A good time is had by all.
Moon Rabbits: I am going to go ahead right now and make a very bold announcement: if there is room for me on any of your many beach and/or poker excursions, i would be very interested in coming along! I think you know by now just how very verymuch I love the beach based on our last seaside adventure during which i was the onlyone dressed in appropriately beachy attire — however, if that is not enough to convince you of my worth as a beach companion, let me just make a second announcement: I recently purchased my first real bikini (i.e. not purchased from Tati, the parisian discount “boutique” that ranks below DEE DEE in terms of its patheticness!). My fate is in your hands.
Despite subsequently extending an invitation to a Jersey Shore surfing and poker excursion, this acquaintance of the Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society claimed she was feeling “headachy” when it came time to catch a train.
If you would like to contact a specific contributor
You’ll find this list of our attractive but aloof contributors extremely handy. Many listings include author e-mail addresses and links to contributor’s websites.
What About O.J.?
He loved too hard.
What About Dogs?
They should not be allowed to eat socks.
For Comments, Suggestions, Criticism, or Trades
There are numerous ways to contact us:
Our e-mail address for general correspondence is johnnyamerica@johnnyamerica.net. Please do not send submissions to this address; the correct e-mail address for submissions is listed just a little farther down this page.
We welcome and encourage gifts, trades, and unsolicited items for review. Send baked goods, CDs, DVDs, books, zines, and racy Polaroids to:
Johnny America
P.O. BOX 44-2001
Lawrence, KS 66044
U.S.A.
Please indicate your intentions (requesting a trade, soliciting a review, offering a present), and bear in mind that some items sent for review will be benignly ignored and most will be assessed at a pace of marked leisure (i.e. weeks, months, years after submission).
Invitations to hip hop shows and gallery openings in Okinawa are also welcome—contact us for our address in prefecture four-seven.
Also
We’re listed on Friendster and MySpace, if social networking’s your bag. We’re not sure it’s ours, but still we’re there with trepidation.
About Submissions
Johnny America specializes in very short shorts, though we frequently accept short shorts and fairly often bite on short stories and short essays that are merely on the briefish side in length. Items over 3,000 words by persons other than Eli S. Evans will almost never be accepted, while items over 4,500 words cannot possibly be considered. Items under 100 words are usually too short for our tastes, which strongly favor the numerical range between 200 and 2,000 words.
Submissions will be skimmed by a junior volunteer of questionable competence (Richard the Intern) who sneaks web access while at his day job. If he likes a submission he will propel it to our lazy and capricious editors, who depending on their sobriety might or might not take notice. Our junior volunteer’s attention span is limited and his taste unrefined, so here are a few ideas that will likely propel a submission past him: stories with explosions, obtuse film reviews that he’ll misidentify as Clever, stories featuring Kristen Chenoweth or similar busty tall-foreheaded sasspots in Horatio Algeresque rags-to-riches triumphs, non-fiction accounts of supernatural creatures. Mind that brevity is rewarded by our volunteer screener, and that poetry by persons other than Keith Kennedy or Stephanie Wakefield is, by policy, rejected without reply.
We, the Editors, enjoy submissions accompanied by crude digital images captured by camera phones, and wish there were more of those. We’ve long hoped someone would send a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story that starts with the question of what to eat for dinner, and ends with the protagonist falling either victim to Murder or madly in Love, but our longing goes unsatiated. Submissions should be sent as plain text in the body of an electronic message whenever possible, but we also accept RTF and Word files when required to preserve formatting. We may mangle and edit submissions to suit our needs, but we clear changes with authors prior to publication.
Please note that previously published work cannot be considered, and that submissions will be automatically considered for both the web site and print edition unless you specifically request otherwise. If you want your story considered for the print edition only, for example, please request otherwise.
Simultaneous submissions? We’re fine with those—but please grant us the courtesy of notification if your story’s accepted elsewhere.
All submissions should be directed to submissions@johnnyamerica.net.
There’s no need to include an author bio with your submission—if we need one we’ll ask, or fabricate our own—but feel free to send one if you wish. If you have a web site you’d like listed, please let us know. We list contributor e-mail addresses on our website unless instructed to the contrary.
The Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society is small and barely profitable entity so payment, if there is any, will come in the form of peculiar or amusing objects of negligible monetary value: a doodle of a mongoose on a coffee-stained napkin, for example, or a foot massage with lavender oil. We do provide a free contributor’s copy to authors included in the print edition, and all contributors recieve a Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society Christmas card if they’re wise enough to send us their mailing address.
Know that we respond to all submissions within one month. If you don’t hear from us within a month, it’s safe to say your message was lost due either to our junior volunteer’s ever-wavering organizational abilities or to over-active e-mail filters. Consider yourself encouraged to re-send your work.
Sweet Lobster, You are obsessed w/ cleanliness—how can you possibly like me, when I look all the time as if I just run away from home? Exactly how often do you wash your car, inside and out?
This query baffled and delighted us. We offer no response.
What of Copyrights?
All items on this web site and in the print magazine are © Copyrighted and are not to be stolen. Stories published here are the intellectual property of their authors. Site design and uncredited text are © Copyright 2003-2008 by the Moon Rabbit Drinking Club & Benevolence Society.
Other Miscellany
People truly ask, so we’ll answer: the serif typeface we use for the magazine is ‘Perpetua,’ designed by Eric Gill in 1928. It’s named in honor of Vibia Perpetua, the patron saint of cattle. A Roman Christian, Emperor Severus sentenced her to death by stampede when she refused to deny her main man J.C. After a mad heifer trampling through an arena failed to do her in, she helped guide a nervous gladiator’s sword to her throat and her martyrdom was cinched. You were a strange girl, Perpetua, but you inspired a lovely typeface.
The rounded serif we started using with Issue Five is ‘Gotham Rounded,’ a new-ish typeface from the foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones. It is a versatile font, expressing “sass” in its heavier weights and embodying “class” in its ‘Light’ and ‘Light Italic.’ Like a cheerleader, its letterforms are pleasantly rounded.
If you have a web site and would like to link to us
You are encouraged to so, free of charge. We are well-respected but surprisingly unpopular, and could use the publicity. If you let us know about your link and you have attractive legs, chances are good we’ll add you to our list of friends.