moocat.net: Personal Essays Gold Star Program Gold Star Free

We are looking for personal essays, ranging from 1000 to 2500 words in length but with a sweet spot of about 1500 words.

Theme for Upcoming Issue

The theme of the Winter 2026 issue is "Thank you, but..." True tales of being wrongly accused of having done something wonderful (and how you responded). We've all been wrongly accused at times of doing something wrong, whether serious or ephemeral, but more interesting are those few times when we have been assumed to have done something wonderful, great, amazing, or even just "interesting" that we simply had nothing to do with. We are looking for just such accounts, of true stories (pseudonyms for persons involved allowed).

Moocat.net is interested in personal essays on many themes, with the goal of taking the reader on a pleasant and unusual little mind-ride. Uninterested in polemics, erotica, argumentative essays, or anything vituperative, mean-spirited, or rapturously religious. The moocat is a gentle cat.

Original works only. Only works sent in via the online submission form will be considered.

All submissions are processed on Duotrope, using the Duosuma submission management system. Your work will be reviewed only by moocat.net editors.

Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but exclusive submissions are preferred (and acted on first). If your submission is accepted elsewhere, please notify us of the piece’s withdrawal within 48 hours.

To protect the time invested in iterative editing, if your work is accepted conditionally, the work remains exclusive to moocat.net during the processing phase until either a final grant of rights is signed or the piece is formally withdrawn.

You retain full copyright in your work.

Electronic rights. By accepting a formal offer of publication, you grant moocat.net First Worldwide Serial Electronic Rights and a perpetual, non-exclusive license to maintain the work in its digital archive. Moocat.net holds exclusive electronic rights for 90 days following publication, after which all rights revert to you and you may republish the work elsewhere, provided moocat.net is credited as the original publisher.

Print rights. You also grant moocat.net a non-exclusive license to reprint the work in print and PDF anthologies of moocat.net content, including for-sale editions, for as long as the anthology remains in print. This license does not affect your right to publish the work elsewhere in any form.