Editor Interview: Cryptic Frog Quarterly

Whatever entertains us

Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Star*Line are all publications we've read from regularly. One of my favorite short stories I've ever read was in Clarkesworld, and it has such a clean design style. One dark horse, Potted Purple, I admire for its artistic flair.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Dickens, Catherynne M. Valente, Shannon Hale, Edgar Allan Poe, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Arthur Conan Doyle

Two things come to mind: first, I create unique drawings for each story to post on social media; second, we have an appreciation for classics. We publish public domain classics in each issue and enjoy stories and poetry that call back to traditional roots.

Please make sure you have a good ending. An ambiguous ending is perfectly fine, but I don't want to read your entire story and feel like you gave up on the last paragraph. Caleb might disagree, but I usually win the accept-or-reject battles with this opinion.

They forget a bio! We don't read bios before reading the submission, so it doesn't help or hurt your chances. It'll save time in the long run to include it.

We like to see a few previous publication credits, but you don't have to include all of them (and they can just be part of the bio). Keep it simple. Follow our guidelines and you'll be good.

After two rounds of reading and narrowing down what we want, we take various steps to ensure the work was not written using generative AI and has not been previously published elsewhere.

We do edit before publishing. The extent of the edit will depend on the story, but we lean toward less editing if possible. This usually ends up being a light line edit.
We try to be very straightforward with our edits and keep you completely in control. Editing is my favorite part of the job, so I try to make sure it's a pleasant experience for the writers as well and take the chance to get to know them and their preferences. Generally, edits can be accepted or rejected. You do have to remove certain swear words if we ask, though! (It's in our guidelines.)
Common edits will pertain to Chicago conformity, American English, grammar, punctuation, and word choice. Less common edits might dig into tense switching, rewording a sentence or two for clarity, perspective shifts, and deleting swear words.

Not currently, but we are looking into it.

We pay writers directly from book sales. If our book doesn't make enough money, then it's usually out-of-pocket.

We have a WordPress site along with Facebook and Bluesky. For now those are sufficient for getting the word out.