We’ve been very very lucky to constantly get awesome submissions from Comrades of the Revolution: links, photos, drawings, essays, reviews, etc. We cannot be more thankful for this. But it turns out that we have been remiss not only in not expressing this gratitute, but also in providing any kind of guidelines for submissions. This became obvious when several Comrades have asked about the guidelines for submissions lately — very justifiably. We are always very happy with the submissions we get, and I only decided to take the time to write up some guidelines in order to encourage more people to submit if they feel so inclined, not to express any kind of displeasure with the wonderful things folks have always been so kind to send in to us. So I personally apologize if there are folks who wanted to submit but did not because they did not know how or what sorts of guidelines we have. We will keep a link to these guidelines in the right column indefinitely, too.

Without further ado:

Pencil Revolution Submission Guidelines

1) For links, emailing is best so that we see it right away. If you have a site or blog we can link to, please let us know.

2) For visual art, the only guideline for content is that it involves pencils in some small way and common sense in a big way. While we will not censor art that contains nudity or violence, please don’t send us pornography or images for which someone else owns the rights, etc. For formatting sake, we appreciate the original (if possible) photo or a large scan of an analog image so that we can format it for the page and upload it to our server.

3) For written work, any genre, format or topic is very welcome. Poems, stories and essays about pencils, written with pencils — these all certainly apply. While we would rather not censor anyone, please be thoughtful and considerate of all the Comrades of the Revolution.

4) For reviews, we do have some specific guidelines. However, to save space, if you would like to review something for Pencil Revolution, please email us (see right column) first. This is both to get the guidelines for the type of gear you’d like to review (pencil, eraser, sharpener, etc.) and to see if the gear you’d like to review is something we are really in a position to publish a review of presently. For instance, if we were to publish too many Faber-Castell or Dixon reviews too close together and in a disproportion to the other gear we review, we would certainly be unbalanced and would sacrifice some credibility thereby.

Nonetheless, if you’d like to review something from a manufacturer for which we have published several reviews, please contact us, and we can arrange a future date for submission or publication, etc. We don’t want to discourage anyone from writing reviews, just from appearing to play favorites. And besides, the things we choose to review do not necessarily reflect preferences anyway. We’ve had some negative reviews, and that’s a good thing if we expect anyone to trust the things we say:)

For all submissions, we reserve the right to re-format, edit or reject whatever we feel is inappropriate for Pencil Revolution. Other than re-formatting some photos, we’ve never had to do this before, and we doubt we ever will have to.

While we’re talking about reviews, there are some for the near future which we would eagerly like to publish, and we invite one to all to contact us if you’d like to review any of the following sometime soon, this winter or spring:

Staedtler Mars Lumograph 100 (drawing or writing); other Staedtler products.
Erasers! Erasers! Erasers!
Sanford Prismacolor Turquoise (drawing or writing).
Various kinds of art pencils (colored pencils, watercolor pencils, pastel pencils, etc.).
And of course, suggestions from Comrades.

We have such a talented community, we’re hoping that some artists and writers and thinkers can share the wisdom of some specific pencils and related goodies.

Myriad thanks to everyone who has shared something with us so far, be it a link, a review, an essay, a photo or drawing — we are thankful for everything!