I have a feeling the guys behind the Machine of Death anthology have had enough. They posted a new page in late February called “Approaches to Avoid“. This translates roughly to “we’ve received about 10 versions of each of these poorly-constructed concepts, and we’re through.”

Unfortunately, it seems as though they’ve tossed every concept out the window, including the original premise that the anthology was essentially based upon. Here’s a collection of some strange head-scratchers:

Gimmicky predictions regarding the machine itself In our opinion, a machine predicting itself as a cause of death is not by itself an interesting story. Examples include “PAPERCUT”, “INFECTED NEEDLE”, and “CRUSHED BY FALLING MACHINE”. This concept may be an interesting jumping-off point for a more complex story, but that story would frankly have to be brilliant to make us look past the gimmick.Stories entirely about the protagonist getting their first prediction There is really only so much internal musing about “THE NATURE OF FATE” that we can find interesting, without something more dramatic happening.

Stories that open with the protagonist getting their first prediction Again, nothing really wrong with this setup, it’s just that we’re seeing it an awful lot, and would rather see more variety.

Stories in which the entire narrative thrust is someone trying to avoid their prediction See above. More variety please!

Stories in which the entire narrative thrust is someone trying to prove the machine wrong This may well be an element of a good story, but there should be more going on than just this.

That is, essentially, every possible idea anyone could ever entertain for this specific type of story. Remember that you’re stuck in the world they created for this story. You can’t venture outside the lines very far, and I wish they had given writers more flexibility in creating their own world with the addition of the “machine of death” thrown in as a catalyst for creative concepts. Instead, they get inundated with hundreds of potentially mediocre ideas that all sound similar because the writers have been boxed in by the limited criteria. And it isn’t enough to take away every interesting option and then tell the writers to “be creative!” It really just reads like they never really understood what kind of submissions they were searching for in the first place. Listen, if you guys don’t even know what it is you want to read, just stop trying to put together an anthology.

I’ll be going back to the historical zombie fiction story for now, as it gives me more freedom to write and it was already about 2/5ths completed when I stopped it to work on the Machine of Death story. Not to mention that these guys appear to be doing everything they can to halt further submissions coming in.