Your key to The Motel Desk

Welcome to the submission guidelines for The Motel Desk Zine. Step into our world of neon-lit roadside motels after midnight, where the edgy, mysterious, playful, and erotic converge. This is where your strange, adult work finds its home.

Why submit to The Motel Desk?

Submitting to The Motel Desk is more than just a chance to be published; it's an invitation to join a unique, underground community. This is not a generic literary market. We are a small, curated, atmosphere-heavy zine built for creators whose work thrives in the strange spaces between erotic art, pulp fiction, queer desire, dirty humor, and handmade underground publishing.

Artistic freedom

We invite creators to take risks. We want pieces that might be too weird, too horny, too playful, too intimate, or too difficult to neatly file elsewhere. The Motel Desk is a place for work that cares about heat, mood, texture, consent, and style.

Unique audience

Our audience seeks adult work with a point of view: sexy but not soulless, strange but not careless, explicit but not exploitative. Your work will reach readers who appreciate the nuances of erotic art.

Growing community

Become part of a growing motel-world of locked rooms, neon signs, secret notes, and consenting adults making art after dark. While DIY and non-paying for now, our goal is to build a recognizable platform for unique voices.

What we seek

The Motel Desk is an 18+ erotic zine that prioritizes consent-centered adult fiction, poetry, visual art, collage, photography, faux classifieds, and strange motel-themed ephemera. We're looking for heat with atmosphere and kink with care.

Vol. 1, Issue 1: DO NOT DISTURB

For our inaugural issue, we are seeking submissions centered on themes of voyeurism, privacy, locked rooms, peepholes, consensual watching/exhibition, surveillance aesthetics, motel windows, red lights, and the erotic tension of being seen.

Consent is your keycard

The most important thing to remember is that consent is paramount. While we explore themes like hidden cameras, spying, and surveillance, these must be handled ethically, whether as consensual roleplay, fantasy, horror/noir framing, critique, or clearly fictional adult scenarios. We are not interested in eroticized real-world violation, exploitation, or nonconsensual recording. Sex alone is not enough; we want mood, voice, texture, desire, strangeness, humor, and tenderness.

How to submit

After reading these guidelines, the next step is simple: send us the thing you cannot stop thinking about.

Email your submission to: moteldeskzine@gmail.com

Use the subject line: DO NOT DISTURB Submission – [Genre] – [Name/Pseudonym]

In the body of the email, include a brief cover note with your name or pseudonym, the title of your piece, word count if applicable, and whether the work is original or a reprint.

Attachments are preferred for writing submissions. Visual submissions may be attached as image files or shared through a viewable link.

Before you hit send, make sure your work is 18+, human-made, on-theme, and consent-centered. Then slide it under the door.