// New Session Issue 3

Summer, 2025: “Adaptations”

New Session, the world’s foremost Telnet literary magazine, is returning after a nearly four-year hiatus; we are coming back to a world where we’ve had to change parts of who we are to survive. In the face of right-wing politics, climate change, a forever pandemic, and the ever-present hunger of imperialist capitalism, we have all been forced to adapt.

Some of these adaptations may be benign, some, on the other hand, are destructive, but, if you are reading this, your adaptations have kept you alive till now. What adaptations will you make in the coming years? How have your adaptations served or hindered you?

What We Need From You

New Session issue three will be different from issues one and two. Delivering the magazine over electronic media allows us to tell stories that more static forms cannot; it allows for a (limited) degree of interactivity, but constraints breed creativity, and New Session would like to invite you to explore that space.

We are looking for short stories, poetry, and non-fiction that contain “adaptations”, or variances. Essentially, we’re asking you to submit work that has small or large changes based on any number of conditions. For example, your story or poem can have words, pages, or sections that change based on time of day, the number of times a reader has seen your story before, or the reader’s location.

These are just examples (and there are more below, see Appendix 1), but the core of the call for proposals is this: your submission should be mutable, it should have a set number of variances, and you should tell us how those variances should be expressed.

Your submission may have one adaption or it may have many. It can be as simple as a single word (think: the gendered editions of Milorad Pavić’s “Dictionary Of The Khazars”) or as complex as wholly different stories.

Submissions open on January 14 and close on March 20. A lengthier submission time than prior issues is designed to leave you time to message the editors and collaborate with us on possibilities for your adaptations.

Email your submissions to newsessioneditors@gmail.com

Accepted submissions will be paid $50.

As per our last issue, please format your work to fit on an 80x24 terminal screen (that’s 80 horizontal characters and 24 vertical). We’re shooting for a length of between 5 and 10 “pages” of 80x24 text for a single reading of the story (ie, each adaptation can make it much longer), but we are quite flexible on length.

Issue 3 will be released in May, in both Telnet and HTML forms.

Appendix 1: Example Adaptations

Please feel free to utilize any of the following adaptations:

• Time of day
• Connection location (geo-IP located)
• Number of times a reader has seen a story (via IP)
• Local weather (geo-IP located)
• Key press (between pages)
• Proximity to a location (geo-IP)
• Other concurrent viewers
• Anything else that can be made to work on both HTML and Telnet

The goal of Issue 3 is to encourage collaboration between writers and the developer of the New Session content management system (Cara), so please reach out to her on social media (@caraessie on Instagram, @cara.city on Bluesky, email at dondeesten@gmail.com) and she would be delighted to help you hone your idea for adaptations.