How to Write for Home Sweet Home
By: Laura Fox
Tags: Submission Guidelines

How to Write for Home Sweet Home

Guidelines and how to submit your work

Photo by Dustin Lee on Unsplash

Welcome to Home Sweet Home!

Before submitting your work, please take the time to read the guidelines below. You may also find our FAQ section helpful.

About Us

Our little family. Photo by Laura Fox.

HSH is run by myself and my husband, David Fox. We have a daughter called Imogen, but we call her Immy for short.

I have mental health problems and write about my experiences as a mother who is recovering from postnatal depression and healing from a traumatic childhood. I hope I can help other parents with similar experiences feel less alone.

David has cerebral palsy and writes about parenting with a physical disability. Not only does this help other parents with disabilities feel less alone, but it also challenges the stereotypes around people living with a physical disability.

About Home Sweet Home

We are a parenting publication and welcome stories on parenting experiences. Whether you’re a parent to be, a single parent, co-parenting, have adopted children, grandchildren, step-children…we want to hear from you!

We realise not everyone is a parent but still have great stories to tell. If you want to write about your hopes for when you become a parent or about family in general, you are very welcome to.

Submission Guidelines

Stories must be tagged with at least one of the following:

Family

Parenting

Special Needs

Education — note that this needs to come from a parenting or family angle. There are other publications specifically for pieces on education.

Mental Health — note that this needs to come from a parenting or family angle. There are other publications specifically for pieces on mental health.

If your piece is in response to the monthly prompt, please include the tag “prompt”.

We pride ourselves on being a publication where readers and writers feel supported. Parents often feel judged and most of our readers are parents. Please make sure your work isn’t of a judging or shaming nature. The sort of articles we accept are:

Well-written with limited spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. We understand it’s easy to miss things in your own writing (especially if you are distracted by parenting duties) so one or two errors are fine. But we expect you to proofread your own work before you submit.

Have something to teach the reader. We don’t accept drafts that are like diary entries. You need to write for the reader . Is your piece relatable? And if it’s about a unique issue, does it have valuable knowledge to give to the reader? Is there an actionable take away message?

. Is your piece relatable? And if it’s about a unique issue, does it have valuable knowledge to give to the reader? Is there an actionable take away message? Are specific to parenting and family. We do not accept drafts that have nothing to do with these topics.

Have links to sources. Some articles may not need these, but if you are stating a point such as “children benefit from their parents reading to them” then you need to find a source to back that up.

Have specific titles that tell the reader exactly what the article is about. People are less likely to click in vague titles such as “Divorce.” A better title would be “How Divorce Has Impacted My Family.”

We do not accept poetry.

Please allow up to 48 hours for your draft to be published, pending any changes an editor asks you to make. This does not include weekends. The editors for this publication are Laura Fox, David Fox, and Mason Sabre. If you any changes need to be made to your draft, we will leave private notes explaining how you can make these changes.

We have a section on our homepage called “Best of” where we select the best articles of the month. If you would like to read examples of articles that fit our publication, we recommend you browse that section.

As always, follow Medium’s Curation Guidelines when submitting your work.

How to Submit

If you would like to write for us, please send a link to an unpublished draft to laurafoxwriter@gmail.com. We do not accept pieces that are already published.

Please allow up to seven days for your draft to be reviewed.

If your draft is of good quality and fits our publication, we will add you as a writer. This means you can add your Medium drafts to our publication and we will publish them for you, pending any changes you need to make.

If you have any questions that have not been answered in our FAQ section, please comment below and we will happily answer them.

We are looking forward to reading your stories!