Nathaniel Tower, managing editor of Bartleby Snopes Literary Magazine, is sick of Alzheimer’s, death endings and masturbation in line one.
If these are the only ideas you can come up with, then please stop writing forever. Or try to write a story that combines all of them. A husband with Alzheimer’s awakens from a dream that tells him his cancerous wife is cheating on him with a trust fund kid who loves Nietzsche; she is masturbating next to the husband in bed as light bursts through the window and dust motes settle on her convulsing body; in the end, she brutally murders her lover for no reason whatsoever. That story might actually be worth reading. Oh, and make sure someone gets drunk and the devil talks to God at least once.
The full list of ‘things I’m tired of seeing in lit mag submissions’ is here.