Reading Period: August 1 – October 31, 2014
Payment: AUD8c/word

Edited by Bram Stoker® -nominated and Australian Shadows Award-winning editor, Marty Young.

• Payment: AUD8c/word
• Maximum word length: 5,000 words
• Submission window: August 1 – October 31, 2014 (anything submitted outside of this window will be deleted without being read)
• Publication Date: Early 2015
• Publisher: Cohesion Press

Do you really know what’s real and what isn’t?
A man called Arnold Paole was accused of being a vampire in 1732 in Yugoslavia, after his body was dug up five years after his death and found with long pointed teeth and nails, with blood in his mouth.
The Mothman of West Virginia was a winged man-sized creature with glowing red eyes and huge moth-like wings sprouting from its back, seen repeatedly during 1967 and 1968.
In 1977, a dead creature that looked a lot like a plesiosaur was caught in the nets of a Japanese fishing vessel, the Zuiyo-maru, offshore east of Christchurch, New Zealand.
The sage Apollonius of Tyana, born in Turkey at the start of the first century AD, hunted demons, and once saved one of his students from a vampire who was going to drink his blood and eat his soul.
These are all supposedly true stories. And there are more, more tales of monsters that shouldn’t exist, of demons and devil possession, of serial killers wearing human skin, ghosts terrorizing families…
But these tales also sound like fiction, don’t they?

What we’re looking for:
Blurring the Line (working title) is seeking to blur the line between what is fiction and what is non-fiction. We want horror stories, tales that are serious and frightening, hard-hitting and imaginative. We want monsters; vampires and zombies and werewolves and the mummy and creatures from the Black Lagoon and giant killer plants and mutated ants and demons and devils and Mothmen and everything else you can think of or that hasn’t been thought of yet. But we also want your serial killers and demented and depraved humanity. We want it all. Push your imagination and take us into the far reaches of your darkness, without letting go of reality. Make us believe.
BUT, we want to be scared, made to feel uneasy and uncomfortable. We do not want to be shocked for no reason; if you’re going to eviscerate someone, there needs to be a good reason for doing so. We want style over shock value. We do not want supernatural romance, or weird fiction. We’re not looking for tales about a monster hunter or a covert monster hunting team (we love these stories but they’re not what we’re looking for here).
Details on the non-fiction component of Blurring the Line will be announced later in 2014, so keep an eye out for this.
Interior artwork will be by the super brilliant Alex McVey, and his pieces will combine to tell a horrifying story of their own.

Please follow these guidelines when submitting to us:
1. Please put your full contact details on the first page of the manuscript top left, with word count top right.
2. Standard submission format, with minimal document formatting.
3. Courier or Times New Roman set at 12pt. Italics as they will appear. No underlining.
4. Double spaced.
5. Please don’t use TAB or space bar to indent lines. Use ‘styles’ only. If unsure or using a program that has no styles, do not indent at all. That’s still cool.
7. NO LINE between paragraphs unless a line-break is required.
8. Please put full contact details on the first page of the manuscript (yes, I said this twice… it’s important).
9. Send your submission to Marty Young at martyyoung2002[@]yahoo.com as an attachment. In the subject line of your email, please put Submission: [STORY TITLE]

(Replace [STORY TITLE] with your actual story title. Yes, unfortunately I do need to state this)

For a guide to standard submission format, see: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html.
The only variation to this format is that italics MUST appear as they will be used; no underlining.

Anyone that fails to follow these guidelines will likely see their story gobbled up by spam gremlins.

Via: Cohesion Press.