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Events / Flat Amount / Online / Token Payment

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Taking Submissions: 100 Word Project April 2025

Deadline: April 30th, 2025
Payment: $1
Theme: Canteen

Submissions for the 100 Word Project from Manawaker Studio are open January thru May and July thru November.

The 100 Word Project is an ongoing project focused on 100 word stories which will be published as a monthly, themed online journal and in a yearly print anthology. Each month (except for June and December) will bring a new prompt, and on the first half of the next month nine of the submitted drabbles for that prompt will be posted in the public-facing section of the Manawaker Patreon alongside one drabble from Manawaker EiC, CB Droege. At the end of the year, the ten stories from each of the ten prompts will be assembled into the next volume of the 100 x 100 series. The project is curated and edited by CB Droege. 100 x 100 is published by Manawaker Studio as part of their regular line of anthologies.

Current prompt

The Prompt for April 2025  is ‘Canteen‘.

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Anthology / Events / Pro / Royalties

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Taking Submissions: Skull X Bones

Deadline: June 30th, 2025
Payment: 0.08 USD / word and royalties
Theme: Science Fiction or Fantasy pirate stories

Avast, ye scurvy dogs! It’s time to plunder! Pirates have enchanted and haunted readers for generations, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to the ill-fated Firefly. Whether it’s Blackbeard, Mal, or Han Solo, we love our swashbucklers, our One-Eyed Willies, and our scruffy-looking nerfherders. In SKULL X BONES, we want writers to give us their best science fiction or fantasy pirates, whether they be on the sailing ships of the deep wide ocean or the spaceships of the black void!

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Events / Magazine / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: SpecPoVerse Second 2025 Window

Submission Window: May 1st – June 30th, 205
Payment: $5
Theme: Speculative Poetry

SpecPoVerse accepts poems with or without known formalism and also experimental forms. An illustrated poem in which the illustration was created by the poet is also acceptable; this must be submitted as a .pdf file with the embedded illustration.

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Articles / Guest Post

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How fantasy built the foundation for my horror stories

How fantasy built the foundation for my horror stories

I’m frequently asked how it is that I became interested in horror as a creator.

It’s one of those questions that I tend to immediately internalize as if it’s coming from a place of judgment (in fairness, more than once it has).

But it’s an honest question also, and the answer is rather mundane, but I think it is useful for us as creators.

Here’s the big (read: boring) reveal: I come to horror by way of fantasy. If anything, fantasy is homebase for me and horror came a bit later.

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Anthology / Events / Royalties

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Taking Submissions: Gauges and Ghouls

Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: Royalties
Theme: Haunted workplace stories

What I’m Looking For: Haunted workplace stories, modern day or historical, it’s completely up to you. Just write a great character-driven story that hooks the reader fast and reels them in hard. There do NOT need to be ghosts. You don’t need to have a truly haunted workplace. You can have spooky vibes, vampires, werewolves, the whole nine.

Story length will be between 5,000 and 10,000 words.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry / Token Payment

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Taking Submissions: Eternal Haunted Summer: Summer Solstice 2025

Submission Window: May 1st – June 1st, 2025
Payment: $5
Theme: Poetry or short fiction about the Gods and Goddesses and heroes of the world’s many Pagan/polytheist traditions that somehow features Music

Summer Solstice 2025: Music. Submission Period: 1 May through 1 June 2025. Jazz and blues. Rock and opera. Ballads and filk songs. Music has been an integral element of human creativity and culture since we first learned to carve holes into bones. Send us your best poems, short stories, and essays about music — in all its forms — from a Pagan/polytheist, witchy, and mythological point of view. Send us poems about the duel between Apollo and Marsyas, Bragi wooing Idun, and Pan stalking a poacher with madness-inducing pipe music. Send us short stories about a desperate musician making a crossroads deal with Dionysus, a composer praying to Hymen for inspiration, an archaeologist uncovering a temple and sacred instruments of Kothar-wa-Khasis. Send us essays about Väinämöinen as archetypal musician, Mozart’s opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, and the rise of the modern Pagan music scene.

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Articles

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A Stolen Livelihood – LibGen, Meta, and The Atlantic

A Stolen Livelihood – LibGen, Meta, and The Atlantic

Like many authors, the ongoing battle against AI has been at the forefront of my mind. In the UK, the focus has been very much on the direction our government appears to be taking towards allowing access to copyrighted materials for AI training. The onus it seems will be on the creator—whether musician, author, or artist—to opt out. The White Paper consultation, which closed in February of this year, can be read in full here. The message overall is that whilst the creator should be able to reserve their rights so that AI cannot be trained on their output, the rights of the AI industry are given an equivalence and must be supported. In fact if you look at the government’s position it seems to favour AI at the expense of the creative sector: despite the responses from the likes of the BBC, The Information Commissioner’s Office, authors, artists, and musicians (who marked their protest with the silent album ‘Is This What We Want’ consisting of recordings of empty studios).

But all this discussion and consultation strikes me as pretty much pointless when the industries using AI are simply going ahead and scraping data before the copyright discussion has been settled legally. This hit home when I spotted a series of posts by a huge number of authors who had found their work on the LibGen Pirated* Books database. US magazine The Atlantic had provided the link. The latter is currently carrying out an investigation into the data set used by Meta to train its AI. It provides the database link here. Are you in there?

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