Monthly Archive: October 2021

Articles

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Indie Bookshelf Releases 10/08/21

Got a book to launch, an event to promote, a kickstarter or seeking extra work/support as a result of being hit economically by Covid or life in general?

Get in touch and we’ll promote you here. The post is prepared each Thursday for publication on Friday. Contact us via Horror Tree’s contact address or connect via Twitter or Facebook.

Click on the book covers for more information. Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page – there’s all sorts lurking in the deep.

 

Charity Anthologies

 Tales Of The Lost Volume Two- A charity anthology for Covid- 19 Relief: Tales To Get Lost In A CHARITY ANTHOLOGY FOR COVID-19 RELIEF by [Gaiman, Neil,, Hill, Joe,, Johnson, Eugene M,]  Flashes of Hope by [Anna Taborska, Dave Jeffery, Amy Grech, Matthew Davis, John Cady, Emma Lee, Gwen Weir, Ken Goldman, Alyson Faye, Theresa Derwin]    

 

Latest Book Launches

Horror Tree Sponsor* and Patreon Releases!

*All Horror Tree sponsors are able to claim a spot at the top of our listing during the donation of their sponsorship. Please use our contact form for more advertising pricing.
 
 

 

They Slipped Through the Net

Rhitta Gawr (Short Sharp Shocks! Book 73) by [David Watkins]

 

On the Shelf

 

 

September

The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales by [Eric LaRocca] Writers Workshop of Horror 2 by [Michael Knost] Empty Graves: Tales of the Living Dead by [Jonathan Maberry] The Museum For Forgetting by [Pete W Sutton]

Shattered Circle: A Jackson Cole Novel Book 1 by [John Stamp, Valhalla Books Publisher] Acquisitor: A Jackson Cole Novel Book 2 by [John Stamp, Valhalla Books Publisher] Ravel by [Cassidy Ward]

Picture Man-Beast by [Deborah Sheldon] Grimoire of the Four Impostors by [Coy Hall] 

Floaters by [Garrett Boatman, Crystal Lake Publishing] Priory (Oliver Hardacre Book 1) by [Becky Wright] Unbreakable Ink by [Shebat Legion] 

The House of Little Bones by [Beverley Lee] Were Tales: A Shapeshifter Anthology by [Jonathan Maberry, Eric J. Guignard, Stephanie Ellis, Catherine McCarthy, Gabino Iglesias, Cindy O'Quinn, Cynthia Pelayo, Christina Sng, Laurel Hightower, H.R. Boldwood, Ben Monroe, Elle Turpitt, Michelle Garza, Melissa Lason, Beverley Lee, S.H. Cooper, Villimey Mist, Kev Harrison, Theresa Derwin, Ruschelle Dillon, Linda Addison, Stephanie Wytovich, Tabatha Wood, Shane Douglas Keene, Sara Tantlinger, Alyson Faye, Baba Jide Low, S.D. Vassallo] 

Whitesands: A John Dark Case by [Johann Thorsson]Midnight From Beyond the Stars by [Gabino Iglesias, James Newman, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tim Curran, Lee Murray, Ronald Kelly, Samantha Kolesnik, William Meikle, Kenneth W. Cain] Kill Kit Killers: Premeditated murder, proved with their kits

Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction by [Kevin Lucia, Gwendolyn Kiste, Kelli Owen, Michael Wehunt, Todd Keisling, Kristi DeMeester, Richard Thomas, Robert Ford, Joshua Palmatier, Chad Lutzke]

October

1 Gorefest: Extreme Horror Anthology by [Wrath James White, Stephen Kozeniewski, Armand Rosamilia, Wesley Southard, Jay Wilburn, Jonathan Butcher, Jack Bantry, Robert Essig, Patrick C. Harrison, K. Trap Jones] A House At War: House Arrath Book 1  

White Ibis: A Horror Novella by [Wendy Dalrymple] Red Sounding: Resurrected by [Winfield H. Strock III, Valhalla Books Publisher] The Midnight Collection by [Ryan Dunn, Valhalla Books Publisher]

5 What One Wouldn't Do: An Anthology on the Lengths One Might Go To by [Scott J. Moses, J.A.W. McCarthy, Joanna Koch, Eric LaRocca, Hailey Piper, Christi Nogle, Cheri Kamei, Daniel Barnett, Eric Raglin, Laurel Hightower] The Pseudopod That Rocks the Cradle by [Tim Mendees]8 Appletown by [Antoinette Corvo]

12 Dead in the Water by [Jennifer Soucy]12 14 15 Image of The Voice of the Burning House: Poems - PREORDER

Image of The Ettinfell of Beacon Hill: Gothic Tales of Boston - PREORDER16 Seeds by [Tabatha Wood]19 Image 21 Postcards from the Body Farm: Horror Unlimited Book 2 by [Charlotte O'Farrell]

26 The Sound of Breaking Glass: (and other weird tales) by [Christine Makepeace, Gabino Iglesias]31

November

2 Chocolateman by [Jonathan Butcher, K. Trap Jones]12 With Benefits: What's a bit of fun between friends? 30 Nocturnal Pursuits by [Glenn Rolfe]

Services

Editing: Michael David Wilson, This Is Horror Founder and Editor In Chief, podcaster, and writer (The Girl in the Video) is currently offering his freelance editing services. “Michael David Wilson invented the fine-toothed comb. His attention to detail is second to none, and he has a wonderful understanding of structure. This is a guy who knows how good writing works.”—Ray Cluley, author of WATER FOR DROWNING Michael has over ten years of editing experience and has edited books by Josh Malerman, Pat Cadigan, Stephen Graham Jones, David Moody, and many others. He’s worked with various publishing houses and small presses including Rebellion Publishing and Broken River Books. Prices start from £0.01/word. For further information go here: michaeldavidwilson.co.uk/editing/. Contact Michael: [email protected]

Editing, critiquing, artwork – Eugene Johnson is a man of many talents, an award-winning editor, filmmaker and artist. He will be will be selling his art, book covers, book art, logo designs, making prints, offering short story critiques/edits, special book projects like a coloring book he’s creating with another author and more for a small fee. Initially to fund desperately needed repairs on his car, once that is complete he hopes to turn his focus towards helping others that need support. Join him in his endeavours in getting this help to those who need it. Contact him via https://plaiddragonpublishing.com/ and he can also be found on https://www.facebook.com/eugene.johnson.14855. If you’d like to help him get his car fixed that bit quicker, please drop in on his Fundraiser set up by friends. (I think another link will be set up in the near future regarding his services and I’ll update it here when that happens.)

Editing – Elle Turpitt, elleturpittediting.com, is facing redundancy. Help her by considering her as an editor. She is available for all editing work – short story, novella, novel, or chapter extracts. She also has a Ko-Fi (ko-fi.com/elleturpitt), or if you’d rather send a little gift to help her smile at a stressful time, she has a wishlist set up for this month (amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls). All support is appreciated. 

 

Writing and Editing Services from Ben Long. Go to Ben for ‘Killer Copy, Creative Content, and Eye-opening Edits’! Ben is ‘a passionate and engaging freelancer with 2+ years of experience in a variety of writing and editing endeavors. He is also a regular contributor to several online brands in the horror niche.’ You can find out more about him here https://readingvicariously.net/services/.

Events

Please send us details of any online panels, conventions, festivals and workshops and we’ll list them here.

The UK Ghost Story Festival returns in 2021 for a weekend of readings, panels, workshops, talks and more! (And I’ll be there – come and say hello! – Steph)

 

Kickstarters and Gofundme!

Kickstarter from The Dread Machine

Mixtape: 1986 features dread-filled stories about latchkey kids, monsters, housewives, gamers, murderers, truckers, spies, and more. Our table of contents has already been finalized, so this Kickstarter campaign will fund printing and production of paperback and digital copies of Mixtape: 1986, including compensating our contributors. If we hit our funding goal with time to spare, we’ll activate stretch goals! Prices for all editions (e-book, paperback, hardback) of Mixtape: 1986 are specially discounted for this campaign; after this campaign ends, they will only be available at a higher retail price.

For more info, click the image.

50935000_1630932056844662_r.jpegFrom their page: ‘Don’t Go Into The Cellar! have been touring the U.K. since 2010 performing their own unique brand of Victorian Gothic theatre. However, since the lock-down was enforced all theatres have been forced to close their doors to live performances.
This campaign is to prevent our business folding.
It costs us £1000 per month to stay afloat (insurance, basic wages, website hosting, storage costs).
We broadcast fortnightly live broadcasts via our Facebook page, as part of our Sunday Down The Cellar season. These performances are free to view, but all donations are gratefully received.

https://www.facebook.com/CellarTheatre/

Please spare whatever you can to help us to continue what we do, and to keep the arts alive in our own macabre way! Thank you.’ Click the image to go to the fund page.

Happy reading.

Steph

 on behalf of Stuart and the Horror Tree Team

Trembling With Fear: Year 4 by [Stuart Conover, Stephanie Ellis] Trembling With Fear: More Tales From The Tree: Volume 3 by [Stuart Conover, Stephanie Ellis, Catherine Kenwell] Trembling With Fear: Serial Killers: Volume 2 by [Stuart Conover, Stephanie Ellis, Catherine Kenwell]

Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Tortured Willows by Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, & Angela Yuriko Smith

Disclosure:

Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken
Author: Lee Murray, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christina Sng and Geneve Flynn
Genre: Horror Poetry
Publisher: Yuriko Publishing
Release Date: 7th October, 2021

Synopsis: The willow is femininity, desire, death. Rebirth. With its ability to grow from a single broken branch, it is the living embodiment of immortality. It is the yin that wards off malevolent spirits. It is both revered and shunned.

In Tortured Willows, four Southeast Asian women writers of horror expand on the exploration of otherness begun with the Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women.

Like the willow, women have bent and bowed under the expectations and duty heaped upon them. Like the willow, they endure and refuse to break.

With exquisite poetry, Christina Sng, Angela Yuriko Smith, Lee Murray, and Geneve Flynn invite you to sit beneath the tortured willow’s gravid branches and listen to the uneasy shiver of its leaves.

Before cracking open Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken, I knew this poetry collection would be honest and raw.  However, I was not prepared for the collection’s level of horror and heartbreak. Throughout this work, it’s evident that the authors opened their veins and bled themselves onto the pages. 

Lee Murray, Geneve Flynn, Christina Sng, and Angela Yukiro Smith weave poetic tales of mental, emotional, and physical abuse against Asian women. The tales end with either the ultimate sacrifice or a rising from the flames. 

News and media talk about prejudices against Asian women. Documentaries delve into the racism and sexism that is sometimes associated with Asian diaspora. Tortured Willows takes us onto a deeper, personal level through poetry regaled to us by Asian women authors who allegorically write about experiences of cruelty from prejudice, tradition, and the patriarchy. Tortured Willows is a haunting outcry that mistreatment of women will no longer be tolerated. The representation of the willow tree symbolizes strength and tenacity. The willow bends against hard blows but never breaks—it continues to bounce back and carry on. 

Tortured Willows is a perfect accompaniment to the award-winning short story collection Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (edited by Geneve Flynn and Lee Murray) to showcase the need to move beyond antiquated roles of tradition and injustices. 

Lee Murray’s poetry is a quiet, but raw and macabre fury that unrelentingly exposes several hundreds of years of suffering and misery placed upon Asian women. Through this literary form, Murray depicts self-sacrifice as a surrender for expectations, love, and the ideal of acceptance. Her poem “Exquisite” left me in tears.

Pay attention. You think it will not matter, but it will. -Geneve Flynn

Geneve Flynn takes several poetry forms and morphs them into her own. In “Her Gradual Hero”, Flynn uses the sonnet, typically used to express love, to convey gaslighting. “Abridge” is blackout poetry executed in a spectacular fashion, and she exposes us to the pantoum (a Malay poetic form) in “When the Girls Began to Fall”. The creativity breathed into Flynn’s poetry exemplifies her writing strength and talent all the while bringing focus to inequity. Pay special attention to “Mouth, and Feet, and Hands, and Eyes” and “Inheritance”. 

Christina Sng lyrically scripts revenge for mistreatment and murder in her poetry. She is quite gifted with paranormal fiction, and through this collection she shows us that her poetry is as strong as her fiction. Sng’s work is full of sorrow and anger as her female ghosts seek revenge against those who have wronged them through racial and sexist discriminations. 

And finally, Angela Yukiro Smith poetry is a historic and cultural journey through time. Her work shines a light on matriarch celebration and casts shadows over the oppressive patriarchy. Smith’s poetry properly rounds out this full collection to show the unbendable nature of the willow and women. 

Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken is an eye-opening, soul exposing journey, and a solid continuation of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women. Both collections demonstrate that women will not go quietly into the night.

out of 5 ravens.

Available from Amazon.

Events / Magazine / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: JOURN-E Volume #1

Deadline: December 21st, 2021
Payment: 1 cent per word
Theme: Adventure, detection and mystery, fantasy, horror and the supernatural, and science fiction

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
JOURN-E: THE JOURNAL OF IMAGINATIVE LITERATURETM
 

 

  • FIRST OF ALL: READ ALL OF THE GUIDELINES BELOW BEFORE SUBMITTING. COMPLY WITH ALL OF THEM WHEN SUBMITTING.
  • ONLY PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED WORK will be considered.
  • SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS ARE ALLOWABLE, but if the work is accepted by another publication, it is expected that the author/poet/artist will immediately contact JOURN-E about the acceptance by another publishing entity. Failure to do so will result in no further acceptance of material for JOURN-E.
  • First World Publication Rights (both online and in print) are expected. With the acknowledgement that the online version will remain available for the life of the publication in its archive of issues. Reprint/Republication rights will be re-negotiated in the event of a “Best Of” future print and/or online publication. All other rights revert to the creator of the work.
  • WORD COUNT RANGES: We are looking for SHORT FICTION in the general range between 3000 to 7000 words, with the median of 5000. We are looking for SCHOLARLY NON-FICTION ARTICLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM relevant to the genres covered in a general range of from 2500 to 5000 words, with a median of 3750. We are looking for REVIEWS relevant to the genres covered in a range from 500 to 2000 words, with a median of 1250. We are looking for POETRY of between 3 and 210 lines (the length of a “Wreath of Sonnets”) with the preference in the case of longer poems for narrative and descriptive poetry over personal, especially introspective, lyric.
    • NOTE: A little leeway might be granted either below or above the abovelisted parameters.

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Articles

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How Do You Start a Chapter in a Horror Novel? 10 Examples

How Do You Start a Chapter in a Horror Novel? 10 Examples

Writing scary scenes is more than just picking a good horror or thriller premise. How you write your story determines how scared your readers will feel. Great horror stories rely on a mixture of proper pacing, refreshed tropes, twisty endings, and line breaks that have been placed strategically to build up the scary stuff. Whether you want to craft a small horror story or an amazing horror novel, the tips that we are going to share with you in this article will help you achieve your writing goals.

Starting a chapter is one of the hardest writing tasks to work on. Keep in mind that the first draft is yours. Therefore, you should spill out everything that comes to mind. However, after revising the draft, you’ll need to cut the entire information that you’ve put in the first chapters. Don’t delete any info. Instead, save it since you might need it later.

After this process, you’ll end up with opening chapters that are different from what you started with. And this should be it. Most of your original first chapters are the ones you’ll have to kill. To start the best first chapter in your horror history, you need to:

1. Use the surroundings

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Magazine / Ongoing Submissions / Online / Royalties

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Ongoing Submissions: Simily

Payment: $0.02 for every unique story view
Theme: All forms of short fiction
Note: This is NOT your standard submission call. IF the platform takes off and/or you have a strong following it could be a fantastic secondary source of income. Worth a look if you have reprints that have been out of circulation or a ton of stories sitting around.

Simily is a new platform to self-publish short stories. We believe in the power of a good story and our goal is to help writers reach new readers, hone their craft, and get paid.

 

The details:

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Anthology / Events / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Into the Forest (a women-in-horror anthology)

Deadline: December 31, 2021
Payment: 6 cents a word (USD)
Theme: Stories inspired by and featuring the BABA YAGA.
Note: Open to writers who identify as women

Deep in the dark forest, in a cottage that moves through the forest on birds’ legs behind a fence topped with human skulls, lives the baba yaga. A guardian of the water of life, she lives with her sisters and takes to the skies in a giant mortar and pestle, creating tempests as she goes. Those who come across the baba yaga may find help, or hinderance, or horror. She is wild, she is woman, she is witch—and these are her tales.

We are looking for stories inspired by and featuring the BABA YAGA.

INTO THE FOREST: Tales of the Baba Yaga is a women-in-horror anthology. All writers who identify as women are welcome to submit.
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Articles / Guest Post

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How Do Beginner Horror Writers Make Money?

How Do Beginner Horror Writers Make Money?

Many people write fiction because it is their passion. They find it amazing to weave a story together and create a masterpiece that has never existed before. This skill needs to be monetized, especially when you specialize in the horror genre. It takes something special to create a story that is intriguing and highly terrifying to the readers. However, making money as a horror writer often feels like an impossible goal to achieve. 

 

In reality, though, there are several ways that beginner horror writers can make the most of their skill by making money off it. You just may not have found them yet, but this article would show you a few ways.

 

Submit your horror stories to websites

Submitting your horror stories is one of the surest ways to make money as a writer. Several websites and magazines compile stories from different genres, including horror. Many of these websites pay you for your work and give you exposure, while others only provide you with exposure. You know which one you prefer.

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Events

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Taking Submissions: One Story Winter 2021

Deadline: November 14th, 2021
Payment: $500 and 25 contributors copies
Theme: literary fiction

Submission Periods: January 15th – May 31st | October 4th – November 14th

What kinds of stories is One Story looking for?
One Story is seeking literary fiction. Because of our format, we can only accept stories between 3,000 and 8,000 words. They can be any style and on any subject as long as they are good. We are looking for stories that leave readers feeling satisfied and are strong enough to stand alone.
Does One Story pay?
Yes. One Story pays $500 and 25 contributors copies for First Serial North American rights. All rights will revert to the author following publication.
Does One Story accept previously published material?
No. One Story is looking for previously unpublished material. However, if a story has been published in print outside of North America, it will be considered. Stories previously published online—on blogs, personal websites, online literary magazines, or forums—will not be accepted.
Does One Story accept simultaneous submissions?

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