The Horror Tree

Category: Flash

Flash Fiction

Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Online

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Taking Submissions: Micro Madness For September 2021

Deadline: August 7th, 2021
Payment: 1st place : $100 2nd place: $50 3rd place: $25
Theme: Flash fiction (500 words or less) that can be classified as cosmic horror, dark science fiction, or weird.

CHM wants to find the very best cosmic horror flash fiction. SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT.

Submissions will be ongoing and open the first week of every month for that month’s contest. THREE stories will be chosen per month to be published the month after they were submitted. (If you submit a story on October 3rd and it is chosen, it will be published in November.)
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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: Arthropoda

Deadline: August 7th, 2021
Payment: $20 and a contributor’s copy
Theme: Speculative poetry and short fiction with monstrous, mythical, or mechanical arthropods

Do you have a story or poem featuring insects, crustaceans, arachnids, or myriapods? We want to publish it!

We are looking for speculative poetry and short fiction with monstrous, mythical, or mechanical arthropods for our upcoming Arthropoda anthology!

The call is open to original fiction and reprints, poetry and short fiction up to 45 lines and 7,500 words respectively.

Please submit no more than two short stories. Shunn manuscript format, simultaneous submissions permitted.

Deadline August 7, 2021. (more…)

Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: Last Girls Club Fall Issue 2021

Deadline: August 1st, 2021
Payment: Short Story-2,500 words or less. $20 upon acceptance and a digital copy of the magazine issue Poems-less than 200 words $10 upon acceptance and a digital copy of the magazine issue
Theme: Dark Shadows: The Gay 90s; closeted, cast out, or converted. Short stories and poems from the female gaze.

The Last Girls Club

The Last Girls Club Magazine is a quarterly feminist horror magazine that publishes international short stories and poems from the female gaze. It is an homage to the scary comics and zines of the late 20th century. Please check on the website for the theme in detail.

  • Submissions will be accepted from Jan 1-Feb 1, April 1-May 1, July 1-Aug 1, Oct 1-Nov 1.
  • Final notifications will be Feb 15, May 15, Aug 15, Nov 15.
  • No more than two fiction stories per author per submission period.
  • Fiction is limited to 2,500 words or less.
  • Flash fiction must be under 1,000 words, no more than two from an author.
  • No more than three poems per poet.
  • Poems are limited to 200 words or less for each poem.
  • I prefer to use PayPal to pay authors, but will work with authors where PayPal is not available.
  • Nonfiction columns will must be pitched to editor in chief before submission. Email your idea to [email protected]

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: Contrary Autumn 2021 Issue

Deadline: September 1st, 2021
Payment: $20
Theme: We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end?

“Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and recombine and fabricate and juggle until something that I have never experienced is experienced. The process is alchemical. The process is violent. It goes to the heart of creativity. It disrupts and shatters. It is splendid with provocation. It is an aggression against banality. It is sharp and loud like a janitor scraping frost from a window. The hectic bounce of steam on a street after a truck roars by. The anarchy of waters, the comedy of the face, dangerous feelings vented from a cage of skin.” ~ John Olson

Poetry — We believe poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. We look especially for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation of beauty and concern. Contrary’s poetry in particular often mimics the effects of fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally contrary toward form – they tug on the forces of exposition or narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of all the poetic forms we publish. Please consider that Contrary receives vast amounts of poetry and that we can publish only a small percentage of that work. Please submit no more than three poems per issue. Our poetry editor is Shaindel Beers.
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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: From The Yonder Volume III

Deadline: September 19th, 2021
Payment: $5 (USD) per poem, $10 (USD) per short story, and a contributor’s copy depending on location
Theme: Regional legends and tall-tales from around the World.

 

War Monkey Publications, LLC, is pleased to announce open submissions for our upcoming anthology:
FROM THE YONDER
Volume III
A horror, short-story collection of regional legends and tall-tales from around the World.
Our Staff so loved working on the first volume, we’ve decided to keep doing it.
 
We are seeking short story submissions (1000-7500 words) for this anthology. The stories must be based upon a regional/cultural legend or tall-tale from any location or culture in the World. “Regional” can be a specific place (Loch Ness) or a larger region (Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest).
We are seeking stories in the horror genre. Inclusion of elements of other genres is welcome, so long as, overall, the story is an horror story. The subject of the story can be based on any legend, so long as it has a horrific flavor. Ghosts, hauntings, alien abductions, monsters, demons, spirits, witches, etc, all are acceptable, as long as the subject is based on an actual legend or tall-tale.
We want an original story involving the legend. Don’t rehash the legend itself or write an essay on the tall-tale. Instead, for example, WOW us with a new fable of some poor unfortunate who finds out that legends are sometimes all too real.
For more examples; read FROM THE YONDER; Volume I (published in February 2020)

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Starward Shadows Quarterly Issue #1

Deadline: August 6th, 2021
Payment: $0.01 per word for each accepted short story, $10 for each accepted flash piece.
Theme: All forms of dark speculative fiction, see below

Starward Shadows Quarterly is an online dark speculative fiction magazine seeking stories between 500 and 8,000 words. We’re interested in exploring the wicked, strange places that walk the line between reality and nightmare—the alien, the absurd, and above all else, the weird.

Short fiction, flash, and artwork submissions are currently OPEN!

Genres We Accept:

Cosmic Horror, Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, High/Epic Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Lovecraftian/Cthulhu Mythos inspired tales, Gothic Horror, Space Opera, Dark Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, New Weird, Grimdark, Slipstream, and Cyberpunk. However, feel free to send us anything that falls under the incredibly broad umbrella of “speculative fiction.”

Inspirational authors:

H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Moorcock, J. R. R. Tolkien, Christopher Ruocchio, Tamsyn Muir, Robert E. Howard

Things we love:

Monsters, vampires, aliens, psychological horror, first-person unreliable narrators, eloquence, themes of neurodivergence, angst done right (think “Interview with the Vampire), death cults, weird religious undertones, wraiths, trickster kings, black metal, stories where the bad guys win, character-driven narratives, and stories that take place somewhere strange and far away where humanity isn’t even mentioned at all.

Anything with a Dark Souls, Morrowind, or Oblivion vibe will have us foaming at the mouth. Also, one of the editors has also had a lifelong, questionable obsession with A Clockwork Orange and those old Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comics . . .

Things we hate:

Post-apocalyptic settings, dystopian fiction, parodies, rock-hard SF, zombies, mermaids, sirens, pandemic stories (we lived it and we’re sick of it), and political and/or moral soapboxes. If you’re going to send us anything falling into these categories, you’d better have completely and utterly reinvented it for it not to get auto-rejected.
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Events / Flash / Semipro

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Contest: Crystal Lake Publishing Shallow Waters Contest: Clowns, Carnivals, and Sideshows!

Deadline: February 28th, 2021
Payment: $0.03 per word and inclusion in an anthology
Theme: Clowns, Carnivals, and Sideshows!
Note: Apologies for the quick deadline, I missed this being posted

Your March theme is…

Clowns, Carnivals and Sideshows!

Authors, you have up to 1,000 words to write a Dark Fiction / Horror story based on this theme. The submission deadline is end of February at midnight. Please send your submission in the body of an email to [email protected], with the title of your story as the subject email.

Payment includes $0.03 per word, publication in an upcoming Shallow Waters anthology, and an author spotlight on our Patreon page and newsletter. We’ll post the best stories here on Patreon for our $5 and higher patrons to read, after which they’ll vote for the winner. Authors are not allowed to vote for their own stories.

Have fun!

Via: Crystal Lake Publishing’s Patreon.

Anthology / Flash / Flat Amount / Ongoing Submissions / Reprints Allowed

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Ongoing Submissions: Shelter of Daylight

Payment: Original Stories: $25.00, Reprint Stories: $15.00, Flash Fiction: 1 cent/word, Poems: $5.00, Articles: $20.00
Theme: Original science fiction and fantasy stories that are upbeat and positive in their mood
Note: Reprints Welcome

Shelter of Daylight began with Sam’s Dot Publishing back around the turn of the decade. After some years, it was discontinued. Now, under Hiraeth Books, it has revived.

Shelter of Daylight is now published semi-annually, in January and in July, in print [and, eventually, as an eBook]. It presents original science fiction and fantasy stories that are upbeat and positive in their mood. It also presents a few original poems, again along the overall mood.

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Shelter of Daylight wants original stories with plot, tension, suspense, conflict, and character development. Remember, if readers do not care what happens to your main character[s], they won’t read the story. The narrative should maintain a sense of wondering what’s going to happen next; of what’s lurking just around the corner. Showing is better than telling. Frex, instead of telling the reader that it’s cold, show your character shivering, stomping feet, or having ice form on beard or hair. The inner thoughts and emotions of your character[s] are just as important.

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Stories submitted to Shelter of Daylight should be between 4K and 8K words long. Longer or shorter stories will be considered; however, anything less than 4K will be a difficult sell. Anything 1K or less will be considered flash fiction. We will consider reprint stories, provided they adhere to the guidelines; however, they are difficult sells.

Submit your stories as rtf or .doc attachments [NO .docx, please] to sdpshowcase at yahoo dot com [you must recombine this address for it to work. Sorry for the inconvenience. Blame spammers].

Please submit one story at a time, and wait for the response before submitting another. We hope to keep the response time down to two months. If you haven’t heard from us in three months, please query.

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