Category: Flash

Flash Fiction

Taking Submissions: Astrolabe First 2025 Window

Submission Window: March 20th – April 20th, 2025
Payment: $50 upon publication
Theme: Stories about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection in all genres with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit

Please read below for details about our next submission window, guidelines, honorariums, and rights.

At Astrolabe, we’re looking for work about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection. Into the woods. Across a line. Beneath the ocean. Along a seam. Into the branches of an alternate present or the crevasse of an alternate future. Across the rifts between one another.

And then, once we find one other, the myths we make.

We’re excited to see as many interpretations of this broad theme as there are stars in the night sky.

We’re open to work of all genres, with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit.

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Taking Submissions: Plott Hound Magazine March 2025 Window

Submission Window: March 1st – 15th, 2025
Payment: Fiction: 8 cents per word, Poetry: $50, Non-fiction: $100
Theme: Stories with anthropomorphized animals as protagonists in any realm of speculative fiction

Submission Periods:
The publishing schedule is quarterly/seasonly. Submission calls open at the start of each season, close in the middle of the first month for reading and responses, and issues aim to be released by the end of the season.

Spring: March 1-March 15, 2025

Summer: June 1-June 15, 2025

Fall: September 1-September 15, 2025

Winter: December 1-December 15, 2025

PROSE Submission Guidelines
-Word limit for original short fiction: 1000 (minimum) – 5000 words (maximum) (sweet spot/preferred: 3000 – 4000 words)

-Maximum word limit for original flash fiction: 999 words

-Reprints: not accepted at this time (unless we meet the Kickstarter stretch goal for 2025!)

-Pay rate: 8 cents/word

-Format: Standard Manuscript Format. 12 point Times New Roman, double spaced, .doc or .docx files. Mailing address and phone number are not required on the header.

-Simultaneous submissions are allowed! Just make sure to give us a howl if your submission has been accepted elsewhere before we make a decision on it.

-Cover letter: please include author name, name of submission, word count, publishing credits (if applicable), any experience pertinent to the story. (For example, if you are a marine biologist and your story features marine animals, do mention that!) Inclusion of content warnings is optional. Do not summarize your story in the cover letter; let the submission speak for itself.

-Translations to English: allowed, welcome, and encouraged! They must be original short fiction or flash within the corresponding word limits. In the cover letter, please state that the work is translated into English from (original language), and include names of the original author and translator.

Plott Hound Magazine welcomes and encourages submissions from writers of all races, religion (creed), gender expression, sexual orientation, age, ancestry, disability, marital status, and military status.

-Stories should be submitted through Moksha (not available yet; link will be provided here when submissions open). Please do not submit through email or postal service.

POETRY Submission Guidelines

Plott Hound publishes 1-3 poems per issue. We’d love to see animal-centric speculative poems in all forms, from free verse to a sonnet to a canto in terza rima.

-Send 1-5 poems/up to 5 pages in a single document.

-Maximum submission length: please send no more than 5 pages (i.e. if you have a single 5-page poem, please send only one poem).

-Format: 12 pt serif font (Courier, Times), single space. See Shunn’s poetry manuscript format.

-Pay rate: $50

-Reprints, simultaneous submissions, and other logistics: see Prose Submission Guidelines above

What We’re Looking For:
-Stories with anthropomorphized animals as protagonists

-Animal-centric speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror)

-Underrepresented voices (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, neurodivergent) that engage with animal myths, tales, and futures

-Stories with uncommonly written about animals as protagonists

-Stories that dig deep into the senses and experience of animals

-Stories that explore the cultures and societies of animals, not just cultures and societies with animals. Think of rabbit language and warren infrastructure in Watership Down, or the clans and warrior code of feral cats in Warriors.

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Taking Submissions: A Coup Of Owls Summer 2025 Issue (Early Listing)

Submission Window: March 1st – 7th, 2025
Payment: Drabbles and Flash – £5, Short Stories 1001 to 4000 words – £10, Short Stories 4001 to 8000 words – £15
Theme: Stories you’ve poured your soul into but haven’t been able to find the right home for. We do not have set issue themes but feel free to be inspired by the season, seasonal occasions and events.
Note: Only publishes creators from under represented and/or marginalized communities.

WE ONLY PUBLISH CREATORS FROM UNDER REPRESENTED AND/OR MARGINALISED BACKGROUNDS AND/OR COMMUNITIES

We don’t ask for any proof, we take this on trust with the expectation that anyone not from a marginalised background or underrepresented community wouldn’t take up the space of someone who is. We ask you to consider this before submitting.

QUARTERLY ONLINE ANTHOLOGY: BRIEF

We’re looking for stories you’ve poured your soul into but haven’t been able to find the right home for. We’re looking for stories that make us feel something.

Warmth, love, melancholy, rage. We want it all.

All genres, styles and themes will be considered and we especially love stories that are outside the box in their telling. Ambiguous endings? Non-linear storytelling? Antagonist’s point-of-view? A story told in just one scene? We love it all.

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Taking Submissions: The First Line – Summer 2025

Deadline: May 1st, 2025
Payment: $25.00 – $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 – $10.00 for poetry
Theme: Story must begin with: No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury.

We love that writers around the world are inspired by our first lines, and we know that not every story will be sent to us. However, we ask that you do not submit stories starting with our first lines to other journals (or post them online on public sites) until we’ve notified you as to our decision (usually four weeks after the deadline). When the entire premise of the publication revolves around one sentence, we don’t want it to look as if we stole that sentence from another writer. If you have questions, feel free to drop us a line.

Also, we understand that writers may add our first line to a story they are currently working on or have already completed, and that’s cool. But please do not add our first line to a previously published story and submit it to us. We do not accept previously published stories, even if they have been repurposed for our first lines. And, just to be clear, we do not accept simultaneous submissions.

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Taking Submissions: Sundog Literature 2025 Window #1

Deadline: March 1st – May 1st, 2025
Payment: $50
Theme: Writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in.

Schedule

We publish two issues a year, September 1 and March 1. We accept general submissions for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction between two reading periods, and the first 300 submissions to each are free. We also run a collaborative writing contest in August. We also accept visual art all year.

    • General Submissions: March 1 – May 1
    • General Submissions: October 1 – December 1
    • Collaboration Contest: July 15 –  August 31

Payment

We are thrilled to finally be able to say that, starting with issue 17, we will be able to offer our contributors a small payment of $50 upon publication.

A Note on Our Aesthetic

We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color.

We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished.

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Ongoing Submissions: Jupiter’s Eye

Payment: Original Stories: $30.00, Reprint Stories: $15.00, Flash Fiction: 1 cent/word, Poems: $5.00, Articles and reviews: $10.00
Theme: Original science fiction stories about the exploration and settlement of other worlds

Jupiter’s Eye is a digest published three times a year, in April, August, and December, in print and digitally. It presents original science fiction stories about the exploration and settlement of other worlds. It also presents one or two original fantasy stories along that same theme. Although it does consider darker sf/f, it
does not present horror. It also presents a few original poems, again consistent with the overall theme.

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Ongoing Submissions: Incensepunk Magazine

Payment: $100 and royalties of the profits from the magazine
Theme: High tech, high church. A literary magazine on the intersection of faith and sci-fi.

Length: About 4,000 to 6,000 words

Pay: $100, plus lifetime “paid” subscription to Incensepunk Magazine. Stories included in annual anthology also receive pro-rata share of 50% of profits (each story’s author receiving a share from that 50% proportioned by the length of their contribution to the total length of the book) and a print copy of the anthology. See the sample contract for details.

Rights: First digital print plus one-time non-exclusive digital and print rights for the annual anthology.

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Taking Submissions: The Morning After

Deadline: June 1st, 2025
Payment: AU 1c/word
Theme: What happens to a person after a major transformation

Submissions open until 1st June 2025

The Morning After is an anthology about what happens after a sudden transformation. This could be an individual person transforming into something new or a mass change that effects humanity as a whole. How does this person or society react to no longer being human?

As an editor, I am keen to see how people react in this unique situation. Focus on struggles and adaptation to new forms are highly encouraged.

Despite the name of the anthology, the story does not need to begin with waking up in this new reality – but it should start shortly after the transformation has taken place.

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