Category: Flash

Flash Fiction

Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Reprints Allowed

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Taking Submissions: parABnormal Magazine 2025 – Second Call

Submission Window: June 1st – July 31st, 2025
Payment: Fiction: $25.00 for original stories, $7.00 for reprints, $6.00 for each poem, $20.00 for original articles, $6.00 for reprints. $7.00 for reviews and interviews.
Theme: Paranormal – this includes ghosts, spectres, haunts, various whisperers, and so forth. It also includes shapeshifters and creatures from various folklores.

Submissions are accepted Feb 1 – Mar 31, Jun 1 – Jul 31, Oct 1 – Nov 30.

Anything submitted outside those periods will be deleted unread.

We no longer accept simultaneous or multiple submissions.

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No matter how far we move forward as humans, we are still bound by the instincts and ancestral memories of our animalistic past. None of these are so strong as the fight or flight response. However, there are times when we seem to be perfectly safe, completely at ease and comfortable, when that urge to run from something sneaks up on us. What causes these sensations? Is there something lurking in the darkness? Why is that man giving you the creeps, he’s not even looking at you? And yet, there is something odd. Something instinctual, something you know without fully understanding. We may have moved on, we may have forgotten and left behind those old stories and legends of beasts, voracious monsters, and dark spirits… But they have not forgotten or left us…

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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Flat Amount

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Taking Submissions: Family, Fae, Fiend, Friend, and Foe

Submission Window: June 1st – July 31st, 2025
Payment: $10 or a contributors copy
Theme: Speculative stories featuring a family with at least one type of supernatural family member

THREE COUSINS PUBLISHING, an imprint of WEST MESA PRESS, will be accepting submissions for its fourth annual anthology with the working title, Family, Fae, Fiend, Friend, and Foe from June 1, 2025 until midnight July 31, 2025. Stories submitted before or after the submission period will not be considered.
This is a themed anthology and stories that don’t fit the theme will be rejected. Submissions must be speculative and feature a family with some type of supernatural family member or members. Vampires and fairies, gnomes and zombies, leprechauns, bigfeet, ghouls, and poltergeists are all welcome. Horror, humor, fantasy, science fiction, or even an entertaining, but bizarre mashup of genres that we haven’t considered. Your characters may be young or old and the time frame may be from the dawn of mankind to the far future. Here’s the short list of guidelines. Pay attention, please. These are important.

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Pro / Reprints Allowed / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Cosmic Roots And Eldritch Shores June 2025 Window

Submission Window: June 1st – 2nd, 2025
Payment: 8 cents per word for original, 2 cents for reprints, For artwork: $10 for the non-exclusive right to use each image, for as long as the site is online.  If we publish a print collection we will pay a pro-rata share for each image used.
Theme: Well written original work in science fiction, fantasy, myth, legend, fairy tales, and eldritch, in written, podcast, video, and/or graphic story form, and from around the world.
Note: Reprints welcome

 

 

Submissions Schedule

The first and second day of every month, 12 am of the 1st to 12 am of the 3rd, E.S.T.

For reading impaired individuals, our submissions manager and ‘forget password’ have a captcha compatible with screen readers.

We pay 8¢ per word for new fiction, 2¢ per word for fiction reprints, 2 – 8¢ per word for new fact-based work, 1- 4¢ per word for reprinted fact articles.
For new poetry, we pay $1 per line, and for reprints we pay 50¢ a line  We’re looking for poems up to 40 lines. We’ll consider longer poems but that would be a hard sell, and words over 40 lines would be paid at 8¢ per word.

We sponsor The Kepler Award to recognize and encourage writers of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories that creatively extrapolate on known science in constructive and exciting ways. You can learn aboutThe Kepler Award here.

You can read a copy of our standard contract here.   It can be varied as needed to include the rights of translators, voice actors, etc.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Online / Royalties

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Taking Submissions: Short Story Substack June 2025 Window

Submission Window: June 1st – 30th, 2025
Payment: $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue
Theme: Any genre, short story

Mission = Revive the art of the short story, support artists, and produce something wonderful.

Payout = Base Pay of $100 for the chosen story + 50% of subscription revenue to be sent by Paypal, Zelle, or check.

Wait, you mean if this substack gets thousands of subscribers, the winner would get thousands of dollars?

Yes! The New Yorker pays roughly $7,500 per story and I sincerely hope to go way past that.

What does the timeline look like?

Submit stories by the end of the month, winner to be announced on the 15th. There is ONE story that wins and receives the full payout.

Where do I send submissions?
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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Reprints Allowed / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Behind the Revolving Door, an Anthology of Choices

Deadline: June 1st, 2025
Payment: 1 cent per word or a flat $10 for reprints
Theme: A story with a choice being made is central to the entire plot of the tale
Note: Reprints welcome

Behind the Revolving Door, an Anthology of Choices is the fifth anthology from Celestial Echo Press. The theme is the choices we make.

Each of us makes a multitude of choices daily, some minor and some with major consequences. Do you or don’t you wear your lucky shirt to the sports event? What do you think the consequences would be if you didn’t wear your lucky shirt?

This anthology will be a collection of stories that take the reader on a journey with the author’s protagonist as they go through a trial and are forced to take an action, to make a choice. For example, does the character find a wallet on the ground? Do they open it? Return it to the owner, or keep it? What are the consequences? Do they encounter a second choice, thus going back through the revolving door? Do they find classified information, implicating a family member in a coup? What do they do with it? Is the character hiking through the woods only to find a portal, not knowing where it will take them if they enter? What happens? Is it so bad that they try to return, hence going through the revolving door? There are many, many ways this theme can be interpreted.

We believe authors can give us a great story by fleshing out the characters and plot. We’re asking for a minimum of 500 words, maximum 4,000 words.

The revolving door on the cover will not be required in the story. If a door and/or a revolving door is in the story, that will be a plus. All fiction (humor, horror, romance, fantasy, etc.) is welcome, except erotica. Send us well-written stories that make us think about the choice the protagonist made, that make us think about the story after we’ve closed the book. Give us new, fresh stories. Authors have free rein how to interpret this theme. We can’t wait to read your story.

Uninvited are screenplays, poetry, and nonfiction. Also uninvited are stories that are publicly available on any website, such as a Facebook page. We will not accept stories with graphic porn and yes, we’ll know bad taste when we see it. We want YA readers to enjoy the published anthology without parental balking. Also uninvited are stories over the maximum of 4000 words. They will be rejected immediately. Don’t write on the Google form that your story is 4000 words and send us one that’s 10K. We’ll know.
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Anthology / Events / Flash / Reprints Allowed / Semipro

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Taking Submissions Self (S)care Anthology May Window

Submission Window: May 15th-31st, 2025
Payment: 2 cents per word
Theme: Reprints of self-published horror stories

Calling all self-published horror authors! Get those short stories ready! Open submissions begin next week for this brand-new anthology geared toward spotlighting the best in indie horror!

In this unique collaboration project, Paul Carro and Candace Nola have teamed up to create a new opportunity for self-published authors! The incredibly talented Laurel Hightower is on-board to write the foreword, and the book will be published in all formats by Uncomfortably Dark Horror.

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Events / Flash / Online / Pro

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Taking Submissions: Anomaly June 2025 Window

Submission Window: June 1st – 7th, 2025
Payment: 8 cents per word
Theme: Dark and disruptive SF stories that have strong emotional resonance under 300 words in length

We open from the 1st-7th of each month, beginning April 2025.

What we want: Anomaly is interested in science fiction stories under 300 words in length, for publication on their Patreon, with the right to collect stories into a future anthology. We’re looking for dark and disruptive stories that have strong emotional resonance. We like stories that stick with us after reading, that get us thinking about the twisted use of technologies, the way the world may be, or how characters might react to an evolving technological future.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Non-fiction / Poetry

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Taking Submissions: The First Line – Fall 2025

Deadline: August 1st, 2025
Payment: $25.00 – $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 – $10.00 for poetry
Theme: Story must begin with: Her truck took the sharp turns of the mountain road with ease.

Fall:
Her truck took the sharp turns of the mountain road with ease.
Due date: August 1, 2025

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.

One more thing while I’ve got you here: Writers compete against one another for magazine space, so, technically, every literary magazine is running a contest. There are, however, literary magazines that run traditional contests, where they charge entry fees and rank the winners. We do not – nor will we ever – charge a submission fee, nor do we rank our stories in order of importance. Occasionally, we run contests to help come up with new first lines, or we run fun, gimmicky competitions for free stuff, but the actual journal is not a contest in the traditional sense.

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