Category: Poetry

Taking Submissions: Diet Milk Magazine Spring/Summer 2023 Issue Window

Submission Window: December 1st 2023 – January 8th, 2024
Payment: $15 per poem, $0.01 per word ($40 minimum) for short stories, and $50 per art piece via PayPal
Theme: Gothic stories, no set genre

Opens on Friday, December 1, 2023 12:00 AM UTC (in 24 days)

From December 1st – January 8th, Diet Milk Magazine will be accepting submissions for its Spring/Summer issue. We will be open to poetry, prose, and visual art of all kinds. While the most detailed information can be found on our website, here’s a quick rundown of what potential contributors need to know!

GENERAL GUIDELINES:

  • All submissions must fall under the Gothic umbrella, but aren’t required to be a specific genre
  • No reprints or multiple submissions
  • Simultaneous submissions permitted, though we ask to be informed promptly if your work is accepted elsewhere!
  • Poetry/Prose submissions should be .doc.docx, or .pdf // Art submissions should be .jpeg or .png
  • If you receive a rejection, you may submit again (with new work) immediately

P O E T R Y :

Poets may submit up to three poems at a time. No single poem should exceed five pages in length.

P R O S E :

Authors may submit one short story at a time, up to 5000 words. This doesn’t have to be on the dot, but stories exceeding 5025 words will be rejected automatically.

A R T :

Artists may submit up to two pieces at a time. We’ll consider any type of visual art. If you’re unsure whether or not your work falls into this category, query us first. Reach out to [email protected] using the subject line “QUERY: YourName [ART SUB]”. We’ll let you know within 24 hours if your preferred medium is eligible.

Responses, Rights, & Payment

  • Please allow up to three weeks for a response. After that, send a gentle nudge via email
  • Diet Milk Magazine asks for first serial rights. Upon publication, all rights revert back to the creator. A contract will be provided upon acceptance
  • All payments made via PayPal.

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Ongoing Submissions: Rising Action Review

Payment: $30
Theme: Poetry or Fiction of any genre

We aim to make submissions as easy and stress free as possible for you. We know all too well how nerve wracking it can be to share your work with a literary journal and a complicated submission process doesn’t help. We only have a few things to keep in mind when submitting, please check them out below and then send us that work already!

We proudly select some of the best pieces we receive annually to submit to Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize!

 

Fiction

Length: While we would love to read your novel someday we must ask that you limit submissions to no more than 8,000 words. This can be one story or multiple flash fiction pieces as long as they stay under the word limit.

What we want: Your best work! Any genre and any style are welcome here. Simultaneous submissions are accepted but we request that you notify us as soon as possible if your work has been accepted elsewhere. At this time we only accept submissions in English but welcome translated works.

What we don’t want: While we love all genres and styles we will not tolerate work that is homophobic, racist, sexist, transphobic or anti-semitic in nature.

Additionally, we do not accept previously published work at this time. (Email us if you have any questions regarding what counts.)

Formatting: For fiction submissions use Times New Roman or Arial font, and double space your work.

How to submit: Submissions can be sent to [email protected]  Please send your submission as an attachment (word document or pdf.) Include your name and type of submission in the subject line of your email. Example: John Doe – Fiction Submission

In the body of the message include a short third person bio. If your work is selected for publication your bio will accompany it, so include anything you want your audience to know about you. Check out the bios on some of our published work if you need inspiration. You may also include an author photo to appear next to your bio but this is optional.

What to expect: We try to review submissions as quickly as possible our usual response time is between 2-3 weeks. Feel free to follow up with us after three weeks if you still haven’t heard back.

If your work is selected for publication we will contact you about any needed edits or formatting changes and provide you with a publication date! If your piece is rejected we will offer our thoughts and welcome you to resubmit. After submitting (regardless of decision) please wait 3 months before submitting again, thank you!

Payment: Thanks to a grant that our budding press received we are now able to pay each  contributor a small stipend of $30.00 to compensate them for their work. (Please note that all authors will receive no more than 1 – $30.00 stipend (per calendar year) regardless of the number of pieces they have accepted.)

Payment will be dispersed on the date your piece is published. For U.S. writers compensation can be sent via check, Venmo, or Cash App. For international writers we currently only offer payment through Venmo and Cash App at this time. Thank you.

Technical Bits: If we publish your work on the website, we reserve first North American electronic publication rights and the right to keep it here in our archives indefinitely. All other rights remain property of the author. We also retain the right to share your work on our social media channels.

We hope to read your work soon! Thanks you for visiting us and happy writing!

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Taking Submissions: Olit Winter 2023 Reading Period

Deadline: March 31st, 2024
Payment: $10
Theme: Stories thought of as “the artfully weird” in any genre, ideally from authors from Orlando but will publish from anywhere

While we prefer writers with a connection to Orlando or the greater Central Florida area, Olit will accept quality writing meeting our aesthetic and criteria from writers anywhere around the world. What do we mean by aesthetic and criteria? We’re glad you asked.

Olit seeks the following:

Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Hybrid, Artwork, Photography. Send us all kinds of stuff. We love the artfully weird.

Strong preference for Orlando based writers/submissions about Orlando and surrounding areas.

We aim to focus primarily on publishing marginalized voices. LGBTQIA+ is a big plus with us. BIPOC voices will always be uplifted here. Disabled? Incarcerated? Low income? Other marginalized voices? Please send us your work. If you do not consider yourself marginalized, your submission is still welcome at Olit if it meets our other criteria.

Our aesthetic is best defined as gritty with grace, fast food parking lots in the middle of the night, the underbelly of a tourist city the locals know by memories. We want quality writing with heart and teeth. Give us words that bite back, stories full of verve, and the poems you wouldn’t let Grandma read. We are not the Academy/highbrow lit scene. We are indie and intellectual, raw yet polished. Send us only your best.

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Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #35

Deadline: February 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 1¢ per word, Poetry: $10 flat fee, Artwork: $25 flat fee (Cover art is $50)
Theme: Lies for Children

NonBinary Review is open for submissions on the theme of “lies for children.”

“If you keep making that face, it’ll freeze that way.” “We found you under a cabbage leaf.” “If you drink coffee, it’ll stunt your growth.” “If you go to sleep with wet hair, you’ll catch pneumonia.”

Adults tell children some outrageous lies. Think back to your own childhood and explanations your parents gave you for things you didn’t understand or superstitions they perpetuated. Why do adults feel that children need credulity-straining fictions rather than objective truths? What things do we find so uncomfortable that we can’t explain them to children? How do those lies affect our relationship with the children we lied to, or the adults who lied to us? Some of these lies are benevolent (although kind of weird), but some can be trauma-inducing. We want to hear the stories behind those lies, and the consequences they engendered.

We’re NOT looking for fairy tales, re-tellings of children’s bedtime stories, tall tales, Santa Claus/Easter bunny/tooth fairy origin stories, or any other fictions that even children know are stories told for fun.

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Taking Submissions: Reckoning 8

Deadline: September 22nd, 2023
Payment: 10 cents/word, 2 cents/word reprints, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork.
Theme: All of the current social issues that are happening

We’re very excited to announce, for the forthcoming Reckoning 8, editors Knar Gavin and Waverly SM! Read on for their issue-specific submission call.

Reckoning is a journal of creative writing on environmental justice; we’re looking for fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, poetry and art.

For Reckoning 8, we want thinking, writing and art about … this. All of this, right now. We want to hear about active resistance to the patriarchofascist, corporate-captured extractive state. Show us what it means that in order to build Cop City*, a massive facility intended to train a new generation of lethal enforcers into an institution directly descended from slave patrols, the state of Georgia and its actors must first level a forest and label protestors “domestic terrorists” as a precursor to murdering them. Help us understand how strategies of repression and control all over the world concentrate agency in the hands of the few at the expense of all other life. We are looking for work in opposition to a broad, insidious fascism that treats water, trees, and bodies as exploitable, expendable resources rather than sacred, essential components of our global, infinitely interconnected and interdependent web of life.

As always, we’re seeking work from people of all genders or none, all sexualities or none, of all neurotypes, all levels of physical ability, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, in all parts of the world. We’d love to add all languages to that, though we publish in English and are currently limited to reading submissions for potential translation in Spanish, French and Swedish.

Payment is 10 cents/word, $50/page of poetry, $50 minimum per piece of artwork. We don’t charge submission fees.

We’re always open to submissions. Deadline for Reckoning 8 is the solar equinox, September 22, 2023.

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Taking Submissions: New Myths Second 2023 Window

Deadline: July 31st, 2023
Payment: 3 cents per word for fiction and poetry, $50 for book reviews, $80 for artwork
Theme: Fantasy and Science Fiction stories
Note: This outlet does accept clearly-labeled AI generated content which will be controversial to many

Good news for 2023: NewMyths.com pay rates have doubled!

Reading past issues is the best way to know if your submission is a good fit for NewMyths.com.

We like to balance each quarterly issue between science fiction and fantasy, dark and light, serious and humorous, hard and soft science fiction, and longer and shorter works.
Our readers are not fixated on a single style or tone or genre, but prefer a
quality sample of the field. Think tapas or dim sum. Maximum length is 10,000 words.
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Taking Submissions: Solarpunk Magazine July 2023 Window

Submission Window: July 1st – 14th, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 1500-7500 words ($.08 per word, $100 minimum), Poetry: up to 5 poems or 5 pages of poems, whichever is shorter. ($40 per poem), Nonfiction: 1000-2000 words ($75 per essay or article), Cover Art: $100 for reprints, $200 for original unpublished, Interior Art: $50 for reprints, $100 for original unpublished
Theme: Hopeful short stories and poetry that strive for a utopian ideal, that are set in futures where communities are optimistically struggling to solve or adapt to climate change, to create or maintain a world in which humanity, technology, and nature coexist in harmony rather than in conflict.

All submissions to Solarpunk Magazine are done via Moksha. Any submissions received via email will be deleted without a response. Please don’t email us to describe your story and ask if it’s something we’d be interested in before submitting. We appreciate the consideration, but its easier if you just submit the story through Moksha.

Please read the full submission guidelines on down below or on our Moksha page before submitting your work. All submission periods end at 11:59 pm PST on the 14th of their given month.

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Taking Submissions: parABnormal Magazine 2023 – Second Call

Deadline: July 31st, 2023
Payment: $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. $5.00 for interior art
Theme: The paranormal

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.

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…

What We Want

The subject matter of parABnormal Magazine is, yes, the paranormal. For us, this includes ghosts, spectres, haunts, various whisperers, and so forth. It also includes shapeshifters and creatures from various folklores.

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