Category: Events

Taking Submissions: khōréō July 2025 Window

Submission Window: July 1st – 31st, 2025
Payment: 10 cents per word
Theme: Fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and any genre in between or around it, as long as there’s a speculative element.
Note: You must identify as an immigrant or member of a diaspora in the broadest definitions of the terms. This includes, but is not limited to, first- and second-generation immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, persons who identify with one or more diaspora communities, persons who have been displaced or whose heritage has been erased due to colonialism/imperialism, and anyone whose heritage and history includes ‘here and elsewhere’.

khōréō is a quarterly publication of stories, essays, and art: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, and any genre in between or around it, as long as there’s a speculative element. We’re especially interested in writing and art that explore some aspect of migration, whether explicitly (themes of immigration, colonialism, etc.), metaphorically, or with a sly nod and a wink. Most importantly, we’re a new magazine and we’re still finding our identity: therefore, please don’t self-reject because you’re not sure if your work is a good fit. We won’t know until we see it, so please give us a chance to look!

See submission requirements & how to submit at the following pages:

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Epeolatry Book Review: Enough Time by J. Edwin Buja

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: Enough Time
Author: J. Edwin Buja
Genre: horror, time travel, paranormal
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
Publication date: 2nd May, 2025

Synopsis: In a paranormal tale that blends time travel, reincarnation, and historical horror fiction, you’re too late to save the love of your life from being murdered. This tragic history repeats itself every forty years, but now it’s only been thirty-five years and it’s time to break the cycle.
In 2020, Emma Ranahan laments that her annual torment is about to begin again. Every January, she has horrible nightmares about torture and murder. None of it makes any sense to her. The only thing she remembers clearly are the words Hero, Victim, Beast, and Friend.
In 1865, Colonel Beauregard Kensington, war hero, psychopath, racist, and cannibal, butchers former slave Emmeline Ronaghan. Captain Philip Daweson, pays with his life, but is unable to prevent the murder of the woman he loves. Major Obadiah O’Dale kills the colonel and cleans up the mess.
In 1905, 1945, and 1985, descendants of the original four players re-enact the events with the same tragic results.
Imagine Somewhere in Time with lots of blood.
Having started early, will the scenario play out again, or can the cycle of death be stopped? And is everyone who they think they are?
With a violent paranormal romance and a female protagonist desperate to change her fate, this supernatural horror book will leave readers captivated by its dark and tragic love story.

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Taking Submissions: Cosmic Roots And Eldritch Shores July 2025 Window

Submission Window: July 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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Taking Submissions: Inner Worlds, July 2025 Window

Submission Window: July 1 – 14 Members of marginalised groups only. July 15 – 31 General submissions.
Payment: £0.02 per word
Theme: Science fiction, fantasy, or supernatural horror prose with a strong emotional or psychological focus.

What to submit

  • Science fiction, fantasy, or supernatural horror prose with a strong emotional or psychological focus. We are mainly interested in fiction, but we’re open to speculative memoir or creative non fiction, as long as it has speculative elements. Please see ‘What We Like’ below for some examples.
  • Stories in English, between 500 and 2,500 words.
  • Please send only one story at a time.
  • Simultaneous submissions (when you send your story to more than one magazine at once) are welcome, please just let us know straight away by emailing us at ourinnerworlds[at]protonmail.com if your story is accepted elsewhere and you need to withdraw it.
  • Reprints are welcome, as long as they’re not already available somewhere free to read online.

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Taking Submissions: Mistletoe and Vine (Hawthorn & Ash Vol 7, 2025)

Deadline: December 31st, 2025
Payment: 0.01c per word. (between $1USD and $5USD)
Theme: Fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror (no scifi) between 100-500 words

We are seeking FANTASY, SPECULATIVE FICTION and HORROR short stories. No Science Fiction.

Mistletoe and Vine (Hawthorn & Ash Vol 7, 2025)

Past volumes are: Hawthorn & Ash 2019, Rowan & Oak 2020, Alder & Ebony 2021, Ivy & Sage 2022, Willow & Rose 2023, Holly and Broom 2024)

Word count : Between 100 and 500 words, excluding title (Maximum of 1 500 word story and 5 drabbles per author)

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Epeolatry Book Review: Midnight Streets by Phil Lecomber

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: Midnight Streets
Author: Phil Lecomber
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication date: 18th March, 2025

Synopsis: A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.

 

When Cockney private detective George Harley saves a young girl’s life on a dark London night in 1929, he doesn’t realise it marks the beginning of an investigation which will change his life forever. The incendiary novel which inspired the girl’s abduction also seems to be linked to a series of grisly murders that are taking place on Harley’s patch, and though he’s delighted to be asked by Scotland Yard to help find the killer before they strike again, he could do without the local razor- and cosh-wielding mobsters thinking he’s a police informant.

 

Set during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, Harley’s world is a far cry from the country house of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. This working-class sleuth does his ‘sherlocking’ in the frowzy alleyways and sleazy nightclubs of Soho – the city’s underbelly – peopled with lowlife ponces, jaded streetwalkers, and Jewish and Maltese gangsters: a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake cigarettes.

 

Here, the midnight streets are black as pitch and, as Harley finds himself embroiled in the macabre mysteries of a city in which truth is as murky as the pea-souper smog, he begins to realise he may never find a way out.

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Taking Submissions: Last Girls Club Fall Issue 2025 (Early)

Submission Window: July 1st – 15th, 2025
Payment: Short Story-2,500 words or less. $0.015 USD per word/$37.50 USD max, Poems-less than 200 words $10, Flash Fiction-less than a 1,000 words $0.015 USD per word/$15 USD max
Theme: Monkey’s Paw/Answered Prayers

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.

This season’s theme is Monkey’s Paw/Answered Prayers. You’ve got everything you ever wanted and it’s awful. More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Show us the folly of wishes. Terrify us with consequences. Keep us up at night dreading a knock on the door or an envelope in the mail.
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Taking Submissions: Sundog Literature 2025 Collaboration Contest

Deadline: July 15th – August 31st, 2025
Prizes: Winners will receive a $300 prize
Theme: Your wildest, most inventive work of any or mixed genre

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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