Category: Pro

Taking Submissions: I Want That Twink OBLITERATED!

Deadline: December 17th, 2023
Payment: 9 cents per word
Theme: Science-fiction, fantasy and horror, inspired by classic pulp magazines, starring LGBTQIA+ heroes and villains.

IWTTO! is seeking classic pulp adventures centring non-traditionally masculine queer heroes and villains. If you’ve ever found yourself reading Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber, and just wanted it to be more sodding gay then this anthology is for you.

Whether fantasy, science-fiction or horror, we want to prove that hetero himbos don’t hold a monopoly on giant swords. We want out and proud thrill-rides starring queers who don’t give a frack what society says. Smash systems, kiss boys, be gay do crime. Concept: Pulp-inspired science fiction, fantasy and horror that explores or subverts classic genre tropes through queer protagonists and villains, particularly those who are non-traditionally masculine.

What we’re looking for: Stories that take full advantage of pulp excess (“more is more”), and that have queerness at their core. The Editors take a broad definition of queer and we want to see stories that speak to our own community. We love our LGBTQIA+ heroes AND villains, and are just as eager for queer rage blood baths as we are for Flash-Gordon-style space opera. Bring us your femboy starship captains, bring us to trans berserkers fuelled by queer rage, bring us your literal demon twinks. Most of all, bring us stories that make you shriek…

“I Want That Twink OBLITERATED!”

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Taking Submissions: We Are All Thieves of Somebody’s Future (Early)

Submission Window: November 1st – December 31st, 2023
Payment: 8 cents per word
Theme: Resource Scarcity

We are seeking stories for an anthology to be titled We Are All Thieves of Somebody’s Future which will collect stories with the theme: Resource Scarcity – using up the last of a critical resource and dealing with the aftermath. While stories could be dystopic (ex. the last tree), authors could also explore hopepunk (losing a resource leads to something unforeseen and positive), solarpunk (a pollution laden resource leads to a better solution), fantasy (the last dragon). We are open to all genres. All stories are requested to be between 1000 and 3000 words in length.
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Taking Submissions: ‘Familiar’ and ‘Last-Ditch’

Deadline: December 31st, 2023
Payment: 8 cents per word and royalties
Themes: ‘Familiar’: Familiars of any type (cats, dragons, etc) for any genre of speculative fiction and for ‘Last-Ditch’: Science Fiction or Fantasy stories of back-against-the-wall, desperate purpose–Hail Marys launched when hope seems lost for spies.

The FAMILIARS, LAST-DITCH, and AMPYRIUM anthology Kickstarter (back us at http://tinyurl.com/ZNBKickstarter2023) has hit its goal! If you have a story idea that fits one of the anthology themes for FAMILIARS or LAST-DITCH, write it up, revise it, polish it, and send it in for consideration. I’ve posted the abridged guidelines below. You can find more detailed submission guidelines at http://zombiesneedbrains.moksha.io. AMPYRIUM will NOT have an open call for submissions, since it is establishing a new shared fantasy world. We hope to do an open call for submissions set in this world next year.
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Taking Submissions: Here There Be Dragons (Early)

Submission Window: October 1st – January 1st, 2024
Payment: 8 cents/word for the first 3000 words and 3 cents/word thereafter., Poetry shall be paid at $1.00/line., Art shall be paid at $30/piece., Cover art shall be paid $300
Theme: Dragons of all types

Dragons are icons of fantasy and legends about them abound. Found in novels, poetry, and art, they stir the imagination as helpers, heroes, villains, and symbols of love, fear, and wealth. We are looking for renderings of dragons in writing and art that capture the essence of these fascinating creatures.

The anthology will be open for submissions from 1 October 2023 to 1 January 2024 or if filled before. Publication will be on or about 15 June 2024. Response to submissions should take 60 days. If you submit and do not receive a response of acceptance or rejection of your work by then, contact us.

Should insufficient interest be shown for the anthology, any contributors who have submitted will be advised by 1 January 2024 and the anthology will be canceled. Any remuneration previously paid will be retained by the author/artist.

WHAT WE WANT

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Taking Submissions: The Map of Lost Places (Early)

Submission Window: December 1st – 31st, 2023
Payment: 8 cents per word and a contributors copy
Theme: Stories about places where weird things happen

Editors Sheree Renée Thomas and Lesley Conner are looking for stories about places where weird things happen. Places that have strange histories, their own traditions and customs, their own dangers. These can be based off real folk tales or old wives tales – think the Mothman in Point Pleasant, WV – or ones that you come up with all on your own. But your story should tell of someone going to one of these places – either intentionally or they just stumble across it – and what happens when they encounter the frightening/strange thing that is in or occurs in that location.

Depending on the Map of Lost Places Kickstarter funding level, we expect to fill the anthology with eight to twelve original stories selected from an open reading period. The Kickstarter will launch on October 10 – click here to be notified as soon as it happens!

In order to avoid duplicates in the open submission call, locations already chosen by the featured authors are listed below. This list will be updated as the authors make their decisions, so be sure to check back!
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Ongoing Submissions: The Cosmic Background

Payment: 8 cents per word, 3 cents per word for reprints
Theme: Slipstream fiction

We want the single best piece of flash fiction you have that comes from the places in-between. We are primarily a slipstream publication — that means we like your stories that don’t make a ton of sense. We want your giant talking frogs. We want your people with unexplained, never commented-upon eyes in their fingertips. We enjoy character-focused writing, with an emphasis on voice. We love Kelly Link, George Saunders, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sarah Pinsker, Shingai Njeri-Kagunda, Christopher Rowe, and Kate Folk. 

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Taking Submissions: Nightmare Diaries

Deadline: December 27th, 2023
Payment: 10 cents per word
Theme: short stories, fairy tales, flash fiction, and novellas of 500-10,000 words

Moonstruck Books will publish an anthology of dark fiction titled Nightmare Diaries in Spring 2025. We are seeking short stories, fairy tales, flash fiction, and novellas of 500-10,000 words. Payment is $0.10 per word. Deadline: December 27, 2023.

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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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