Category: Semipro

Semi-Pro Rates

Anthology / Artwork / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Vampire Hunters: An Incomplete Record of Personal Accounts

Deadline: February 25th, 2025
Payment: .02 cents a word, $20 per accepted artwork
Theme: Found diary/journal entries from vampire hunters through out history.

VAMPIRE HUNTERS: An Incomplete Record of Personal Accounts

Submissions Open January 15 – February 25 on Query Manager

Vampire Hunters: An Incomplete Record of Personal Accounts will be a collection of found diary/journal entries from vampire hunters through out history. There would also be illustrations, charts, anatomy sketches and pieces of articles texts ect. interspersed throughout.

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Anthology / Flash / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Patterns

Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.01 per word
Theme: Dark stories with the theme of patterns

PATTERNS

Submission window now open.

Deadline: May 31st 2025

We’re looking for dark stories (2-4k words) on the theme of patterns.

Please interpret this theme however you like. Write us a quiet mood piece or an action-packed powerful, character-driven story. Make it humorous or as dark as the night. Send us your best speculative, horror, dark fantasy or dark sci-fi stories, as long as it’s full of the feels. We are not, however, the market for violent, bloody, racist, homophobic, or masochistic fiction. And no poetry please, just short fiction.

Some ideas: the pattern could be in the narrative technique (fragmentation, mirror writing, foreshadowing, meta-fictional repetition), the thematic composition (think cycles of death and birth, family curses, sin and retribution) for example. Or how about incorporating chants, supernatural rituals, or echoes in your prose? A story with temporal patterns in it might float our boat (although be careful, we don’t want our inbox flooded with time loops and cyclical stories, unless done exceptionally well or with a novel twist). Seasonal patterns, recurring times, patterns in nature, patterns in objects which feature in your tale, geographical patterns, repetitive architecture, patterns in weather, behavioural ticks, recurring nightmares, obsessions…any tenuous link will do, just make it your best work and give it a good edit prior to sending it our way. You get the idea. Surprise us.

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Events / Magazine / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Sci Phi Journal January 2025 Window

Deadline: February 5th, 2025
Payment: 3 (Euro) cents per word for original fiction and 1 (Euro) cent per word for translations of fiction into English.
Theme: Campbellian hard SF with a focus on sociological, technological and indeed cosmic elements over characters

**** Sci Phi Journal is currently OPEN for short fiction submissions, until Tuesday 5th February 2025, via Duosuma. For inquiries re: essay/article proposals, you may email us anytime at [email protected]. (Apologies, we do not accept fiction submissions via email, though.) ****

 

There are plenty of amazing print and online journals out there for ‘character-driven’ fiction, and we encourage you to read them. Sci Phi Journal (SPJ) is not one of them, though.

Hence, we are not too keen on stories predominantly about the sentiments and subjective experiences of fictional people. We want hard SF that zooms out of the personal and lifts off into the structural, the systemic, the epic. We yearn for carefully crafted philosophical speculation that puzzles over the questions of the future and alternate pasts. And we have a soft spot for stories created as ‘artifacts’ (fictional, ‘in-universe’ non-fiction).

So here are SPJ‘s quests:

– Campbellian hard SF. Reaching back to the roots of classic sci-fi, these rigorous tales take themselves seriously and push the boundaries of our scientific imagination, scaling from the nano to the meta. The cast, if any, is functional and disposable. It’s the sociological, technological and indeed cosmic developments that sweep the reader up in an expanding sense of wonder. (For a contemporary long-form example that received mainstream attention, see the latter two books of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy.)

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Foofaraw 2025

Deadline: March 31st, 2025
Payment: Fiction: $0.01 per word, Poetry: $5.00
Theme: Stories inspired by either of the definitions of “foofaraw”: A great fuss or disturbance about something very insignificant OR an excessive amount of decoration or ornamentation, as on a piece of clothing, a building, etc.

Guidelines

The Anthology is an annual print-only hardcover anthology based on the definition of “foofaraw.” It is split into two parts based on these two definitions:

  1. a great fuss or disturbance about something very insignificant.
  2. an excessive amount of decoration or ornamentation, as on a piece of clothing, a building, etc.

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Events / Flash / Flat Amount / Magazine / Poetry / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Heartlines Spec Spring 2025 Issue

Deadline: January 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.08 CAD per word for short fiction (500-3,500 words) and $60 CAD flat per poem
Theme: Speculative fiction focused on long-term friendships and relationships.

We’re looking for short fiction and poetry focused on long-term relationships: platonic, romantic, or familial. We don’t want the blaze of new love or the obsession of a new friend. We want pieces that show that comfort that develops when people know each other for years.

Give us deep space, dusty frontiers, or dreamy fantasy. We want stories and poetry with strong, confident relationships amid all the sci-fi/fantasy. While we are primarily looking for stories with happy endings (yeah, yeah), we also want endings that are earned. If things get a little teary or gory, that’s ok.

We are especially interested in stories featuring queer platonic relationships, ace/aro love stories, and polycules.

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Anthology / Contributor's Copy / Events / Flash / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Silk and Foxglove – A BIPOC Anthology

Deadline: January 31st, 2025
Payment: $0.01 USD per word and a contributors copy
Theme: Eco-horror
Note: BIPOC authors only

Z. K. Abraham (she/her) is a writer and psychiatrist. She has been published in Clarkesworld, The Rumpus, Fantasy Magazine, FIYAH Magazine, JMWW, and more. She will be a Royal Literary Fund Reading Round lector for 2024-2025. She is represented by Carleen Geisler at ArtHouse Literary Agency.

Read Abraham’s interview here!

Eco-horror explores the idea of nature becoming the source of terror; in an article for MUBI, Danielle Burgos describes eco-horror as “nature becomes uncanny and maliciously turned against man.” In a Teen Vogue article “Ecosexuals are Queering Environmentalism,” musician Peaches describes Mother Earth as a lover. “Sex-ecologist” Annie Sprinkle amusingly reflects on how “all this wood here is very sensual.” Ecosexuality might include, “masturbating with water pressure, using eco-friendly lubricant, or literally having sex with a tree.”

Nature as setting or character contains so much possibility for the sensual and horrifying. Nature is inherently physical and erotic; we are stripped down to our most grounded, raw selves in nature. We can experience the tactile and sensual when we touch plants, bark, earth, when we smell flowers, when we feel the shift in temperature or moisture in the air. However, nature contains decay as well as growth. Shadows move between distant trees, while legends and folktales come to life in forests and valleys and deserts. In nature’s beauty, there is a sense of power beyond our grasp, an awe-inspiring terror, as well as a delicate intimacy.

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Anthology / Events / Flash / Reprints Allowed / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Modern Mummies

Submission Window: Feb. 1st – Feb. 28th, 2025
Payment: 5 cents per word for original fiction, 1 cent per word for reprints
Theme: New horror related to the sub-genre of Mummies in horror
Note: Extended submission window exclusively for BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+, Disabled, Neurodiverse, and other underrepresented voices: March 1 – March 15, 2025
Note: Reprints Welcome

Modern Mummies Anthology

Open call submission window: Feb. 1 – Feb. 28, 2025

Extended submission window exclusively for BIPOC, 2SLGBTQ+, Disabled, Neurodiverse, and other underrepresented voices: March 1 – March 15, 2025

The Prompt

Modern Mummies is a new horror anthology looking to update the “mummy genre.” The anthology’s title has several possible interpretations to help guide submissions.

First and foremost, it means stories that take place in the reasonably understood present day. That means a world in which the internet, social media, industrialization, urbanization, etc. exist. Sure, some elements can be fictionalized to make a story work, but we don’t want period pieces that take place in the 1920s or in the far-flung past.

“Modern mummies” has other meanings to us too. In the short story “Asleep on the Job” by Scott Parson, mummies were described as time travelers in a sense. Through the preservation of their bodies, these characters awaken to find all that they had known and loved gone, replaced by some modern-day other. While time is certainly a key element of the equation, we also want you to think about space. Mummies all over the world are likely to find themselves in radically different locales than where they were originally buried. With these ideas in mind, we’re curious what you think a mummy might have to say about modern-day living. What might they have to say about their new surroundings and the colonialism that brought them there? How might these things influence their actions over the course of the story?

Modern mummies could also mean a modern-day person being mummified and its ramifications. We’d like you to think about how social media or our politics might react to a “new wave” of mummification. And what does that say about death in the modern era?

We are also keenly interested in seeing:

  • Mummies as heroes AND villains

  • Diverse characters with agency (we’d love to see stories with gender-inclusive, BIPOC, queer, and/or disability visibility)

  • Mummification from around the world (i.e. not just Egypt)

  • Non-human mummies

  • Unique, modern settings (museums are not off-limits, but we do foresee quite a few stories taking place in that setting.)

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Artwork / Events / Flash / Magazine / Semipro

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Taking Submissions: Dracula Beyond Stoker Issue 7

Submission Window: May 1st – June 30th, 2025
Payment: .05/word plus contributor’s copies
Theme: Mina Harker

Issue 7: Mina Harker(To Be Published November, 2025)
Mina is teacher, a wife, and the heart and the hero of the novel. Her spirit and intelligence keep her resilient even when darkness closes in. But who is Mina beneath the surface? Did her experiences leave her haunted? How did her connection to Dracula affect her view of the world or her family? Whether it’s before, during, or after the events of the novel, let’s explore her strength, her struggles, and her secrets.

Submissions open May 1, 2025-June 30, 2025. Submissions received earlier will be read and considered but will not be responded to until the window opens.

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