Deadline: July 1st, 2018
Payment: 8 cents per word

We are now open to original short stories of urban weird fiction (so stories about cities and dealing with the complexity that is other people) for the upcoming Nowhereville: Weird is Other People. These are modern weird tales (give or take a few decades) that could only be told of the weirdness of the urban experience and our interactions with one another.

REQUIREMENTS 
We want diverse stories with modern sensibilities from many different voices that show the immense and diverging possibilities for weird fiction, fearlessly exploring the new and the strange. We are actively seeking submissions from writers from underrepresented populations. (This includes, but is not limited to, writers of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, class, and physical or mental abledness.)

• Original, previously unpublished weird fiction short stories of 3,000-7,500 words (you can read more of what we’re looking for with regard to weird fiction briefly below and in more detail at Eyedolon magazine in the Overview under the title “Toward a Weirder Tomorrow”)
• Pay rate of 8 c/w for first rights to digital, audio, and print formats in English.
• Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please, let us know as soon as possible if your submission has become unavailable before you hear back from us.
• No Cthulhu Mythos for this one.
• Only one submission per author.
• We seek both rich characters and grandiose ideas. We seek diverse characters.

Submit your story in standard manuscript format as an attachment to submissions(at)brokeneyebooks(dot)com with a subject line of the following: [NWV] “Your Story Title”.

Submission window open from May 1, 2018 to July 1, 2018. (We cannot confirm receipt of your manuscript, so please don’t ask. We will accept or reject as quickly as we can.) The published anthology will be a mix of stories both from invited authors and from submissions. Don’t self-reject. If in doubt, submit.

The selected stories will appear in Eyedolon magazine, and then, when we have some to-be-determined critical mass of stories, they’ll be collected in print form as an anthology. Then we’ll pick a new topic and start the whole process over for another anthology. (It’s a magazine-anthology hybrid.)

EYEDOLON MAGAZINE is an online magazine of weird tales. These are the stories that take place in the realms between science fiction and fantasy, between the realistic and the absurd. This is weird fiction and its borders with other genres.

And what is weird fiction? We at least want to tell you what it is to us. So here’s a quick list and then below, (You can read more of our thoughts on weird fiction at Eyedolon magazine.) We are looking for, in no particular order, dark fantasy, cosmic horror, fabulism, folk horror, magical realism, slipstream, “soft” science fiction, supernatural horror, and surrealism. In short, weird fiction and where it borders with science fiction and fantasy:

• It must be speculative fiction.
• It need not be horror. At its core, weird fiction is the unknown. That sits very well as warding off the shadows—or horror—but beyond the grotesque, it reaches clear to the ecstatic with stopovers at all modes in between, such as at the comedic and the slice of life.
• As a landscape, speculative fiction exists on a spectrum with other genres and at times shares their borders. These frontiers are evershifting.
• The weird sits in an “uncanny valley” of realism, snug between the impossibility of fantasy and the certitude of science fiction.

And it needs to incorporate the current theme…

Thank you for your support! 

Broken Eye Books is an independent press based in Seattle, here to bring you the odd, strange, and offbeat side of speculative fiction. Our stories tend to blend genres, blurring the boundaries of sci-fi, fantasy, and the weird.

Support weird. Support indie.

Via: Broken Eye Books.