The fire alarm clanged all around the building, sending thundering waves of pain through his skull. Slowly, carefully, he got up from the explosion. He was surprised he was alive, and though he felt like death warmed over he was still fully intact. As he looked around the smoke filled room he noticed that his fellows were similarly alive and intact, but they looked angry and strange in the smoke. Firefighters burst into the room and put out the raging inferno that was devouring Dimensional Communicator they’d spent so many years working on. When the smoke cleared, Henry Michaels sighed and slowly made his way over to the blackboard. A collection of angry moos followed him. He carefully erased one of the numbers in an equation with his muzzle and used an open marker in his mouth to carefully write the symbol for Pi. An angry, but vindicated moo from his rival, Sarah Douglas, indicated she was happy he finally saw her equation to be the most accurate. He wondered if it mattered at this point and how they were going to rebuild the Dimensional Communicator now that they were cows.

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What We Want

Things are too serious around here. We have all sorts of absolutely amazing stories of dark terrors, shapeshifting monsters, and epic fantasies. We really need to lighten the mood. To that end we present Suddenly, Cows! We want silly stories of experimentation from all sorts of places; beit the 1950’s style “scientist” using their “radio tubes” to stop aliens, or a wizard trying to figure out how to create a better spell for conjuring demons, or even someone of today trying to do something as simple as wash a load of laundry and ending up in the 6 and ½ dimension. We want silly, lighthearted tales that illustrate no matter how well planned something might be, that tiny bit of chaos that keeps the universe running can enter in and wreck the best laid plans.

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Publishing Details

Lead editor for Suddenly Cows! is Karen Otto. The anthology is open to submissions from January to June 31, 2019.

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Its format is perfect-bound paperback, 6 x 9, color cover and b&w interior.

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Submission Details

Stories should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words and be fiction. The word count is a soft line, meaning we will consider longer or shorter stories, though those within the limit will be given priority. We are interested only in original fiction and will not accept reprints.

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We are not interested in poetry for this anthology.

Interior art needs to be black and white and must be submitted in .jpg or .png format.

Cover art needs to be full color and eye-catching. It also must be submitted in .jpg or .png format.

Have fun with this!

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Payments

Stories: $25 for original work.

Cover Art: $25

Interior Art: $15

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Each contributor will receive one copy of the book in which that person’s work appears as well as a discount on more copies.

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For original work we purchase FNASR.

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How To Submit

Submit your work to [email protected]

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Be sure to put SUDDENLY COWS and the title of your story in the subject line. As we use this address for most of our anthologies now, we need to know which anthology you are submitting to. If we don’t know, we will probably just delete your submission out of hand, without response.

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Here’s and example:“SUDDENLY COWS – Montegna – Moos and Booms”

Submit stories and nonfiction as .doc or .rtf attachments, illustrations as .jpg attachments less than 500KB. Please send only one work at a time for consideration.

Next, make sure your contact information is in the upper left corner of your manuscript and in your email. Put the approximate word count in the upper right corner of your manuscript.

Contact information example:

                                                    Stephen Calloon                         Word Count: 3427

                                                    1561 Looming Ave

                                                    Mushroom, NY 12117

                                                    [email protected]

                                                    paypal [if any]:[email protected]

If your submission does not include your contact information, Alban Lake Publishing reserves the right to delete your submission unread and without notifying you.

Please, do not put any special formatting into your submissions, such as adding your name, title and page number randomly throughout the story, headers and footers, or anything else that might take away from reading and editing. It is important to note that style is much different than the above, and centering certain parts, bold, or italicized type is acceptable.