Deadline: April 15th, 2025
Payment: $10 per story or 1 cent/word rounded to the nearest 100 words, up to a maximum of $25.
Theme: Speculative Fiction up to 2500 words
We are current open to submissions.
We will be open for admissions for the Summer, 2025 issue until April 15, 2025.
Please do not query prior to March 3.
Our general guidlines for submission remain unchanged. Our primary mission is to provide readers with speculative fiction, broadly defined. We like character-driven stories that take us to the boundary where imagination and reality collide. If in doubt, please submit your story. We will enjoy reading it, even if it doesn’t quite fit with our mission.
We prefer stories between 1000 and 2500 words. If your story is longer than 2500 words, please do not use the submission form on this website. Instead, use the separate query submission form.
We welcome submissions from under-represented groups who bring their lived experience to their fiction. We also welcome submissions from first-time, unpublished authors. We welcome submissions from any location. However, our mission includes providing a market for authors from the region of the Crosstimbers Forest–which includes Oklahoma and surrounding states–so we especially encourage authors from this region to submit.
Please do not send mulitiple submissions, simultaneous submissions, or previously published stories. If considered for publication, we will ask authors to disclose the extent, if any, to which they have used generative AI in their stories.
Payment will be the larger of $10 per story or 1 cent/word rounded to the nearest 100 words, up to a maximum of $50. Payment will be rendered via Paypal at the time of publication. We cannot issue checks or pay in cash–you must be able to accept Paypal to be paid. If you cannot accept Paypal, payment will be in the form of a copy of the printed issue
Please read author guidelines before submitting. Please pay particular attention to what kind of stories we seek and submission requirements. In particular, stories must be submitted via the online form on this site. See the author guidelines for the link.
Nonfiction
We will consider nonfiction articles that are otherwise consistent with the guidelines for fiction. The issue will include at most one nonfiction article. We are primarily interested in fiction, so successful nonfiction submissions must be particularly compelling.
Poetry
While we won’t rule out poetry, we are primarily interested in publishing prose. In order to be successful, poetry would need to complement in some way the speculative fiction that is our primary content. Doing that will likely depend, at least in part, on the mix of fiction that is in any particular issue. We admit, this is is a challenging hurdle since the stories in any future issue are unknownable.
We are primarily interested in speculative fiction, including such genres as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and stories involving the supernatural. A hallmark of such stories is that they create a fictional world that is different in some fundamental way from the world in which we live and breathe. Neil Gaiman has said the author of speculative fiction starts by asking questions that begin with one of three phrases:
- What if…
- If only…
- If this goes on…
The range of fiction that these questions might generate is broad enough to encompass everything from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, to Harry Potter, to Star Wars, to Dracula. We’re interested in speculative fiction, yes, but speculative where the term is broadly defined. If you’re not sure, ask us.
Successful stories will be between 1000 and 2500 words. We will consider longer stories, but please query first.
Stories should be grounded in strong characters interacting with a gritty, realistic world. We prefer stories with traditional narrative form. If you’re not sure what that means, consider this quote from Gary Kurtz: “I took a master class with Billy Wilder once and he said that in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down.” Do that.
We seek original fiction only. We’re probably not interested in poetry unless the call explicitly asks for it.
We like character-driven stories that grab us by the throat and make us continue reading. We like stories that do this starting with the first sentence and first paragraph. This blog post includes both examples and a list of ten things that we believe contribute to effective openings, the most critical being hook the reader. In our experience, failing to hook the reader in the opening is the single biggest impediment to a successful submission.
We also like stories that immerse us in the fictional world and avoid things that pull us out of the here-and-now like info-dumps, head-hops, and passive writing. We prefer stories that start in media res.
We’re not looking for stories with violence or sex, but these are acceptable if essential to the story. However, we will not publish stories that feature incest, underage sex, non-consensual sex, or sex with animals–space aliens or other sentient creatures being excepted! We are generally not interested in extreme horror, fan fiction, erotica, graphic sex, manga-type stories, or overtly political pieces. We will not publish stories that are degrading to any person or persons of any type.
We will also give preference to local and regional authors, although we are open to authors from any location.
We welcome submissions from members of minority groups and members of under-represented communities. We welcome submissions from unpublished authors.
Via: Tales from the Crosstimbers.
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Stuart Conover is a father, husband, published author, blogger, geek, entrepreneur, horror fanatic, and runs a few websites including Horror Tree!
