Submission Window: November 6th to 12th, 2023
Payment: $100 for stories of up to 1,000 words
Theme: Fantastical and speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, myth, fairy-story, magic realism, literary fabulism, and genre/subgenre remixes.

The Fabulist Flash, a new flash-fiction project from The Fabulist Words & Art, welcomes submissions from November 6-12 for fantastical and speculative writings of up to 1,000 words.

The Fabulist Flash will debut in 2024, and run in parallel to our current short-fiction programming. See below for program details.

Word Count & Rate

• We’re offering a flat fee of $100 for stories of up to 1,000 words (the equivalent of an SFWA-qualifying rate of $0.10/word), payable upon contracted acceptance.

• Going above the word count is fine if you need a little headroom to take the story home, but it’s in your interest to keep it tight, as the flat fee is firm.

• You can review our flash-fiction contract here.

What We’re Looking For

• Fantastical and speculative fiction, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, myth, fairy-story, magic realism, literary fabulism, and genre/subgenre remixes.

• Evocative and intriguing scenes, settings, places.

• Clear, efficacious writing that doesn’t shy away from the poetry within prose.

• Wide-ranging human (or sentient) experiences that we care about, or at least feel.

• Yeah: Odysseys, revelation, transformation, dilemma/struggle, fluid dualities.

• Nah: Grimdark, military, cops, vengeance, power trips.

• Exploded/deconstructed cliches of any of the foregoing …

If you’re not sure where your story lands in these various target zones — just send us your best. Great work will shine through.

Please Think Twice, We’ve Really Seen Quite Enough Of

• Zombies, zombie apocalypse, teen vampire/werewolf romance, cute Cthulhu/nice baby Elder God, etc.

• Splatter/gore/brutality

• Virtual-reality visitations with the beloved deceased

• Mundane fantasies of revenge, sex, financial and business success, etc.

• “Another Friday Night at the Elftown Police Station” — or really anything that takes fantastical archetypes or plot devices and makes them vernacular or silly: drinking hard liquor and shit-talking with a primal entity (Death, Cupid, Santa, Time), for example, or an all-powerful god with an ordinary mortal name and ordinary mortal foibles (“Bob, creator of the Universe, woke up one Sunday with a headache”). Maybe you ARE the next Neil Gaiman — but probably not?

• “And then she/he/they woke up” (which includes not just it-was-all-a-dream but also we’re-all-living-in-a-giant-simulation)

• Suicide and self-harm (we realize this stuff is real and we write to deal with it, just saying that successfully deploying it as a trope in the fantastical fiction we run is very, very difficult to pull off)

That said … surprise us. If you feel you’ve written a truly original, compelling take on any of these genre cliches, we’re glad to check it out.

Please No

• We are not open to AI/LLM-generated text.

• No misogyny, sexism, racism, bigotry, hate, etc. (view our nondiscrimination statement).

• Previously unpublished works only — no reprints

To Submit

• Check back on this page from Nov. 6-12, or on our main Submittable portal, for a live submissions button that will take you to our Submittable intake form.

• Shunn format or at least double-spaced is great.

• Please anonymize your submission! There must be no identifying details on your manuscript. Fear not — your contact info will be collected as part of the intake process, and your cover letter will not be visible to our slush readers.

Via: Fabulist Magazine.