Events

All Day

Taking Submissions: Mental Ward: Stories from the Asylum – Volume 2

Deadline: July 31st, 2017 Payment: $25usd and a contributor's copy We loved our first Mental Ward: Stories from the Asylum call so much, we’re opening another for Volume 2 with the exact same details! Have at it wordsmiths, and send us true depravity to read! Sanatorium, mental ward, psychiatric hospital – they’re all the same. Places where the infirm, the crazy, and the certifiable go for treatment… Or what passes for ‘treatment’. We want stories of bedlam taking place within the padded walls of an institution. Give us stories of experiments gone wrong, patients revolting against the staff, or tales from the perspective of those charged with offering care. Make them sick, make them depraved, make them atrocious – these should be the kind of stories that rarely reach the light of day. Are you brave enough to see what your mind conjures up… Or are you afraid you’ll be locked up for trying? Deadline: July 31, 2017 Word Count: 4,000 – 8,000 words All submissions MUST be submitted to: [email protected] Reading & Evaluation Period: Two to three months after close of the deadline ** NO REPRINTS WILL BE CONSIDERED ** Payment: Each story selected for inclusion will receive a one-time payment of $25US, plus one print copy of the book. As per our standard guidelines, there will be no stories containing pedophilia, or graphic rape scenarios accepted. Full submission guidelines can be found on our website – www.SirensCallPublications.com – we invite you to read them before submitting! Via: Siren's Call Publications.

Taking Submissions: The Food Of My People

Deadline: August 1st, 2017 Payment: 5 cents/word (CAD) Note: Only 5% of authors accepted will be from outside of Canada. Speculative writing, whatever the sub-genre, is full of food scenes. Food can be integral to the magic, the meetings, the processes of narratives from hard SF to high fantasy. For all of us, eating is a symbolic and magical act, a transformation, a covenant, a ritual, a comfort, and a necessity, and this awareness has been expressed in story – all the way from myth, legend and fairy tale to modern speculative writing – in many memorable ways. Alice eats and drinks to participate in Wonderland, Ripley's alien has to feed its young, Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds and spends half her life in the Underworld, the witch entices Hansel and Gretel with food to become food, the food in 2001's famous white room is spookily nutritious and generic, and Soylent Green is people. We can’t live without food, but sometimes we can’t live with it, either. In literature and in history, food-themed stories have had a darker side: starvation, poisonings (whether intentional or accidental), struggles with eating disorders, and more. We’re all drawn to candy coatings (in this case, literally) but we also want the story about how the missing ingredient ruined the feast. For the Food of my People anthology, its award-winning editors seek speculative writing that makes the magic and reality of food and nourishment integral to each story and its outcome. See the story "The Food of My People" by Candas that sparked this anthology, and began as an enquiry into what might be the everyday magic of the post-aboriginal incomers to the Canadian prairies, the culture of the jellied salad and the Saskatoon pie. Ursula Pflug and Colleen Anderson chose it for Playground of Lost Toys (Exile Editions, 2015), and when Candas read the story at ICFA...

Taking Submissions: Body Parts Magazine Issue #9: Nothing but Witches, Bitches!

Deadline: August 1st, 2017 Payment: $5 for flash fiction and $10 to $20 (depending on length) for short stories Issue #9: Nothing but Witches, Bitches! (Fall/Winter 2017) All witches, all the time! Permutations of witchery, magick, crones, warlocks and familiars from fairy tale baddies to black or white magic, witch doctors, and the merely misunderstood. Personal power, communion with spirits and the dead, spells, trickery, solitude and a visionary third eye with a window on the fates. Submission deadline: 8/01/17 We are not afraid." Body Parts Magazine is an online literary magazine of horror, erotica, speculative fiction, essays and art. Each themed issue honors Eros and Thanatos, the Greek gods of libido and mortido—life and death. We celebrate the vast and various expressions of dreams and darkness, our primitive desires and urges, and seek to encounter—and embrace—those shadowy monsters who dwell in the dimly lit corners of human experience.  Upcoming Themes Submissions for each issue are accepted through the last day of each reading period (if specified). You are welcome to submit material for any issue--simply indicate which issue you would like your work to be considered for. Be advised: we generally begin reading submissions for a particular issue after the close of its submission deadline, so don't panic if you haven't heard back before then. Fiction Body Parts accepts well-written, thoughtfully structured horror, erotic horror, speculative fiction, dark fantasy (including fairy tales and mythology), exceptional stories about ghosts, ghouls, monsters and wretched creatures, Gothic fiction, and all combinations of the above. Our boundaries are few and far between. Flash Fiction: 1,000 words or fewer. Short Stories: up to 8,000 words. Serialized or Longer Fiction: query us with total word count. Art/Photography We accept your original artwork and photography reflective of an issue’s theme. Email a query with a link to your art online (web, Dropbox, Google album, etc.) Payment varies. Essays...

Taking Submissions: Infurno: The Nine Circles of Hell

Deadline: August 1st, 2017 Payment: Contributor's Copy Thurston Howl Publications is now accepting submissions for its third furry anthology, Infurno: The Nine Circles of Hell. Deadline: August 1, 2017 Word count: 2,500-8,000; a little above and a little below will be acceptable The Nine Circles of Hell has been a much-loved conception of the inferno, popularized by Italian poet Dante. Look here for the basic elements of the circles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)#Overview. This collection will be divided respectively into the nine parts. We expect stories to be framed to focus on people who will end up in a specific circle. Most of a story should focus on what they did back on Earth in life. Showing how they died is not required. We need to see their sin that brought them there, and you can definitely have them in hell (always fun to describe; in general, try to keep infernal descriptions consistent with Dante's). We want to see anthro-animal characters at their darkest and weakest moments: at the brothel, at the chopping block, in the morgue, in the dining room with the candlestick. It is perfectly fine but not required if submissions are NSFW. We are honestly expecting a fair amount of horror and erotica. However, again, adult stories are by no means required for acceptance. All story submissions must be "furry" in nature. We will NOT accept: Racism, sexism, or discrimination presented in a positive light. If you are in doubt, ASK. Better to ask then to get a straight up rejection! If you are unsure, just shoot me an email at [email protected]. (restrictions borrowed from Voice: https://t.co/MWykJ6RY36) You can submit up to three stories, but we will only accept one per author (if any). Reprints are fine, but you have to own full permission of the work in order for us to consider...