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Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $25 and a contributor's copy What darkness dwells in the realm of dreams . . . “There are so many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and proasic with the poison of life.” ― H.P. Lovecraft, Celephaïs ​ What We Want An integral part of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft dealt with forays into, and results from explorations of, a dream realm. A frequent traveler to that realm, Randolph Carter, brought back many tales of his experiences – of the fantastic cities, the exotic peoples, and the terrible dangers. We want you to tell us more about those realms, but we want the stories to be true to the Lovecraft ideas. If you haven't already, we suggest you read or become familiar with at least a few of the following stories: Celephais,Hypnos, Ex Oblivione, The Dreams in the Witch House, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Silver Key, The White Ship, and Through the Gates of the Silver Key. These stories are all available to read for free at the H. P. Lovecraft Archive online (http://www.hplovecraft.com/). There are some things to consider, however. When relating your story, you will be walking a fine line between psychological and blatant horror. The following issues will cause your story to be instantly rejected: Sexual content not inherent to the story line, adult content, or erotic fiction. Explicit description of torture or sacrifice, human or otherwise. Violence or abuse against a minor, infant to teenager. Overuse of profane language. Hate language against a race, creed, or Quoting previously published material not in the public domain. ​ Publishing Details Lead editor for this...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $25 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. ​ ​ 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...

Deadline: June 30th 2019 Payment: 3 cents per word Everything that is living EATS!  Plants, animals, humans, aliens, monsters, sea creatures, they all eat in one form or another. For the Chew on This! anthology we are looking for food-related stories, but we need you to dig deeper and get creative when it comes to the substances that keep us alive. Food should be integral to the story in some way, but not the entire focus. The plots can revolve around a wide range of cultures and belief systems, science and superstition, settings in the future or past. Above all we want stories that are macabre, scary, unsettling, and even gross. There's room for every subgenre of horror from quiet and unsettling physiological tales to extreme and bizarro. Well written, imaginative, frightening, and unique perspectives that make readers afraid to visit restaurants, try cuisine in a foreign lands, attempt new cooking recipes, etc. Food Allergies: Cannibal stories- Sure they’re good enough to eat but not for this anthology. No zombies, werewolves, vampires, or other well-tread tropes. If it’s off the dollar menu we won’t be ordering. Pizza stories. We love a good pie but don’t want past anthology leftovers. Predator and prey without any substance. Reasoning is the seasoning! Fan fiction. Give us a fresh recipe! Ingredients: Email: [email protected] Subject: Chew on this: Story Title by Author Name Length: 3k - 7K Deadline: June 30th 2019 Multiple Submissions: No Simultaneous Submissions: No Reprints: No Format: Doc or Docx Payment: 3 cents per word Chef: Robert Essig Via: Blood Bound Books.

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: AUD5c/word and one contributor copy AU5c/word / 2k-10k words Opens Apr 1st / Closes June 30th Fantasy, Horror, or Science Fiction Theme – Last stand military horror. What we want: Military action-based last-stand horror, and lots of it. Think 300, the Alamo, the Battle of Mirbat, the First Battle of Mogadishu, the Battle of Hel, or Custer’s Last Stand (but with unnatural monsters)… anything that can be called a high-action potentially-last stand monster story. For level of unnatural creature we will give priority to, think Dog Soldiers or Aliens. We want lots of monster goodness. We will also be looking for soldiers, mercs, police, private security/paramilitary. Hell, even a group of bodyguards protecting some arsehole druglord on his jungle property. Just ensure the last stand aspect is both overt and unique, and don’t forget monsters! This volume is like the previous volumes squared. All action. We want extreme action, and it has to be military or paramilitary action. And to say it again, full action. Nothing less. Hoo-rah! Introduction by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator, Love, Death & Robots) Edited by Amanda J Spedding, Matthew Summers, and Geoff Brown Payment: AUD5c/word and one contributor copy in each format released. Wordcount range: 2,000 – 10,000 words (query for shorter or longer) Submissions open April 1 2019. Closing date is June 30th 2019 Anything submitted outside this period will be deleted without being read or replied to. No selections will be made until after the period closes. Projected publication date: Late 2019 Please follow these guidelines when submitting to us: Please put your full contact details and word count top left of the first page of the manuscript. Standard submission format, with minimal document formatting. Courier, Palatino Linotype, or Times New Roman set at 12pt. Italics as they will appear. No underlining....

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: Royalty of 50% of net revenue WE ARE CURRENTLY OPEN TO SUBMISSIONS April 1- June 30, 2019 All submissions will receive a response by July 31, 2019. What we are looking for: Eraserhead Press is seeking original novellas and novels of 20,000 to 100,000 words in length that fit into the Bizarro Fiction category. We want surprising, unique, well-crafted weird stories with compelling plots, eccentric characters, and never-before-seen concepts. We want a balance of both plot and character – we love weird characters with weird problems in weird places. We are looking for exciting concepts that make people say “I have to read that!” and well-developed characters they can fall in love with along the way. We’re most drawn to darkly absurd tales that are addictive to read and contain a strong emotional core. We love fiction that is both heart-rending and fun. While it may or may not be funny, we are interested in more than just a joke. If you can make us both laugh and cry or creep us out and draw us in, we will love your book. We are looking for entertaining and accessible stories that speak to a specific audience. Will your book appeal to vegan punks? Riot grrls? Overworked airline pilots? Cos-players? Fans of 80s New Wave? If you’ve identified the audience for your work, please tell us in your book description. Multiple submissions are okay – during our open submission period we are open to reading as many manuscripts as you feel would meet our criteria but we are only interested in your best work. Bring it on! We have high standards – we have been the leading publisher of Bizarro Fiction since 1999 and have worked with everyone from brand new authors to established heavy hitters. We have gained a cult following for our high-quality boundary-pushing weird fiction and are looking for...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: Between $0.04 and $0.08/word, depending on factors listed below Note: Reprints, poetry accepted Following our guidelines does not guarantee that we will accept your story, but ignoring them does guarantee that your submission may be returned without receiving the attention it deserves. An Overview At DreamForge, our goal is to publish positive science and fantasy fiction. (That’s about it, but if you want to know more, you can check out our Rules of Fiction page.) What Are We Looking For? Space opera, urban fantasy, military sf, magical realms, hard science fiction, sword & sorcery, time travel, cyberpunk, steampunk, hopepunk, and whatever else comes before punk. Parables, poetry, zombies, and vampires are also welcome. No horror please. Yes to communities and teams working together to overcome dire challenges. Yes to marginalized and under-represented characters as protagonists. Yes to science and magic that solve problems, alleviate suffering, and boldly explore new possibilities. No to corrupt, dystopian governments or evil corporations. No Horror, please Stories set before, during, or after an “apocalypse” are more likely than not to be rejected. Tone down the violence, profanity, and sex Story Length Shorter is better! If you submit a story over 5,000 words, it has to be amazing to get very far in the review process. We want variety in each issue, and longer your story, the less variety we can print. Overall, we will consider the following word counts: Flash Fiction & Poetry: 100 – 1500 words Short Stories: 2,000 – 7,500 words Novelettes: 7,500 – 12,000 words. Submission Formatting Your story must be submitted in Word or RTF format. Top of the Page Title of Story (centered) Your By Line (centered) Formatting: Font: Arial, Size 12 Double spaced Indented paragraphs No extra line break between paragraphs Section breaks, as needed, should be...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $10 and a contributor's copy Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels: an anthology inspired by the songs of Bruce Springsteen ​ Deadline: June 30, 2019 Bone & Ink Press is now accepting submissions for our first-ever anthology—Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels: an anthology inspired by the songs of Bruce Springsteen. This will be a cross-genre anthology, including poetry, flash fiction, and flash non-fiction. ​ What we want: ​ -Broadly, we want poetry, flash fiction, and flash CNF inspired by one or more Bruce Springsteen songs. ​ -Specifically: We’d love fictional or poetic looks at the characters from various Springsteen songs—      Who is Bobby Jean? What is Mary thinking as she dances across the porch to a Roy Orbison song? Tell us about the girl twirling her baton who became an outlaw in “Nebraska,” about Terry hiding on the “Backstreets” that one soft, infested summer.      We’d also love poetry or prose (fiction or CNF) related to the following themes:      Hard times—loss/grief, unemployment, trauma, illness, a breakup, anything—if there was a Springsteen song that you (or a persona/character) connected with during a dark time in your/their life, tell us that story.      The American Dream as presented in Springsteen songs, particularly the ways in which it fails or has failed you/a character or persona.      Identity—did a Springsteen song (or songs) help you/a character or persona realize or connect with your gender identity, sexual orientation, cultural identity, or any other aspect of identity? Write about it! ​ -We are all for “weird” submissions. By that I mean—hybrid forms like prose poems and lyric essays? Send them in! Have a horror, sci-fi, magical realist, or spec-fic flash or poem inspired by a Boss tune? Heck yes, we wanna read...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $5 War is hell. Human monsters run amok, cruelty is the order of the day and if you can’t become a killer you will die. There are other things lurking in the fog of war, creatures that feed on misery and suffering. That drink the blood of man on morphine for the high and feast on spilled entrails. What sort of entity heightens the madness of war for it’s own gain? Is it PTSD or have the monsters really followed the soldier home to continue the hunt? How many wars has Vlad Tepes fought in through the years? This collection plans to bring together the best stories of monsters and boogeymen during wartime strife. Stories of soldiers and mercenaries dealing with supernatural and supranatural threats. We will not accept any stories about rape. Racism/Sexism/Bigotry of any form will never be accepted here. Stories over 1500 words preferred. Double check your grammar and spelling. Format your story correctly. Please submit all stories in DOC/RTF format. We prefer stories that have not been published before. We prefer to avoid multiple and simultaneous submissions. We retain exclusive publishing rights for 12 months. We pay $5.00 for stories We provide a digital contributor copy free and at cost+shipping physical copies Deadline is 6.30.19 Via: Madness Heart Press.

June 30th, 2019 Payment: 50GBP (roughly $65usd) Electric Athenaeum is a Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine publishing short fiction, articles, poetry, and interviews. Each issue features an accompanying theme, and is available for free to readers. We are currently OPEN for submissions until 30 June 2019! Our current theme is: INHUMANITY What is it like inside the mind of a being that is not–and never has been–human? How might morality and conscience change with different biologies and non-human societies? How does the binary thought of Artificial Intelligence differ from our own? If a society of beings are obligate carnivores, what impact might that have on the morals developed by their culture? The Inhumanity issue of Electric Athenaeum seeks to explore these and other questions, and, in the process, question those aspects of the human experience that we may take for granted. Challenge the assumptions we hold about what it means to be human. This issue seeks to explore what it is to NOT be human, and, by extension and contrast, what that perspective can offer to our thoughts on what it means to be human. Show us alien societies grounded in truly different thought processes. Take us inside the dreams of an artificial intelligence. Explore the deepest implications of an immortal elvish society, or the courting rituals of a polyamorous orcish culture. Show us what it means to be (in)human. Fiction Guidelines Word Limit: 3,000 words minimum, 10,000 words maximum Pay Rate: 50GBP per story Genre: We are open to any genre of speculative fiction, so long as the story contains a strong imaginative thread. Theme: Inhumanity (more detail above) Language: English (translations are welcome, as are submissions from authors worldwide) Rights: We purchase first world electronic text rights. Next Theme: TBD Submissions Process: Please submit stories to us at [email protected], using the Subject Line: Fiction: . Please include a...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $5 per printed page LGBTQ+ Humor Are you queerly hilarious? Well, prove it! Seeking humorous original work by and/or about LGBTQ+ people and lives. This is a positive publication celebrating the LGBTQ+ community through the lens of humor. Only pieces supporting this mission will be considered. No homophobic, transphobic or hateful material will be considered. This premiere edition of our first LGBTQ+ humor anthology will be published in print & ebook. It will be made available in paperback on Amazon, the Barnes & Noble website, QommunicatePublishing.com and wherever books are sold (available to booksellers and libraries through Ingram.) Ebook versions will be compatible with the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows devices in addition to PDF and other downloadable formats and web-viewable formats. Submission Guidelines Please read the following submission guidelines carefully before submitting your work to Funny Queer. If you have any questions not answered below, please write us at [email protected] and we will be happy to answer. Theme Humor by and/or about LGBTQ+ people. The only criteria is it makes us laugh! Genres Anything meeting the theme, including: Fiction. Nonfiction. Jokes. Comics/graphic shorts (black and white only). Poems. Short scripts. We will NOT consider: Erotica Work written for children Length Prose: up to 3,500 words Poetry: Up to 3 pages Comics & Scripts: up to 10 pages These length recommendations are flexible. Formats All submissions must be typed. No handwritten submissions will be accepted. If you send your submission in, please do NOT mail us your only copy of your work. We can not be responsible for returning submissions. Multiple Submissions Multiple submissions (submissions of more than one work) are fine. Send us what you’ve got! Simultaneous Submissions Simultaneous submissions (submitting work you’ve already submitted–or are planning on submitting–elsewhere) are fine too. Please just be sure that...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: 4 cents/word, 1cent/word for reprints Note: Reprints Welcome Open 1-30 June 2019 — Special Session: WW2  Special session instructions: stories not set during the World War II era (rise of Nazi Germany to troop homecoming) will automatically be rejected without read. Previously rejected WW2 manuscripts may resubmitted. Hello! This project is a comfortable two-headed beast at play in the curious and often dark corners of retropunk fiction. That means steampunk, dieselpunk, dreadpunk, bronzepunk, others that haven’t even been invented yet punk … but not atompunk. Sorry, space fans, we draw our line at Sputnik. About 2/3 of rejections are for “bad fit.” We buy nonexclusive rights for fiction, cover & interior art, music & sound effects usage, and narration services. What we do: 1—Curiosities, a thrice annual themed short story publication, which is available in digital and print on demand formats, and 2—The Gallery of Curiosities, a twice monthly podcast which features stories from the publication. Not every story we buy will make it to an audio podcast release, but we do make good effort to get it there before our rights expire. We started out as a podcast, and went to print later.  Audio production is incredibly time intensive. Short version: -We buy original (4 cents/word) and reprint (penny/word) short stories. -Length up to 7500 words. -We read blind. Anonymize your manuscript before sending it to [email protected] as a doc, docx, or rtf. Remove headers and/or footers as they will mess up the manuscript. -Use the format SUBMISSION: Your Story Title in the title bar of your email or it gets lost. -Multiple? No more than 3 at a time. Send them in separate emails. -Simultaneous? Yes. Please be prompt with a withdrawal if sold. -If accepted, your story will be published in ebook and print-on-demand formats. -If accepted, we will make a...

Deadline: June 30th, 2019 Payment: $100 for stories and $25 for poems Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is OPEN for submissions of fiction and poetry in June, 2019.  Repeat!  We will not be open for submissions in December, 2018.  We hate to spring this on people with only two days notice, but we are actually a couple of issues ahead at this point and we need to all take a break for the holidays. We plan to re-open to submissions in March, 2019. Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is generally open to fiction and poetry submissions four months per year. The months you can submit are: March June September December (we are closed to submissions in December, 2018) If you submit fiction or poetry in any other month, you will receive an auto-response and your tale will not be reviewed.   * * * As its name suggests, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is a quarterly ezine dedicated to publishing heroic fantasy — in both prose and poetry. We are unrepentant in our goal of elevating unapologetic sword and sorcery to a rightful high place. We pay $100 for stories and $25 for poems, upon publication.  (Scroll down for info on art submissions.) We purchase first world English language electronic rights, electronic rights for 90 days, archival rights for twelve months, and excerpt rights. Our fiction word limit is a soft 10,000 words, although we are willing to serialize at a maximum of 50,000 words over four issues. You may submit up to three poems, with a cumulative maximum of 30 pages. While we don’t have iron-clad rules regarding our fiction payment, we roughly pay $25 for stories under 1,000 words, $50 for stories between 1,000 and 5,000 words, $75 for stories between 5,000 and 7,500 words and $100, for stories of 7,500 words and over. Tolkienesque (as in really long) poetry...