Events

Deadline: March 1st - May 1st, 2025 Payment: $50 Theme: Writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. Schedule We publish two issues a year, September 1 and March 1. We accept general submissions for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction between two reading periods, and the first 300 submissions to each are free. We also run a collaborative writing contest in August. We also accept visual art all year. General Submissions: March 1 – May 1 General Submissions: October 1 – December 1 Collaboration Contest: July 15 –  August 31 Payment We are thrilled to finally be able to say that, starting with issue 17, we will be able to offer our contributors a small payment of $50 upon publication. A Note on Our Aesthetic We believe there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color. We look for this same quality in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We want writing that attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished. Practical Matters We are grateful to be a part of a literary community that is taking action against systemic racism. We will also be donating submission fees...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $25.00 - $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 - $10.00 for poetry Theme: Story must begin with: No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury. We love that writers around the world are inspired by our first lines, and we know that not every story will be sent to us. However, we ask that you do not submit stories starting with our first lines to other journals (or post them online on public sites) until we've notified you as to our decision (usually four weeks after the deadline). When the entire premise of the publication revolves around one sentence, we don't want it to look as if we stole that sentence from another writer. If you have questions, feel free to drop us a line. Also, we understand that writers may add our first line to a story they are currently working on or have already completed, and that's cool. But please do not add our first line to a previously published story and submit it to us. We do not accept previously published stories, even if they have been repurposed for our first lines. And, just to be clear, we do not accept simultaneous submissions. One more thing while I've got you here: Writers compete against one another for magazine space, so, technically, every literary magazine is running a contest. There are, however, literary magazines that run traditional contests, where they charge entry fees and rank the winners. We do not - nor will we ever - charge a submission fee, nor do we rank our stories in order of importance. Occasionally, we run contests to help come up with new first lines, or we run fun, gimmicky competitions for free stuff,...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: Approximately: 10,000 words – $100, 7,500 words – $75, 5,000 words – $50, 2,500 words – $25, 1,500 words – $20 Theme: Horror set in Texas written by Texas authors HellBound Books is pleased to announce the 2025 edition of Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers. Author E. R. Bills will edit Vol. 10 of the series, which has featured works from Joe R. Lansdale, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Graham Jones, Robert E. Howard, Madison Estes, Jeremy Hepler, Bret McCormick, Josh Rountree, Patrice Sarath, Mario E. Martinez, James H. Longmore, William Jensen and others. RK10 is looking for original horror stories 1,500-10,000 words in length. The stories must be written and submitted by Texas authors and must be set (based) here – hence the title. One cent per word and contributing writers will receive two free copies and a discounted wholesale price on any copies of the book that he or she purchases to carry and sell on their own. Writer stipends will look something like this: 10,000 words – $100, 7,500 words – $75, 5,000 words – $50, 2,500 words – $25, 1,500 words – $20. All payments will be made after official acceptance, and when acceptance is communicated, each author will need to send a short bio. HellBound will be requesting two-year non-exclusive rights. This means we will use your story in this anthology and we can print excerpts of it online and otherwise (for promotional purposes, etc), but two years down the road you can do with it what you like.   The Submission Period begins FEBRUARY 1, 2025. The deadline to turn in stories is MAY 1, 2025, and our intent is to have the book printed and available by October 1, 2025, in plenty of time for Halloween. Please...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $10 Theme: poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, & anything else Note: Reprints welcome we are currently open for submissions. through may 1st or until we reach contributor cap. what to submit send up to five pieces of poetry, prose, nonfiction, fiction, & anything else. if you wrote it, submit it! we welcome both unpublished & published work, but please give credit in your document to where the work appeared first. please include all work in one document (pdf or doc). i don't have a preference over font & font size, nor line spacing. what not to submit we are not considering work made or inspired by ai, nor plagiarized, unoriginal, or stolen pieces. please do not include photos in your work, unless the specific format calls for that. i have a hard time getting through super lengthy work, so i will generally pass on those. also, do not send me any work that encourages racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. what happens after i submit? you'll have a decision in your inbox hopefully in a week or two. worse case scenario, it will be no longer than a month. you'll be notified even if it's rejected, i won't leave you hanging! please note: i sometimes don't read emails or submissions on weekends, so any inquiries over those days will be promptly answered on monday! if you are declined during this reading period, please wait until the following period to submit again! what happens to contributors? my contributors will receive payment of $10 per piece within a month of publication. payments can only be dispersed through cashapp, paypal, or chime, & i do not have any alternative methods i can work out. i am not offering contributor copies at this time, but your issue will always be available for purchase. how to submit...

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $1,200.00 for all accepted submissions (unclear if this is split between the authors or for each piece.) Theme: Soilpunk (sci-fi involving soil) with the theme of 'The Garden' Your fiction, our future. Tractor Beam is a new quarterly speculative and science fiction publication dedicated to soilpunk: radical visions of hopeful futures built from the ground up. Our editorial mandate is to explore audacious and provocative ideas around farming, food, earth science, and beyond, reimagining how humans can live more harmoniously with nature. For our second issue, themed “The Garden”, we’re seeking original written and graphic works set on a future Earth transformed by new approaches to soil. Literal or abstract, near term or on distant horizons: worlds can take inspiration from innovations or alternative practices in earth and material science, regenerative agriculture, food, microbiology, and more. Each story should be a visionary proposal woven into a spectacular plot. We prefer submissions under 6000 words for writing or 16 panels for graphic novellas. Pitches and pencils are welcome. Please send all submissions to [email protected]. Deadline to submit for Issue 2 is May 1st. Tractor Beam pays $1,200.00 for all accepted submissions. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify us immediately if your piece was accepted elsewhere so we can withdraw it and congratulate you! Let’s bring sci-fi down to earth–literally–and sow the seeds of a better tomorrow, today. Via: Tractor Beam.

Deadline: May 1st, 2025 Payment: $5 usd Theme: Splatter Friendly Horror How the Sausage is Made! Submissions: We want solid entertaining writing. That has to be clearly stated because we are open to gore, extreme horror, splatterpunk, and horror with sexual elements to it. Sounds great? Like anything too good to be true, there is a catch. We have some hard “Nos.” Before you go off about the freedom of expression, remember, this is a web ‘zine, not a government. We donate our time to it and if we’re not getting joy from reading your story we’re not going to publish it. This website runs on our love of horror. We offer a token payment of $5 USD to support your drug habit, paid upon publication. However, you keep your rights –we don't want them. The Stuff We Don’t Want to Read: NO sex with children, NO sexualization of children, and NO child rape. If you’re writing a story about a child predator who gets what’s coming to him –great. But we don’t want to read about that predator coming on his victims. We won’t publish anything supporting a racist, transphobic, or homophobic agenda, so don’t try it. Sex and sensuality are fine, but we publish horror. We won’t publish a story that’s 90 percent lesbian vampires having explicit sex and 10 percent them ripping their victims to pieces. Go 50/50 on that and you've got our attention. High-quality gory smut is fine. Like gore, sex has to serve a purpose. If you want to write a piece about a cowboy who discovers one of the prostitutes at the local brothel has a vagina that opens to another dimension filled with blood clot monsters and he can fit his entire body into it… Sure, that’s great. If you want to...

Submission Window: May 1st-2nd, 2025 Payment: 8 cents per word for original, 2 cents for reprints, For artwork: $10 for the non-exclusive right to use each image, for as long as the site is online.  If we publish a print collection we will pay a pro-rata share for each image used. Theme: Well written original work in science fiction, fantasy, myth, legend, fairy tales, and eldritch, in written, podcast, video, and/or graphic story form, and from around the world. Note: Reprints welcome     Submissions Schedule The first and second day of every month, 12 am of the 1st to 12 am of the 3rd, E.S.T. For reading impaired individuals, our submissions manager and ‘forget password’ have a captcha compatible with screen readers. We pay 8¢ per word for new fiction, 2¢ per word for fiction reprints, 2 – 8¢ per word for new fact-based work, 1- 4¢ per word for reprinted fact articles. For new poetry, we pay $1 per line, and for reprints we pay 50¢ a line  We’re looking for poems up to 40 lines. We’ll consider longer poems but that would be a hard sell, and words over 40 lines would be paid at 8¢ per word. We sponsor The Kepler Award to recognize and encourage writers of excellent science fiction and fantasy stories that creatively extrapolate on known science in constructive and exciting ways. You can learn aboutThe Kepler Award here. You can read a copy of our standard contract here.   It can be varied as needed to include the rights of translators, voice actors, etc. Writers Guidelines We accept new work as well as reprints, prose and poetry, from a minimum of 1000 words on up.   All else being equal, shorter pieces will be favored, and we have yet to find a story over about 9-10,000 words we have even...

Deadline: May 5th, 2025 Payment: $25 and a contributors copy Theme: short comedic fiction Eggplant Emoji, the comedy literary journal is currently seeking previously-unpublished comedic short fiction submissions for its fifth volume. Eggplant Emoji Volume 5 will be a print and eBook collection of hilarious short stories that are character-driven and culturally striking. We are not looking for essays; we want scenes with dialogue, and stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. For a better sense of what we’re looking for, check out previous Volumes of Eggplant Emoji, available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Submissions should be 1,000 – 8,000 word prose, with a comedic tempo of at least one witty line or funny moment per page, but ideally more than one. The intended audience will be 17+ and we encourage adult or sexual themes. Submission Guidelines: We use a blind submission process. That means your name, email address, or any other identifying information should be absent from the pages of your .doc/.docx piece. Please title your work and reference it in the body of your email. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but please immediately advise us if your piece is accepted elsewhere. A maximum of 2 pieces will be accepted per person for consideration. Contributors will receive a $25 one-time payment and author copy per accepted piece. Please send submissions to [email protected] Deadline: Monday, May 5, 2025. Decisions will be rendered by Thursday, July 30, 2025. Projected release date: September 2, 2025. Read “Advice on Writing for Eggplant Emoji, and Biggest Mistakes Made by Submitters“ on Eggplant Emoji’s Substack. Via: Eggplant Emoji.

Deadline: May 7th, 2025 Payment: 8 cents per word and a contributor's copy Theme: Speculative Fiction, ideally with sci-fi elements if not sci-fi itself People of the World! Planet Scumm accepts submissions from writers across the world. Our pages have hosted the imaginative work of authors from every contintent but Antartica. We want to hear from writers with as various experiences, identities, and points of view as possible. Please do not busy our big-hearted slush readers with AI-generated tripe. Stories generated in part or whole by AI are in violation of our author contract. Specs WHAT TO SUBMIT Hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi, sci-fi that melts in your mouth-brain not your hand-brain Speculative fiction, weird fiction, slipstream Basically anything that pleases Scummy, our megaphone-toting slime buddy, will be considered for entry to the interstellar archive aboard Scummy’s saucer HOW TO SUBMIT Include submissions as a .doc or .docx attachment to [email protected] along with a brief cover letter in the email body. Please attach only your story (no images, do not put your story in the body text of the email). Stories, or collections of flash fiction, should be no more than 5,000 words in length, and submitted in standard manuscript format. Submit only ONE previously unpublished short story or flash collection. We do not accept multiple submissions from the same author in one reading period. Simultaneous submissions are okay, as long as you promptly withdraw a story accepted elsewhere. SCHEDULE, RIGHTS, AND PAYMENT Accepted authors receive 8 cents a word and one contributor copy. Our publication operates in print, e-book, and audiobook. Some accepted stories will also be published on our website. We purchase exclusive English-language print, audio, and electronic publishing rights for six months, with non-exclusive rights thereafter. Authors will receive payment within 3 months of finalizing story edits. Via:...

Submission Window: May 1st - 7th, 2025 Payment: 8 cents per word Theme: Science fiction stories under 300 words We open from the 1st-7th of each month, beginning April 2025. What we want: Anomaly is interested in science fiction stories under 300 words in length, for publication on their Patreon, with the right to collect stories into a future anthology. We're looking for dark and disruptive stories that have strong emotional resonance. We like stories that stick with us after reading, that get us thinking about the twisted use of technologies, the way the world may be, or how characters might react to an evolving technological future. What we're asking for: First rights with 90 days of exclusivity after publication, and the nonexclusive right to republish the story in a future anthology that collects Anomaly stories, with permission from the authors. Compensation: .08 per word for original fiction and an electronic copy of any future anthology. Submission Guidelines: Please attach your file to this form in .doc/.docx format. Use Times New Roman 12 point font with Shunn standard manuscript format. Stories must be 300 words or less. No simultaneous submissions. No multiple submissions. No stories written with AI. No reprints at this time. If you need any further assistance, please email us at [email protected]. SUBMIT HERE Via: Anomaly's Patreon.