Events

Deadline: August 28th, 2020 Payment: 6¢ a word Theme: Must be set in Motherland, a landyke community, details below. During a panel discussing a number of topics, including queering weird fiction, editor and publisher Steve Berman recalled an article in the New York Times: "Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Live in This Perfect Place?" The notion of a dying lesbian community instantly seemed an ideal setting for weird fiction. And so Lethe Press is accepting submissions for Motherland. All stories must be set in Motherland, a landyke community founded on the Delmarva Peninsula in 1968 by Ida Marmer and Robinia Atwell. We are currently working on more details about Motherland that authors can include in their story. Please check back to this listing and page. Stories can be set during any time period, from the founding of Motherland to the current day. All stories must feature lesbian or bisexual protagonists. We recommend authors read the NY Times article and the book Landykes of the South before writing their submission. Deadline is August 28, 2020. Stories should be between 2,000 and 10,000 words. Payment is 6¢ a word, split between a sum upon acceptance (up to $100) with the remainder upon publication. Email stories as attachments (MS Doc or RTF files only) to [email protected] with the Subject Line: MOTHERLANDSUBMISSION. Include in the body of your email a brief synopsis of the story and a couple lines about yourself. Via: Lethe Press.

Deadline: August 28th, 2020 Payment: Royalties Theme: Some real-world social issue where denial is causing great harm. Because we had such success and are so proud of our anthologies Strongly Worded Women and Shout, we want to do it again. Co-editors Zack Dye and Benjamin Gorman will be compiling another anthology for publication in the winter of 2020/spring of 2021. This time, the theme will be: Denial Kills. Your story or poem could be about some real-world social issue where denial is causing great harm. Denying global climate change? The dismissal of real news as "fake"? Ignoring the benefits of vaccines? Refusing to acknowledge the world is round and four and a half billion years old? Or it could be more personal. One character refusing to recognize something about her partner? About herself? These can serve as powerful allegories for those other issues without ever mentioning them. And of course your story doesn't need to be set in our world at all. Spaceships and black holes? Wizards and orcs? Fairies and vampires? Bring it! The stories do need to be fictional, though. We're not knocking journalism, long form essays, memoirs, or online rants, but there are other places for those. We want to create a space for fiction and poetry (ideally an equal amount so they can trade off and converse with one another). Short Stories: 2000 to 3500 words Poems: Up to 350 lines, max, for a single poem Multiple submissions accepted. Due date: Friday, August 28th Send your poem or short story to:  [email protected] with the subject line: Denial Anthology Submission from _your name__ Reading fee: Zero dollars and zero cents Payment is in the form of royalties, depending on sales of the anthology. All authors included will divide the profits evenly with the editors and the publishing company. Via: Not A Pipe Publishing.

Deadline: August 30th, 2020 Payment: $20 Theme: Must include some aspect of death, "Ghosts, ghouls, possession, ritual, cultural beliefs, the paranormal, monsters, the occult" etc Death. What would horror be without a little sprinkle of death? Yet it’s not the act of dying that creates the evergreen mystery surrounding the finality that comes with loss of life, it’s the enigma that follows the question: what comes next? The Other Side is a horror anthology which explores the great beyond. We’re looking for stories that tackle the world beyond the living. Ghosts, ghouls, possession, ritual, cultural beliefs, the paranormal, monsters, the occult, this anthology will collect the greatest stories that answer the age-old question: When we breath our last breath, where do we go? Submission deadlines: Sunday 30th August, 2020 Word count: 5,000–10,000 words. Payment: $20 Submission Guidelines A submission Word template is available for download HERE. Stories slightly over or under the word count will be considered Stories must be saved as a Word document, PDFs will not be accepted Times New Roman Size 12 font 1.5 paragraph spacing Place your name, the title of the anthology for which you are submitting, and your preferred contact email address in the header of the document Sex, violence, and coarse language are accepted as long as they serve the story No hate speech or fan fiction Multiple submissions welcome Reprints will be considered Payment for accepted stories will be made within 7 working days of confirmation of entry. Failure to adhere to submission guidelines will result in immediate rejection from the anthology. SUBMIT MY STORY Via: Devil's Rock Publishing.

Deadline: August 30th, 2020 Payment: 3000+ words is $125, Under 3k words is $75, $50 for reprints Theme: Horror by black authors Note: Reprints Welcome if not previously published in audio We will be open August 1-30, 2019. Are you Black? It doesn't matter what part of the world you're from, or where you are now–as long as you're Black and you write horror, you are welcome to submit! Here's what you need to know: Story submissions should be no longer than 10,000 words. We may occasionally do short fiction episodes for stories less than 3,000 words, so feel free to submit shorter stories–it just may be a bit longer before your story airs. Please send only one submission to us at a time. Simultaneous submissions (sending the same story to multiple publications) are okay. We respond within 4-6 weeks. If you found another home for your work, let us know ASAP. We do give personalized feedback, so long as your submission falls within our submission guidelines. If we reject your story, you can submit a different story at any time, but you'll only get feedback for stories submitted 12 months after the rejection. We pay for exclusive audio (first world) and electronic publishing rights for 6 months after the air date. We also reserve the right to continue to broadcast, promote, and/or link to your story on our website/podcast, but after six months, you can publish your story in any format elsewhere. We only accept reprints that have not been published in audio format previously. Just let us know your story has appeared elsewhere and where so we can credit properly. We do have plans to eventually publish “Best Of” anthologies. Should we decide to include your piece, we'll ask your permission first and you'll be paid for inclusion. If you have...

Deadline: August 30th, 2020 Payment: $40 Theme: It needs to evoke a sense of wonder and be appropriate for a YA audience. With a whisper of magic, the portal begins to open. Travel through, fellow wanderers, and tell us of the stories you find. Submissions for Cast of Wonders’ Flash Fiction Contest will run from August 15-August 30th, 2020, via Moksha. To be a valid submission to the contest, each story must adhere to the following rules: The story must be no more than 500 words long, not including its title. Do not use the title to skirt around the word count. Word count will be determined using MS Word. The story must adhere to the general Cast of Wonders Submission Guidelines. Most importantly, it needs to evoke a sense of wonder and be appropriate for a YA audience. We aim for a 12-17 age range: that means sophisticated, non-condescending stories with wide appeal, and without explicit sex, violence or pervasive obscene language. The story must be original and previously unpublished. Stories will be posted on a members-only portion of the Escape Artists forum, so first publication rights will not be spent if your story does not win. The person submitting the story must be the story’s author (or acting for the author with express permission) and hold full publishing rights to the story. A story that is derived from a previously published work in another format (i.e. not a short story) may be fine, assuming doing so isn’t in violation of copyright, obviously. This is a grey area – a retelling of a classic tale, or popular culture references, are likely to be fine, but other forms of fanfiction would probably not be appropriate. If in doubt, please send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “QUERY” and ask before submitting....

Deadline: August 31st, 2020 Payment: Royalties Theme: A Collection Of Viking Tales A Collection of Viking Tales Zimbell House is holding open submissions for short Viking tales that feature Reanna the Red. These tales must be about her leadership, heroics, and survival of her people. Your point of view character can be a bard telling of her exploits, her second in command explaining why they follow her, Reanna herself, or anyone that has witnessed her actions. However, once you pick a POV do not change it. Let your imagination roam and put our readers in the middle of the action. Our readers want to feel the cold, smell the sea-spray, hear the village sounds. Our readers want to understand the gods that are worshipped, have a true sense of what daily life is like and what the stakes are. Please keep foul language to a minimum-it loses its punch if over-used. Dialogue needs to be believable, and please keep dialects/slang to a bare minimum if you must use them. No head-hopping or POV changes. Pick one point of view and stick with it. Please show more of the action than just telling the reader what happens. Submissions of both short stories and novellas to this anthology are welcome, please keep in mind the minimum word count is 4,500 and the maximum word count is 19,500. This anthology is a great opportunity to showcase emerging writers and allow them to build their professional platforms. Submission Deadline: August 31, 2020, with a targeted release date of late October 2020. Submit your best work. Poorly formatted and unedited work will be turned down. Please use Americanized English spellings. We will be doing light editing as necessary to fit the standards we strive to maintain. Submission Guidelines: Any work under 4,500 words will be automatically disqualified for this anthology. The...

This is a full color digital illustration of a book cover depicting skeletons. Deadline: August 31st, 2020 Payment: 6c per word for original stories, 2c per word for reprints Theme: Speculative fiction about Pregnancy, Birth and Babies Note: AUS Authors only Note: Reprints accepted Deadline: 31 August 2020 Payment: 6c per word for original stories, 2c per word for reprints (Australian currency) Publisher: IFWG Publishing Australia (co-published in North America through the IFWG Publishing International imprint) Note: Open to Australian writers only (citizens, residents and ex-pats) To be edited by award-winning author Deborah Sheldon, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies will comprise stories from Australian writers obtained via commission and open callout. The commissioned writers are the multi-award-winning and bestselling authors Isobelle Carmody, Jack Dann, Kaaron Warren and Sean Williams. On-spec submissions are welcome from Australian writers of every persuasion including non-parents. Ideally, stories should be between 1500 and 5000 words, give or take. (Stories significantly longer than 5000 words would have to be outstanding.) Reprints will be considered, but must not be available for free anywhere online—the anthology will have only a small number of reprints, regardless. Artwork by commissioned Australian artists will complement selected stories. The anthology will be a visceral, frightening read. Each story must nominally tick the box of “body horror” but there is no restriction on subgenre: anything from sci-fi to fantasy to gothic to supernatural to psychological and beyond will be given equal consideration. Feel free to play with the theme and not take it too literally. Ideally, your story should make the reader feel uncomfortably aware of their physicality, morbidity or mortality. While graphic violence and swearing are acceptable, submissions must have a literary bent. Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies aims to deliver an elegant—and elevated—anthology of body horror. What to avoid: Gratuitous...

Deadline: August 31st, 2020 Payment: $10 Theme: We’re looking for speculative literary poems that touch the heart as much as the head; poems of the liminal, the fluid, and the fantastic. In anthropological terms, liminality is the midpoint of a ritual: the threshold where a person is no longer quite who they were, not yet who they might become. In between masks, what face might you have? What might you be in transit? Where will you go? Everything is possible in that moment; change is its own goal. Liminality is the space between. Liminality is an online quarterly magazine of speculative poetry edited by Shira Lipkin (co-founded and co-edited through our third year by Mattie Joiner). We are very pleased to meet you. We’re looking for speculative literary poems that touch the heart as much as the head; poems of the liminal, the fluid, and the fantastic. We’d love to see work that shifts shape, refuses to be to be easily pinned down or categorised. We actively welcome diversity; we want to hear new as well as established voices. Tell us tales we thought we knew, the way only you can tell them. Give us new myths. Liminality pays $10 per poem, for first worldwide publication rights and non-exclusive anthology rights. We will be open: January 1-February 28 April 1 – May 31 July 1 – August 31 To submit, send up to five poems to liminalitypoetry AT gmail.com with the subject line “SUBMISSION – ”. Please include your poems in the body of the e-mail; if you have formatting that makes that untenable, you may attach the poem as an .rtf. You may send up to five poems per reading period. We do not accept reprints or simultaneous submissions. (If the poem has been publicly viewable online, yes, it would be a reprint.)  “Dear Editor”, “Dear Shira”, and “Dear Mx. Lipkin” are...

Deadline: August 31st, 2020 Payment: $5, royalties, and a contributors copy Theme: All stories must be centered around Mardi Gras and contain a crime. Back by Popular Demand: Mardi Gras Mysteries, a new Mardi Gras mystery anthology for 2021. All stories must be centered around Mardi Gras and contain a crime, up to and including murder.  Supernatural/occult content is allowed, as long as the story is a mystery. Please refrain from being too explicit with sex or gore in your story, although some detail is acceptable. The focus should be on the holiday and the mystery or crime. Women flashing their breasts for beads is one thing; detailed sexual acts are another. Man waking up naked in bed next to a dead body is acceptable; having sex with it 'on-screen' is not. Story length should be 2000-5000 words. The submission window is July 1st - August 31st, 2020. Please do not sub sooner. Publication of Mardi Gras Mysteries will take place in late December 2020/January 2021.  Send your submissions to [email protected] with “Mardi Gras Mysteries” in the subject line. If we buy your story, you will receive a free print copy of the book and a $5 USD advance on royalties. For further information on royalties and publishing rights, please go to our Submission Guidelines page.  Via: Mystery and Horror LLC.

Deadline: August 31st, 2020 Payment: $20 and contributors copy Theme: Lovecraftian Tales The guidelines are simple. The working anthology title is Strange Aeon: 2020 (Lovecraftian Tales). That alone tells you most of what you need to know. I want good, solid Lovecraftian stories. I specifically say Lovecraftian rather than Cthulu because I’d like stories across the entire Mythos including additions by the original group of Mythos authors like Robert Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Likewise, specific Mythos references are not as important as getting the right style and tone. For example, I would happily take Smith’s Seed From the Sepulcher over a Deep One tale. This style preference also applies to gore and sex: think early Weird Tales. Having said that, science fiction horror is strongly encouraged; this is not an anthology of period pieces. For this anthology I’m asking for non-exclusive rights and will happily take reprints. Simply tell me the publication history so that I can give proper copyright acknowledgement. Simultaneous and multiple submissions are acceptable (please do so in a professional manner.) Though I am not especially interested in non-fiction or poetry, I will consider it. At most only one non-fiction piece and one work of (long) poetry will be used. I’m not overly concerned about length. 2,500 to 10,000 words is preferable but I also know from personal experience that horror doesn’t always lend itself to a strict word count. I don’t care about submission formatting as long as it’s legible, clean copy. Electronically, I need the story either in the body of an email or an as RTF file. Please submit to the email address mkeatonauthor (at) gmail (dot) com with the word Submission in the header. The goal is a final book with about ten stories averaging 5,000 words apiece. I be receiving submissions...