Events

Deadline: May 1st, 2023 Payment: $25 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 $25 upon publication. Hopefully, with time it will be more. 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...

Deadline: May 1st, 2023 Prizes: $100, $75, and $50 for the top 3 spots Theme: A speculative fiction LGBTIQA story with the theme of "Rise" (See below) Note: Those who submit a quality story, even those who don't win, will likely see their work in print which would put selling this in the future as a reprint Every year, QSF holds a flash fiction contest to create an amazing new anthology of queer speculative fiction stories. We ask authors to do the nearly-impossible – to submit a sci fi, fantasy, paranormal or horror LGBTIQA story that has no more than 300 words. Our 2023 contest launches on March 1st, and closes on May 1st, but we will soon be open for early entries. We’ve increased our prizes for the 10th anniversary edition of our contest. The theme for 2023 is “Rise”: Rise (Noun) 1) An upward slope or movement 2) A beginning or origin 3) An increase in amount or numberttaining certainty about something 4) An angry reaction Rise (Verb) 1) To take up arms 2) To return from death 3) To become heartened or elated 4) The exert oneself to meet a challenge With the world in turmoil, we all need a little hope, so this year we chose a word rife in meanings and ripe for inspiration. Tell us about rise in all its forms and the difference it can make on your characters, the culture, and the world, for better or worse. Submit Your Story What We’re Looking For We’ll be accepting works from across the queer spectrum, and would love to see more entries including lesbian, trans, bi, intersex and ace protagonists, as well as gay men. We also welcome diversity in ability (physical and mental) and in race. We had our most diverse set of entries yet...

Deadline: May 1st, 2023 Payment: ¢ per word for prose, $10 for poetry, $25 for artwork Theme: Epic Fail NonBinary Review is open for submissions on the theme of "epic fail." We're not talking about everyday failures, like you didn't pay the electric bill, so your lights are turned off. We're talking about the cascades of calamity that end in death, destruction, disaster. Series of unfortunate choices that lead to plague, famine, and war. A train wreck that, once it's been set in motion, you can neither stop nor look away from. There but for the grace of some spectacularly poor planning, bad decisions, and gross incompetence, go all of us. Let's hear it all. Zoetic Press publishes the best in new lit - experimental, interstitial, luminous. We welcome submissions from EVERYONE. The only requirement is that they be in English, or translated into English (we love a translation). If your writing is outstanding, no matter who you are, we have a place for it. NonBinary Review, our award-winning themed lit journal is published quarterly. Each issue revolves around a specific theme, but we're asking contributors to go beyond the old familiar media tropes. We're looking for work we can read with our whole body - work that gives us goosebumps, makes us see the world differently, has the tang of authenticity, makes us sit up and listen, and smells like....something. This analogy got out of hand. What we're saying is that we're not looking for re-hashes of images or stories we've read before. We want contributors to explore every facet of our themes, really getting in between the cracks, in the corners, all the forgotten places that no one ever thinks to explore. We want to read work that makes us think "I never would have thought of this, and...

Deadline: May 1st, 2023 Payment: $35 or $25 with a contributor copy. Theme: Taking a look at the super Wealthy and Depraved Issuing layoffs from their yachts. Making idiotic business decisions while others pay the price. Keeping their riches via tax loopholes for the super wealthy. Profiting from the hard work and suffering of others. Sending dick-shaped rockets into space. Evading punishment. It goes on and on. The details range from the banal to the scandalous. The uber wealthy play an outsized role in our society — determining or demanding too much and contributing too little. With The One Percent: Tales of the Super Wealthy and Depraved (our previous working title was Rich People Being Shitty, so that should give you a target to aim for), Rock and a Hard Place Press changes it up a little bit from their established pattern. Instead of stories about desperate protagonists in tough positions, we’ll explore the privileged and elite, and how they traffic in, revel in, and benefit from the desperation that they cause. Hopefully, some of these characters get the comeuppance they so richly deserve . . . but we wouldn’t count on it. WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR? We are looking for fictional short stories ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words examining the ways in which the most affluent among us commit wrongs. These transgressions can range from broken laws to the perfectly legal, though otherwise reprehensible. These acts can be small in scale — being an awful parent or spouse — or they can have wide-ranging impact — concealing carbon emissions or human rights abuses. At RHP, we subscribe to the notion that the act of becoming a billionaire, even if no other laws are broken in the process, is, by its nature, a crime against humanity. People should...

Submission Window: May 1st-3rd, 2023 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 We have a new submissions schedule as of June 1, 2020: The first and second day of every month, 12 am of the 1st to 12 am of the 3rd, E.S.T. Only one submission per person. 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 – 6¢ per word for new fact-based work, 1- 4¢ per word for reprinted fact articles. For new poetry, we pay $1 a line, reprints would be 50¢ a line, up to 40 lines. We’ll look at longer poems but that would be a hard sell, and words over 40 lines would be paid at 6¢ per word. We began 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 about The 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, anywhere from 1000 word flash fiction on up, but all else being equal, shorter pieces...

Submission Window: May 1st-7th, 2023 Payment: $25 Theme: Someone going through the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. JUNE SUBMISSIONS (opens May 1 - 7, 2023) — The twenty-first of June is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But our longest days (or nights) aren’t measured by minutes but by worry, hardship, or struggle. We’ve all had days like that, where it feel as if hours have passed only to see a couple minutes have vanished off the clock. So to honor the solstice, we want stories about somebody’s longest, unending day. Send us tales of what someone is going through that is making every Stone’s Throw is the monthly online companion to Rock and a Hard Place Magazine, delivering shorter, sharper content on a regular basis in an electronic medium, before collecting all 12 stories for an annual print anthology. Each month, writers will be given a submission prompt, and the best of the best, by our estimation, will be posted here the following month. INTERESTED IN SUBMITTING? Stone’s Throw will open for submissions the first week of every month, from 12AM on the first through 11:59PM on the seventh. We’re looking for all the same dark fiction, crime and noir as our usual submissions, but with a target length between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and aligned with the monthly submissions prompt (see below). We’ll read through the best, choose the one story that shines brightest, and publish it online the following month, paying $25 per accepted story. After a year, we’ll collect all twelve stories into a Stone’s Throw Anthology, to be published alongside our other print issues. PLEASE NOTE — If you have been accepted within the calendar year for Stone’s Throw, you are ineligible to submit again during that same calendar...

Submission Window: May 1st - 14th, 2023 Payment: Fiction: 1500-7500 words ($.08 per word, $100 minimum), Poetry: up to 5 poems or 5 pages of poems, whichever is shorter. ($40 per poem), Nonfiction: 1000-2000 words ($75 per essay or article), Cover Art: $100 for reprints, $200 for original unpublished, Interior Art: $50 for reprints, $100 for original unpublished Theme: Solarpunk is a prefigurative, utopian artistic movement that envisions what the future might look like if humanity solved major modern challenges like climate change, and created more sustainable and balanced societies. As a genre and cultural aesthetic, it encompasses literature, visual art, fashion, video games, architecture, and more. Solarpunk carries many aspects of punk ideologies such as rebelliousness, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, animal rights, decolonization, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, and anti-consumerism. Similar to the cyberpunk genre, the big difference between the two is that in solarpunk technology and nature are in harmony with one another rather than in conflict. (At the moment, our nonfiction department is always open for submissions. If the fiction portal is closed and you submit fiction through the open nonfiction portal, your submission will be rejected.) All submissions to Solarpunk Magazine are done via Moksha. Any submissions received via email will be deleted without a response. Please don’t email us to describe your story and ask if it’s something we’d be interested in before submitting. We appreciate the consideration, but its easier if you just submit the story through Moksha. Please read the full submission guidelines on down below or on our Moksha page before submitting your work. All submission periods end at 11:59 pm PST on the 14th of their given month. 2023 Submission Window Schedule: January 1-14 March 1-14 (Colorful Roots: BIPOC authors only) May 1-14 July 1-14 September 1-14 2023 Issue Release Schedule: Issue #7 – January 10 Issue #8 –...

Deadline: May 15th, 2023 Payment: Two cents per word Theme: Horror stories that take place in Texas by Texas authors DEADLINE: MAY 1, 2023 HellBound Books is pleased to announce plans for the 2023 edition of Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers, Vol. 8. Horror author and editor Patrick C. Harrison, III will edit Vol. 8 of the series, which has featured the works of Joe R. Lansdale, Stephen Graham Jones, Robert E. Howard, O. Henry, Jeremy Hepler, Madison Estes, David Bowles and others. Harrison 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. Two cents per word and contributing writers will receive one free copy and a 50% 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 – $200, 7,500 words – $150, 5,000 words – $100, 2,500 words – $50, 1,500 words – $30. 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 on February 1, 2023. The deadline to turn in stories is May 15, 2023, and our intent is to have the book printed and available by October 1, 2022 - in plenty of time for Halloween. Please send submissions to [email protected] CONTACT INFORMATION Questions / submissions: [email protected] - Make sure that you...

Deadline: May 15th, 2023 Payment: $10 plus a contributor copy Theme: The best LGBTQ etc voices out there in the world of horror. No limits, no theme, just your very best stories. Come out, Come out, whoever you are. I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but I wanted to open up the submission call as soon as possible for our June issue. We here at PTP are all about good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. In June we will be celebrating Pride month and we're on the hunt for the best LGBTQ etc voices out there in the world of horror. No limits, no theme, just your very best stories. This issue will be double sized so we look forward to seeing your work. Oh and like all of our work, our writers and artist get paid. ​Pay is $10 plus a contributor copy. ​ Send submissions to [email protected] with Pride in the subject line, or upload a .doc, .docx, or pdf file below. Via: Pyschotoxin Press.

Deadline: May 15th, 2023 Payment: 1 cent per word and a contributors copy Theme: Crime Fiction In the near future, Unnerving will be dipping its claws into CRIME fiction, and to launch into this avenue, I’m compiling an anthology. Meaning, I need stories. Short ones: 1,500-8,000 words, preference being 2,500-4,000 words in length. Renumeration is $0.01/word USD + a paperback copy. I’m asking for six months exclusivity. Reprints are okay, as long as they were last printed more than five years ago (personal collections excluded in this period) and are not available to read online (Audio excluded from this request). I want gritty stories. Think Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Sara Gran, Jo Nesbo. I also like humorous stuff with a dark edge. Think Donald Westlake, Adam Howe, Brian Evenson. I like twists. I like oddity. I like violence. Now, for what I don’t want: no police procedurals, no copaganda, nothing supernatural, no rape revenge stories, nothing pro-religion, and nothing cozy or soft. ​ Stories written using AI tech will not be considered. ​ Send stories to [email protected] in a .docx or .doc file. No PDFs. Double-space your manuscripts. Please use the word ANTHOLOGY in the subject line. Submissions close May 15, 2023. Via: Unnerving Books.