Submission Window: May 1st – June 30th, 205
Payment: $5
Theme: Speculative Poetry
SpecPoVerse accepts poems with or without known formalism and also experimental forms. An illustrated poem in which the illustration was created by the poet is also acceptable; this must be submitted as a .pdf file with the embedded illustration.
I’m frequently asked how it is that I became interested in horror as a creator.
It’s one of those questions that I tend to immediately internalize as if it’s coming from a place of judgment (in fairness, more than once it has).
But it’s an honest question also, and the answer is rather mundane, but I think it is useful for us as creators.
Here’s the big (read: boring) reveal: I come to horror by way of fantasy. If anything, fantasy is homebase for me and horror came a bit later.
Deadline: May 31st, 2025
Payment: Royalties
Theme: Haunted workplace stories
What I’m Looking For: Haunted workplace stories, modern day or historical, it’s completely up to you. Just write a great character-driven story that hooks the reader fast and reels them in hard. There do NOT need to be ghosts. You don’t need to have a truly haunted workplace. You can have spooky vibes, vampires, werewolves, the whole nine.
Story length will be between 5,000 and 10,000 words.
Submission Window: May 1st – June 1st, 2025
Payment: $5
Theme: Poetry or short fiction about the Gods and Goddesses and heroes of the world’s many Pagan/polytheist traditions that somehow features Music
Summer Solstice 2025: Music. Submission Period: 1 May through 1 June 2025. Jazz and blues. Rock and opera. Ballads and filk songs. Music has been an integral element of human creativity and culture since we first learned to carve holes into bones. Send us your best poems, short stories, and essays about music — in all its forms — from a Pagan/polytheist, witchy, and mythological point of view. Send us poems about the duel between Apollo and Marsyas, Bragi wooing Idun, and Pan stalking a poacher with madness-inducing pipe music. Send us short stories about a desperate musician making a crossroads deal with Dionysus, a composer praying to Hymen for inspiration, an archaeologist uncovering a temple and sacred instruments of Kothar-wa-Khasis. Send us essays about Väinämöinen as archetypal musician, Mozart’s opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, and the rise of the modern Pagan music scene.
Like many authors, the ongoing battle against AI has been at the forefront of my mind. In the UK, the focus has been very much on the direction our government appears to be taking towards allowing access to copyrighted materials for AI training. The onus it seems will be on the creator—whether musician, author, or artist—to opt out. The White Paper consultation, which closed in February of this year, can be read in full here. The message overall is that whilst the creator should be able to reserve their rights so that AI cannot be trained on their output, the rights of the AI industry are given an equivalence and must be supported. In fact if you look at the government’s position it seems to favour AI at the expense of the creative sector: despite the responses from the likes of the BBC, The Information Commissioner’s Office, authors, artists, and musicians (who marked their protest with the silent album ‘Is This What We Want’ consisting of recordings of empty studios).
But all this discussion and consultation strikes me as pretty much pointless when the industries using AI are simply going ahead and scraping data before the copyright discussion has been settled legally. This hit home when I spotted a series of posts by a huge number of authors who had found their work on the LibGen Pirated* Books database. US magazine The Atlantic had provided the link. The latter is currently carrying out an investigation into the data set used by Meta to train its AI. It provides the database link here. Are you in there?
Horror stories thrive on fear, and at the heart of every great horror story is a terrifying antagonist. Whether it’s a supernatural entity haunting a school dormitory, a deranged professor with a dark secret, or a sinister force lurking in the library basement, your antagonist is the driving force behind the fear. A well-crafted antagonist does more than just scare readers; they create tension, challenge protagonists, and make your horror story unforgettable.
Greetings, children of the dark on this second-to-last day of March—which, btw, WTAF?! How does time work these days? I am, as ever, back to being behind on life because my brain is refusing to do its job lately, so I’ll just pop one note in here and then let you go about your merry ways…
Our April short story submission window shall be declared open on TUESDAY. Yes, that’s April Fool’s Day, but I promise you this is no prank.
We’re right up to date on our slush pile now, so come on and fill it right up again! We want your best and brightest (well, darkest) speculative fiction. Your gothic tales and mythological beasts. Your killer-on-a-spaceships and your dystopian futures. Your dark dabblings with magic and your haunted happenings. Come on and submit—just make sure you read our submissions guidelines first, and please please please submit a clean, plain Word document. Bonus points if you do the following:
We’re not asking you to follow any strict particular formatting here; just the basics of helping us be able to open and read the document, identify what the story is, and who wrote it. Honestly, it’s formatting issues that have delayed the anthology publication because we now need to go through and proofread it carefully and check it for consistency, so do us a solid and let’s start out with the consistency, yeah?
But now, it’s time for this week’s edition of dark speculative fiction. For our main course, we have a gorgeously dark and haunting morsel from John Dougherty. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:
Want to join these four in the illustrious pages of TWF? Here’s what we’re looking for:
Send your submissions via the form at the bottom of this page (and you may as well read the content of that page, since it tells you our guidelines).
Over to you, Stuart.
Hi all.
This week I had 3 full days of training (and next week I have 2), so I hate to say this, but I wouldn’t expect much progress on the new layout for 3ish weeks.
That being said, more proofing has been done on the next Trembling With Fear print addition! As I’m not currently in charge of getting that together, something IS being done.
Now, for the standards:
Offhand, if you’ve ordered Trembling With Fear Volume 6, we’d appreciate a review!
For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree as we’re not really active on Twitter anymore, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads.
I’d like to take this time to give special thanks to our Patreon Sponsors who are at the Level 3 reward level and above!
– Ryan Benson.
– Jane Nightshade.
– Rebecca Rowland.
– James Aitchison.
– Robin Ginther-Venneri.
– Burial Books.
– Craig of Write my paper.
– Celltrackingapps.
