Events

Deadline: July 31st, 2016 Payment: $30USD plus a copy of print, electronic, and audiobook formats Expanses of water so vast they seem to go on forever…the silhouette of a dead ship on the horizon…stars filling the night that have never shone over our earth…nightmares made flesh, rippling just under the surface…a siren’s call no man can deny…this is what waits for you in CETO’S BRINE. CETO’S BRINE is open to ocean-themed horror – mermaids, selkies, doorways to other dimensions, ghost ships, curses, madness, mythical beasts from beyond, Lovecraftian horrors, and demonic forbidden love are just a few of the tales we’re looking for. Genres accepted: Horror Dark Fantasy Horror Erotica Adult-level fiction only (no children’s/preteen fiction). To be published in print, e-pub, and audiobook formats Pay is $30USD plus a copy of print, electronic, and audiobook formats Submit any questions to [email protected].   SUBMISSION INFORMATION SUBMISSION LENGTH: 5,000-12,000 words. Query for shorter/longer FILE FORMAT: Submit work in RTF, ODT, DOC, or DOCX formats as an attachment. Do not put your submission in the body of the e-mail. PAGE MARGINS: 1 inch margins. LINE SPACING: Double-spaced. SENTENCE SPACING: Single or double-space between sentences FONT: 12 point Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial, or equivalent font. PARAGRAPH INDENT: Auto-indent new paragraphs. Do not manually indent with spaces or tabs. CONTACT INFORMATION: Name, address, phone number, phone number, and e-mail address at the top-left of the cover/first page. HEADERS / FOOTERS / PAGE NUMBERS: Do not include any headers, footers, or page numbers. Submit your manuscript as an e-mail attachment to [email protected]. Via: Strigidae Publishing.

Deadline: July 31st, 2016 Payment: Five cents per word on fiction or five cents per word or a flat twenty bucks for poems, whichever is greater. For our fourth issue, Deep Black Sea, we want short stories, flash, and poetry hauled from the brine of oceans both real and fantastic: the shipwrecked rocket bobbing in the black ocean waves of a starless planet, its bloodied crew and their flashlights at the hatch that opens into the perfect dark, and the heavy thump against the hull; the work song of a dozen sailors, and the lilting mezzo-soprano that begins to harmonize from the empty crow's nest; the fleeing galleon's dreadful captive gnawing the last rivet from its iron box; the granddaughter that chucks a sharpened stick and spears a skull-sized opal blob galloping across the sand on its little wet fingers. We want your stories and poems. Descend by choice or let yourself be dragged under by those things that grasp upwards. Come back with the meanest, meatiest, most vigorous weird fiction you can wrestle to the surface. Watch them gasp and flop and promise you everything in ten languages. Once you're done with them, give them to us. Submission Guidelines: We will only be accepting work that fits with the set theme. Your work could be terrific, but if it's a bad thematic match we can't use it. For general questions, including our rates and rights acquired, see our FAQ Word limits as follows: Short stories and poetry to 2,500 words, flash stories to 1,000 words. With this in mind, here's how you format your email submission: 1. Subject Line: Submission, (your story title & approximate word count), (submission theme) 2. Email Body: Please summarize in a few lines how your story fits the theme. Any submission that doesn't include...

Deadline: July 31, 2016 Payment: $25 plus one contributor’s copy Many of the Christmas stories we hold dear in Western culture focus around male figures – Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, the Krampus, Rudolph and Frosty. But if you look to the past, female figures were central to family and hearth celebrations occurring on or around the Winter Solstice. Do some research and tell us your own unique story about the feminine spirit in the Yuletide. Here’s some links to get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modranicht http://paganwiccan.about.com/od/yulethelongestnight/a/Winter_Sol_Gods.htm What we don’t want to see: Gratuitous anything – violence, sex, profanity, doesn’t matter. If it is not integral to the story and it’s not advancing the plot or character development, we don’t want to see blood, gore, or sex just for shock value’s sake (this goes for language too). We are not opposed to violence, sex, or profanity – as long as it belongs in the story and it’s not just there to shock and titillate. Some things would be a very hard sell for us, like rape or torture of any sort, and torture of children or animals will get an immediate rejection. Think of how far we’re willing to go based on the well known movie rating system – if it would qualify for a PG, PG-13, or R rating, we’ll look at it. If it would be NC-17 or up, we’ll have to pass, thank you. Word Count: We’re looking for stories that fall in the 3,000 to 10,000 word range. We will consider looking at stories outside this range, but they need to be just too good for us to pass up. You have a much better chance if you keep the word count within our range. Please query us before sending a story outside of the word count guidelines. Reprints:...

Deadline: July 31, 2016 Payment: $25 and contributor's copy SUBMISSION OPEN CALL! Anthology Deadline: July 31, 2016 Publishing date: October 30, 2016 Pay: $25 upon acceptance, plus one contributor copy Word Count: min| 3500, max| 5,000 Title: The Unleashed: Monsters Vs. Zombies Are you tired of the same old zombie stories? Have you had your fill of man vs. zombie? Stiched Smile Publications wants you to unleash your imagination and mash it up. We are looking for uncommon stories featuring a monster (dracula, big foot, frankenstein, etc) fighting the undead. Unleash your imagination and take us on a ride that we've never been on. Thank you Mark Deloy for the idea. It's why you're a part of SSP! How to submit: Please send your submission to [email protected] You must have your full name, pen name if applicable and mailing address include. Entries without all information will be disqualified. Via: Stitched Smile Publications.

Deadline: July 31st, 2016 Payment: $5.00 with an equal share of 50% of royalties. “Revenge is a dish best served cold..” Eugène Sue, Memoirs of Matilda, (1848) Indeed revenge is sweet! How about served with a big scoop of ice cream, with whipped cream, sprinkles, and a gleaming drop of blood red cherry on top? Just Desserts is all about vengeance. Whether your character is dishing it out or tasting the well-deserved (or not) fruits of their actions, we want to hear stories of revenge. We’ll accept most genres, including science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror (but keep the PG-13 rating in mind), romance, steampunk, Weird Western, and poetry of various types. We are especially looking for DIVERSE protagonists and characters, all races, including aliens, sexual orientations, disabilities, etc. RESTRICTIONS:  No fan-fic or erotica. Keep the content PG-13, please.  Limit profanity, seriously gory violence, and erotic content. We want to make this book available to young adult readers as well as adults. If you have questions about content, please feel free to email:  [email protected] SUBMISSION EMAIL: [email protected] READING PERIOD:  June 1 2016 to July 31, 2016 (DO NOT SUBMIT PRIOR TO JUNE 1, 2016) RELEASE DATE:  October 2016 SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED: We do not accept simultaneous submissions. Make this your best work. If we see spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, we’ll reject your story. We will accept reprints if you have the current rights to them. LENGTH:  Up to 7,000 words, but the “sweet” spot is between 3,000 and 5,000. FORMATTING:  Standard manuscript formatting, please. Margins should be 1” to 1.5” sides, top, bottom. Indent the first lines of each paragraph, double space, italics for thoughts, etc. Please, use italics for italics not underlining. (This makes unnecessary work for your editors) Font should be 12 point Times New Roman or Courier. File...

Deadline: July 31st, 2016 Prize: £10 This month sees our one year anniversary and to mark it, along with our announcement that here on out, we will grace the winner with the mammoth sum of £10, we are looking for your best and most original monster stories. Big Foot, the Yeti. Loch Ness Monsters and Beast of Moors Bodmin and beyond. We want your creations to grace our pages for the next month. Lacking in inspiration? Fear not, here are a few images from tabloids and websites of unimpeachable repute. (www.dailystar.co.uk, http://www.dailymail.co.uk,http://www.express.co.uk and http://www.ancient-origins.net) 300 words is the max. Aim for Times New Roman and 12 points if you would be so kind. Either submit in the body of the email or as an attachment. If you do decide to grace us with your prose, there’s a good chance that at some point (probably a year down the line) we might use it in a ‘best of’ collection. So, be warned, by sending us your stuff, it will/might be published in an outmoded form called paper and as such, you accept this. Should this happen you will be offered the opportunity to buy the book at ‘cost’ price + delivery. Please send your stories to: [email protected] Via: Zero Flash.

Deadline: July 31st Payment: 8 cents per word NOTE: During the last submission window there were some problems with email notifications getting through to users.  If you think of it when submitting, write down the tracking number shown in your browser; you can use that to check the status at any time.(normally that would also be emailed in an auto-notification).  If you didn’t write that down, you can query as described below–just be careful not to mention your story title to disqualify, just say the email address you used to submit. David Steffen is the editor.  He will be reading all submissions himself, no slushreader.  Be sure you read the guidelines and pay close attention to the requirements around anonymity–since there is a staff of one, the requirements for anonymity are extra important to avoid disqualifying your submission.   FICTION OVERVIEW Genres: science fiction, fantasy, horror (everything must have speculative element, even horror). Word count: 3500 words or less. This is a firm limit.  If you submit a longer story, it will be rejected unread and that will count as a submission. Do not query to ask permission to submit something longer either–the answer will be no. Pay rate: 8 cents per word (more than the professional rate as deemed by SFWA) Multiple submissions: A total of TWO submissions per author during this submission window.  You don’t have to wait for one response to send the second one–you can just send both whenever you want during the window.  We’re aiming to publish a couple stories of complementary length per month–one very short with one longer or two middling length ones–so I suggest that it would be a good idea to submit a short and long yourself if you have them available. Simultaneous submissions: No. Reprint submissions: No. That means you should not submit anything...

Deadline: July 31st, 2016 Payment: 1 cent per word Note: Female authors only Reprints allowed 'Killing it Softly'—Women. The softer sex. Maybe, but trust me, the frightening tales from the women in this anthology will not be soft. Not in any way. This select group of female authors will take you for a ride into the darkest part of your psyche; to places you’ve been too afraid to go. And once you’ve been there—you’ll never be able to ‘unsee’ the horrors they’ll bring… Suzie Lockhart - Managing Editor Welcome to Digital Horror Fiction. We are excited to announce a new open call for reprint short stories in the horror fiction genre - dedicated to stories by female* authors. These stories will be published as part of an anthology (Killing it Softly) of short stories, flash fiction, and some poetry under the Digital Horror Fiction imprint, by the publisher, Digital Fiction Publishing Corp. (Note that flash fiction and poetry are by invitation only and will be solicited directly by the Editor, this open call is for horror reprint short stories of 3,000 to 7500 words in length only.) We are looking for reprint short stories that have appeared in professional or semi-professional books, magazines, collections, or anthologies, and that are available to be re-licensed by Digital Horror Fiction and published through Amazon and elsewhere in an anthology of stories. We are not looking for (and will not license) self published stories (in any format/venue), stories that have been published and are available to download on-line (free or paid) as stand-alone stories (in collections and anthologies is fine), or stories that are available free on-line in any form (magazine, archive, blog etc, but podcasts that have not been made available in print are fine). Basically, if we search for your story on-line and find it, in writing, by title or content, and it's free in any format we won't license it - no exceptions. Reprint short stories must have a...

Deadline: August 1st, 2016 Payment: a percentage of the final product based on how many stories are in the collection. The Project:  In Fall 2016 we’ll be releasing our second collection of stories under the wide umbrella genre of ‘Horror.’ It will be released as one large volume. This collection will be edited by Head Editor of Onyx Neon Shorts, Jeffrey P. Martin. What genre are you looking for?: This isn’t for a specific sub genre, but more of a call for anything that fits under the larger umbrella of “Horror.” Stories about haunted houses, killer dolls, classic gore, weird fiction, or various other topics will fit right in. What authors inspire you? We are inspired by authors like Laird Barron, Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, Nathan Balingrud, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft How will this work? We’re looking for 13 stories and they will be released in one large collection in October/November. What’s the length? Because it’s a collection of stories they can range anywhere from 0-30,000 words. So, no minimum limit. What we pay: Our standard collection rate is a percentage of the final product based on how many stories are in the collection. What’s the deadline: Because the collection comes out in the fall, no stories will be considered if they come in after August 1st. We need time to read through stories and decide if we want to include them. This isn’t a moveable deadline. This is literally the final deadline that we will take submissions for the collection so please, be aware. First Print and Electronic Publishing Rights: It must be stated that when your story is published for the first time that publisher has taken your stories First Print Rights. What this means is that every publication that publishes the story after that has to list where the stories were published. In this case we...

Deadline: August 1st, 2016 Payment: $25.00 – $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 – $10.00 for poetry, and $25.00 for nonfiction (all U.S. dollars). We also send you a copy of the issue in which your piece appears. You’ll receive your money and issue at the same time. Fall Prompt: Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die. We love the fact 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 two to three 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.) 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...