Events

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: Royalties The first entry in an anthology series showcasing horror in every state, “50 States of Fear: California” is all about the terrors, horrors, creeps, and shrieks found in the Golden State. Stories must be horror, they must be original (no urban legends, creepypasta, or retellings of true crime), and must take place in California. The submission deadline is 31 July 2019. Our target is 30 stories. There is no limit on the number of submissions per author, but we reserve the right to limit the number of accepted stories per author. As payment, authors will receive royalties divided by word count. Guidelines First and foremast, all submissions must be horror. However, we recognize that horror is a very broad and often nuanced genre. To that end, we’ll read stories that fit into other genres (thriller, family drama, coming of age, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, romance, et cetera) as long as the story contains horror, and as long as horror is integral to the narrative. ALL submissions must be within the horror genre, and MUST meet the following requirements: Submit all documents as an attachment in .docx or .pages format 12 point Arial, Calibri, or Courier font Double-spaced Submit via email to [email protected] In the body of the email, include your name and contact information. PLEASE NOTE: If your piece is accepted for publication, we take First Print and Electronic Publishing Rights. A copy of our publishing contract is available upon request. Open Submissions: Anthologies These are general guidelines for ALL anthology submissions. We’re looking for stories between 500 – 7500 words. A few words under or over won’t necessarily disqualify a story, but please keep as close to the guidelines as possible. Stories MUST fit within the horror genre. Via: Soteira Press.

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: Contributor’s copy with chances at a $25, $50, or $100 prize! Do you have a scary story to share?  Fiction, fact, or otherwise, share your prose with us and you, too, can win up to $100* and get your story printed.  Enter your submission today!  Contest will be judged by a panel of impartial judges, all of whom have a vested interest in the unknown.  Scare us, terrify us, and thrill us!   Contest Rules: Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please only send us one story at a time and if your story is accepted elsewhere please email us and let us know ASAP. We are seeking original fiction only.  In other words, NO REPRINTS. Many will enter, few will win. Entrants cannot be related, legally or otherwise, to OPQ staff Entries must be submitted via our Green Submissions Manager (located here ) by July 31st, 2019 to qualify. Entries must match one of the following themes: ‘True Tales of Terror,’  or ‘Fantastic Frights’ No entry fee necessary! Note: entries will be judged based on quality, thematic appropriateness, and writing chops. Though we want to be scared, there are some things that are off-limits.  As with our normal morality policy, OPQ will automatically reject stories that involve pedophilia, excessive gore, violence for violence’s sake, and non-consensual sex.  As always, we would prefer stories that use religion and/or spirituality as an uplifting theme or a bridge towards a larger, thematic discussion, rather than being derogatory towards one specific religion.  That being said, we enjoy looking forward to what your twisted imaginations come up with!   Themes: Entries must follow one of the following themes: ‘True Tales of Terror’ are reserved for true experiences you’ve witnessed.  Ritual gone wrong?  Cryptid got a little up close and personal?  Alien attacks at night? ...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: $25 for original work, $12 for reprints Note: Reprints welcome Amara looked up to the sky; the moon showered her with pale light. The sign was clear. She lowered her gaze to the field before her, to the bodies laying there, contorted in death. With a heavy sigh, Amara walked forward to her fate . . . ​ ​ What We Want Catacombs: Martyrs on Earth and Elsewhere is an anthology of stories about fictional martyrs past, present, and future, on Earth or some fictional world. The title is tentative so keep in mind that the final product could have a different title.   This anthology has some specific rules. Please read carefully.   Stories must be historical or speculative fiction; a combination of the two would also be fantastic. ​ We are looking for stories about individuals who give up their lives for their faith or for some cause greater than themselves. Judeo-Christian history is replete with stories of individuals who died for their faith, who sacrificed their lives rather than renounce God. Many of these martyrs, such as Sts. Stephen, Sebastian, Agatha, and Lucy, for example, are well known, recognized by one Christian sect or another, and are listed as Saints. For this issue, please send us plausible stories of unknown martyrs from any historic period or some future period or alternate reality, so long as the martyrs are martyred for the faith as understood by traditional Judeo-Christianity.   Please be sure to invent your own martyr and not use an actual historical or legendary figure.   We are also open to stories of individuals who died for other causes dear to the heart of Western civilization. If your hero died for a freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights for instance, go...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: 1.5 cents per word Submission Guidelines: New Myths will no longer consider submissions of fiction, nonfiction and poetry outside of specific reading periods. These periods run from June 1-July 31 and from January 1-February 28. Artwork, requests for book reviews, and other correspondence can still be submitted at any time. No Multiple Fiction Submissions Please do not send more than one fiction submission at a time. Wait until you receive an answer before sending a second story. No more than three fiction submissions total from any one author will be considered during a given reading period. Poetry is different. See below. Contact information: Please send fiction, nonfiction and poetry to [email protected]. Please send queries for book reviews to [email protected] All other correspondence, including art submissions, to [email protected] NewMyths.com publishes speculative fiction of every stripe except graphic horror. We like each issue to have an eclectic variety of stories:  funny, frightening, hard and soft sci-fi, adventure, thoughtful, etc. Every issue includes at least one nonfiction piece dealing with some aspect of science, myth, folklore, or literature as it relates to speculative fiction, usually of the well-researched essay variety rather than opinion or editorial. Speculative poetry is welcome. We tend to receive a lot of free verse and not enough "form" poetry. We also buy one piece of artwork per issue, and occasionally commission one. We publish book reviews of recent releases about every two weeks. If you have written a review, or have a book coming out soon, please contact us. Reading an issue is the best way to know if your submission is a fit for NewMyths.com or not. Responses take 60-90 days on average. Feel free to send a follow-up query after that point. Submissions made outside the submission windows may be deleted, unread. We save email...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: $3 (.15 cents per word!) Haunted Waters Press seeks exceptionally small works of flash fiction to be showcased in Penny Fiction, a regular feature of the literary journal, From the Depths. Stories will also appear in the Penny Fiction Poster Collection. Tell us a story in exactly 19 words—no more, no less. Extra points will be awarded for those writers who adhere to the guidelines. Not really. There are no points. Just read the guidelines below and impress Penny with your ability to follow instructions. WORKS CONSIDERED We seek flash fiction stories told in exactly 19 words—no more, no less. Original fiction only. No poetry, taglines, or jokes. Please include a title for each story submitted. One active Penny Fiction submission per author, per reading period. Multiple stories per submission encouraged. One is fine. Four is cool. Twenty is borderline obnoxious...we like obnoxious! No previously published works. Need inspiration? Follow Penny Fiction on Facebook for tips and prompts. THE DREADED COVER LETTER Include one interesting fact about yourself in 13 words or less. Undertakers and cat herders earn extra points. If we do not find you interesting, we reserve the right to make you appear more interesting. No long lists of previously published works. No cut ‘n paste author bios. Confused? Check out The Lovely Penny bios from any past issue. COMPENSATION $3.00 per published piece. (That’s a professional rate of .15 cents per word— enough for a hot cup of coffee to sip on while you pen your next brilliant work of incredibly short fiction!) THE DETAILS Free to submit. Accepting submissions in the months of December/January, March/April, June/July Limited to 200 submissions per month. Submit early! Notifications to be sent as decisions are made or within 60 days of closing. Please review full guidelines prior to submitting,...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Prizes: The coveted Bloody Axe Award, as well as a $100 cash prize Every year we seek 10-minute audio drama scripts that are genuinely scary, imaginative, chilling, intelligent, suspenseful, horrific or downright grotesque. Writers may submit up to two audio drama scripts to Deathscribe in any given year. Five scripts will be selected from all submissions. These five pieces will be performed on stage in front of a live audience. The writer of the winning piece, chosen by a celebrity panel of judges, will receive the coveted Bloody Axe Award, as well as a $100 cash prize.The submission window for Deathscribe 2019 is now open. Scripts will be accepted through July 31st. Guidelines: PDF format is strongly preferred. If PDF is not possible, then only MS Word please. All scripts must have a title page with all contact information, but NO identifying information should appear anywhere else in the document. Scripts must be no more than TEN MINUTES in length, and should follow audio drama format. An example of proper audio drama format can be found here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scripts/bbcradioscene.pdf The Deathscribe experience includes performing the pieces on stage with Foley artists and a band creating the sound effects and music live. Therefore, scripts must be ready to produce, including direction for sound and music cues. Sorry, but submissions cannot include usage of copyrighted music. Writers may submit up to two (2) scripts for Deathscribe consideration in any year. NO SCREENPLAYS. SCREENPLAYS WILL BE DISCARDED. WE KNOW THEM WHEN WE SEE THEM. (Nothing against screenplays. But this is a radio play festival.) DO NOT submit full-length plays for consideration in Deathscribe. They will be discarded. If you wish to submit a full-length horror play to WildClaw, see our general submission guidelines. Previous winners include: 2018: “Whisper Trigger” by Dan Finnen and Sarah Gise 2017: “Cavities” by Bill Daniel...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: 0.04 USD per word via Paypal JULY 2019 SUBMISSIONS THEME : Any genre, dark humour. Theme is ONLY WHEN I LAUGH This theme will be open for submissions from 1st July 2019 and will close midnight 31st July 2019 (last place on Earth).  Submissions received outside of this timeframe will not be read. You must include the theme in your email subject (as shown above). Reading will start once the submission period has closed. The BEST 13 drabbles will be chosen for publication in OCTOBER 2019. Word count : EXACTLY 100 words, excluding title Author eligibility : Open only to authors who have already been successfully accepted into one of our anthologies Reprints : Not allowed Simultaneous Submissions : Not allowed Multiple Submissions : One per month Publication : Online in Dark Moments.  May be included in a single anthology in print and digital formats at a later date (but within one year of initial publication) Author compensation : 0.04 USD per word via Paypal How to submit : See our submission guidelines for formatting. Send your story as either a Word format attachment to [email protected]. Your email title should be “ – – ” Please include a 50 word bio and ONE link Via: Black Hare Press.

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: 10 cents per word David Steffen is the editor, who you may also know from using the Submission Grinder writing tool or reading the Long List Anthology series.  Diabolical Plots is a SFWA-qualifying market, so if you have a personal goal to join SFWA, making a sale here would help you toward that goal. 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–the answer will be no. Pay rate: 10 cents per word (more than the minimum 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. Simultaneous submissions: No.  We understand we are tying up your story while you wait, and so we strive to respond as quickly as possible.  While each year might be different, last year the maximum wait time to get a first response (a rejection or a hold notice) was 14 days.  The maximum overall wait time if someone submitted on the first day and was held, was about 6 weeks. Reprint submissions: No. That means you should not submit anything that has been published in any format, blog, e-zine, print, podcast, anything.  Sharing stories with other authors in login-protected critique sites like Baen’s Bar or Critters is fine. Resubmits: No.  Do not send a story you’ve submitted to us before, whether it’s been revised or not. Estimated Resolution Time: 30 days after end of submission window.  I will send initial responses to stories as...

Deadline: July 31st, 2019 Payment: 3 (Euro) cents per word There are plenty of amazing print and online journals out there for ‘character-driven’ fiction, and we encourage you to read them. SPJ is not one of them, though. Hence, we are not interested in stories predominantly about the sentiments and subjective experiences of fictional people. We want hard SF that zooms out of the personal and lifts off into the structural, the systemic, the epic. We yearn for carefully crafted philosophical speculation that puzzles over the questions of the future and alternate pasts. And we have a soft spot for stories created as ‘artefacts’ (fictional, ‘in-universe’ non-fiction). So here are SPJ‘s quests: – Campbellian hard SF. Reaching back to the roots of classic sci-fi, these rigorous tales take themselves seriously and push the boundaries of our scientific imagination, scaling from the nano to the meta. The cast, if any, is functional and disposable. It’s the sociological, technological and indeed cosmic developments that sweep the reader up in an expanding sense of wonder. (For a contemporary long-form example that received mainstream attention, see the latter two books of Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy.) – Fictional non-fiction. The purest, most intimate form of world-building. A transcript of the last UN Security Council meeting before an extinction-level event. The dental bills of a cybernetic vampire. Interviews with eyewitnesses of a battle between Martians and archangels. Think ‘World War Z’, not ‘Walking Dead’. – Speculative philosophy. Extrapolating abstract ideas to examine the implications if they were to manifest. (See for instance The End of History, the Beginning of Hers in Vol. V. Issue 1. for a theological example of just what we mean: what if prayers for supernatural intercession were answered in 1453, but the faithful got more than they had bargained for.) (The first author to have a story published in each of the three...

Deadline: August 1st, 2019 NOVELS, NOVELLAS, COLLECTIONS We are looking for horror novels, novellas, and short story collections. No specific theme or subgenre. Please send submissions to [email protected], include SUBMISSION, book title, and your name in the subject line. Include the following: 1) A brief query in the body of the email. Make this the elevator pitch. 2) Attach a synopsis of the story in a word doc. file telling us the beginning, middle, and ending of the book. 3) Include a ONE page sample from anywhere in the book attached in a separate word doc. 4) Be sure the manuscript is completed. 5) If we like what we read, we'll ask for the first three chapters. If we like those, we will ask to read the entire manuscript. 6) Word counts: Novellas between 17k and 40k words; novels 40k to 120k words. 7) All stories in a short story collection must be written by the same author(s). Give us at least 50k words total for the entire collection. Deadline is August 1st.