Events

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: 5 cents per word What happens when we make monsters? What happens when we confront the monsters inside ourselves? These are the grotesque things that should never have been. These are the beasts that stalk our twisted pasts. These are the ghosts of our own making that haunt our regrets. They’re the blood on our hands. They’re the obsessions in our heads. They’re the vengeance in our hearts. These are Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. Bram Stoker Award-winning editors Doug Murano and Michael Bailey welcome you to submit your best work for consideration in this anthology, which will launch in early 2020. We've already announced two of our contributors--Ramsey Campbell and Usman T. Malik--and will be making more announcements in the coming weeks! Pay: 5c/word U.S. Length: 2-5,000 words. FIRM. Reprints? No thanks. Anything you should avoid? Graphic, gratuitous depictions of child abuse, sexual abuse and animal abuse are generally unwelcome. Where to send it: [email protected] Deadline: Aug. 31 Via: Miscreations Facebook.

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: $25 for fiction, $5 per poem WHAT WE WANT:   1) Dark, literary fiction between 3,000 and 7,000 words. Think Jackson, Ligotti, Barker, think the films of Polanski (especially the Apartment Trilogy), think of Cronenberg. For inspiration purposes, not imitation. Give us something new, but with the haunting flavor of the artists listed above. Submit as an .docx or .doc only.  Pay: $25 via Paypal for each accepted story.   2) Twisted Poetry. POEMS SHOULD WALK ON THE DARK SIDE. Submit only 3 poems at a time, in a single document, either .docx or .doc  Pay: $5 via Paypal per accepted poem.    3) Chilling Art. Surprise us with your depravity. Submit no more than 1 piece at a time, either as an .jpg, or .png.  Pay: $10 via Paypal per accepted piece.    BASIC GUIDELINES   -With each submission, please submit a cover letter with the title of your piece(s) and word count (if fiction), as well as a third person bio of no more than four sentences.  –Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let me know right away if your work is accepted elsewhere.  –No multiple submissions (except poetry, in a single email – see above).  –Please allow 45 days for a decision to be made. After that, feel free to query about your work. Does not apply to $5 Tier Patreon supporters. Those submissions will be put into a priority queue and decided on within 14 days (be sure to mention your Patreon support in the submission email). -Subject line of submission email should read: SUBMISSION / category of submission (fiction, poetry, art) / Last name, First Name. – Fiction and poetry should be single-spaced. No odd formatting unless absolutely essential to presentation of work.  -All submission should be emailed to [email protected] – Please wait until a decision...

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: Fiction: $0.02/word, $0.01/word after 500 words. Poetry: $0.50/line, $0.25/line after 20 lines. CROSS+DECAY is an independent art and literary magazine, connecting creators through dark and eerie themes. This magazine is edited and curated by CRUCIFIXVI. Purchase your copy of Issue 1: Ghosts here. SUBMIT WORK Cross + Decay is now accepting work for Issue 2: Witches. The deadline for submissions is August 31 2019. Submission Guidelines: Cross+Decay is a literary and art magazine, welcoming poetry, prose, and artwork. The work must adhere to the  issue's theme, but it is up to the interpretation of the creator to decide what work best fits that theme and would be most relevant. Prose can be fiction or non-fiction, 500-1000 words (maximum 1000). Prose must be clearly formatted, and fully edited, including spell-checking and proper grammar. Previously published work is welcome, as long as rights have reverted back to the writer. Work exceeding 1000 words will automatically be rejected. Visual art can be of any medium, including photography and photographs of three-dimensional work. Work must be attached as .jpegs. Artists can submit their work with watermarks or as lower quality files, but the images must represent what the work would look like in print, and must be able to be sent as a high quality .jpeg if accepted (300 dpi, and at least 2000 pixels square). Creators are welcome to submit multiple works, but they must all be submitted at the same time, and within the same email. Payment: Accepted creators will be paid for their work. Prose- $0.02/word, $0.01/word after 500 words. Poetry- $0.50/line, $0.25/line after 20 lines. Artwork- $15/selected digital file. All creators will continue to have full rights to their work. Please email submissions to [email protected], with full name, a short bio, and information relevant to understanding...

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: Flash fiction (up to 1,000 words) $20, Short stories (1k to 5k words) $50, Novelettes (5k to 15k words) $100, Novellas (15k to 25k words max.) $150 Note: Only accept unsolicited submissions from writers in (or originally from) Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands. Midnight Echo 14 is upon us and the AHWA is proud to announce that Deb Sheldon is onboard to guest edit this representative of all things good about Australasian horror writing. Deb’s themed issued of “Things are not as they seem“ will open to submissions from July 30 to August 31 and she is seeking only the best for this edition of Midnight Echo. To know more about the editor, we have a brief bio to introduce her and prepare you to make the most of the submissions window. Deborah Sheldon is an award-winning author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum. Her titles include the noir-horror novel Contrition, the bio-horror novella Thylacines, the collection Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories (Australian Shadows “Best Collected Work 2017”), and the creature-horror novel Devil Dragon. She has a novel, a collection, and a novella forthcoming in 2019. Her work has been shortlisted for numerous Aurealis Awards and Australian Shadows Awards, long-listed for a Bram Stoker, and included in “best of” anthologies. Other credits include TV scripts, feature articles, non-fiction books, and award-winning medical writing. Thank you for considering ME14 for your submission and thank you to all who download the edition when it becomes available at the end of the year. Submission Guidelines Midnight Echo is the magazine of the Australasian Horror Writers Association. We seek original, previously unpublished horror fiction and non-fiction on horror-related subjects. As the AHWA’s goal is to support the genre in...

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: Between $0.04 and $0.08/word Note: Reprints allowed We will be open August 1 though August 31st. Follow our Guidelines and you are more likely to receive a personalized response. Ignore our Guidelines and a standard rejection may quickly follow. What Are We Looking For? Positive stories demonstrating the triumph of the human spirit and the power of hope and humane values in overcoming the most daunting challenges. We are interested in all SF and Fantasy genres, but no horror please. In this reading period, we need more SF than Fantasy. Young Adult to the Literary. No to Pollyannish and Utopian simplicity. Yes to communities and teams working together to overcome dire challenges. Yes to marginalized and under-represented characters as protagonists. Yes to science and magic that solve problems, alleviate suffering, and boldly explore new possibilities. No to corrupt, dystopian governments or evil corporations. Tone down the violence, profanity, and sex. It’s only useful if the story demands it. Story Length Shorter is better! We need works 5,000 words and under. If you submit a story over 5,000 words, it has to be amazing to get very far in the review process. Overall, we will consider the following word counts: Flash Fiction & Poetry: 100 – 1500 words Short Stories: 2,000 – 7,500 words Novelettes: 7,500 – 10,000 words. Submission Formatting Your story must be submitted in Word or RTF format. Top of the First Page Title of Story (centered) Your By Line (centered) No Address or other Personal Info please. Formatting: Font: Arial, Size 12 Double spaced Indented paragraphs Single spacing between sentences. No extra line break between paragraphs Section breaks, as needed, should be three ### symbols, centered on the page. In the document Header, include Last Name/Title/Page # File Naming: When you SAVE your file, name...

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: $0.03 per word Apparition Lit is open for poetry and short story submissions four times a year. February 15-28 May 15-31 August 15-31 November 15-30 Submissions received outside of posted open dates will be deleted unread. Our themes for 2019 will be: Resistance (Submission period November 15-30, 2018 CLOSED, Published January 2019) Ambition (Submission period February 15-28, 2019, CLOSED Published April 2019) Retribution (Submission period May 15-31, 2019, CLOSED Publishing July 2019) Euphoria (Submission period August 15-31, 2019, CLOSED Publishing October 2019) Our themes for 2018: Apparition (Published January 2018) – Delusion (PublishedApril 2018) – Vision (Published July 2018) – Diversion (Published October 2018) Apparition Lit also holds monthly flash fiction contests. These stories will follow selected themes and be published online. For more information on themes and submission guidelines, please see the flash fiction drop down below. PAYMENT: Apparition is a semi-pro rate magazine, paying $0.03 per word, minimum of 30.00 dollars (excluding flash contest. See details in the Flash Fiction dropdown for flash rates). If we accept your story, we are purchasing the right to publish the story online and in the quarterly edition. Rights will revert back to the artist after one year. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: (Click on the sections to see detailed guidelines for each classification.) SHORT FICTION SHORT FICTION: We will only accept stories between 1000-5000 words. If the story is complete with an extra hundred words, then it will still be considered. Any stories over 5,100 words, or incorrectly formatted, will automatically be rejected. PAYMENT: Apparition is a semi-pro magazine, paying $0.03 per word, minimum of 30.00 dollars (excluding flash contest). If we accept your story, we are purchasing the right to publish the story online and in the quarterly edition. Rights will revert back to the artist after one year. HOW TO SUBMIT: Format the story using the Shunn manuscript Please only use Times New Roman or Arial font in your document Save...

Deadline: August 31st, 2019 Payment: Royalties Nightscape Press will open to short fiction collection submissions on May 17th and will close to submissions at the close of that month. This call has been postponed and will instead open on August 16th through the end of August. We apologize for the inconvenience. Payment and Requirements Payment will include an advance and royalties to both the author and a charity of their choice. Short story collections must be 40,000 words or more and include at least two to three previously unpublished works. Formatting Standard Shunn formatting is just fine, but we're finding more and more that we prefer single spaced manuscripts as we read submissions on our devices. And italics should preferably be italicized and not underlined. Single spaces between sentences is also a huge help when final formatting comes around. That said, we will not reject collections if the formatting isn’t perfect. First and foremost make it readable. And where stories require odd formatting for effect, certainly don’t change that on our account. Via: Nightscape Press</a..

Deadline: September 1st, 2019 Payment: $20 “Turning words into art is unnatural. It begins with a contrary attitude. It says, I am unhappy with the way things are and desire to make things different. Rather than represent the world, I will make something wildly and savagely new. I will defy logic. I will invest in new perceptions. I will combine and recombine and fabricate and juggle until something that I have never experienced is experienced. The process is alchemical. The process is violent. It goes to the heart of creativity. It disrupts and shatters. It is splendid with provocation. It is an aggression against banality. It is sharp and loud like a janitor scraping frost from a window. The hectic bounce of steam on a street after a truck roars by. The anarchy of waters, the comedy of the face, dangerous feelings vented from a cage of skin.” ~ John Olson Poetry — We believe poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. We look especially for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation of beauty and concern. Contrary’s poetry in particular often mimics the effects of fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally contrary toward form – they tug on the forces of exposition or narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of all the poetic forms we publish. Please consider that Contrary receives vast amounts of poetry and that we can publish only a small percentage of that work. Please submit no more than three poems per issue. Our poetry editor is Shaindel Beers. Fiction — We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end? We have published long stories on the belief...

Deadline: September 1st, 2019 Payment: $15.00 to $20.00 and 2 contributors copies New century – New tech – New ways to defeat the monsters? Give us your take on the intersection of elder gods, old monsters and new technology Are the old monsters too far behind us? In this era where almost everyone can instant share to the web, where almost everyone carries in their pockets a powerful computer that can take movies, and record events, in a time when we are a few years away from colonizing planets — are the Elder Gods defeated? Quaint? A joke? Would you live tweet Dagon’s forces rising from the depth to put an end to your cruise ship special? Maybe vlog Shib-Nigurath tromping trough your city park? Or would they use the new technology to conquer this blue marble, corrupt social apps databases to elect unfit to serve, orange hued puppets. Would they alter vaccines or launch nuclear warheads? Darkness Wired, the anthology Unless specified otherwise, we’re looking for stories that are: 2000-8,000 words long,  original (No reprints) short story (if longer, ask first). Edited. Some minor grammatical errors will be accepted but if the submission requires major overhauls, it will be returned to you to edit before being accepted. You must use the information provided in this link. Grab one of the events and go to town! If accepted: Each author receives $15.00 to $20.00. Payment is based on story length and quality. Author copies: two paperback copies and a digital copy of the book. Register for details and upload link. Rights For this collection, we ask for exclusive first worldwide electronic and print rights for one year and nonexclusive rights afterwards. For reprints, we will ask for nonexclusive reprinting rights. Formatting First page should have: Your name: Your name and pen...

Deadline: September 1st, 2019 Payment: Contributor's Copy Thurston Howl Publications is now accepting submissions for its third volume of its HOWLERS series, Gruesome Games. Deadline: Sept 1, 2019 Word count: 2,500-8,000; a little above and a little below will be acceptable Games and horror create a delightful combination. Notable cases include the Running Man and The Long Walk (Stephen King), The Hunger Games (Collins), the Saw series, European thriller GAME, Barker's puzzle boxes, new film Escape Room, and even elements of Jumanji and multiple episodes of Dark Mirror. We want to see a collection of game horror at its finest. For this editor, game horror is best defined as horror literature whose premise hinges on the crux of an established and explicit game. I say explicit because I'm not interested in a horror story where one "could read it as a metaphor for chess." The characters need to be aware that this is a game with rules (whether they are broken or not). We will NOT accept: Racism, sexism, or discrimination presented in a positive light. If you are in doubt, ASK. Better to ask then to get a straight up rejection! If you are unsure, just shoot me an email at [email protected]. (restrictions borrowed from Voice: https://t.co/MWykJ6RY36) You can submit up to three stories, but we will only accept one per author (if any). Reprints are fine, but you have to own full permission of the work in order for us to consider it. We will not accept simultaneous submissions. Payment: Authors will receive a free copy of the print book. Send submissions in .doc or .docx format to [email protected]. Title your email with the story title in all caps. If you are sending more than one submission, send multiple emails instead of putting them all in one. We will inform...