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Deadline: February 28th 2022 Payment: 10 cents per word Theme: Beyond the Veil NOTE: The magazine also runs a monthly contest with a $3000 prize, though the contest is only open to members who pay the $10/month fee How do you feel as you lift the wedding veil? As you lay the burial shroud? When you stand at life’s final doorway, will you look back and say you tried to reveal truth, or to conceal it? Veils obscure what’s right in front of our eyes. The great wizard is only a man behind the curtain. It’s smoke and mirrors—and there’s always another secret. Try to read between the lines and glean the truth wrapped in lies. Disguises, double-meanings, and false trails. Even the sun hides behind the moon. Be wary of peering too closely at the darkness, where unseen creatures shift in the night. But light blinds as easily as shadows, so hold your lantern high and hope the lighthouse pierces the fog. Still, veils keep us safe. Sane. Just ask anyone who’s glimpsed the future and seen their death. Is reality that brittle? But hush now, the masked performers are waiting backstage. The curtain rises, our story begins. All new writers can submit work to the magazine. It’s free. We don’t believe publications should charge authors to be published. However, we have a specific submission process you must adhere to in order to have your work considered. Our submissions window opens on the first and closes at midnight on the final day of each month. Each issue of the magazine is themed according to our monthly prompt. The prompts are designed to inspire ideas but leave room for you to tell the story you want to tell. You can always write in any genre. This month’s prompt can be viewed...

Deadline: February 28th, 2023 Payment: €20 Theme: horror, sci-fi, fantasy and erotica that grapple with the topic of Endings Note: Reprints Welcome Submissions are open from February 01-28 2023 for TOWER VOL. 1: END. We accept all genres and encourage submissions of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and erotica. For VOL. 1: END we’re looking for work that grapples with endings, death, dissolution and finality; sudden, brutal endings; torturously slow breakdowns; how do things come to an end and who gets to decide? Some inspirations: The desperation for an ending to the tortures of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s No End Will Be Found The cyclical violence in “Herbert White” by Frank Bidart The clash between audience and artist’s expectations of an ending in ABC’s LOST The desperate battle against a prophesied ending in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth The incomprehensible disappearance and abrupt end of an internet friendship in Lol Cuthbert’s “This journal has been deleted and purged” How we go on after the end of the world in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk and Torrey Peters’ Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones The role of geography and place in predetermining a life as in Cherie Priest’s Those Who Went Remain There Still The endless scroll of Tiktok PAYMENT Payment is €20 per contributor paid via PayPal or Revolut. Co-authored pieces count as one contributor. Issues will be hosted at readtower.itch.io and available for PWYC down to free. REPRINTS We are open to reprints and encourage submissions of self-published materials (EG. an illustration or comic posted to Twitter, a short story published on itch.io). SIMULTANEOUS / MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS We’re totally fine with simultaneous submissions, just email us withdrawing your piece if it’s accepted elsewhere. Please only submit once per category, making a different submission for each category. We encourage submissions of related works (EG. a story and accompanying illustration). FORMATTING We love pieces with unusual formats, specific layouts or mixed media, for example, “The Pipeline” by...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: short story, $25; short-short piece (up to 1000 words), $10; poem, $10, artwork, $25 for cover, $10 for interior page display. Theme: Help from a Stranger ALL SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, POEMS, PHOTOGRAPHS and ART MUST RELATE TO ONE OF THE PREMISES SPECIFIED ABOVE. NOTE: Previously published pieces are welcome, provided that the submission fits the theme and that the author owns the copyright. The premise (target theme) must be an integral part of the plot, not necessarily the central theme but not merely incidental. NOTE: Fewer than 20 double-spaced typewritten pages preferred. Indicate premise (target theme) on title page. Be sure to Indicate target theme in cover letter or on first page of manuscript. Include self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) with each submission. Rejected manuscripts unaccompanied by an SASE will not be returned. Response time: 3 months after premise deadline.  NO READER'S FEE. Mail to: THEMA, Box 8747, Metairie, LA 70011-8747. Outside the US: email [email protected] On acceptance for publication, we will pay the following amount: short story, $25; short-short piece (up to 1000 words), $10; poem, $10; artwork, $25 for cover, $10 for interior page display. Copyright reverts to author after publication. THEMA isn't for everyone. To find out why, click here. New to submitting manuscripts to journals? Click here to download a PDF file of a few basic guidelines. Unlike many publishers, we prefer works submitted by the authors themselves, without the involvement of an agent. Be sure to indicate premise and include SASE for each submission.  BE SURE to include a separate SASE for each premise. No handwritten manuscripts will be considered. NOTE: We do not accept e-mailed submissions EXCEPT from authors who live outside the U.S. For those living outside the U.S., submit manuscript as an email attachment (readable by MSWord ― either as a DOC file or an RTF file), and include the following information on the title...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: Royalties through Draft2Digital Theme: Winter Holiday stories of warmth, good cheer, love, and miracles We are looking for Winter Holiday stories of warmth, good cheer, love, and miracles. Please no “dark” stories for this anthology. (Send your darker winter or holiday stories to Particular Passages: Closed For The Season.) Submissions open now until March 1st, 2023. Anthology expected to be published in or around December, 2023. **If you don’t have the patience to wait a year for your story to be published, DON’T SUBMIT.** * *If you are not willing to obtain a Draft2Digital account in order to receive royalty shares as payment, then DON’T SUBMIT.** For this anthology, please no horror or anything more than kissing or implied sex. Please keep content and language limited to the equivalent of a “PG” rated movie. We want to be able to share this with our mothers and children. There are no genre restrictions on this anthology, as long as the story fits the theme. Please remember, Knight Writing Press will not accept a story that glorifies, supports, encourages, or gratuitously includes hate, hate crimes, rape, sex, sex crimes, or any other forms of inhumanity. Please make sure you read and follow all submission guidelines and look over the sample contract before you submit. The sample contract will not exactly match what you will receive, should your story be accepted, but it will give you a good idea of what to expect. In the text of your query letter, include confirmation that you understand we are using Draft2Digital and that you must have an account there in order to receive royalties for your story. Failure to do this may result in an immediate rejection for failing to follow submission guidelines. No reprints. (The reason for this is explained on the Upcoming and Open...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: Royalties Theme: Dark, scary, terrible Halloween stories We want your dark, scary, terrible Halloween stories guaranteed to make the reader afraid to answer the door because those just might not be Trick-or Treaters giggling out there… (Doesn’t have to be Halloween themed, but the Halloween holiday is the general aim of this anthology.) Submissions open now until March 1st, 2023. Anthology expected to be published in or around October, 2023. **If you don’t have the patience to wait a year for your story to be published, DON’T SUBMIT.** **If you are not willing to obtain a Draft2Digital account in order to receive royalty shares as payment, then DON’T SUBMIT.** For this anthology, please no “extreme” horror or “graphic” sex. Please keep content and language limited to the equivalent of a “PG-13” rated movie. While we do want this to be a horror anthology, we are not interested in the extremes of the genre. We are interested in thrills and chills horror not shock value/gross out horror. Please remember, Knight Writing Press will not accept a story that glorifies, supports, encourages, or gratuitously includes hate, hate crimes, rape, sex, sex crimes, or any other forms of inhumanity. Please make sure you read and follow all submission guidelines and look over the sample contract before you submit. The sample contract will not exactly match what you will receive should your story be accepted, but it will give you a good idea of what to expect. In the text of your query letter, include confirmation that you understand we are using Draft2Digital and that you must have an account there in order to receive royalties for your story. Failure to do this may result in an immediate rejection for failing to follow submission guidelines. No reprints. (The reason for this is explained on...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: $.08 per word Theme: Halloween Kangas Kahn Publishing is seeking unpublished Halloween short stories for an upcoming anthology to be released in September of 2023. We're looking to put together the best Halloween anthology in existence, and that's a tall order because there are a lot of great ones out there. That's why we've hired one of the best to edit it: Kenneth W. Cain. This is an open-themed anthology, but Halloween must be central to the story. Length: 2,000-5,000 words. Make them seep with the Halloween spirit, no matter what month we're reading it. We put out a book called Halloween: The Greatest Holiday of All, so you know we're fanatical when it comes to All Hallows' Eve. We will accept up to three submissions per author. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable but please let us know if it’s sold elsewhere. If a story is accepted or rejected, notification will be within sixty days of submission. If it's in consideration then it could be as late as April 1st, 2023. Please attach your story and email it to [email protected] with the subject "Halloween Anthology Submission". In the body of the email, please give us a short bio with credits, if any. Not having credits doesn't mean anything to us; the story is what counts. Make sure your story is in proper format(Shunn)--you can find details here: https://www.shunn.net/format/ We're buying global first print and digital publication rights for one year exclusively from the date of print(Sept 2023). After that, all rights revert to the author, and we maintain non-exclusive rights to keep the book in print. Note: This anthology will be approximately 60/40 invitation/open-submission. We expect to have some big names in this anthology, so competition will be fierce. Via: Kangas Kahn Publishing.

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: $20 Theme: 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? “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...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: Royalty split on 2000-7000 word stories, half split for flash fiction under that Theme: Spoopy (spooky but mostly fun) stories you can share with grandma and the kids We are looking for spoopy (spooky but mostly fun) stories you can share with grandma and the kids. (Doesn’t have to be Halloween themed, but the Halloween holiday is the general aim of this anthology.) Submissions open now until March 1st, 2023. Anthology expected to be published in or around October, 2023. **If you don’t have the patience to wait a year for your story to be published, DON’T SUBMIT.** **If you are not willing to obtain a Draft2Digital account in order to receive royalty shares as payment, then DON’T SUBMIT.** For this anthology, please no horror or anything more than kissing or implied sex. Please keep content and language limited to the equivalent of a “PG” rated movie. We want to be able to share this with our mothers and children. There are no genre restrictions on this anthology, as long as the story fits the theme. Please remember, Knight Writing Press will not accept a story that glorifies, supports, encourages, or gratuitously includes hate, hate crimes, rape, sex, sex crimes, or any other forms of inhumanity. Please make sure you read and follow all submission guidelines and look over the sample contract before you submit. The sample contract will not exactly match what you will receive, should your story be accepted, but it will give you a good idea of what to expect. In the text of your query letter, include confirmation that you understand we are using Draft2Digital and that you must have an account there in order to receive royalties for your story. Failure to do this may result in an immediate rejection for failing to follow submission...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: 5 contributors' copies and $30 Theme: Horror that includes Vampires, Werewolves, or Both Campfire Publishing is excited to announce that we are currently accepting submisisons for “After Dark” Volume One, our first collection of horror stories! Please read below to ensure that your story will be a good fit, and feel free to reach out to us–via the form located on our main page or by sending an email to [email protected]–if you have any questions. “After Dark” Volume One is the first volume in a horror collection dedicated to vampires and werewolves. Campfire Publishing aspires to publish multiple volumes in the “After Dark” collection along with collections specific to a variety of themes in the horror genre. What are we looking for? We are looking for WELL-EDITED stories in the range of 20,000-35,000 words that insert themselves in the world of vampires, werewolves, or BOTH! Campfire Publishing is keeping its eye out for a wide range of chilling voices that offer unique perspectives into these spooky characters. We want twists and turns, thrills and chills; make us want to sleep with the lights turned on at night. Show us excitement, culture, and blood-curdling screams! What are we NOT looking for? We don’t want works that promote hate speech; and while a romantic note or two is fine and dandy in our humble opinions, we are not looking to publish erotica. Last but absolutely not least, check your glittery creatures at the door. We don’t want vampires who sparkle and shine or werewolves that get all up in their feels about fluffy bunnies. General Submission Guidelines: Genre: Horror Characters: Vampires, Werewolves, Both Word Count: 20,000-35,000 words Submission File Format: Please Label Your Files “After_Dark” “last name” (example: After_Dark_Smith) Formatting: 12-point font, Arial, Courier (New), Times New Roman File Type: .doc .docx .pdf **.txt files...

Deadline: March 1st, 2023 Payment: Royalties Theme: PG-13, stories of long winter nights, pale winter suns, and people with cold hands and colder hearts. The winter can be long, cold, and hard. Even the holidays can be terrible. Send us your stories of long winter nights, pale winter suns, and people with cold hands and colder hearts. Submissions open now until March 1st, 2023. Anthology expected to be published in or around January, 2024. **If you don’t have the patience to wait a year for your story to be published, DON’T SUBMIT.** **If you are not willing to obtain a Draft2Digital account in order to receive royalty shares as payment, then DON’T SUBMIT.** For this anthology, please no extreme horror or graphic sex. Though we want dark stories and even horror,  we are not interested in the extremes of the genre. Please keep content and language limited to the equivalent of a “PG-13” rated movie. There are no genre restrictions on this anthology, as long as the story fits the theme. Please remember, Knight Writing Press will not accept a story that glorifies, supports, encourages, or gratuitously includes hate, hate crimes, rape, sex, sex crimes, or any other forms of inhumanity. Please make sure you read and follow all submission guidelines and look over the sample contract before you submit. The sample contract will not exactly match what you will receive, should your story be accepted, but it will give you a good idea of what to expect. In the text of your query letter, include confirmation that you understand we are using Draft2Digital and that you must have an account there in order to receive royalties for your story. Failure to do this may result in an immediate rejection for failing to follow submission guidelines. No reprints. (The reason for this is explained on...