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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.

Deadline: August 1st, 2019 Payment: $30+ The theme of the eighth annual Bikes in Spaces, the galaxy’s only series of feminist bicycle science fiction anthologies, is in the works! This volume’s theme is… cats. House cats. Ship cats. Lions. Strays. Anthropomorphic talking cats. Feline deities. Familiars. Wherever your imagination takes you, we’d love to read your story. Please send us your short stories that feature both cats and bicycles or bicycling in a way that is essential to the story; be fundamentally feminist, even if they aren’t explicitly addressing feminism as a topic; and fall somewhere in the science fiction and fantasy spectrum (sorry, no fanfic, but all other fantastical and speculative genres are welcome). Black and white illustrations are also sought. We especially love to publish work by writers and artists who don’t see themselves well-represented in mainstream books. Word count: 500 – 6,000 words, but don’t sweat the exact count too much—make your story the length it needs to be. Format: Google doc or Word preferred; a PDF or text document are also fine. If submitting an illustration, please get in touch about format and dimensions before you start work on it. Payment: A portion of profits after expenses from the Kickstarter project used to fund the book is split between contributors; payments are not less than $30 each. Send submissions to elly at takingthelane dot com by August 1, 2019. Via: Taking The Lane.

Deadline: August 1st, 2019 Payment: $25 and a contributor's copy NIGHTMARE PRESS IS NOW TAKING SUBMISSIONS for an upcoming anthology called Retro Horror and we are also taking submissions for horror novels, novellas, and short story collections. RETRO HORROR: The name says it all. We are looking for short stories reminiscent of the old low-budget horror films that used to come on late at night. Imagine someone like Vampira or Joe Bob Briggs introducing your tales. Think monster hybrids, experiments gone wrong, or reanimated corpses. That kind of stuff. $25 if accepted Contributor's copy if accepted Send story to [email protected] and put RETRO HORROR, Title, Your Name in the subject line Attach the story in a word doc. file only. No PDF or Google Docs or anything other than word doc or docx. DO NOT paste the story in the body of the email. Deadline August 1st 2000 words minimum, 10,000 words maximum Reprints acceptable as long as you own full publishing rights. We will try to respond to every submission but we may not be able to. We apologize in advance if we do not. Via: Nightmare Press's Facebook.

Deadline: August 1st, 2019 Payment: $25 and a contributor's copy Timeworn Literary Journal welcomes submissions of unpublished historical fiction stories in English under 5,000 words. They should be set before 1996, rooted in history but with a focus on narrative. Historical Fiction from the fringe means anything with a bend toward the surreal, the dream-like, the strange. The off-beat kind of story that settles into your heart long after reading. That said, we also value beauty and warmth and a generally well-written story with soul. Romance, Mystery, Crime and the Gothic are all acceptable. Speculative elements strongly encouraged. Think, The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill. Think, The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt. Think, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Think, Longbourn by Jo Baker. While we love a tasteful sex scene, no erotica. No gratuitous violence or rape. History can vary a great deal based on the perspective it's written from. We aim to publish stories from all walks of life and encourage submissions from those in marginalized groups. Not sure if your story fits? Submit to [email protected] using Standard Manuscript Format in Times New Roman, 12-point font, double spaced. Subject line should read: SUBMISSION: . Simultaneous submissions ok, but let us know as soon as the story is accepted elsewhere. Stories will be published in a limited quantity of hand-bound, saddle stitch publications twice a year, available for purchase in October and April for $10. Stories will also be available on our website for all to enjoy. Payment of $25 will be sent to authors upon acceptance + contributor copy upon publication. Via: Timeworn Literary Journal</a..

Deadline: August 1, 2019 Payment: $25.00 - $50.00 for fiction, $5.00 - $10.00 for poetry, and $25.00 for nonfiction (all U.S. dollars). and a contributor's copy To celebrate twenty years of publication, we're going to revisit the past. There are no new first lines for 2019. Each issue will be comprised of original works based on past first lines. Were you inspired by the fall 2008 first line (Roy owned the only drive-thru funeral business in Maine.) but didn't see the sentence until 2015? Or maybe you started writing a story for the spring 2005 issue (Life would be so much easier if I were a cartoon character.) but you never got around to submitting it. Or maybe you sent us a story that just missed the cut and you reworked it and want to try us again. Well, now is your chance to make up for missed opportunities. The following is the schedule/list of first lines for the 2019 issues (click the season to see the entire list of first lines for each issue): Fall 2019 All submissions must begin with one first line from Volume 11, Issue 1 to Volume 15, Issue 4. Due date: August 1, 2019 A few notes: Don't just resubmit a story we've already rejected. We will know. We have every story submitted to us on file and why we rejected it. 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. However, if you used one of our past first lines for a story...