Tagged: Fiction

Hello, children of the dark. It’s time. Yes, it’s time for your short stories to come back to us. I know it’s been frustrating having submissions closed for SO DAMN LONG, but we were a victim of our own success, and you’re all just too goshdarn talented. 

In celebration at the window reopening, I’m keeping it short and sweet this week to remind you of what we’re looking for, and to give a recap on our submission guidelines. All of this – including the form to submit – is over on this page.

Short stories

• Up to 1500 words – any longer and we won’t read it.
• Make the most of the word count, please; the sweet spot is at least 800 words for our publication.
• It needs to be a complete story in itself; no extracts from longer works please. We can tell (most of the time). “A complete story” means  it has a coherent and strong beginning, middle, and end, and a narrative that is well-paced. Descriptive prose is great for scene-setting, but there also needs to be some action and character development with it.
• We might be called “Horror Tree”, but we’re not just looking for horror. In fact, we want your best dark speculative fiction – emphasis on the speculative. Think fairy tales, paranormal entities, scary stuff in space, fantastical beasts, grimdark worlds. Get creative!
• We’re ready to read them NOW.

Drabbles

• Exactly 100 words – no more, no less.
• Also needs to be a complete story in and of itself, with a strong resolution (not just tapering off…)
• We have an insatiable appetite for these, and are always looking for more! (Otherwise we’ll have to start publishing pieces from Stuart and I, and we’ll look super self-indulgent – and you don’t want that, right?)

The intense but important warning

• No erotica, pornography, or graphic sex
• No rape (implied or explicit)
• No homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, misandry, ableism, or racism
• No killing or abuse of kids or pets – don’t cause great harm small sentient things!
• No reprints
• No fanfiction or stories in someone else’s established world – there are copyright issues

Be inspired/spurred on by this week’s efforts!

But for now, let’s turn to the reason you’re here: it’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. For this week’s short story, Paul Lonardo tells the sad tales of a man who collects haunted houses. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Cassandra Vaillancourt enters the darkness of the cave,
• Tom Ray receives a dreaded postcard, and 
• Alan Moskowitz goes off for a date night.

Over to you, Stuart.

We’re still working through our readings for the physical release and best of anthology! Things are going well, more soon! 

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads. 

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. As we start to reach our fingers into August, my world is full of two things—well, three, if you count the fact our beloved elderly bunny familiar has been very poorly of late. 

August is my birthday month. I grew up having winter birthdays in Australia, and was excited at the prospect of a summer birthday when I moved to London. Seventeen years later, and I don’t think I’ve had a sunny birthday even once? Put your best weather vibes out there for my birthday, please! I mean, I’ll officially be in my mid-40s after this one, so anything will help!

But much more importantly, it’s only two weeks until I run my first chunky online writing day. I’ve partnered with Alex Davis (read the Horror Tree interview with Alex here) to create “Writing the Occult”, a soon-to-be regular series of events bringing together writers and experts about various occult matters. The idea is to help writers working in these areas to explore, ask questions, and learn more to spark ideas for their writing works. 

So, on Saturday 12 August (incidentally a few days before the aforementioned birthday), I’ve gathered a handful of amazing humans to talk all things witches and witchlit for Writing the Occult: Witches. You’ll meet:

• Claire Askew & Alice Tarbuck, poets, writers, and editors of the Watkins anthology The Modern Craft: Powerful Voices on Witchcraft Ethics
• Tiffani Angus, award-nominated SFFH writer and co-author of Spec Fic for Newbies (learn more about the book in our Horror Tree interview, here)
• Stacey Thomas, author of the just-released historical witchlit, The Revels
• Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, tarot queen, writer, and coach
• And, well, me! I’ll be kicking off proceedings with a look at the witch trope in pop culture.

If you’re witch-curious, meet our speakers over here and grab a ticket. I’d love to see you there – and make sure you let me know you’re a TWF-er on the day! I love to meet our contributors and readers IRL.

Speaking of witches, a quick shout-out to Horror Tree’s own Holley Cornetto. I’m in the midst of reading the first book in the Trailer Park Witches series she’s created with S.O. Green, and it is GREAT. Keep an eye out for my review on this site, coming sooooooon.

But for now, let’s turn to the reason you’re here: it’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. For this week’s short story, Gregory Von Dare heads to the weekly poker night in the basement. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Harrison S Foreman has some sight challenges,
• Engilbert Egill has a cold case breakthrough, and 
• Ceferino Ruiz has a creepy teddy bear.

Finally, some reminders for your creativity:

• You’ve only got a few days left to submit to our summer special. Get your summer shorts and drabbles in by the end of July via our submissions page, and our lovely specials editor Shalini will review and make her choices for our summer special edition.
• We are, as always, looking for your darkly speculative drabbles. We publish three every week, and try not to publish the same writer twice within a month, so we’re always looking for new voices. Why not give it (advance pun warning) a stab?

Over to you, Stuart.

We made a LOT of progress on our Trembling With Fear physical release. I’ve finally pulled my weight being out of the MBA class and did just about everything I can on pushing it forward with 2-3 small changes over, so we should see some real finalized progress in the next week or two. Super excited! I’ve also but the time your reading this should have hit and passed the half way point for all of our other stories that are in the queue. So much reading!

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads. Though, no promises on how active we’ll be on either until after this semester.

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. You lot are keen beans, eh? Since we announced we’d soon reopen to short story submissions, a few eager beavers have snuck into the inbox already. It’s great to see enthusiasm, but please note anything submitted to us before we officially re-open next month will not be read. You will need to keep it and re-submit it when we open. We won’t be keeping hold of the pieces to add them to the list when the time comes – that kinda defeats the purpose of having submissions windows! 

Which brings me to the matter of those short story submissions. One of the things I love about the role I play here at HorrorTree.com is the ability to nurture and support new writers. So many of our submitters are taking that leap for the first time, nervous about how it might go – even nervous about having to write a bio because they’ve never done it before. I don’t want to lose that about TWF; it’s one of the great things about it…

However, I can tell you that we’re going to need to be much tougher on short stories in future. 

We’re all volunteers with lives and jobs and other commitments, so we don’t have the time to sit and go back and forth with writers multiple times to help stories to take shape. Whereas before we might’ve taken a chance on a writer that we could see had potential but needed a lot of nurturing, we may now need to send that writer on their way with some feedback but not a potential acceptance. If we don’t, we’ll end up with another year-long backlog of acceptances and will need to close again to subs, which we don’t want to do. It’s not fair on you, the wonderful community of darkly speculative humans (and other creatures). 

If we do face another onslaught – and part of me hopes we do, because it’s wonderful to see so much enthusiasm for genre writing out there! – we’ll need to consider other options. Like having a quarterly subs window. Or even an annual one. Who knows. It all depends on how the coming months take shape.

However, there’s still plenty of space for new TWF subs this week. We are always, always looking for drabbles, and it’s also the dying days to sub to our summer special. Get your summer shorts and drabbles in by the end of July via our submissions page, and our lovely specials editor Shalini will review and make her choices for our summer special edition.

But for now, let’s turn to the reason you’re here: it’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. For this week’s short story, Paul R. Panossian explores the abandoned cabin in the woods. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Matt Krizan is counting drips,
• Ken MacGregor faces excitement in a pub, and 
• Emma Burnett has a secret to share.

Over to you, Stuart.

I’m officially in between MBA classes and The Great Reading has begun! There is a lot of progress on our two anthologies and I’m hoping the reading and proofing will be done in the next week as we’re really behind on our TWF release. 

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads. Though, no promises on how active we’ll be on either until after this semester.

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. In my race last week to announce our re-opening to short story submissions, I totally missed a milestone: it’s now been a whole year since I took over leading this publication from the inimitable Stephanie Ellis. A whole year! I can’t believe it either.

So in celebration/commiseration, I thought I’d share five things I’ve noticed about you, our wonderful writers and readers, in that time.

1. We have some prolific regular subbers! A quick shout-out to those writers who are in our inbox a lot with fresh tales. We appreciate you.
2. There’s an ebb and flow to submissions, with peaks in summer and, unsurprisingly, at Halloween. But we’re always open, so you don’t have to wait until specific periods to get your dark tales into our coffers. In fact, if you’re writing earlier in the year, you might have a better chance at acceptance. Just saying.
3. There’s also trends in topics. Right now, we’re getting a lot of horror based in real life—things like serial killers and murders, or hitchhiking gone bad, or traumatic events, or terrible people in general. Those are fine, but we are first and foremost a publication for speculative fiction, so we’ll always give precedence to dark tales with a hint of otherworldliness to them. 
4. If you want to stand out, try writing a dark bit of science fiction or fantasy. The site’s name might have “horror” prominently in its title, but we do cover all sorts of speculative fiction. We don’t get anywhere near enough space dramas or epic fantasy creations!
5. Finally, remember we’re a small team of volunteers, and we’re actual humans! When you receive an acknowledgement email, or an acceptance email, that is legitimately coming from me. I’ve typed it out just for you. There’s no automation involved (apart from the tech that sends the submission form to our shared email). So say hi every now and then, please!

What’s the next year got in store? Well, if Stuart keeps me around, we have some big stuff on the horizon. First and foremost, we’re reopening our short story submissions at the beginning of August. They’ve been closed for almost a whole year because of the sheer volume of submissions we had last summer (told you about the peaks and troughs!), so I’m excited to see what you’ve had percolating all that time. 

We’re also still open for submissions to our summer special! Get your summer shorts and drabbles in by the end of July via our submissions page, and our lovely specials editor Shalini will review and make her choices for our summer special edition. Successful stories could also make our annual anthologies, so there’s double the chance at publication!

But for now, let’s turn to the one-year-plus-one-week anniversary of my first TWF. It’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. For this week’s short story, Jason Fischer has some sleep worries. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Frances Castaneda gets digging,
• Cassandra Daucus gets writing, and 
• Adam Eherenberg gets resurrecting.

Over to you, Stuart.

I’m not sure if Lauren reads my additions as I add them after she’s done, to everyone who reads this, I am 110% hoping to keep her around! She’s been a fantastic addition to the team!

So, not much to say yet again. I’m soon to be in between MBA classes. My main goal, as stated last week, is still to be finishing up TWF and our Best Of anthology. No major changes past that quite yet. Still too slammed to think past that and I only have about a month to burn through timewise before classes start up again.

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads. Though, no promises on how active we’ll be on either until after this semester.

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. Summer has kinda disappeared on this side of the pond (it threatens a return, don’t worry!), which has got me thinking more about the light and the sun and the green open fields and the seaside settings. Why is it we see so little dark fiction set in the daylight? 

I know the very name of it – dark fiction – tends to bring to mind claustrophobic spaces and midnight jaunts and something hiding in the shadows. And these stories are our bread and butter here at TWF. 

But just because it’s usual doesn’t mean it’s the only thing possible. 

Think of something like Midsommer, which brought horror crashing into the eternal sunshine of the Nordic summer. Or Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its Valentine’s picnic gone awry. Sunshine and BBQs and boat trips can actually be rife for dark tales. What would you do with a prompt that required a summer story fit for Horror Tree’s shelves? 

While you ponder that, I’ll remind you: we’re still open for submissions to our summer special! Yes, there was theory to my madness (and also I’ve just come from a class about “summer frights” so it’s on my mind). As we say on our submissions page: “We’re looking for horror on the beach, at a B&B, on a cruise, backpacking, road trips, glamping, end of the pier. What about a drabble as a holiday postcard: Wish you weren’t here?” 

Get your summer shorts and drabbles in by the end of July via our submissions page, and our lovely specials editor Shalini will review and make her choices for our summer special edition. Successful stories could also make our annual anthologies, so there’s double the chance at publication!

But for now, let’s get to the reason you’re all here. It’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. For this week’s short story, Henry Martin is left behind deep under the ground, with horrific consequences. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Cassandra Vaillancourt heads for open waters,
• Patrick Norris spies on the kids next door, and 
• G.B. Dinesh survives a plane crash.

And finally, a quick reminder that we are reopening to short story submissions in a few weeks. Get those darkly speculative flash fiction tales ready for us!

Over to you, Stuart.

So, had a great Fourth of July with the kids. Our new puppy also, thankfully, has 0 care in the world when it comes to fireworks. I’m sure having two young boys that run around the house constantly has helped her not be surprised by loud noises. Our elder pup also is good with fireworks so it was a great extended weekend of fun with family and the doggos. 

I’m in the last two weeks of my current MBA class. The next semester is going to likely be as challenging as this one has been if not more so, however, I’m in the home stretch. It is putting me massively behind on things. My goals in between semesters are to finish up the TWF print release, finish reading the Best Of stories, and finishing fulfilling a couple of our Patreon edits that are almost overdue. Past that? I can’t say I have much in mind quite yet. 

For those who are looking to connect with Horror Tree on places that aren’t Twitter, we’re also in BlueSky and Threads. *I* am also now on BlueSky and Threads. Though, no promises on how active we’ll be on either until after this semester.

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. July already, huh? And it feels simultaneously like the year has whizzed by and also that it’s crawling along. So much for all those grand plans for 2023! I better get moving!

It also feels like an age since we closed to short stories, because it really has been. After an absolute deluge of great submissions last summer, we took the rare decision to temporarily close our doors for anything other than drabbles. It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done – otherwise writers would be waiting literal years for their pieces to be published, and that’s not fair on anyone. 

We had hoped the submissions window would reopen in early 2023, but we kept pushing it back. Some of you have tried your luck and subbed shorts anyway, and we’ve had to decline with a vague “we’ll reopen at some point, so please resubmit then”. As we sit here this week, we’re still scheduled through beyond the end of this summer – another 10 weeks worth of stories still waiting for publication. Yes, I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘onslaught’; we were getting around 30-40 a week at one point last summer! 

That said, we’ll need to reopen at some point, and it’s only fair we give plenty of notice. With that in mind, I will say we’re aiming to re-open to short story subs from the beginning of August. So, get your short stories ready for us! We love anything that’s darkly speculative – not just all-out blood-and-guts horror, remember; try us with your dark space operas and dystopias and all the speculative sub-genres – as long as it’s no longer than 1500 words long. Yes, it’s really a flash fiction market. Make sure you send it in via our submission form, and that you upload it in a Word document, not a PDF or a screenshot please. We accept simultaneous submissions, but do let us know if your subbed piece is accepted elsewhere so we can withdraw it from contention.

But for now, let’s get to the reason you’re all here. It’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu. Our short this week has Dylan James in the North-West Territories during elk season, which is rarely a good idea. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Victoria Huntley reflects on some marital difficulties,
• Jakob Wild runs from *something*, and 
• Sean MacKendrick doesn’t resist at all.

Over to you, Stuart.

Another small hiccup with hosting this last week lead us to get an upgrade that has made the site lightning-fast on the backend, Hopefully, that speed has increased to your reading experience as well! Still reading through stories and working on this year’s TWF, hopefully, news soon. I’ll be honest, I won’t expect a big update next week with it being the 4th and whatnot. 

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. I’m writing this on the eve of the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, and pondering life and goals and meaning and purpose as is one’s wont at these milestones. I also happen to be in the dip phase of my depression cycle, and these things are not great to coincide. 

(Sorry, this intro might be ponderous; feel free to jump to the stories!)

I’ve been considering my purpose for a while now, and coming up blank. I’m sure it’s there, and it revolves around creativity in some way. I am a huge believer in the importance of the creative arts to the world, though I seem to be a minority these days. But what does that mean at an individual level—particularly when at this individual level I am also bereft of motivation and in the midst of one giant hill of writers’ block? 

I’d love to know how you deal with these troughs, dear readers. What’s your magic wand when things get tough? How do you survive the dips so you can conquer the peaks? All suggestions welcome!

For now, though, it’s enough of the navel gazing; let’s get to the reason you’re all here. It’s time for this week’s offerings on the TWF menu.

Our short this week comes from the strange mind of Amanda Leslie as seen through her smart doorbell. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Ceferino Ruiz faces the end of the world
• Francesco Levato faces a very lyrical end, and 
• Fiona M Jones tries to find out what is at the end.

Over to you, Stuart.

Still feel like I’m treading water. Lots of short stories being read for our Best Of anthology and lots of work being done toward our release of the next Trembling With Fear. I have 3 weeks left of my current MBA class, and I’m honestly not sure if things will calm down until the program is done at the end of the year at this point. Fingers crossed! 

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.

Hello, children of the dark. As I’m putting together this week’s issue for you, I’m also listening in to a talk on how we can use AI for creative collaboration. The speaker is passionate and knowledgeable and tends towards the speculative side of writing. I’m finding myself getting swept up in the possibilities.

But then.

Yes, but then.

I’m just not sure. AI, and particularly Chat-GPT, has turned the fiction world on its head. Lots of publications—ours included—have updated submission guidelines to say we are only looking for human-generated stories. And I agree with that. But I also know that this thing is here to stay, and we need to find a way to adapt. To grow. To evolve. 

At the moment, we’re scared because there’s a lack of transparency. There’s also the ethical question of where, how, and on what these AI models have been trained on. These are Very Large Questions that we won’t easily solve or answer. And then there’s this, which I put to this speaker via the chat: it does make me wonder what new ideas or new spins on things will be left if we’re just consuming stories based on stories based on stories based on… Or maybe we’re already doing that anyway? Is there anything new left?

The human element is essential. I’d like to believe that will never go away. But then, there are enough people out there getting so excited about possibilities that they are maybe not thinking straight, or thinking ethically, or logically, or with a future-proofed-for-humanity mind. Who knows what they’ll throw at us.

And all of this just makes me want to turn to writing sci-fi to figure out what I think!

How about you? Have you got a speculative tech-based story that is burning a hole in your pocket? Duncan Cave did, and this week he brings us a very different conversation with the Administrator—one with world-changing consequences—for our short story. This is followed by three delicious quick bites:

• Nancy Pica Renken has a very dangerous shower,
• Emma Burnett struggles for an idea, and 
• Catherine Berry finds out what happens when you mess with nature.

Over to you, Stuart.

I don’t have too much to say quite yet! I’ve been starting to spot-check the Trembling With Fear collected anthology and have been reading short stories for our Best Of anthology. Outside of that? Work and school have been killing me this week so I don’t have too much to really add in that is new. More to come!

If you’d like to extend your support to the site, we’d be thrilled to welcome your contributions through Ko-Fi or Patreon. Your generosity keeps us fueled and fired up to bring you the very best.