Tagged: Free Fiction

Greetings, children of the dark. I don’t mean to alarm anyone but… I’m actually up-to-date on reading submissions! Yes, after being almost an entire year behind, I’ve been reading like a madman and sending out feedback and contracts left right and centre. We are absolutely 100% up to date on drabbles (as at time of writing), and I’m just waiting on the bossman looking at the last few short stories from the January window and then we’ll be done. Which means: if you submitted in 2024/25 and haven’t heard from us, please get in touch as the gremlins might’ve been hard at work as well.

The reason I’ve been able to spend so much time catching up? That’s simple: we have so much help around TWF Towers these days. It is so, so lovely to have housemates to keep us ticking over, to pick up the slack, to keep us on track. The biggest help in recent months has been the lovely Annette taking over inbox management – I’m sure you’ve seen her name in your inboxes acknowledging your submissions. Just having that admin taken care of is a huge help, and means that you don’t have to wait so long for me to get time to respond to things. Soooo helpful!

But of course, it’s not just Annette’s help that’s got us bursting at the seams around here. We welcomed a couple of new Assistant Editors a few months ago to take over the mantles of Serials and Unholy Trinities –  hi, Vicky and Sarah! – but we’ve now got another four on board to help with the special editions. Yes, that’s a total of six assistant editors in TWF Towers! As interest in this free fiction publication has increased, and we’ve gotten more and more submissions through, we needed to grow the team. It had to happen, or Stuart and I would’ve imploded in a very messy way. (Stuart may still, given he’s trying to revamp the site.) Please join me in welcoming our new residents:

• Jane Morecroft, who you met when we published the Valentine’s Edition
• John Nugent, who’ll be looking for all your dark summer stories very soon
• Angela Zolner, taking up the Halloween Queen mantle, and
• Ahlissa Eichhorn, our new festive fiction specialist 

You can meet the full TWF team over here. 

These newbies are also helping us get out the incredibly-very-late-embarassingly-so 2023 TWF anthology; the great Steph Ellis has laid it all out, and we just need to proofread it all, so hopefully that will be out by the end of the month. Then we’ll get cracking on the 2024 anthology, and hopefully have a new Publications Editor to help with that!

So yes, lots and lots of new blood around TWF Towers now, but we can always do with fresh blood for Horror Tree as a whole. If you’d like to get involved as a reviewer, interviewer, blogger, social media person, website manager, etc etc, do get in touch and let us know. Or, pitch an idea! You never know what the bossman will be in the mood for…

With that out of the way, it’s time for this week’s edition of dark speculative fiction. For our main course, we’re off on an autumnal walk with Austin Anna; it’s full of nostalgia, strange characters, and, well, suckers. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Karin J Robinson’s monster under the bed,
• Margaret Eve’s danger outdoors, and
• Geoff Holder’s economics of grave robbing.

Want to join these four in the illustrious pages of TWF? Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Always, always with the drabbles – those short, sharp bursts of exactly 100 words. Make it dark and make it speculative (scifi, fantasy, horror). We publish three of these every darn week of the year.
• Unholy Trinities – that’s three drabbles that are connected in some way. Sarah Elliott awaits your tales.
• Serials, or dark speculative fiction that can be serialised on the site over several weeks. Vicky Brewster is ready for ‘em.
• Finally, our next submissions window for general short stories opens at the beginning of April. 

Make sure you check our submissions page here for what we do and DON’T want. That last bit is super important – don’t waste your time sending us things we have publicly stated we’ll reject! (Seriously, you’d be surprised…)

OK, rant done. Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. This little two-week period has been full of gothic goodness in my world. Last weekend, the other half and I headed off to Derby (in England) for the UK Ghost Story Festival. It’s been a regular fixture in my life since 2020, and it’s such a great small festival filled with lovely people and lots of workshops. I’ve been brainstorming yet more stories, dear reader! I have no idea where all this creative energy has come from…

And I’m absolutely sure I’ll have been capitalising on it this weekend (insert hands-over-eyes emoji) at the British Fantasy Society’s retreat. At the time of writing this missive, I’m a couple of days away from heading to Wales to join the crew, and I’m still not sure what I want to (or need to!) work on. I’m prepared for a mess, but hopefully I’ll get some stuff done. Even if that *stuff* is just my next article for the BFS’s Journal – I’m digging into the resurgent popularity of the humble vampire. The issue is out in the summer, so why not talk about our favourite creature that’s allergic to sunlight? 

Quickly moving on from my ridiculousness… It’s time for this week’s edition of dark speculative fiction. Our main course takes us to a very interesting hotel with a secret, and our guide is P.N. Harrison. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Andrew Keyworth’s gothic note,
• Christina Nordlander’s forest trek, and
• Kevin M. Folliard’s chicken trouble.

One more thing: we now have a full complement of new assistant editors to helm our special editions! I hope to introduce you to them some time in the coming week, so keep an eye out.

Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. Short and sweet here this week as I’m coming to you live from the UK Ghost Story Festival. It’s been a bit of a year of writing for me so far – I cannot believe I’ve finished a second story already, making it two stories and a total of 11,000+ words in the last 4 weeks. WTAF?! Ghost Fest this weekend, then next weekend I’m off to the British Fantasy Society’s annual retreat at the very iconic Gladstones Library, so maybe the floodgates are trying to prise open? I’m going with it, at any rate. I’d love to hear how your own writing is going – let me know in the comments below, or find me on social media. 

Handing over to the talent in this week’s edition, and we find our main course is a tribute to audio thanks to Erik Keevan. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Emily Jones’s warning label,
• Robert Allen Lupton’s warning from space, and
• Weird Wilkins’s warning from beyond.

Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. Did you enjoy your international day of corporate love? I’ve never been a Valentine’s gal, but I sure did enjoy the V-Day edition of TWF assembled by our own Jane Morecroft. Thanks to all who submitted – next special edition is the Summer one, and we have another new assistant editor to take the helm of that one. I’ll introduce the revamped team very soon, I promise! Just got to get over this stupid virus first…

In other news, I’m very excited to almost be up to date with our short story submissions reading. That hasn’t happened in… oh, I don’t know… YEARS. The expanded team is truly helping, and I would give each of them a massive hug if I could. Thanks to all in TWF Towers for all you do. Including the boss man, who is the world’s busiest man and I honestly don’t know how he does it all and still finds time to write and submit!

Speaking of submissions: I’m in a mode, my friends. I actually wrote an almost-10,000 word story last month and submitted it to an anthology being put together by the amazing PS Livingstone. No word yet on how/when it will be released, but I feel so smug for having actually done it that I’ve now got my sights on two folk horror anthology calls that close in the coming fortnight. And considering I’ll be off at the UK Ghost Story Festival this coming week, and then at the British Fantasy Society’s annual retreat at the iconic Gladstone’s Library the following weekend, well, maybe my writing journey might be getting back on track? Don’t make too much of a fuss; I don’t want to alert the universe to this anomaly. 

Soooo, let’s quickly and seamlessly transition to this week’s edition, where Adam Hannah tries to keep Friday’s love-fest going but takes it in a much more familiar TWF-y dark direction (aka revenge). That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Autumn Bettinger’s art experiments,
• Crystal N. Ramos’s therapy tech, and
• Shiloh Kuhlman’s generational trauma.

And one last thing: I often mention the British Fantasy Society here, mainly because I volunteer as its marketing officer, but there’s something afoot you should really know about. We’ve recently announced a mentorship programme, and there’s a whole range of speculative fiction bods lining up to offer mentorship across everything from ideation to writing a manuscript to editing and querying to, yes, marketing and building an author brand (that one might be me). It’s only open to BFS members, but with membership starting at just £20 per year and open to anyone, anywhere, there’s really not much stopping you. Right? Details over here.

Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. I’m loaded full of cold and flu right now so will cut to the chase today with just a few parish notices:

• We are now closed to Valentine’s submissions. Our V-day editor Jane Morecroft will be getting in touch in the coming days – if she hasn’t already – to let you know if you were successful. Make sure you keep an eye out for the Dark Love edition hitting the interwebz on Friday!
• We are slowly, slowly working our way through the regular ol’ short story submissions from both the October and January window; please bear with us but we’re catching up slowly.
• We’re also now proofreading the 2023 anthology, which should hopefully be ready soon. Thanks to the legend that is Steph Ellis for helping pull this together, and some of our fresh new residents of TWF Towers who are divvying up the proofreading to help out.
• Finally, this is your regular reminder that we have an insatiable need for drabbles – like, all the damn time. Get your little darklings of exactly 100 words over to us via the submission form, and make sure they’re a complete story in and of themselves; as much as I love reading extracts from longer works, our drabbles need to work on their own more than anything. 

And so onto this week’s edition, where P.A. Cornell (a Nebula finalist, no less!) has a neighbour who takes a bit too much and faces the consequences. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Nico Martinez Nocito’s glimmer in the dark,
• Kelley Tai’s star-crossed lovers, and
• Nissa Harlow’s woodland wanderings.

Over to you, Stuart.

Oh, PS: for those who have been following my creative burnout journey, guess what? I only bloody well finished and submitted an almost-10,000 word short story this week! I know, I can’t believe it either. It’s probably why I’m sick now…

Greetings, children of the dark. Finally – finally! – the neverending bullsh*t of January is over. But that does mean it’s now February, and time marches ever onward. I’m consoling myself with the fact the daylight is staying around slightly longer every day. 

The arrival of February also means we’ve officially started reviewing our Valentine’s submissions, but you’ve got a few more days left to get yours in – hit our submissions page for details, and make sure you’re channeling your best jilted monster lover, ghostly unrequited feelings, and other obsessions of the soul. Which brings me to introducing the first of our new residents in TWF Towers: welcome, Jane Morecroft, who’s now laser-focused on your dark hearts. Jane is a journalist as well as a creative writer, a slush reader for Andromeda Spaceways, an editorial assistant at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and now the Assistant Editor for the Valentine’s Special Edition at TWF. Needless to say, she’s pretty darn qualified to sit in the loveseat.

Wanting to catch her eye? Jane says she’s looking for character driven stories with a twist, and a close narrative voice is very appealing to her. All the usual TWF submission guidelines also apply, so head over here to check those and get submitting. 

And so onto this week’s edition. For today’s TWF main course we get weird – real weird – on a stormy clifftop with Andrew Keyworth. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Catherine Berry’s warning, (trigger warning: sexual harassment)
• Brian Rosenberger’s vengeance, and
• Henry Gibbons’s impatience (trigger warning: talk of suicide)

Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. And it really is dark out there, isn’t it? I hope you’re staying safe, staying kind to yourself and to others, and finding what you need to get through this. It’s going to be a long haul, but we’ll get there together. 

And if issuing our weekly missives of dark speculative fiction from TWF Towers helps in any way to keep you chugging along, then we’re very happy to oblige. Soon, we’ll have new residents moving in, and I hope to introduce them soon. We’re still seeking someone to take on our festive special editions, so please do get in touch if you’d like to join the crew. Obviously we have a bit of time up our sleeve, but it’d be nice to complete the crew sooner rather than later!

The good news is that our newly-expanded crew is also helping to get our very overdue 2023 anthology into your hands, so they’re already making an impact. And, of course, all credit, glory, and gifts go to the incredible Steph Ellis who’s jumped back in to help with the technicalities of that project. 

And so onto this week’s edition. For today’s TWF we head into the furthest reaches of space with Anna Orridge. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Kara Kahnke’s artistic needs (trigger warning: domestic violence),
• Robert Allen Lupton’s assessment of manking, and
• DJ Tyrer’s lost city.

Until next time, stay strong.

Over to you, Stuart.

Greetings, children of the dark. How’s your 2025 emerging? I’m already berating myself for not sprinting out of the gates, so it feels right to remind you tomorrow, 20 January, is the third Monday of the month which makes it Blue Monday. While this was originally a marketing gimmick for a travel company, it’s ballooned into a global mental health awareness day. January can be dark in more than just weather ways, so check in on yourself, check in on your friends, and keep each other safe. It’s ok to not be ok, and it’s definitely ok to ask for help. 

With that, I have some parish notices for you before launching into this week’s edition:

• First, our January short story submissions window is now firmly closed. We will not be taking any more short story submissions until the next window opens in April; find the details over here, and note they’re also on the submission form itself if you need a reminder!
• That said, we are always open for drabbles – those tiny tiny complete stories in 100 words – as well as unholy trinities and serialised stories. You’ll find details for those over in the submissions page as well.
• Finally, thanks to those who’s expressed interest in joining our assistant editor team to help out with the special editions. I’m hoping we have three out of four confirmed now, but are still seeking a volunteer to take ownership of our Christmas special edition. Could it be you? Do you love a bit of festive darkness? Get in touch and let us know!

And so onto this week’s edition. The TWF dark and delicious menu today is centred around Jessie Atkin’s strange growth. That’s followed by the short, sharp speculations of:

• Jane Bryan’s gloomy warning,
• Joshua Ginsberg’s dark omen, and
• Weird Wilkins’s thirst for knowledge.

Over to you, Stuart.