Trembling With Fear 11-5-23
Hello, children of the dark. I promised an update to you all on our short story submissions situation, so here’s the tl;dr—we are closed to short story submissions for the rest of this year, and will only be open next year in 2-week windows once every quarter.
More detail? Here we go.
At present, we have close to 70 stories working their way through our review process—and we only reopened to submissions two months ago, after having been overwhelmed around this time last year and ending up fully booked for almost an entire year. We really don’t want that to happen again, so we tried being much more selective and hard-lined about what we choose to accept… But it hasn’t been enough.
So after much thought and discussion, we’ve decided to change the way we handle our submissions processes. Pay attention, now: this is important.
>>We will still be open year-round for drabbles, serials, and unholy trinities.
HOWEVER
>>Short story submissions will be open in 2-week seasonal windows as follows:
- Winter: 1-15 January
- Spring: 1-15 April
- Summer: 1-15 July
- Fall: 1-15 October
Any short stories submitted to us outside of those windows will be returned unread, with a note to resubmit during the next window. This also makes it doubly important that you mark any submissions to our special editions (Valentines, Summer, Halloween, Christmas) as being for the appropriate edition, otherwise your story won’t be read.
I’m sorry we have to be such hard-asses about this, but we can only afford to publish one short story every week—and at the current rate of submissions, it will take us years to get through everything we have. I hope you understand why we are making this change. We want to protect your great work while making sure we can keep up with spotlighting the best of you.
Right. Hard hat off, let’s get to the matter at hand: Hilary Ayshford sees some echoes of the past in this week’s TWF main menu. It’s followed by three delicious quick bites:
- KL Bexon is gripped by grief,
- Cassandra Daucus is perplexed by a new room feature, and
- Nicolette Ward gets her dancing shoes on.
Finally, to those on my side of the pond: remember, remember, the 5th of November. May your bonfire night be bright and merry.
Over to you, Stuart.
ATTENTION YOUTUBE WATCHERS: We’ve had some great responses so far but are open to more ideas – What type of content would you like to see us feature? Please reach out to [email protected]! We’ll be really working on expanding the channel late this year and early into next.
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.