Deadline: March 31st, 2023
Payment: $40 USD
Theme: Eerie stories that would be perfect to be told around a campfire!

Pull up a seat, roast a marshmallow, and tell us a tale.

We want the stories you’d whisper in the dark. The kind that linger and leave readers with more questions than they answer. We want a little bit of campiness and a whole lot of speculation on the world around us.

We prefer stories set in a rural backdrop with the intimate feeling of a small town. We want sparse populations and a closeness to nature. The stories don’t need to be about camping necessarily, but they should evoke the eerie feeling of a story told around a campfire with the strange sounds of the forest just beyond the firelight.

All stories will need to be previously unpublished (this includes your own website/blog/etc.) and must feature a speculative element, whether it’s magic or monsters or anything in between. All subgenres of speculative fiction are welcome, although sci-fi will be a harder sell. We will judge all stories by their own merits though, so if you think you have something that fits, we want to read it.

A note on horror: we are not looking for gratuitous violence, grimdark, or gothic romanticism.

We will not accept any stories featuring bigotry, hateful language, or sexual assault of any kind. This is an anthology for adults so some sex/violence/profanity is fine, as long as it directly pertains to the story and isn’t used solely for shock value. We do want our grandmothers to read this though, so any sex should preferably be fade-to-black rather than overly descriptive.

Guidelines:

Deadline: March 31st, 2023 at 11:59 EST

Word count: 2,000-5,000 words

Payment: $40 USD per accepted story, paid through PayPal.

Rights: First world print and digital publication rights with one year exclusivity following the date of publication.

Simultaneous Submissions: Yes, life is short. But please withdraw your story by emailing us immediately if it’s accepted somewhere else prior to our decision.

Multiple Submissions: No

Reprints: No

General tips: We will not accept re-submissions and we cannot guarantee feedback on any rejected submissions. Please, no poetry. Anything outside our word count range will be deleted unread. Craft is important to us, and while we don’t expect perfection, we do expect pieces to be polished, so please don’t send us a first draft.

How to submit: Please send all stories as .doc or .docx attachments to [email protected] with [STORY TITLE]-[LAST NAME] in the subject line. Do not paste the story into the body of the email, but do include a brief third-person bio in your email. Please, for the sake of our eyeballs, double space and use 12pt font. We also strongly suggest you use Shunn’s Manuscript Format.

Via: Hallow Oak Press.