Deadline: December 31st, 2020
Payment: $0.05 per word
Theme: To lost contact (not being specific in the call, just what that means to you, ideas for themes below!)

Hi! If you are a writer, this post will be of great interest to you. But, before we get to our big announcement, I do want to point out we’ve recently uploaded several new titles on our homepage. Please check it out and order (or, in some instances, pre-order) a couple books. If you love indie horror, the best way to show that is to support publishers directly, and you can do that by ordering books through our webstore. (We will be issuing out other posts at a later date going into more detail on the new titles uploaded, such as Jessica Leonard’s debut novel, Antioch, which is gonna blow y’all’s minds; seriously, you might as well just go ahead and pre-order it right now before reading anything else in this newsletter–it’ll be the wisest decision you’ve ever made.)

Now, on to our announcement…

Long-time fans of Perpetual Motion Machine know we have released two critically acclaimed anthologies titled Lost Signals and Lost Films. These anthologies have featured fiction from folks like Josh Malerman, Brian Evenson, Kristi DeMeester, Gemma Files, Damien Angelica Walters, and so on…

One thing we’ve been asked about the most, probably, is when are we going to complete the trilogy of these…LOST anthologies. And…well, it’s pretty obvious by now, but we intend on completing the trilogy in 2021. But we need help.

Which is why, beginning right now, we are officially open for story submissions for a brand-new anthology called…LOST CONTACT. 

Now, what does LOST CONTACT mean? I guess that depends on what the word CONTACT means to you. To lose contact…does that bring to mind something physical, something intangible? Does it give you a sense of isolation? Does it bring to mind…aliens, maybe? Being stranded? LOST? I think, in the times we live in right now, the phrase “LOST CONTACT” might mean a whole heck of a lot to all of us, and we want to see what you make of it. We’re keeping the theme vague here. We’re excited to see how writers interpret it. There are so many ways you can explore “LOST CONTACT”. Go wild with it.

And, since this is the final entry of our LOST trilogy — Lost Signals and Lost Films being the previous two entries — it would be to your benefit to include TECHNOLOGY of some kind in the submission you write, whatever that might mean to you. The stories need to be deeply rooted in the horror genre, but if it also contains flavors of weird science fiction, that would be pretty radical. (We highly recommend checking out the previous two volumes to get a sense of what we’re looking to publish.)

Interested? Great! Here are the rest of the guidelines:

Lost Contact
an anthology edited by Max Booth III and Lori Michelle

Deadline: December 31, 2020
Word count: 1,000 – 7,000
Payment: $0.05 per word
Simultaneous submissions: Yes
Multiple submissions: No
Reprints: No

Email all submissions to [email protected] with “STORY TITLE_LAST NAME_WORD COUNT” in the subject line.

Oh, and please–for the love of god–spare us your terrible contact lens puns. You are not clever. Your mother lied to you. Don’t do it.

Thanks! That’s it. Now go write some groovy horror fiction!

Via: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.