Submissions
Open Submissions Call — Monstrous Outlines anthology
06 years ago
Martian Migraine Press is now open to submissions for our 2019 anthology project…
“Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not;
and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.”
— H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror
Monstrous Outlines will be an anthology of horror and weird fiction with a focus on the theme of camouflage: people, entities, monsters, gods, even concepts, that masquerade as things other than themselves. Predators in plain sight, deities on their down time, sublime extra-dimensional terrors slumming in 4D. We want to see stories of exceptionally well done camouflage, all the more baffling and frightening for its seamless nature. We want to see stories of seeming where the hidden thing is poorly hidden for a number of reasons: perhaps there are layers to its camouflage, or perhaps it doesn’t care how well it hides. Imagine the moment when the perfectly hidden thing reveals itself. When the poorly hidden thing reveals itself. We’re also interested in duplicates, doppelgangers, and shapeshifters. Think John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? and its cinematic offspring, The Thing, for the latter. The seed story for this anthology will be Algernon Blackwood’s classic tale, The Willows, a story of two worlds touching, of men meeting the unnameable through the medium of the nearest natural analogue, the titular willow trees.
Submission period closes 31 NOVEMBER 2018. The anthology will be released in trade paperback and electronic book formats in early March 2019.
SUBMISSIONS GUIDELINES may be found here
New Anthology Open Submissions Call — Innsmouthbreathers
06 years ago
There are folks for whom the question of whether Cthulhu has two eyes or six is a vitally important one. Individuals that believe, somehow, that a dinner of tinned spaghetti and ice cream with a reanimated H. P. Lovecraft would be the height of both culinary and intellectual pleasure. Scholars who feel that The Horror at Red Hook is a timely warning about, well, you know… those other people. Esteemed biographers of weird fiction luminaries who reveal their foaming insecurity at the changing of the guard, or the form of a literary award. Entities who dissolve with glee at the slapping of some tentacles on a meme, thus rendering it “Lovecraftian”.
Yes, they’re out there, in their seeming thousands, trolling social media, fawning over the dead, podcasting their paranoia. Yes, they are slouching roughly towards Arkham and Providence and fabled Y’ha-nthlei, to dwell in fossilized canon and geeky glory, forever.
INNSMOUTHBREATHERS.
Martian Migraine Press announces an open call for submissions to our latest anthology project, INNSMOUTHBREATHERS: Cautionary Fables of Mythos Fandom! We are looking for humourous stories of a certain kind of Cthulhu Mythos fan: the rabid Lovecraft worshipper, the defender of the outmoded and outclassed, the pulp reader for whom Weird Fiction peaked somewhere in the middle of the last century. (The 20th, for those keeping track of such things!) We’re looking for tales that pit Innsmouthbreathers against all manner of real and imagined horrors: shoggoths with Social Justice agendas, politically active Deep Ones, enlightened Mi-Go, and Nick Mamatas*. Make them lovable, make them loathsome, make us feel their triumphs and defeats! Put us in their basements, their garrets, their comic shops and conventions and pop-culture covens, and put us in their Cthulhu parody t-shirts while you’re at it. Mmm, is that a cotton/poly blend? Only in black, you say? SOLD.
INNSMOUTHBREATHERS will be a mostly funny book. We’re going for light-hearted ribbing here, a send-up, a roast. Stories that are outright mean and nasty won’t play well within these pages. Remember, let they who have not geeked out over Lovecraft, even a little, even once, throw the first Shining Trapezohedron into the bay! And sure, we’re asking for yuks, but please don’t feel you need to dial back the weird horror. Mix it up, thrill us, chill us, make us laugh at ourselves.
Submission period closes 31 JULY 2018. The anthology will be released in early October 2018. Details at our SUBMISSIONS PAGE.
Open Submissions Call for CHTHONIC: Weird Tales of Inner Earth
07 years ago
“The nethermost caverns … are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific … out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
— H. P. Lovecraft, The Festival
We’re excited to open submissions to our sixth anthology…
CHTHONIC
The full title of this book will be
CHTHONIC: Weird Tales of Inner Earth
Pelucidar. The Hollow Earth. DEROS, and the Shaver Mysteries. Blue-litten K’n-yan, red Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. The Amigara Fault. Derinkuyu. Agartha. The world (and worlds) below. Inner earth, a near infinite space of vast, echoing potential … our (possible?) birthplace, and the place where we all return, either as corpses, or something other? … the churning, chaotic underworld, and true home of all that is weird, unconscious, and forbidden. Descend with us in this anthology of weird fiction; descend to the realms CHTHONIC.
We are looking for weird fiction that explores the mystique and terror of caverns, abyssal spaces, and subterranean worlds. As with previous MMP anthologies, we will be including a seed story from H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre (in this case, The Rats in the Walls, though many of his stories went underground). We want to see bizarre civilizations, mind-boggling physical and biological phenomena, horrific rituals, mad science and madder sorcery. We want to feel the tunnel floors beneath our feet shake with the passage of beasts, machines, and gods that have never seen the light of the sun; sentient oils, intelligent muck, living rock, molemen, formless spawn and Efts of the Prime, worms, Dholes, and ghastlier things. But CHTHONIC won’t be just a serving of pop culture “surface” material, if you’ll pardon the pun. We like to see stories with depth (oh god, another one, sorry!); emotional and psychological explorations of the internal spaces of the human mind and soul, as well as the ground below. Write us stories that induce crushing claustrophobia or open us wide to new dimensions of thought and being. If your story can do both, so much the better.
Final story count for the anthology will be determined based on quality and number of submissions. CHTHONIC: Weird Tales of Inner Earth will be released as a softcover paperback and as an electronic book in multiple formats.
Submission period closes JULY 31, 2017. The anthology will be released in early December of 2017.
Submitting
Please use Standard Manuscript format when submitting. That’s double spaced, left justified, Times New Roman or Courier or something at least readable, a header on the first page (at least) with your author info and word count and… well, you know the drill. RTF or DOC files preferred, but DOCx and text files also accepted. Obviously, you could send us something that’s not in Standard Manuscript format, but it will lower your chances of it being looked at seriously.
We will look at both original work and REPRINTS.
To submit a story to CHTHONIC: Weird Tales of Inner Earth send an e-mail (with the story file attached, not in the body of the email) to: submissions@martianmigrainepress.com, with subject line: CHTHONIC, title of your story, and your name.
Length
For short fiction, we’d like to see anything from 1,500 to 7,000 words.
FLASH FICTION: got something under 1500 words? Send it in. However, the following still applies…
NO POETRY.
Payment
All accepted submissions will be paid .03CAD per word, via Paypal, as well as two contributor copies (paperback) of the anthology, and copies in all electronic formats (mobi, EPUB, and PDF). Authors are also entitled to electronic copies of three additional Martian Migraine Press titles of their choosing.
Replies and Queries
We will try to acknowledge receipt of your submission within a week of its arrival in our inbox. The submission period itself will close on July 31, 2017 and we should be responding to all submissions, yes or no, throughout the submission period and no later than August 2017. We do our best to ensure that all submissions are contacted and kept up-to-date, but sometimes items fall through cracks, so, if you haven’t heard from us by September 15 2017, please query.
