Posts tagged weird fiction
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
CHTHONIC Authors and ToC Announcement
06 years ago
The selection process for the next MMP anthology reflected the theme, Migraineers. There was a sensation of compression, a certain claustrophobia to our reading of the (literally teeming, like worms, or molemen!) submissions, a shortness of breath, a distinct impression that time, and air, and light were in short supply. And, like light glimpsed dimly in some noisome cavern world, the stand out tales were instantly attractive, obvious choices. So, we reached out and grasped them, bringing them into our little book of underground terrors and marvels! Here they are, then, the authors and their stories, some well known, some new, as is our custom, and in no particular order as yet. We’ll release the final order of the ToC closer to the on-sale date, which, incidentally, will be 5 December 2017, with pre-orders becoming available a month previous to the on-sale date. Also, please stay tuned to MMP for the next open submissions call for the first of our 2018 anthologies! That announcement before the end of this week. Thanks for reading with Martian Migraine Press!
CHTHONIC: Weird Tales of Inner Earth ToC
H. P. Lovecraft
The Rats in the Walls
John Linwood Grant
Where All Is Night, and Starless
Aaron Besson
A Song for Granite Khronos
Gemma Files
The Harrow
Scott Shank
Nivel del Mar
Nadia Bulkin
Pugelbone
Christopher Slatsky
Tellurian Facade
Adam McOmber
The Re’em
Antony Mann
Vault
S. L. Edwards
Volver Al Monte
Tom Lynch
The Writhe
Belinda Lewis
The Dragons Beneath
Sarah Peploe
UNDR
Adam Millard
Tending the Core
Orrin Grey
Hollow Earths
Ramsey Campbell
The End of a Summer’s Day
David Stevens
Some Corner of a Dorset Field That Is Forever Arabia
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.
