Boo Fellow Writers!

It’s getting eerily close to my very favorite holiday, Halloween. It’s not just because the stores are stocking (or should I say stalking) candy corn and pumpkins that I mention Halloween before August is dead and buried, but because there are some serious deadlines coming up. Don’t be caught dead missing a deadline! Okay, I’m not sure the evil sounding voice that I hear while typing this post is actually coming through to you all, so I’ll stop the bad jokes. Seriously, if you have a creepy piece, you need to send it like NOW. Below are some journals/magazines requesting Halloween and/or spooky pieces for one of the following genres: flash fiction, short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction pieces. Pull your monster out from under the bed or out of the closet and get submitting!!

Written Backwards:

Theme: Miscreations; Gods; Monstrosities & Other Horrors;  Deadline: 8/31

Tigershark:

Theme: Night Terrors; Deadline: 9/30

Stormy Island Publishing:

Theme: Stories must have a supernatural theme (ghosts, spirits, demons, hauntings, anything that goes bump in the night); Deadline: 9/13

Deadman’s Tome:

Theme: Monster Party: Horror, satire, & dark fiction involving and about the less popular monsters. Set Dracula & Frankenstein aside, and let’s bring Yeti, The Mud Man, Swamp Thing, The Lizard Man, and Radioactive Ant, and so forth. Think B-Movie horror monster. You can even go international & pull from other cultural influences; Deadline: 9/15

Cleaning Up Glitter:

Theme: Honoring October holidays like Dia de los Muertos, Samhain, and All Hallows Eve by focusing on Mystery, Death and the Dead, Harvest, Season of Darkness, etc.; Deadline: 9/31

Trembling With Fear:

Theme: Halloween; Deadline: 10/13

Please do read the guidelines for submission closely. Make sure you check that you are submitting for the correct genre and word count. Also, when I was new to submitting, I didn’t always read the fine details a/k/a blah, blah, blah. Well, blah, blah, blah is super important. As an example, I will give you one of those fine details from the list above. Miscreations states that they do not accept the following: graphic, gratuitous depictions of child abuse, sexual abuse and animal abuse. Now, I wouldn’t have known this had I not read it on their submission page. They want a haunting based on a college campus? Do I have a short story for you?! My trigger happy finger hits SUBMIT before noticing they like just about anything but ghosts. See what I mean? You may love your gruesome little ghoul, but not everyone does. It wastes time for both you and whomever you are submitting to. 

 Happy Writing!