Flash Me, for short short fiction–all Fantasy Issue, due August 31

Flash Me Magazine’s All Fantasy Issue
FLASH ME MAGAZINE will be doing another ALL FANTASY ISSUE October 31, 2009. All stories submitted for the fantasy issue must contain some element of fantasy and be 1,000 words or less. The submission deadline is August 31, 2009.

Special guidelines apply, so please visit our website prior to submission. You can view the fantasy issue submission guidelines here.

The deadline’s coming up, and we’re still searching for spectacular stories – maybe yours?? 

Yvonne
FMM Admin Assistant

(thanks Specfic Markets)

Realms of Fantasy Folds: Is it Past Time to Save A ‘Zine?

Very ,very sad to announce that Realms of Fantasy is folding.

The news broke yesterday.

Realms of Fantasy has been with us for fifteen years and “was coming up on its 100th issue,” Cleveland said. “We were excited about the special Halloween issue we’d been planning, which would have been our first.” The staff is obviously harried by the news, and that it’s become public so quickly. Cleveland had been hoping to tell the authors and artists the news before it broke publicly.

Realms of Fantasy has been one of the anchors of the Fantasy short story publishing industry.  As a print magazine, Realms was billed as “the largest magazine in the world devoted to Fantasy”.  It was part of the big four anchor magazines of the industry (the others being Asimov’s, Fantasy and Science Fiction and Analog) partly built on the venue–a large glossy magazine (not a small pulp), its reputation for helping careers begin, the high distribution from subscription, and the amount it paid for stories. Editor Shawna McCarthy was recognized as one of the best editors in the business (and she will be here in the Yukon in April!–I hope!!).  Will all venues and markets go web-only?  Is that an answer to part of it–or is it about advertising, and since you’d have to have advertising either way, are closings inevitable?

With Fantasy and Science Fiction going bimonthly, Realms‘ closing narrows the market for writers of short FSF considerably.  If this is the beginning of the economic crisis, recession, depression, etc., then this isn’t a good sign.  Two out of four of the big anchor markets down or downsized?   I’m assuming Realms thought of all options–bimonthly, web-only zine, etc.— so I’m not gonna try to come up with suggestions for fixes…

However, now is the time to save a ‘zine.  If the economic crisis is just going to get worse, is there a way to help ‘zines as fans and writers?  Can we donate money? Tell us.  Can we help support in other ways?  Tell us.  Can we ask universities to adopt a Zine for a short period of time?  I was never one to subscribe much–mostly because I moved around every couple of years, and my subscriptions had a hard time finding me, and because I was often broke.  When I could I bought from the newsstand.  But if I can help by choosing three zines to subscribe to in order to save them from oblivion–let me know.  I should have been doing that all along.  However, if I thought it was balanced on my subscription, I would have done it earlier.  And I suspect many writers would feel the same way—that if people needed to borrow from us, they could.

Is there a way to stop the closing of Realms of Fantasy?  Is there a way to stop the decline in markets and venues and places to read great science fiction/fantasy?

New Anthology Market– Triangulation: Dark Glass

March 31, 2009, Deadline— From Their Website:

Taking Flight by Vincent ChongTriangulation is an annual 125-150+ page short fiction anthology that publishes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and any other speculative fiction that caught the editors’ fancy. Every year we have a theme: 2009’s theme is “Dark Glass”. We pay semi-pro rates and are available online at places like Amazon.com. We use Lulu.com as our printer, so if the publish-on-demand thing leaves a foul taste in your mouth, avoid us. We’re a small outfit but we work hard to produce a quality product; Asimov’s Science Fiction said we were “equal to any issue of your favorite prozine.”

No, we don’t get tired of mentioning that Asimov’s said nice things about us.

We define “short fiction” as “up to about 5,000 words or so.” We have no reason to impose hard and fast arbitrary word limits, but we are interested in publishing a wide variety of entertaining and literate stories, so the more space a story would take, the more it will need to impress us. If you have an awesome story that exceeds 5K then by all means send it; but be warned that if you’re closer to 10,000 words, it will probably need to have the editorial staff cheering and high-fiving each other so much that the senior editor’s roommate’s poodle runs into the room to see what all the commotion is about. And that dog likes his naps.

We dig flash; there is no minimum word count.

We have no interest in getting more specific about the term “speculative fiction.” Science fiction, horror, fantasy, magic realism, alternate history, whatever — if there’s a speculative element vital to your story, we’ll gladly give it a read.

We love creative interpretations of our theme, “Dark Glass”. Don’t ask us what it means — tell us what it means with a story that convinces us you’re right.

We publish both new and established writers; the level of experience for the authors gracing our pages has ranged from “first time in print” to “Hugo winner.” The majority of our stories usually wind up being from American authors, but we’ve had a number of international contributions; we’re happy to consider work from anywhere in the world, just as long as it’s written in English.

We will run mature content if we like the story. So make sure there’s an actual story in that mature content.

We will gladly consider reprints. If the story ran someplace obscure, then it’s probably new to our readers; and if it ran someplace high-profile, it’s probably really good. Either way, we win!

No poetry. Sorry.

No fanfic, even if it’s fanfic of a fictional universe that has passed into public domain. Cthulhu Mythos, I’m looking in your direction.

No thinly-disguised transcripts of roleplaying sessions, no settings obviously based on D&D or other such games. Don’t get us wrong, we love to game ourselves — which means our imaginations are probably too cluttered with elves and dwarves and orcs and the like as it is.

Submission deadline is March 31, 2009. All electronic submits must be sent by that time, all snail mail submits must be postmarked by that date.

Compensation:

We pay two cents per word (USA funds, rounded to the nearest 100 words, US$10 minimum payment) on publication and a single contributor’s copy. The anthology will be published in late July of 2009. We purchase North American Serial Rights, and Electronic Rights for the PDF downloadable version; since we’re cool with reprints, we really don’t care whether we have firsties. All subsidiary rights released upon publication. Contributors will also have the option of purchasing additional copies of the anthology at-cost, exact price TBD.

How To Submit:

Electronic submissions make our lives easier. Please send your story to editor@parsecink.org. Please put your subject line in the format of “SUBMISSION: Story Title” so we can tell you apart from the spam.

We’ll consider stories ONLY in the following formats:

  • .odt (OpenDocument Text — format used by the OpenOffice.org suite) — preferred format
  • .rtf (Rich Text Format — generic document format that most word processors can create)
  • .doc (MS Word — we’re not crazy about it, but let’s face it, it’s the one most people actually use)

Please use industry standard manuscript format. There’s disagreement on some of the exact details of the “standard” — we’re cool with that. We’re not testing you to see if you can follow each and every niggling detail, we just want a manuscript that looks professional.

If you absolutely positively can’t use email, please send the manuscript (with either a SASE or a return email address) to:

Triangulation 2008
134 Orchard Dr.
Penn Hills, PA 15235

No hand-written manuscripts. We gotta draw the line somewhere.

Please, no multiple submissions; only send us one story at a time. We’ll get back to you promptly, we promise.

For Full GUIDELINES, CLICK HERE>

New Market: Federations Anthology–Get your Star Trek on!

federations_3All right, Science Fiction Writers, you have another cool opportunity for publication. Remember back when you and me were discussing writing for Star Trek? Well, John Joseph Adams, editor of this year’s fun anthology of zombie stories, The Living Dead, (which has a great story from my BFF Catherine Cheek) is looking for stories about the impacts of far-flung galactic empires in a new anthology called Federations. I quote from his guidelines:

What are the social, religious, environmental, or technological implications of living in such a vast society? What happens when expansionist tendencies on a galactic scale come into conflict with the indigenous peoples of other planets, of other races? And what of the issue of communicating across such distances, or the problems caused by relativistic travel? These are just some of the questions and issues that the stories in Federations will take on.

So, if you have an idea you’d like to explore in an intergalactic empire sort of way, in 5000 words or less, submit it to Adams by Jan 1 2009. We may not get to write for Star Trek, but we can write out our Trek-like visions and still discuss the same issues in this anthology–and that may be a better thing than boldly going into Roddenberry’s universe. We get a universe of our own to play with.