Tag: short short story

Call for Submissions: Flash Frontier

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Submissions now open

In 2013 we are reading and publishing on a bi-monthly basis. Each issue follows a theme. See our Themes and Announcements pages for details. Also see Archives to read past issues and get a feel for stories we publish.

February 2014: one way (submitted by Brendan Way and among the top five themes from the winter 2013 comp)

April 2014: scattered (submitted by Bruce Costello and among the top five themes from the winter 2013 comp)

What we like

We are looking for variety and originality. Tickle us, haunt us, gobsmack us. Choose your words carefully and leave our readers wanting more. And do it in 250 or less (not including title).

Please submit only previously unpublished works. If the work has appeared in any other print or electronic journal, we consider it published. If it has appeared on a writing workshop site, we will consider it but please do let us know, and we expect Flash Frontierto be credited with first publication if your work appears in our pages.

We love original art in all forms — colourful and daring, muted and understated. We’ll choose art each month which reflects the theme.

How to submit

Stories

  • Electronic submissions only. Submit submissions in an email to: flashfrontier [at] gmail [dot] com
  • Write Submission: month / theme (that is, name the theme, as in: Submission: January / Frontiers) in the subject line.
  • Place your story in the body of the email. No attachments, please. If your story requires unusual formatting, the editors may ask for an different kind of document to confirm your formatting requirements.
  • Include the title of your story, your name, and the whole text in the email.
  • Please format your story by using double spacing between paragraphs and no indent on paragraph beginnings.
  • Provide a brief biographical sketch (approx. 60 words) about yourself that can be included on our Contributor page. You do not have to include your bio if you have submitted to us before.
  • Submissions are due by the last day of the month for the following month’s issue. Each issue will appear mid-month.
  • Remember to count: 251 won’t be accepted.
Art
  • If you are submitting art, please send your work(s) as an attachment. Provide a title for the piece and tell us where the artwork originated. Artists may send up to five pieces for consideration at once.
  • Please provide a brief commentary (approx. 60 words) about your art submission.
  • Provide a brief biographical sketch (approx. 60 words) about yourself that can be included on our Contributor page. You do not have to include your bio if you have submitted to us before.

Payment and Rights

  • We do not pay authors for their work, but there will be prizes awarded quarterly and at the conclusion of our first year.
  • An author must own full copyright of the work submitted.
  • First rights revert to author upon publication, although Flash Frontier reserves the right to anthologize material originally published here in electronic or printed format.

Please direct any questions to us at flashfrontier [at] gmail [dot] com

Racking up More than Rejections: Shards in Exegesis

Jaclyn12 Comments

So, the ripples of goodness from July’s Submission Bonanza! are still rolling in.  (Rejections are still rolling in too, so it is true that I am racking up rejections, but these small victories overshadow the rejections by so much.)  It’s amazing what happens when you just decide to put yourself out there.  I wasn’t expecting much back except for some experience and some notches on my writing bedpost.

But I’m in the latest issue of Exegesis, an academic journal at Royal Holloway, University of London.  They published Shards, a short short of mine, in their third issue: Landscapes:Digital, Real, Imagined.

Woohoo!

Featured Author: Reaping the Rewards of a Submission Bonanza!

Jaclyn11 Comments

After an incredibly intense month of submitting writing to 30 literary magazines in 30 days, following my Submission Bonanza! Challenge, I am beginning to reap the rewards.

This month Flash Frontier included me in their featured authors section.  Check it out!

Also, if you want to do your own Submission Bonanza! you can check out my tips for editing and choosing pieces to submit, finding magazines, and writing your cover letter and bio.

Or check out the unexpected lessons that I learned while doing this challenge.

Call for Submissions: Flash Frontier

JaclynLeave a comment

In October, one of my favorite magazines, Flash Frontier, will be putting out an international issue, so everyone can join in the fun!  The theme of the issue will be “Rescued!”  They are open now for submissions for the international issue.  See the guidelines below.

 

Submissions now open

In 2013 we are reading and publishing on a bi-monthly basis. Each issue follows a theme. See our Themes and Announcements pages for details. Also see Archives to read past issues and get a feel for stories we publish.

What we like

We are looking for variety and originality. Tickle us, haunt us, gobsmack us. Choose your words carefully and leave our readers wanting more. And do it in 250 or less (not including title).

Please submit only previously unpublished works. If the work has appeared in any other print or electronic journal, we consider it published. If it has appeared on a writing workshop site, we will consider it but please do let us know, and we expect Flash Frontierto be credited with first publication if your work appears in our pages.

We love original art in all forms — colourful and daring, muted and understated. We’ll choose art each month which reflects the theme.

How to submit

Stories

  • Electronic submissions only. Submit submissions in an email to: flashfrontier [at] gmail [dot] com
  • Write Submission: month / theme (that is, name the theme, as in: Submission: January / Frontiers) in the subject line.
  • Place your story in the body of the email. No attachments, please. If your story requires unusual formatting, the editors may ask for an different kind of document to confirm your formatting requirements.
  • Include the title of your story, your name, and the whole text in the email.
  • Please format your story by using double spacing between paragraphs and no indent on paragraph beginnings.
  • Provide a brief biographical sketch (approx. 60 words) about yourself that can be included on our Contributor page. You do not have to include your bio if you have submitted to us before.
  • Submissions are due by the last day of the month for the following month’s issue. Each issue will appear mid-month.
  • Remember to count: 251 won’t be accepted.
Art
  • If you are submitting art, please send your work(s) as an attachment. Provide a title for the piece and tell us where the artwork originated. Artists may send up to five pieces for consideration at once.
  • Please provide a brief commentary (approx. 60 words) about your art submission.
  • Provide a brief biographical sketch (approx. 60 words) about yourself that can be included on our Contributor page. You do not have to include your bio if you have submitted to us before.

Payment and Rights

  • We do not pay authors for their work, but there will be prizes awarded quarterly and at the conclusion of our first year.
  • An author must own full copyright of the work submitted.
  • First rights revert to author upon publication, although Flash Frontier reserves the right to anthologize material originally published here in electronic or printed format.

Please direct any questions to us at flashfrontier [at] gmail [dot] com

Call for Submissions: Hoot Review

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Hoot Review

I love the idea of this mini-litmag on a postcard and the challenge of staying under 150 words.  Also, they have online workshops where they will help you edit your work before you even submit.  This one is definitely worth sharing.

Here are their submission guidelines:

We accept fiction, non-fiction, memoir, poetry, and book reviews year-round. Graphic fiction/non-fiction also welcome, but it must fit on a postcard.  We publish only one (1!) piece in print form each month– we publish 1-4 pieces in our online issue.

We accept work on a rolling basis–you can expect to hear from us within a month to six weeks, if we’re on schedule, which we are about 50% of the time. We do pay for pieces published on postcards (more details on this below).

  • ALL PROSE: <150 words. We’re not going to count them, but…we mean it.
  • ALL POETRY: <10 lines (if it’s more, be open to “creative reformatting”), but still <150 words.  Remember, it has to fit on a postcard!
  • BOOK REVIEWS: These will be published online, or on the back of a postcard when possible. Still <150 words. Must be of a recently published book (within the last year). The book must be published by an independent or small press. You are welcome to query before submitting if you would like our feedback on the book you are reviewing. If you would like your book reviewed by us, please send a query letter to info@hootreview.com.

You may submit as many works as you like, but two per submission. All work must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are, of course, allowed–but please let us know if your work is placed elsewhere.

We will read all types of work. However, we especially like work that is audacious, surprising and zesty. Furthermore, we want this postcard to be shareable. As you’re submitting, remember the Refrigerator Rule. Ask yourself: “Would someone want this hanging on their fridge?” Work that’s about the depressingness of gloomy alcohol clinking on the bottom of a shadowy glass in the gloaming after a father’s death wouldn’t work as well hanging from a fridge or tucked playfully in someone’s lunchbag.

That said, if you’ve got some melancholy work that is surprising and zesty and GOOD then we would be very excited to check it out.

See our “ISSUES” page to read samples of the work we have published in the past.

We will also read your work, and give you detailed feedback, BEFORE you submit. (We must be crazy.) Bring your piece to our super friendly online workshop, held every other Wednesday.

Depending on how generous we’re feeling, we also often give feedback with our rejections, especially if it is requested.

Note: We do not solicit work — and we read all of our submissions blindly (we don’t look at cover letters until we decide to accept/reject). Every submission we receive is given the same consideration, and is read by at least two, but up to four people, and often out loud (while we consume delicious items, like raspberry tart and/or dumplings.)

COSTS & PAYMENT:

To use our online submission manager, it costs $2 to submit up to two pieces of work. We also accept submissions by regular mail, for no fee. All pieces are considered for both our print (postcard) and our online issues, unless you specify otherwise.

You may submit as many pieces as you like, but you will need to pay the $2 submission fee for every two submissions (your two pieces must be in the same document, or Submittable will charge you twice!)- or, if you submit by mail, you must mail every two pieces separately, with their own return envelope (you mustinclude a SASE for a response.)

As for payment– it is sort of like we hold a mini-contest every month (but it’s not exactly a contest, as our submissions are rolling). The author we publish on a postcard receives 30% of all the submission money (after Submittable takes its 52% cut) for that month, from the 20th of the month two months prior publication, to the 20th of the month one month prior (guaranteed minimum of $10!), along with five copies of that month’s issue. For example, if we publish you in October, you get 30% of the money we received between August 20th and September 20th.

Authors published in our online issue do not receive monetary compensation at this time, but will receive five copies of the corresponding month’s postcard.

OTHER STUFF

  • You have to be okay with having your work ‘creatively’ formatted—so that it will both look cool and fit on a postcard.  Which means—we might paint the words on some wood and photograph them, or photo-edit the words onto an interesting-yet-appropriate thing, like a medicine bottle label, or a paper napkin, etc.  If you are submitting a poem, this sometimes means we have to change line breaks…though we try not to do this, and we always do it tastefully (at least, we think so.) Do not submit your work if you are not okay with this.
  • We are often asked about what informs our decision regarding publishing a piece on a postcard versus publishing it in our online issue. Choosing pieces for postcards vs. online is not a matter of “which ones we like best.” We love all of the pieces we publish. Factors include- what pieces we have for other months (we try to balance poems and prose, as well as keep style and content varied from postcard to postcard), appropriateness for sharing (see the Refrigerator Rule above), and illustration potential (both imagery and length of the piece factor here, as longer pieces are much harder to work with.)

READY TO SUBMIT?

Click here to go to our online submission manager.

Akhenaten (Winter 2012.)

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Even when history is written in stone, it is re-written.  This is the nature of the story.  Suns and hawks and buffaloes are erased, scratched over to be reused in the temples of the future.  Reunderstood.  Re-envisaged.  Repostulated.  This is how Akhenaten was lost, struck from the roll of the pharaohs, a distant memory of a monotheistic heretic, a madman with only one god.  He built cities and temples and sculptures of stone and gold and they were quietly erased in the span of a generation.  Father of history’s most famous pharaoh, the first individual, founder of world religions and yet … forgotten.

Even when etchings are deep, the vengeance of history is deeper.

His lips were full, and so was his stomach, as if he were the bearer of life:  Mother and Father in one.  Son of the sun, he named himself.  Descendant of the stars. Yet “He is the sun, as compared to the stars,” the people wrote.   He shone and spun with energy and life.   He was daytime and dawn and we were drawn to him.  The pull of his large middle seemed to keep earth in orbit and suggested that he was … different.

His head was large, too.  And not just metaphorically.  His skull was not round, not adorned with the dress of kings.  Instead it jutted, backwards.  As if his brain were trying to leap out of his head.   As if he came born with too many thoughts for a human skull to hold.  Or too many questions.

His face was not manly and beautiful.  It was strange and androgynous.  His lips pouted, asking to be kissed.  His nose barely fit on his face.  And his chin, his chin was so pointy.  It turned his giant skull into the shape of an upside-down tear drop: a large, rounded cranium that ended in a small, pointy face.  And then there was the matter of his eyes.  They were big, but not round, enormous almonds that seemed to fill his brow.  With his mouth and eyes and nose, there was very little room for a face, to speak of.  Instead he was an immense head, full of features.   It wasn’t normal.  It wasn’t human.  It was almost alien – as if he did come from the stars.

He did not recline the way other pharaohs did.  He was not somehow both always at rest and gifted with an athletic, sculpted body.  His shoulders were small and his hips were large.  His arms and calves were so spindly that some likened him to a spider.  His thighs were so large that there were whispers amongst the people “Is he Oedipus, swollen foot?”  His mother was, after all, beloved.

Instead, he was lively, as if stone carvers always caught him in the act.  Each carving seemed to be a live-action photograph of a son of god engaged with his surroundings.  The cartoon pharaoh, always animated, surrounded by loved ones, animals, and the outdoors.  Not only acting as a ruler, but acting as a father, a man, a lover.  He was a king of movement: orbiting and revolving through the universe.  His pull and the pull of the world around him spun together, and inspired each other to dance faster and further.

You can see how the present had fallen in love, and how history was not amused.

Response to a previous prompt: http://lightningdroplets.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/prompt-rasputin/

Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/zinetv/ for the photo of Nefertiti (?).

Cicadas (Thailand. May 2010.)

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She could hear his abdomen, even from eight stories above. She knew he waited for her, dressed in new skin holding the bark of a mango tree. For thirteen years, she had dug and hid, dug and hid, a pale pearl of a nymph sheltered in flooding clay. Prematurely buried. She had fed on rootjuice and waited.

And now, the time for burying herself was gone. She no longer wore the tough soil skin of the past. The brightness of being was nearly unbearable. She was green and larger than herself.

She sat exposed, mesmerized by the equatorial sunlight and the scene in front of her. A kaleidescope of rounded, dark-haired girls with lightning eyes and cloud-colored skin. Mirrored and moving the same. The repetition of girls had no expression on their faces. Their mouths moved at the groups of people surrounding them, but their dream-time eyes looked through the scene.

She heard him again, dry-fly ribs rubbing together to blot out the sounds of metropolitan traffic and children. The vibrations called to her.

She looked down at the expectant mango tree and imagined the future she would create. Millions of shimmery nymphs sprinkling from the branches, raining onto the soil below, christening the ground with their sparkling selves.

There was nothing for her to do now, except let go.

 

 

 

Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersmith/ for the photo! Thanks!

 

You can take the girl out of Florida… (Thailand. Spring 2009.)

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The pull of the swamp is unbearable. As if there is muck in my marrow. The brine I sweat has alligator gar swimming through it, snaky and smooth. It is a cycle that follows me even to Asia — too much grows, it chokes itself, and it falls to die in the water. The gases of decomposition lurk behind cypress knees and tamarind trees alike. They haunt the air and shimmy up to my nostrils. In my lungs, it is wet, it is safe, and it is warm. The perfect place for growth. The perfect place for rot. A steamy warmth for alligator eggs, filling my mouth and forcing a pearly grin. Small cracks and mucus begin to appear as they tumble off my tongue. The birth of baby predators, so cute, falling from my lips to the slippery algae below, is so much more than words.

Many thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielproulx/ for the picture.  Also, check out the other things on this flickr profile, because they are super cool.