Deadline: September 30th, 2025
Payment: The larger of $10 per story or 1 cent/word rounded to the nearest 100 words, up to a maximum of $50.
Theme: Character-driven speculative fiction
We are currently OPEN to submissions for the Fall 2025 issue. We will remain open until September 30, 2025.
We anticipate regular open calls during the months of March, June, September, and December for the Summer, Fall, and Winter and Spring issues respectively.
Our primary mission is to provide readers with speculative fiction, broadly defined. We like character-driven stories that take us to the boundary where imagination and reality collide. If in doubt, please submit your story. We will enjoy reading it, even if it doesn’t quite fit with our mission.
Each issue includes ten stories. We prefer stories between 1000 and 2500 words, and issued will have at least seven stories within that range. We will consider stories as long as 5000 words, and we anticipate that the competition for these more limited slots will be stiff.
We welcome submissions from under-represented groups who bring their lived experience to their fiction. We also welcome submissions from first-time, unpublished authors. We welcome submissions from any location. However, our mission includes providing a market for authors from the region of the Crosstimbers Forest–which includes Oklahoma and surrounding states–so we especially encourage authors from this region to submit.
Please do not send mulitiple submissions, simultaneous submissions, or previously published stories. Please do not submit stories where you have copied text generated by AI into any portion of the submission.
Payment will be the larger of $10 per story or 1 cent/word rounded to the nearest 100 words, up to a maximum of $50. Payment will be rendered via Paypal at the time of publication. We cannot issue checks or pay in cash–you must be able to accept Paypal to be paid. If you cannot accept Paypal, payment will be in the form of a copy of the printed issue
Please read author guidelines before submitting. Please pay particular attention to what kind of stories we seek and submission requirements. In particular, stories must be submitted via the online form on this site. See the author guidelines for the link.
Nonfiction
We will consider nonfiction articles that are otherwise consistent with the guidelines for fiction. The issue will include at most one nonfiction article. We are primarily interested in fiction, so successful nonfiction submissions must be particularly compelling.
Read What Kinds of Nonfiction Do We Seek
Poetry
While we won’t rule out poetry, we are primarily interested in publishing prose. In order to be successful, poetry would need to complement in some way the speculative fiction that is our primary content. Doing that will likely depend, at least in part, on the mix of fiction that is in any particular issue. We admit, this is is a challenging hurdle since the stories in any future issue are unknownable.
