Call for Submissions
Grimm Retold - SUBMISSIONS CLOSED
check back for release details
Open for submission February 9th – April 19th
Fairy Tales can be frightening, and while many have been watered down over the years, their grim roots are steeped in black magic, forced marriage, abduction, murder, curses and cannibalism.
And we’re here for it.
Grimm Retold is a horror and dark fantasy collection of Dark Grimm Fairy Tales, retold in new and horrific ways.
We’re looking for stories 2000 – 8000 words
and Poems 1 - 4 pages
email a brief cover letter, bio and attached full manuscript, .doc or .docx formatted to standard Shunn Manuscript style to
editors@speculationpub.com
$25 for stories 2000 - 5000 words (after edits)
$35 for stories 5000 - 8000 words (after edits)
$15 for poems
$10 for reprints
Stories should be based on specific Grimm Fairy Tales and recognizable to their source material, even if they drastically diverge from them. We want voice-y weird and terrifying. We welcome blood, violence and gore, but be careful with gratuitous and exploitive sexual violence, and keep it away from children and animals. (To be clear, there are many fairy tales with children and animals in danger and killed, but watch how those are described)
We would particularly love to receive retellings from the perspective of other cultures or marginalized points of view.
Tentative Release Date: September 2024
Some ideas:
The Robber Bridegroom
Sleeping Beauty
The Goose Girl
The Juniper Tree
Rumpelstiltskin
Hansel and Gretel
And for your reference here is a link to a List of All Grimm Fairy Tales
https://internationalstoryteller.com/brothers-grimm-fairy-tales-complete-list/
Check back or join our mailing list for release news
We reply to all submissions that do not insult us. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.
Utter Speculation Novella Series - CLOSED FOR SUBMISSIONS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
We are looking for stand alone speculative fiction novellas explaining or exposing the root of a real life supernatural mystery, urban legend or folklore, to include in a series we are building. (Please note, we don’t want a whole series by one author. At least not yet)
Submissions Open November 7 and close February 7
If we don’t find what we want, we may extend this deadline or reopen submission later
Please read and Follow All Guidelines Carefully or your story may be discarded without being read.
Novellas should be 20,000 - 35,000 words
Send a query with a story summary and a bio in the body of the email to:
Payment is a signing bonus and royalty split to be discussed upon offer to publish.
Send full manuscript as a separate .doc or .docx attachment, Formatted in Shunn format style (Standard Manuscript Format)
The Collection of Utter Speculation series speculates about what is behind real mysteries and legends. The stories must start with the known facts. They can be rooted in real world explanations or supernatural causes, but they need to answer the question, what causes this?
They can go wherever you want them to go regarding genre, style and explanation.
Our past anthologies have been broad. The Lost Colony of Roanoke, The Jersey Devil, The Lady in White, The Dancing Plague, and Cry Baby Bridge. Historical mysteries, cryptids, prevalent folklore and urban legends which people still claim to experience today.
We are not looking for ghost stories or famous hauntings, unless they are specific and there is a mysterious aspect to them that can be speculated on. Example: The Bell Witch.
There are a lot of subjects we would love to see explored in a longer, more in depth format, and many subjects we haven’t even considered yet, including:
The Bridgewater Triangle
Sasquatch
The Lost City of Atlantis
The Mandela Effect
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The Bell Witch
The Mary Celeste
The Phoenix lights
We do not want specific stories with living people or people with living relatives. Examples of this would be the death of Elisa Lam, Amelia Earhart, or the actual people who abandoned Lincoln Way in Pittsburgh.
However, you can take a real case and fictionalize characters to tell the story, or you can use the actual players as long as they have long left this world, such as with Roanoke and The Dancing Plague.
We prefer that stories about specifically indigenous mythology and folklore be written by writers from those cultures.
We welcome marginalized and other-abled authors of all genders and cultures.
We do not want gratuitous or sexual violence particularly toward children or animals. We don’t want rape as a plot device nor are we interested in being a platform for bigotry. There is a clear line here and if you don’t know where it is, we suggest you figure it out before submitting.
Speculate for us! We want to know.