Harvest Hill

CLOSED TO SUBMISSIONS

Graveside Tales is now open to submissions for an upcoming Halloween-themed anthology entitled Harvest Hill. We are seeking stories from 2,000 to 6,000 words. The pay rate is $.01 per word and a contributor’s copy. All rights of work revert to the author after two years from the publication date.
The set up:

Harvest Hill, a little town in East Tennessee, seems like an idyllic place most of the year. But it is not always so, and especially not on Halloween–every Halloween. From just after midnight of Oct. 30 until midnight Oct. 31, horrors break loose both big and small. And this has been happening as far back as the 1500s.

The treats we want:

• Place your story in Harvest Hill, TN. You can set it on any Halloween of any year from 1550 CE until the end of the 20th century.
• Horror is the essential genre here but the stories can include elements of crime, black humor, dark fantasy or even mild sci-fi. Sexual and gory situations are fine as long the plot justifies them. You may use standard Halloween images, but strive to execute them in new and amazing ways.
• We will be looking especially for strong three-dimensional characters, as well as unusual disturbing situations. Think about your setting and the characters in it–what are the hidden things that have been near the surface, just waiting for an unseen push to tear free? Tell us those stories.
• Do your research, but do not get bogged down in it. We will check your setting against general history as it is knowable, and so should you. Pay careful attention to the time line of Halloween itself, including its varying names and rituals.

The tricks we do not want:

• Do not reference other years unless it is directly relevant to your story. Confine stories to their particular year/Halloween.
• Do not send us stories in which Samhain is the Dark Lord of the Dead or some other god figure. This was never the case. Samhain simply refers to summer’s end.
• Do not send us stories in which Satan unleashes his evil on the populace while his worshippers conduct their rituals on his holy day, Halloween. This also was never the case. Halloween is a shortened form of All Hallow Even.
• Furthermore, since we are not publishing Chic tracts, no, the Devil did not make your characters do it. It is okay for you to exploit generally “demonic” forces. Do not, however, employ overtly stereotypical figures to engage in trite religious sermonizing.

Upon acceptance your story will become part of the anthology’s meta-narrative. This meta-narrative will involve a character or characters who will introduce each story; it will serve as an opening for the volume and have its own resolution as well. The editors will write the meta-narrative after choosing the stories for the volume.

Submissions:

Put “Halloween Anthology: your story title” in the subject line. Include the title and a paragraph setting up your story, a brief bio and publication history, and any other relevant information in the body of the e-mail.

E-mail submissions, as attachments only, to: halloween@gravesidetales.com

For all attachments, please make sure to:

• Save in Microsoft Word as .doc or .rtf.
• Use a Courier font, size 12.
• Double-space between lines.
• Position 1″ margins all around.
• Space twice after any sentence-ending punctuation and after colons.
• Underline instead of italicize.
• Indicate section breaks by a blank line, followed by # centered on a line, and then another blank line before beginning your next paragraph.

Name, address, phone number and e-mail of author should appear on the first page of the manuscript in the upper left corner. The word count should appear in the upper right corner. The header for subsequent pages should contain the author’s last name, key title word and page number.

If you are unfamiliar with proper manuscript format, please read and follow the article here: http://www.shunn.com/format/story.html. We will return unread any submissions that fail to follow the guidelines exactly. Authors can then reformat their stories and resubmit them, but they will go to the end of the reading line.

We are shooting for a reading time of four to six weeks for rejections. If we like your story you may not hear back from us right away, so please be patient. If you have not heard back from us within three days to acknowledge the receipt of your manuscript, please feel free to query us.

The submission period will run from March 1 until May 31, or until filled. We will be completing the table of contents from June through August. The release date for this anthology will be September/October 2008.

To learn more by reading an interview with the editors, visit DL Snell’s Market Scoops here: http://marketscoops.blogspot.com/. To visit the Harvest Hill section in the Graveside Tales forum, go here: http://gravesidetales.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=53&board=62.0.

No reprints.

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