You know what I miss? Pulp adventure stories. The sort of dark, gritty tales with morally ambiguous characters that were made popular in the 1920's and '30's. They've sort of fallen out of fashion these days - at least in short fiction markets. The most recently published good short story anthology I read was the Thieves World series.
This is bad news if these are the sorts of stories you like to read. It's even worse news if these are the sorts of stories you like to write. There are few venues for speculative short fiction these days, and even fewer of them are receptive to heroic fantasy and weird fiction. That's why Tim Shorts (Gothridge Manor), Ken Harrison (The Rusty Battleaxe), Boric G (The Dwarven Stronghold), and I decided to form Pulp Mill Press. We want to publish the sorts of stories that we love to read and we're putting the call out for stories to be included in our first anthology, Libram Mysterium. We know that many of the members of the OSR community share our love of weird fiction and we're hoping that at least some of you are writers as well as gamers and will contribute a story.
The pay isn't great. Heck, it's non-existent; all we're offering in compensation is a complimentary electronic copy of the finished book. The reason for this is that we don't have funding to buy stories, and we aren't in the position to make that kind of personal investment, so our plan is to hopefully raise enough money through the sale of Libram Mysterium to offer page-rates for our next anthology. Eventually, we hope to be able to pay professional rates. We are eager to work with new and emerging authors, to grow along with you, and to fill a much-need gap in the publishing industry.
We like our warriors mighty-thewed, our rogues cunning, our sorcerers sinister and our horrors cosmic. If you can tell a story with well-developed characters and fill us with wonder and dread we want to see it!
Please visit the Pulp Mill Press home page and submission guidelines for more information. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at pulpmillpress4@gmail.com.
2 comments:
Definitely color me intrigued. I'll see what I can get to you by the submission guideline, and I've passed this along to a like-minded friend.
Question: would you consider serialized stories?
Hi David; since we are publishing stand-alone books and not a regular fiction magazine, serialized stories probably won't work too well. If you have a larger story that exceeds the 8,000 word limit, let us know - we may be able to work something out.
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