Submission Calls

PATTERNS

Submission window now open.

Deadline: May 31st 2025

We’re looking for dark stories (2-4k words) on the theme of patterns.

Please interpret this theme however you like. Write us a quiet mood piece or an action-packed powerful, character-driven story.  Make it humorous or as dark as the night. Send us your best speculative, horror, dark fantasy or dark sci-fi stories, as long as it's full of the feels. We are not, however, the market for violent, bloody, racist, homophobic, or masochistic fiction. And no poetry please, just short fiction.

Some ideas: the pattern could be in the narrative technique (fragmentation, mirror writing, foreshadowing, meta-fictional repetition), the thematic composition (think cycles of death and birth, family curses, sin and retribution) for example. Or how about incorporating chants, supernatural rituals, or echoes in your prose? A story with temporal patterns in it might float our boat (although be careful, we don’t want our inbox flooded with time loops and cyclical stories, unless done exceptionally well or with a novel twist). Seasonal patterns, recurring times, patterns in nature, patterns in objects which feature in your tale, geographical patterns, repetitive architecture, patterns in weather, behavioural ticks, recurring nightmares, obsessions…any tenuous link will do, just make it your best work and give it a good edit prior to sending it our way. You get the idea. Surprise us.

If you want an idea of what we publish (and my, oh my, what an eclectic range it is), why not check out some of our other publications? Links can be found by clicking here: Books.

Normally, we only allow one submission per author, but we're going to try something new this time. If you send us a story and we reject it within the submission window (and we hope to be able to read your stories fairly fast), feel free to send us something else. You can submit new stories as many times as you wish within the submission window, as long as we only have one story from you at time.

No reprints. Absolutely no AI-generated or AI-assisted fiction.

SEND US YOUR BEST WORK!

Payment: $0.01 per word (after edits) and an e-book of the final anthology.

After we’ve recuperated our outgoing costs for this anthology, any profits seen in 2025 will go to NAPS (https://www.pms.org.uk) - a UK-based charity for PMDD. PMDD is a distressing cyclical condition (hence our ‘patterns’ theme) which affects approximately 1.6% of people who menstruate.

An anthology of selected stories will be published in print and as an e-book publication.

See our 'Submission  Guidelines' section for information on how to submit.

Do get in touch via email (bagofbonespress@gmail.com) or Twitter (@BagBonesPress) or Blue-sky (our EIC can be found there: https://bsky.app/profile/sjtownend.bsky.social) with any questions that can’t be answered by the information here, on our website.

Good luck and thank you so much for supporting our press!