Michael A. Ventrella

The anthology Release the Virgins! is now open for submissions.

Through a kickstarter campaign, we were able to raise enough to go ahead with this project, and we have confirmations from authors David Gerrold, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Jody Lynn Nye, Allen Steele, Steve Miller, Sharon Lee, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Gail Z. Martin, Cecilia Tan, Patrick Thomas, Shariann Lewitt, Alex Shvartsman, Hildy Silverman, and Daniel M. Kimmel.

We should have room for a few extra stories as well. But only a few.

Submissions are open for short stories that include, somewhere in the story, the phrase “Release the Virgins.”

The story should be no more than 5,000 words. This should be sufficient for what should most likely be a somewhat humorous tale. The payment is 5 cents a word. Do not take this as an invitation to pad your story in order to earn a few more bucks. If your story is complete at 3,000 words, then end it. A good but padded story may get rejected over a concise, fast-moving one, because we want to fit in as many stories as possible.

Unpublished authors are encouraged to submit, but will still face the same standards for submissions as the published authors. (Hint: Don’t send me a submission full of spelling and grammatical errors.)

An email proposal is required to make sure you are not duplicating an idea already reserved by one of the accepted authors. Send to michael.ventrella@gmail.com.

Once that is approved, your story should be double-spaced in rtf format with 12 point Times Roman font. There should be no spacing after the paragraphs. The first page must contain the name of the story, the word count, and your name, address, email, and phone number. Your cover letter should list any previous publications.

The deadline is September 1, 2018.

EDIT (ADDED A WEEK LATER):

I’m getting a lot of proposed story ideas for the anthology and if they all submit stories, I’ll have to reject a lot (or hold them in case we do a second book).

But here’s some advice:

1. Avoid unicorns. I’ve already had a bunch of proposals about unicorns and even if the submitted stories are all good, I’m not going to want to have more than one or two unicorn stories in the anthology. We want variety.

2. Be creative. If it looks like you just took a story you already had and found a way to work the phrase into the story in such a way that I could remove the phrase completely and it wouldn’t hurt the story, then I will probably not accept it. The phrase should be relevant and necessary to the story.

3. Don’t send me a proposal with spelling and grammatical errors. I mean, duh.

Thanks!

Filed under: writing | Tagged: Release the Virgins!, submission guidelines, submissions |