2024 FantaSci Short Story Contest open call for submissions.
The theme is Paladins of Valor, and your story must be a fantasy story that includes deeds of valor centered around paladins and chivalry, and the oaths that bind them.
The contest is complete. The four selections are:
- Chris Hepler with High Water Mark
- Nathan Balyeat with Welcome to Detroit
- David Birdsall with The Passing of the Mantle
- Chad Boyer with Apprentice in Trouble
This does not mean each hero must wear armor, only that they fit the larger class of paladins and chivalry. For example, I contend Malcolm Reynolds is a paladin seeking to regain his faith. Yoda was a paladin. Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Spenser are all knights errant.
Deadline: November 30th, 2023
Pay Rate: Royalty Share
Word Count: 7-10,000 words
Specifics: Times New Roman, 12 point font, 1.5 line spaced.
It must also be a fantasy story. Any type is welcome, urban, epic, high, western, gothic, whatever, it just have to have magic. Finally, it cannot have been published anywhere else before.
The four chosen for Paladins of Valor will be included in the anthology published at FantaSci 2024. One of the four, as chosen by me, will win the prize, which is two free passes to FantaSci 2025.
Please send all submissions to rob@chriskennedypublishing.com
I meant to ask if you had received any Bond, James Bond stories
I did not! They would have had a leg up, too 🙂
Considering submitting a chapter from a yet-unpublished novel I have written, that I think could work as a standalone story. Would that be workable?
Secondly, should it be chosen, would that cause any future difficulty in publishing the larger work?
Howdy! First, if it hasn’t been published, it hasn’t been published, and we encourage stories in larger universes, so I don’t inherently see a problem there.
However, it’s been my experience that chapters rarely my good short stories because chapter design and short story design are significantly different. Here’s a blog post I made on story structure that will touch on much of why this is true: https://robhowell.org/blog/?p=2186.
That being said, assuming you strip out all the extraneous stuff and punch up the story arc, then you absolutely could make that happen. It won’t be exactly the chapter, of course, but cover the same things.
As for future publishing, we claim the rights to every short story we publish for a year after the publication date, so if it releases in April of 2024 at FantaSci, you can do whatever you want with it after April of 2025. All we’d require is a line in the front matter that says, “Portions of Chapter X were previously released in Paladins of Valor, New Mythology Press,” or something like that. I’ll have to check the exact verbiage.
We encourage all writers to re-use their short stories as they’re too useful to leave fallow. I’ll be re-publishing all the short stories in the Firehall Sagas I’ve published previously in a collection in November or December, for example, and I’ve used them as free stories for mailing lists and giveaways. So, using it as a chapter is fine by us.
Hope that answers everything.
Hi,
I have a couple of characters in mind from a larger universe that I have/will publish longer-form work from, but it raises a question about the edges of what we are calling a paladin. Most characters I work with are antiheros of some sort or another, so their internal monologue may not seem valorous even if their deeds within the hypothetical story are. Would that fit the criteria here?
Howdy
Send something in! Malcolm Reynolds doesn’t always seem a paladin, yet I think he is.
Worst case, you have a short story finished 🙂
Is this complete? Curious who got in.
Howdy! Yes, it’s complete.
I’ve edited the post to reflect that, as I should have done sooner 🙂
Thanks for reminding me.