This week, PodCastle invites you to scare us! We are looking for a Halloween story for 2017. If you’re a writer with a short story (original or reprint) that you’d like us to run this Halloween, visit our submittable portal now. Scary or funny, ghosts, ghouls, or goblins—haunted stories of all kinds are welcome.

The jaws of the portal snap shut at the unholiest of hours (midnight, EST) on August 19th, so be sure to feed the beast your less-than-6,000 word offering in time. Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions will be regurgitated automatically, so please don’t send them for this call. See the portal for more terrifying submissions details.

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali and Jen R. Albert

PodCastle Editors

Greetings good people,

It is only August and we can definitively say that PodCastle has had a fantastic year in more ways than one.

We ran our third Artemis Rising in March, and showcased some of the best stories by women and non-binary authors. We had our first Eid Special with a fantastic story by Saladin Ahmed. We have added on a bright bunch of new staff. We became a SFWA-qualifying pro rate publication, and we have had a record number of submissions from some very talented writers.

Save for a couple of dates, we’ve also pretty much filled our lineup of stories for the remainder of the year. Because of this, we will be keeping general submissions closed until October. This does not include two specific open calls.

1. August 13^th through 19^th we will open submissions for our Halloween special. If you have a story that you think fits, or something you’ve been ruminating over, get to work and send it to us.
2. Submissions for our fourth Artemis Rising, slated to run March of next year, will be open during the month of September. Artemis Rising 4 will be edited by our magnificent and much beloved assistant editor Setsu Uzume.

Lastly, don’t forget to head on over to the forums to follow the voting for our Flash Fiction IV Contest.

Jen Albert and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, co-editors PodCastle