September is here, and we are open for submissions for ARTEMIS RISING, our fourth annual month-long event across the Escape Artists podcasts featuring stories by women and nonbinary authors in genre fiction.

As your guest-editor, here’s what I’d like to see…

I know tough older women. Firefighters for the national forestry service. Mechanics. Veterans. Founders of engineering departments. I’ve been honored and humbled to call them sisters, mentors, and guides. They are weather-beaten and grizzled, and no less women for it. The live, love, and crack jokes. Some have families; some don’t. But there’s a perception that these women aren’t women because of their vocations, and those vocations have been the province of heroic male characters in fantasy for as long as I can remember.

If you want to explore archetypes, go deeper. “Strong female character” is as much a box as “hero’s girlfriend.” Show me complexity, experience, insight. Take maiden-mother-crone and shift it into youth-warrior-sage. I want warriors and sages in spirit, even if they never pick up a weapon. I want female heroes, non-binary heroes—and most of all, I want a damn good story.

If your best doesn’t quite match the above, but still fits the spirit of Artemis Rising, send it. Write what feels true… but for PodCastle’s slice of Artemis Rising this year, that’s what feels true to me.

Head on over to our submittable portal to submit now.

Setsu Uzume
Guest editor, ARTEMIS RISING

We’re very excited to announce that PodCastle was nominated for and has won the award for Best Podcast—Fictional at the Academy of Podcasters awards this past week! We were shocked and delighted to have won. We’d like to congratulate our fellow nominees: Alice Isn’t Dead, Hello from the Magic Tavern, Homecoming, LifeAfter, Terms, The Black Tapes, The Bright Sessions, Welcome to Night Vale, and Within the Wires. We’re so honored to have been recognized alongside these wonderful, groundbreaking podcasts.

The awards ceremony took place in Anaheim, California on August 23rd and was attended by our associate editor Stefani Cox. She brought home this beauty:

A huge thanks goes out to everyone who’s helped get the castle off the ground—to our current and former staff for all their dedicated work, to our talented authors, narrators, and other contributors, and of course, to our wonderful listeners, who’ve stuck by PodCastle all these years. Thank you!

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali and Jen Albert
PodCastle Co-Editors

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