News: The Crossroads Theater open to submissions

AHWA member Rodney J. Smith, an Australian living in the US, is editing an anthology The Crossroads Theater to be printed and distributed stateside by Dead Jester Press.

The Crossroads Theater will feature stories from varied time periods and settings -- from the urban to the fantastic, and all the weird places between. Theater won't be your ordinary anthology; it will present its collected stories in a new and unique way.

General guidelines
Stories should be dark and/or weird; they need not be full-blown 'horror', but they must contain creepy/unsettling narratives. Stories focusing on evil deeds in disturbing places are especially sought.

Open to all settings/periods (and hope to see a wide variety of time periods), however please note that no story should date later than the 1980s-90s. This could mean turn of the century; the middle ages; the 1960s; alternate histories (ie. steampunk); even other worlds. The only place they can't be is anywhere futuristic.

Characters and settings can be as weird and fanciful as you please, but they must be 'real' within the story (ie. not merely a character's delusion/hallucination).

Stories must be written in third-person; omniscient narration is preferred. Narrative should lean closer toward immediate, visual story-telling than internal thoughts/flashbacks -- while characterization is important, engaging plots that 'come alive' before the reader are the priority.

Length should be between 500 and 7000 words. No reprints. No poetry. No multiple or simultaneous submissions, please. And NO vampires. Seriously.

Rodney has expressed his enthusiasm to receive submissions from any interested Aussie writers, and encourages interested writers to check out the full anthology submission guidelines and send their best work his way!

Deadline for The Crossroads Theater: the reading period closes July 29, 2008. Publication is tentatively expected to be late 2008.

Source: Rodney J. Smith