DailyNightmare.com is accepting submissions for its second annual anthology of 100-word prose poems based on any of the 350-plus nightmares currently posted on the site (https://dailynightmare.com/category/nightmares/). Payment will be $10.00 made via PayPal and a .pdf of the final anthology in exchange for First World Serial Rights, electronic rights, and reprint rights for posters and postcards. (After one year, rights can be reassigned to the author.) In addition to professional word-rate, this will be a cool-looking publication since we intend to exploit all the tricks of expressive digital typography.
The deadline for submissions is July 1.
A couple extremely specific criteria:
1) All submissions must be “inspired by” one of the nightmares posted on the site. (Hint: Want to submit a story based on one of YOUR nightmares? Then submit a non-fictional account of the nightmare along with the art or story that it inspired. We’ll assign it a Nightmare Number.)
2) Written submissions (stories or poems) must contain EXACTLY 100 words including title.
Email submissions to: anthology @ dailynightmare.com
and include the number of the inspirational nightmare in the SUBJECT line
Include a brief bio (~ 25 – 50 words) with the submission so we don’t have to track you with our hellhounds.
What are we looking for? We at the DailyNightmare groove on the idea of inhabiting each other’s dreams, even the nasty, ooky ones, and this anthology is one step toward that kind of communal nightmare-scape.
100 words aren’t many, so sharpen at least one point of the narrative pentacle: mood, character, plot, setting, theme, and try to imbue your piece with a “sense of completion.” Poetry or prose, matters not; word count does. DailyNightMare.com celebrates literate terror (or “snob horror” if you will), so heighten the language, make every syllable count and don’t be afraid to mean something.
Multiple submissions are AOK, though no more than 13 per author.
Why these rights? Legal rights nomenclature hasn’t caught up with digital realities yet, and we want to cover our tails since we plan to use every corner of the Web to publicize this endeavor. We are also planning to typeset each story “expressively” and hope the resulting pieces will be attractive enough to use as posters and postcards. We will keep the contributor in the loop and, where feasible, contributors will get a free copy of any of these subsidiary creations beyond the initial three publication types: a hoity-toity extremely limited hard-bound, a POD softcover edition and a .pdf and/or ebook edition. If “rights” is, like, “a thing” getting in the way of your submission, let us know which rights you’re reserving at time of submission and we’ll try to work something out.
If you’d like to receive a digital copy of the first anthology, drop us a note and will send one your way.
If you are submitting your own nightmare with your story, be advised that we publish the nightmares under a Creative Commons, attribution license. Basically, other folks can use the nightmares themselves in any way, as long as they note they got ‘em from theDailyNightmare.com. We anonymize the nightmares to binary gender and decade age (i.e. “Male, 30?s”) so please include those… and feel free to embellish or lie. On the internet, no one knows you’re not 200 years old and female.