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Nightmares

Nightmares about Bugs!

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If you are looking for bug-related nightmares to inspire 100-word stories, follow the links below. Keep in mind that we’re defining the category broadly, so topics can include insects and arachnids, worms and slugs, ants, bees and creepy crawlies as well as diseases, biological, mental and spiritual.

The March 30 deadline approaches quickly! Submission details can be found here.

Nightmare #249: House Consumed by Bugs and Rats

Nightmare #222: Water Bugs

Nightmare #182: Bugs Everywhere

Nightmare #339: The Needle and the Conqueror Worm

Nightmare #336: Pick on Someone your own size

Nightmare #225: Smothering Humidity and Heat

Nightmare #310: Larval Goddess

Nightmare #75: Snakes and Straw

Nightmare #71: Snakes and Chain Fence

Nightmare #143: The Dark Carnival

Nightmare #84: Bees and Spiders… and Nazis?

Nightmare #26: Monstrous Bees

Nightmare #360: House of 1000 Copses

Nightmare #358: Child Vampire

And to be sure, there are many MORE nightmares about bugs among the collection that would prove suitable for a 100-word prose poem for the Quick Shivers about Bugs anthology. We invite you to explore, to experiment, and frankly to shake up the editors’ mailbox. Be clever, horrific, reflective, playful and wise in your word choice. 100 words allows no time for fillers, dull words, or repetition. Are you ready to try? Good!

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“Inspired by…”?– From Nightmare to Your Submission

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We’ve had questions about what we mean that submissions should be “inspired by” an actual nightmare that we’ve posted on the site. Fair question. Lord knows, the words “Inspired by True Events” have caused us to roll our eyes so often we’ve suffered permanent brain damage. But even though nightmares are “true events,” sometimes devastatingly real for the dreamer, it can be challenging to get to the facts of the matter.

Clearly we’d like it best if you could travel to the dream-realm and uncover the events. You could merge your consciousness with the original dreamer, allowing you to re-enter the actual dream and craft a tale based on that direct experience. Perhaps via a hypnotic trance. Or hire someone to read the account of the nightmare to you, over and over, while you sleep. Alas, we know how hard it is to find professional dream-whisperers these days.

The next best solution —- and fully valid —- would be to evoke the sensation of a dream while using any element of the nightmare in question. ANY element. This kernel could be an image, a turn of phrase, the mood… We ask that your piece stand on its own because it’s highly likely readers won’t look up the original nightmare to check on how closely your account matches.

Pro Tip: Don’t go with your first thought. Or maybe your second or third. Sharpen at least one point of the literary pentagram: character, plot, mood, theme, setting. Further advice: imbue your piece with a “sense of completion” that grants the reader the same sensations experienced following a satisfying dream or nightmare.

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Call for Submissions for the DailyNightmare.com’s Second Anthology

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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.