Submission Guidelines – The October Monologues Anthology

Submissions are currently OPEN.

Real Horrorshow is looking for works that provide an immersive experience to the dark side of reality. We want stories accounting freaky experiences that reflect on the day to day reality of people. We have built a home for these very stories, and we call it, The October Monologues. This anthology will be an annual publication of the best stories we receive, ready just in time for Halloween (hence the name), so what are you waiting for?

What we want.

  • Fiction
    • No more than 1500 words
  • Poetry
    • No more than 5 pieces
  • Non-Fiction
    • Stalker stories
    • “I knew a murderer” stories
    • “Wanna see a dead body?” stories
    • Essays in the vein of the above

What we DON’T want.

  • Stories of paranormal experiences. Sam and Stormy have collectively had enough of this shit.
  • Pornographic content
  • Inappropriate content containing: pornographic content or stories, photos, any actual photos depicting violence onto a human or animal. We won’t have it.

The moral of these stories must reflect the fact that people are scarier than monsters. The most evil person could be sitting next to you on the bus dressed in business attire…just saying, this is what we’re after. Dig deep, send us something freaky, and if it fucks us up, we’ll publish it.

It’s alright if a story is sent in that’s not the 100% truth (this is mostly just for the non-fiction submissions), there will be a focus on suspension of disbelief where haters can’t troll you. If something crazy happened to you, and it’s enhanced with just a few false details, we want it. Think, NoSleep.

Submission Guidelines

  • Please send all of your submissions to: [email protected]
  • Include the subject line as so: “Last Name, First Name, Anthology Submission, Date”
  • In the body of the email, please include an author’s bio and summary of work:
    • Author’s Bio: Full name, 2-5 sentences that describe you and the kind of work you produce. If this is your first time writing, tell us about yourself: schooling, hobbies, that kind of thing. If you have a blog or website that features your writing, please include it in the bio. No funny stuff.
    • Summary of work: What type of work (fiction, non-fic, poetry), or topic of work you are submitting (just give us the bare bones plot/synopsis so we can gauge if it fits), the word count (if you can’t figure out how to use the word count tool on your word processing program, you should probably just count each word for us), and include any trigger warning (rape, violence, child porn, etc).
  • Please send your submission as a DOC or DOCX file. Do not create something with clever formatting, it’ll just be reformatted for our blog.
    • This means send it as an attachment, don’t copy and paste the damn text into the body of the email. Don’t you know how to use email? Don’t you know how to attach files? Prove it.
  • If you have relevant images to accompany your work, send those as well as JPEG files. Again, no funny stuff.

Please give us a while to read your submission and get back to you with an answer. We will either reject you or accept you, but we WILL respond. Just give us time. If a year happens to go by, send us a reminder.

If you happen to submit your work while we are compiling the current anthology, the work will be rolled over and considered for the following year’s issue.

If you disobey the guidelines even in the slightest, we will not read your work.

If you disobey the guidelines and send us inapropro shit, funny shit, anything that we DON’T want, you’ll be banned.  

With that being said, happy submitting!