The Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (CSFG) has announced its next anthology and it’s monstrous and unnatural – just the way we like it!
The submission call for Unnatural Order makes it clear that editors Alis Franklin and Lyss Wickramasinghe are looking for tales about the truly monstrous in all its fanged, furred and tentacled glory. They want “stories that explore humanity through the lens of the inhuman” not protagonists who are just angsty, sparkly people-with-a-problem, or as they put it “rubber forehead aliens”.
No elves, no vampires, no zombies. No pining for a cure tales. They want non-human protagonists with attitude. Embrace the monstrous – you know you want to!
I’ll have to write a new <5000 word story for this, because my monsters do tend to be a little “monster-lite”. But I was thrilled to have one of my stories accepted for the CSFG’s last anthology, A Hand of Knaves, so I’m hoping to craft a suitably unnatural creature to join the Order.
The trouble is narrowing it down…. myths and folklore seethe with monsters who would happily find a home in a speculative fiction tale. I need to marshal my dire hordes or, in effect, run some beasties through a job interview to work out what I’m going to write about.
Read the guidelines at the Unnatural Order link above and get writing, my writerly friends, because submissions will close in October and you don’t want your monstrous progeny to miss out.