Veteran-owned Press Seeks Horror, Fantasy

A long-time writing coach and advocate for telling military-themed stories in unexpected ways, Iraq War veteran Rachel A. Brune has a far-flung porfolio of professional projects. Now, as editor and publisher of Crone Girls Press, she's telling stories of dark fantasy, supernatural, and horror.

Aiming Circle patrons may remember Brune as the creative guru behind a Patreon site focused on providing coaching and insight to writers of military-themed fiction and others. Brune is also the author of military-themed urban fantasy, including the 2-book "Rick Keller Project" werewolf series, as well as the 2013 thriller "Soft Target."

Brune twice deployed to the Iraq War as a photojournalist, and is now a commissioned Military Police officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.

As appropriate to the month of October, Crone Girls Press is soon to release its first volume of a horror anthology series, "Stories We Tell After Midnight." The e-book title officially releases Oct. 21, 2019. Meanwhile, it's available for pre-order for just 99-cents. If you want to see what Crone Girls Press is all about, that's pretty inexpensive research.

The press has recently announced plans for two genre anthologies to be published in 2020. While the projects are not specific to military topics, the editor-publisher's background as citizen-soldier guarantees that scary stories involving the military would receive careful consideration.

Crone Girls Press seeks flash-fiction (500 to 1,500 words); short-story (3,000 to 8,000 words), and novella-length (12,000 to 25,000 words) stories of dark fantasy, supernatural, and eerie horror for an anthology to be released March 19, 2020. Deadline is Jan. 6, 2020. Pay is $0.02/word or $25/story, whichever is greater. Editors seek:

[…] stories that explore the darker side of speculative fiction. We want stories that are scary or disturbing or upsetting, or that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection of Gothic prose or Grimm folktales or dark contemporary fantasy or a dark forest as night comes on … While horror is the name of the game, this anthology is for those stories that might not hit all of the tropes, but still leave us unsettled when the night settles in.

Crone Girls Press also seeks flash-fiction, short-story, and novella-length stories of chilling horror for a second volume of its "Stories We Tell After Midnight" series, to be released Oct. 1, 2020. Deadline is Jun. 1, 2020. Pay is again $0.02/word or $25/story, whichever is greater.

Editors seek:

[…] chilling horror, your stories that are set firmly in the genre, tagging the tropes and atmospherics of things that will cause you to have nightmares and not be able to escape the dark, even when you pull the covers over your head and sleep with the light on.

Full guidelines appear here.

For more info about Rachel Brune, visit the Crone Girls Press website; Brune's blog; or Patreon site.

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