A New Summer Flash Fiction Contest

Until now, we’ve run The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition only once a year, in the dead of winter. We’ve accepted submissions from December through January, with the winner and honorable mentions announced and published on Valentine’s Day.

But starting right now, with our new Summer Flash Contest, we’re doing it twice a year. Same guidelines, same word length . . . with a July 15 deadline and winning pieces presented to the world on July 31, just before the August 1 opening of our Fall Supernatural Fiction Award competition for full-length short stories.

The new Flash event now gives us an uncanny-story contest for each season of the year—flash fiction in the winter and summer, and full-length stories in the fall and spring.

If you like flash fiction—and particularly if you like to write flash fiction—the guidelines are only a click away.

Cheers —— The Editor

Now Published!

Treanor Wooten Baring, of Houston, Texas, won the spring 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award contest for her story, “The Unseen.”

Honorable mentions were awarded to Goldie Goldbloom for “The Hours” and Bradford Gyori for “Docking The Blue Impossible.” Read all three winning pieces here.

Also, be aware—and beware—we begin accepting submissions for our first-ever summer Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition on June 6. Cheers — The Editor

Now Accepting Submissions: The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

What? Our biannual contest for sudden short stories incorporating a supernatural theme or element.

When? NOW.

Deadline: January 31.

Judge: Tara Lynn Masih, author of the novel, My Real Name Is Hannah, and editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction.

Length Limits: 250-1,000 words.

Cash Awards: $1,000 for the winner, $200 for each of two honorable mentions. Print and online publication for all three.

Recent Media Coverage of our competitions and publications: Here are some links.

Complete Guidelines and link to our electronic submissions system: Right HERE!

Tara Lynn Masih

Our Winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction competition opens to submissions on December 1—and we’re delighted to have award-winning novelist, flash-fiction crafter, flash-fiction teacher, and anthology editor Tara Lynn Masih on hand to choose our winner and two honorable mentions.

Tara is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of a Julia Ward Howe Award for her debut novel, My Real Name Is Hanna. Her anthologies include the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. In addition to other collections, her flash has been anthologized in Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose, Flash Fiction Funny, and W. W. Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month.

Awards for her work include the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award, The Ledge Magazine‘s Fiction Award, Wigleaf Top 50 recognition (judged by Roxane Gay), a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Pushcart Prize nominations. She has taught flash fiction workshops around the country, and is Founding Series Editor of The Best Small Fictions and a Founding Donor to the Harry Ransom Center’s Flash Fiction Library in Texas.

Her second story collection, How We Disappear, is forthcoming from Press 53 and Blackstone Audio in September 2022. www.taramasih.com

Welcome Tara! It’s going to be fun working with you. 

TV, Newspapers, YouTube . . . TGS Has Been Getting Around

You likely have already seen the Boston Globe review of 21st Century Ghost Stories—Volume II, the latest addition to our ongoing print anthology series. The Globe‘s take on the stories that are winners or honorable mentions in our competitions:

“[S]trange and smart and upends ideas of what a ghost story is, and expands, with verve and unsettling bizarrity, what it can be.“

And we’ve recently received some other attention as well.

There’s a television interview

There’s a newspaper feature article about us in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

In  addition, for your listening pleasure, two of our stories have been narrated and uploaded to YouTube from the Classic Ghost Stories Podcast:

The Beast of Blanchland, by Rowan Bowman

and

Snake in the Attic, by Garret Johnson

Both are read—in his natural British accent, no less—by Tony Walker. Enjoy!

Our Short Story Competition Winners Feature The Ghost Of A Notorious Murderer, A Shape-Shifting Grandma, Phone Calls From The Dead, And A Slavic Nightmare

We’ve selected four fine short stories as the winner and three honorable mentions in the Fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition. Accompanied by original illustrations from artist Andy Paciorek, all are now available for your reading pleasure right here.

These four pieces will be included in Volume III of our ongoing print anthology series, 21st Century Ghost Stories. Volume III is due out from Wyrd Harvest Press (Durham, U.K.) in 2024. Meanwhile, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of Volume II, which was just published in August. All profits from the sale of our books are donated to the Wildlife Trusts, a British wildlife conservation organization. Cheers. 

. . . . And A (Glowing) Boston Globe Review For 21st Century Ghost Stories

It’s October 1, which means that we’ve stopped taking submissions for the fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Competition. Everyone who submitted a story will be hearing from us over the coming weeks, and the winner, along with two honorable mention pieces, will be announced and published on Halloween—complete, of course, with a custom Andy Paciorek illustration for each.

Our next supernatural story contest, the winter 2022 Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, opens to submissions on December 1. By flash fiction we mean 1,000 words or fewer—and for further information, have a look at our guidelines.

Further news: A few hours ago, our just-published anthology of competition winners and honorable mentions from the last three years, 21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II, received its first big review in a major newspaper, the Boston Globe. Here’s what they said:

October now, and so begins the haunted season of the year. A new anthology of ghost stories, edited by Midcoast Maine writer and editor Paul Guernsey, and including a selection of stories by authors from all over the world, traffics in the uncanny, the strange, the inexplicable. “21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume II” (Wyrd Harvest) is striking for its variety of approaches to the supernatural. [Read more…] about WHEN’S OUR NEXT COMPETITION? . . .

Author, Supernatural Fiction Award Winner, And “Foremost Authority On Halloween”

Behind the scenes here at The Ghost Story—well, actually . . . working from her home in Massachusetts—Lesley Bannatyne is busy reading submissions to the fall 2021 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition in preparation for selecting a winner and two honorable mentions—all of whom, of course, will be announced on Halloween.

The autumn competition couldn’t have a finer or more appropriate judge: not only is Bannatyne a previous Supernatural Fiction Award winner for her summer 2020 piece, “Corpse Walks Into A Bar,” but her nonfiction books on Halloween have earned her the unofficial title of “world’s foremost authority” on the holiday.

Her Halloween titles include Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night (Pelican Publishing), which was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award. She edited an anthology of folklore-based literature, A Halloween Reader (also published by Pelican). [Read more…] about OUR FICTION AWARD JUDGE

The Best Of The Ghost Story—And The Best Of Ghost Stories

Our Fall 2021 Contest

Now open for submissions: The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award.

Prizes: $1500 for the winner. $300 for each of two honorable mentions.

Plus, publication for all three, both online and in our print anthology, 21st Century Ghost Stories: Volume III.

Read our complete guidelines.