Submit Your work
to Landing Zone

Welcome to Landing Zone, a fantasy and science-fiction imprint of our parent magazine, Ember Chasm. We’ve just sparked a fire in the fireplace, so come in, take a seat, kick off your seven-league boots, and tell us your fantastical stories over a mug of warm mead or iced nebula juice.

Our publishing schedule: We try to publish two short stories, two poems, and two visual art pieces online per month. Payment is a $15 honorarium through PayPal (if you don’t have PayPal, we can work something else out) and submissions are received solely through our Submittable account.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We want fantasy that exists out behind the famous tavern, out in the strange twists of woods that no one has traveled through before, and no one will again; fantasy that blends the magical and the real and anything in between, that’s brutal and honest to the characters. We want science fiction that’s original and nuanced, that throws you into the glitching areas lurking between the gears, that sends you soaring to breathtaking skylines, or the deepest pits of the WiFi dark zones. We want poetry that explodes from the page like a star fighter battle, glitches out, reads like a lonely robot powering down at the end of the world.

In other words, Landing Zone seeks narrative with fantastical elements or genre fiction within the realms of fantasy, dark fantasy, afrofuturism, high fantasy, paranormal, magical realism, science fiction, steampunk, and anything in between. Please send us work that contains some form of genre elements, or experiments with subject matter like it. We like themes associated with fantasy, science fiction, magical realism. Basically, if it's otherworldly, we'd love to read it.

Payment is $15 through PayPal for online only features, and $15 and one copy of the issue for print publications. If we accept you, we'll let you know where we'll place you depending on how full up we are on print spots for each issue. We're hoping (and planning) to pay more than that in the future.

If you want to know what we like to read, check out the wonderful, fantastical content we have posted for free on our site. Reading what we've published before is the best way to know what we'd publish in the future, although we're always looking for writing that opens up portals to new places, forms, and genres we haven't seen.

We're especially interested in writing by unestablished, undergraduate, and underrepresented authors. If you're one of those, let us know in your cover letter.

For additional inspiration, check out:

"Seasons of Glass and Iron" - Amal El-Mohtar - Uncanny Magazine

"Dirty Wifi" - Porpentine Charity Heartscape - Strange Horizons

"26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" - Kij Johnson - Clarkesworld Magazine

"Cat Pictures Please" - Naomi Kritzer - Clarkesworld Magazine

A few other magazines we love: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Metamorphosis, Coffin Bell, Ghost Parachute, Uncharted, Asimov's, Black Warrior, Stardust, FracturedLit, Last Resort, Ember Chasm, Button Eye, Fatal Flaw, Booth, Room, Carve, Split Lip, Luna Station Quarterly, Rust+Moth.

There are many more we're fans of, but to list them all would likely exceed our website space limits.

Mechanical GUIDELinES

- Manuscripts should be double-spaced, in 12pt Times New Roman font, with standard one-inch margins, with the exception of poetry.
- Please remove all identifying information from your submitted document.
- Submissions should be one fiction piece no longer that 7,500 words or five poems all in one document.
- We are happy to review both short stories and novel excerpts.
- If you're accepted elsewhere, congratulations! Please just withdraw your work on Submittable.
- Please use .doc or .docx file formats. PDF's are difficult to format on our website.
- We're a very small review, so please refrain from contacting us about the status of your submission unless it exceeds six months. We're trying to sharpen our processes to a one-to-two month response, but if your work is still in progress, it's likely still being considered by our magazine. For expedited responses, please submit through our other Quick Response form, and we'll respond within a week, usually less.