Welcome to Apex in August. We’ve got all sorts of happenings to share with you, and we hope you’re as excited as we are despite the heat much of our team is experiencing. Read on!
Apex Magazine 2025 Kickstarter
Our Kickstarter to fund our 2025 publishing year launched July 9th. Unfortunately, subscription drives haven't covered the cost of paying pro rates for our original fiction, licensing amazing cover art, paying our editorial staff, and covering all the background costs associated with running a magazine. The number of issues in 2025 is directly tied to our funding success. Our priority is and will continue to be our community of writers and readers.
If you want to support Apex Magazine and help make 2025 another year of strange, surreal, shocking, beautiful stories, head over to our Kickstarter page!
Violet Lichen Books Closed to Submissions
Violet Lichen Books has officially closed to submissions. But we will open again, and we will announce when we have a date! Head over to the submissions page to read the guidelines and start prepping your work.
Violet Lichen Books aims to publish unique novella-length horror and dark fiction, focusing especially on New Weird, Weird, folk horror, eco-horror, and eco-science-fiction.
Inspired by the mysterious beauty of lichens growing in shadowy woods and the surreal drama of violet shades in nature, Violet Lichen fully embraces the weird, strange, and uncanny. It aims to leave readers feeling a little changed and disquieted, as if they have just emerged from under a strange spell.
Our goal is to work closely with authors in an ethical and caring way, and to get more brilliant, weird fiction into more readers’ hands.
Marissa van Uden is a New Zealander who is now living her best bog-witch life in rural Vermont, in a little cabin in the woods. She’s a professional manuscript editor with more than fifteen years experience, a staff interviewer at Apex Magazine, and an anthologist (Apex Magazine’s Strange Microfiction series and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird - forthcoming). Her stories have appeared in Vastarian, Dark Matter Magazine, Los Suelos, and others. She loves weird and disquieting fiction, all the creatures, and eerie forests filled with strange fungi.
Visit Violet Lichen Books: https://violetlichen.com/
Issue 145
Issue 145 continues to be released on the website through the month of June. Cover art by Silvia Moravčíková Bobeková, original fiction by Daniela Tomova, Stephen M.A., Marie Croke, and Pamela Rentz, flash by Akis Linardos and Anne Wilkins, essays by Christopher Mark Rose and Malon Edwards, Marissa van Uden's interviews with authors Stephen M.A. and Marie Croke, and reprints from T.K. Rex and Christi Nogle. A.C. Wise continues the wonderful Words for Thought short fiction review column, and Leah Ning reviews Kelsea Yu’s It’s Only a Game. This issue is full of strange and literary stories – join us in letting them seep into the quiet, secret places of your skull you never knew were there.
Dreamer by Silvia Moravčíková Bobeková, cover design by Justin Stewart
Cinderwich by Cherie Priest
"Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?”
Decades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop, no one knows the answer.
Kate Thrush and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to Cinderwich, Tennessee in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen: Katie’s lost aunt, Judith’s long-gone lover. But they’re not the only ones to have come here looking for closure. The people of Cinderwich, a town hardly more than a skeleton itself, are staunchly resistant to the outsiders’ questions about Ellen and her killer. And the deeper the two women dig, the more rot they unearth … the closer they come to exhuming the evil that lies, hungering, at the roots of Cinderwich.
Cinderwich is out now! Get your copy of this "mystery wrapped in Appalachian lore and family secrets" (Fran Wilde) today!
CHERIE PRIEST is the author of two dozen books and novellas, most recently the Booking Agents mysteries Grave Reservations and Flight Risk. She also wrote gothic horror projects The Toll, The Family Plot, and the Philip K. Dick nominee Maplecroft; but she is perhaps best known for the steampunk pulp adventures of the Clockwork Century, beginning with Boneshaker. Cherie lives in Seattle, WA, with her husband and a menagerie of exceedingly photogenic pets.
Writing Classes with Apex
The Reach Your Apex initiative is our way of making the knowledge and skills of publishing professionals available to those individuals who are seeking to improve their literary craft. While a majority of our offerings target the craft of writing, we will intersperse our curriculum with workshops/webinars covering various topics about the art of editing and the business side of publishing. Check out our site dedicated to our classes and workshops, including on-demand recordings!
Coming up in July we have a class with publisher and editor Jason Sizemore! In this comprehensive workshop, Jason will deep dive on crafting compelling first pages in genre fiction, from first lines to characters to inciting incidents.
Also in July, author Jason Sanford will be running a webinar on "Writing Tips and Tricks for Neurodiverse Writers", where he’ll talk about both sides of the advice coin: tips and tricks he’s learned, both for himself and from other neurodiverse writers, as well as generally given advice that may be harmful for neurodiverse authors.
You can find our current list of webinars here and workshops here. We also now offer pre-recorded on demand classes as well as critiques and query feedback!
Apex Flash Fiction
The Flash Fiction Contest for July 7-31—themed Abandoned Castle—will close on July 31. The theme for August 7-31 will be announced and will open to the public on August 7th for flash fiction submissions. Themes are chosen by Patrons at the end of the month and announced to Patrons on the 1st of each month. Submissions will be open to the public on the 7th of each month. Submissions close on the last day of the month at midnight (US Central Time).
The winner will be paid $0.08/word or $10, whichever is more. The winning story will appear on our Patreon as an exclusive and will be included in a forthcoming issue of Apex Magazine.
Discord Happenings
As always, we have a fun community on our Discord, offering critique swaps, co-writing opportunities, and general community support for writers. (Rejectomancy, anyone?)
Patreon Exclusives
On our Patreon, we have an exciting lineup of exclusives for our Patrons from the Authors of Issue 145. We'll have our usual interviews, critique opportunities, and some story insights. Keep an eye on our Patreon!
Not a Patron? Join us for as little as $3/month to get access to these exclusives and the magazine in your inbox!
To add the Apex Events Calendar to your google calendar, follow this link: https://tinyurl.com/4c74rext
