2024 is halfway gone already. Whether you're heading into the brightest or darkest part of the year, we're glad you're sharing some time with Apex. We have big news and a lot going on in the next month - read on!
Apex Magazine 2025 Kickstarter
We're running a Kickstarter in July to fund our 2025 publishing year. Launching July 9th, we're pulling together exclusives, add-ons, and rewards unlike anything we've done before! 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 will be directly tied to our funding success. We promise to be transparent and forthright about costs and our goals. Our priority is and will continue to be our community of writers and readers.
If you want to support Apex Magazineand help make 2025 another year of strange, surreal, shocking, beautiful stories, head over to our Kickstarter page and click "Notify Me!"
Closing to Submissions in July
Following our Kickstarter announcement, we will be closing to submissions in July. There are two reasons for this and in the spirit of transparency and forthrightness, we want to make both clear.
First, we don't want to inadvertently overbuy and end up with stories we cannot publish. Until we know how well the Kickstarter funds, we have to be careful about buying stories that would take us into 2025.
Secondly, our response time has slowed due to our shift to a two-reader system. We need to take time off to catch up on the submissions currently in our queue and decide if we need to further expand our reading team. The submissions portal will close July 1, midnight eastern time. We plan to reopen August 1, but please check our July newsletter for the details!
Announcing Violet Lichen Books
Apex Book Company is delighted to announce the launch of a new imprint, Violet Lichen Books, to be headed by Editor-in-Chief Marissa van Uden. 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 ART REVEAL
Issue 145 releases July 2. Watch for the cover reveal later this month! Authors Daniela Tomova, Stephen M.A., Marie Croke, and Pamela Rentz provide our original fiction, with flash from Akis Linardos and Anne Wilkins, essays from Christopher Mark Rose and Malon Edwards, and reprints from T.K. Rex and Chisti Nogle.
"Dreamer" by Silvia Moravcikova Bobekova
Issue 144
Issue 144 continues to be released on the website through the month of June. Cover art by Tom Edwards, original fiction by Kanishk Tantia, Monica Joyce Evans, Derrick Boden, Sara S. Messenger, Spencer Nitkey, and Natalia Theodoridou, flash by Wen Wen Yang and Kelsea Yu, essays by Nicole Givens Kurtz and Rebecca E. Treasure, Marissa van Uden's interviews with authors Kanishk Tantia and Sara S. Messenger, and reprints from Jermane Cooper and LP Kindred. A.C. Wise continues the wonderful Words for Thought short fiction review column, Leah Ning reviews Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall, and as a treat, we have an excerpt from Cherie Priest’s newly released novel from Apex Book Company, Cinderwich! This issue is full of stories in which the familiar turns surreal, and we invite you warmly – but not toowarmly – to join us in exploring these sharp-edged spaces.
n0-M.A.D//003 - Military Assassin Droid by Tom Edwards, cover design by Justin Stewart
Cinderwichby 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 mysteriesGrave Reservations andFlight 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 Apexinitiative 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 sitededicated to our classes and workshops, including on-demand classes.
In July, the successful "Keep it Short" flash fiction class with Apex flash fiction editor Rebecca E. Treasure will run for the last time. This class has limited enrollment and has always sold out - act fast!
You can find our current list of classes here. We also now offer pre-recorded on demand classesas well as critiques and query feedback!
Apex Flash Fiction
The Flash Fiction Contest for June 7-30—themed Glitter—will close on June 30. The theme for July 7-31 will be announced and will open to the public on July 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
