If y’all aren’t following Havok magazine, you should be. This flash fiction magazine is the place to get your quick hits of speculative fiction, and it’s a great paying market for you to submit to.
Each issue of Havok has a theme, and submitted stories must fit the theme. Below are themes for upcoming issues. Havok parent company Splickety Publishing Group pays 2 cents per word for flash fiction (except for contest issues). Splickety acquires first rights and exclusivity until six months after the publication date.
Havok and Splickety’s other two titles (Splickety Love for romance and Splickety Prime for everything else) are staffed largely by Christians, and religious themes are acceptable but not required. Splickety magazines are marketed to the general public.
All Splickety magazines acquire about twelve stories per issue. Submitted stories should be between 300 and 1,000 words, but most stories accepted are between 500 and 700 words, so if you can hit that sweet spot, you increase your odds of acceptance.
For more information, see the Splickety Submission Guidelines.
Havok publishes four issues a year, but since we’ve already planned our themes for 2016, here are the deadlines and themes for the next five issues.
October 2015 — Shivers and Screams
Deadline: July 24, 2015
Havok Halloween is synonymous with Horror. This year we want traditional, supernatural monster stories—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, monsters, and things that go bump in the night.
January 2016 — Inferno
Deadline: Nov. 6, 2015
Here’s your chance to heat things up. We’re looking for stories that ignite imagination: fiery volcanoes, blazing superpowers, desert planets, steamy jungles, sizzling science experiments, and anything else that raises the mercury.
April 2016 — Fairytales: Unfettered
Deadline: Feb. 5, 2016
Whether it’s old-school elven mischief-makers and wicked witches, or uptown urban sprites and magical creatures, take us on a trip into the fantastical realm of Faeries—a world of magic from which no one returns unchanged. If they return at all.
July 2016 — Heroes vs. Villains
CONTEST ISSUE ($10 entry fee; hundreds of dollars in prizes)
Submission Deadline: May 6, 2016
Who do you like better, the hero or the villain? What makes a hero heroic? How does a villain become evil? What drives a hero to become better? Where do those lines blur? Choose a side and write a story that compels us to love or hate—or both—a true hero or a dastardly villain.
October 2016 — HalloWhimsy
Deadline: July 22, 2016
October is usually our Horror issue, but for 2016 we want to walk on the lighter side of All Hallows Eve. We’re looking for silly, creepy, and quirky stories featuring grim humor, graveyard mischief, and good old-fashioned Halloween fun.
A couple of flash fiction pointers:
Flash fiction usually depicts a single event, not a cascade. So it has three points: inciting incident, response, resolution. In some stories, the inciting incident happens before the story starts.
It’s better to write your story really short and then expand it a little than to write a long story and then pare it down to flash length.
Randy Ingermanson wrote a great article about writing flash fiction.
Have you tried flash before? I didn’t think I could write that short. But once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot of fun. Give it a try!
