Here we have Lori is the car she crashed being a moron. Here we have a zombie desperately, futilely in search of brains. Here we have the show’s writers, thinking we would find this scene tense because we were worried about Lori and whether she would get away. Here I am on my couch, yelling, “Go zombie! Bite her! BITE! HER!”

Did you ever wonder what zombie teeth on glass would sound like? Now you know. Some of the most effective and horrific scenes in the zombie genre involve zombies mutilating themselves in their mindless attempts to reach their warm and breathing victims. The windshield glass shredding that dude’s face off was an excellent example.

The action does not let up as we head back to Cowboy Rick’s wild west zombie shootout. If you were to make a zombie western, what would you call it? Butch Cassidy and the Undead Kid? The Dead Bunch? The Good, the Dead and the Ugly? The Man Who Ate Liberty Valance?

The scene when Dave and Tony’s friends first show up was brilliant, with our heroes holed up in the saloon sweating bullets. If they’d just been attacked by walkers (or roamers, as the others called them), the choice is simple: shoot your way out, or run like hell. Instead they sweated and ground their teeth until Rick tried to explain, like a sensible man, why their two buddies had pissed on their last floor. You’ve got to respect the response – that guy knew he was in a western, and in westerns you don’t have a cordial chit-chat with the man who shot your friend. You let your gun do the talking.

If nothing else, Hershel gets the line of the night: “Yeah, I can shoot. Just don’t like to.”

Glenn was mostly useless again, but later on in the episode we find out why. He’s so worried about poor Maggie being all lovesick for him, he got too cautious. What if he died and Maggie was left without her noodly, pale, indecisive buddy to romp in the hayloft with? What a bizarre response. Most guys get hyper-aggressive in that kind of situation (also known as the Shane effect). Glenn decides the solution is to push Maggie away and become a celibate zombie-killing monk. A man has to keep his edge somehow, I guess.

It seems like pretty much every relationship in the show is splintering at this point. Maggie’s mad at Hershel. Lori thinks Shane is going psycho. Glenn shuns Maggie. Andrea disagrees with Shane’s bedside manner. Daryl is totally over these people, he’ll be in his tent, thank you very much. T-Dog had a single line of dialog. Again. “Who the hell is that?”

The scene where Shane professes his love, and the “rightness of it,” to Lori was pretty creepy. It was partly because you could feel the intensity of the emotions Shane was feeling, and even understand them a bit. He had a family, a makeshift one, true, but one he really cared about. And just like that he had to watch another man waltz in, “Hey, sorry, not actually dead, thanks for taking care of business, I’ll be reclaiming what’s mine now. We cool?” It helped that the scene was underscored by creepy cello music more fit for a lurking zombie than a, “Shane, we need to talk,” scene.

Meanwhile, Hersh, Rick and Glenn are still trying to shoot their way out of the bar. This is the kind of action the show could use more of. Give the characters brutal choices to make. A lot of people watching were probably thinking, “Just shoot the kid in the head.” They try for a battlefield amputation instead, but at the last second shred the kid’s leg and pull him off the fence. Seriously, watch out for pointy fences people. I know of at least three instances in real life where people impaled themselves on fences and died. Learn from Randall’s mistake.

We have three major conflicts looming over the next few episodes. First is the decision over what to do with Randall once he’s conscious. There’s the Shane and Andrea (and we’d assume Daryl) side, which figures he ought to be killed or at least kept captive. Then there’s the flowers and get well soon canteen side, who want to send him on his way. All this could lead to the next big conflict, an all-out war between the survivors and those other people out there somewhere in their Ford F-150. Who are they? Where are they hiding out?

The real rumble is the one that’s been brewing since episode one of the first season: Shane Vs. Rick. Lori seems to be made of pure evil, manipulating both men into a collision course. She may as well have tied them together with a ten-foot rope, thrown them in a pit and said, “Last man standing gets to be my baby-daddy, and you know you want some of this Olive Oyl action.” Thing is, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. All along Lori’s been so concerned about Carl and how this grim world is making him…you know, grim. Now she’s driving off at night alone, and possibly setting up a situation where Carl sees his own dad murder Shane. Or Shane murder his dad. Either way, pretty f-ed up. It’s almost like she’s thinking, “Welp, I already screwed Carl up, better cut bait and try again with this new baby.”

Maybe Lori’s been a zombie all along. It would explain a lot.

Following the Great Zombie Barn Massacre of ’11, the show keeps the foot to the pedal with a gritty snuff scene. Farmer’s daughter Beth runs to embrace her zombie mom, who isn’t quite fully dead until Andrea puts a pickaxe through zombie mom’s skull. Everyone seems divided into two groups – those who are still really freaked out by death and undeath (Dale, Lori, Rick) and those who are jaded and willing to do whatever it takes to make it through another day (Andrea, Shane, T-Dog, Carl).

The whole “zombie arm falls off the pickup” scene was expressly designed to show how used to all this crap Andrea has become. Heaving a rotting human arm into a pile of bodies is just another day on the farm. It’s the emotional sensitivity of some of the other survivors that seems a little unrealistic to me. I think pretty much everyone would grow a pretty thick skin after a few months living in that world. Morgue attendants, paramedics and other people who deal with death and gore on a regular basis learn to tune it out and even use morbid humor to keep the horrors of each day in check. Living in Zombieville, U.S.A. would probably be no different.

We get some new info dumped on us in short order. Dale blabs his fear that Shane killed Otis to Lori, and even though Dale is spot on with his suspicion, he still seems like a putz. Lori doesn’t believe him. Or does she? Then we learn papa Hershel used to have a mighty fierce drinking problem, so naturally Rick and Glenn head to the town bar to find him. We learn that Maggie loves Glenn – or at least, she tells him she does, but Glenn leaves that big meatball hanging out there.

The crux of the episode takes place at the town bar, where Rick tries to pep talk Hershel into coming back to the farm to help out his daughter, Beth, who seems to have gone into shock. Glenn says nothing and doesn’t even stand guard very well, since just as Rick is about to succeed (with the old, “We don’t matter, but think about the kids!” routine), a couple of strangers come stumbling in.

Thus enter Dave and Tony, a coupla guys from Philly looking for a place to rest their weary heads. They seem so affable and honest. They sit around, share purloined booze, and talk about all the pipedreams and mirages every survivor group is chasing. Refugee camps in D.C., military help at Fort Benning. None of them pan out. The latest craze? Catching a train to the heartland, where population is low and ammo is plenty. Based solely on the Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska with zombies can’t be any more dreary and depressing than it was to begin with.

That whole speech drove home the point that there’s no savior and no safe place waiting for these people to discover. They have to make their own safe place and save themselves. Seems like the best way to go about that would be to band together and rebuild a community of some kind. You could eradicate the walkers (or lamebrains) in an area, fence it off and gradually expand your territory as more survivors found you. But no, as soon as Dave and Tony start asking to join the farm, Rick gets all reticent. No room at the farm, nevermind that he was an outsider there not so long ago. Then Dave thinks he can outdraw Deputy Rick and turns out to be wrong. Thus exit Dave and Tony.

By the end of the episode, we get a couple tables turned on us. Rick, who was so upset about killing zombies and hurting Hershel’s feelings, becomes a man of action (were Dave and Tony bad guys all along? Or just desperate?). Shane washes Carol with clean water, comforting her over the loss of Sophia. Daryl‘s about to go rogue, trading in his parables about flowers and souls for a pointy stick. Plus the episode gets bonus points for playing a song by Clutch over the final scene (“The Regulator” from the Blast Tyrant album, if you’re curious).

1. OUTPOST by Adam Baker. Baker’s debut novel gives us a glimpse into what he is really capable of as an author. We are shown an oilrig crew that is seemingly already isolated from the rest of the world, but is thrown into a deeper, more real isolation while awaiting a terrible plague that is inevitably coming for them. This is a story about survivalist issues, first and foremost, and also a study of the human condition when placed in a dire and bleak position. Adam Baker is able to place us inside each character and to show us their desperation, all the while giving us a reason to turn the page in the face of such hopelessness. Truly an outstanding novel.

2. 11/22/63 by Stephen King. The master of macabre is back with a shiny new toy. This time he takes us back to that fateful day when John F. Kennedy was shot, and everything changed. He brings a new spin when he allows a time traveling portal to take a character back to that time. It’s as if us readers step through that portal ourselves, and are transported to a long gone era, one ripe with rock and roll and muscle cars. Here we have the storyteller that we all know so well back and strong. Stephen King does not disappoint with this one.

3. THE NIGHT ETERNAL by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. In the third installment of The Strain Trilogy, our beloved characters stories are brought to an end. Fans of the series receive a well-constructed conclusion in this book. The writing team of del Toro and Hogan has consistently delivered, and they end with the same, albeit more action packed, passion and eloquence that was visible in the first book.

4. SOUTHERN GODS by John Hornor Jacobs. A stand out in this list, and another debut novel, Jacobs’ tale of grit, darkness, and soul-selling music, combines a Gothic flair with Lovecraftian lore. It is not only aesthetically outstanding, it also conveys a vein of terror and intrigue effortlessly. The delta Blues have never been experienced like this. Join antagonist, Bull Ingram, on a journey to Hell and back via the backwoods of Arkansas, as he journeys to find Ramblin’ John Hastur. It will be a trip you won’t forget.

5. DEAD OF NIGHT: A ZOMBIE NOVEL by Jonathan Maberry. Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestseller, and has won the Bram Stoker award multiple times. He brings his talent to us once more with this novel about the end of the world by way of zombies. A serial killer is experimented on while he’s in prison, and such is the beginning of the end. Graphic and not at a loss for details, DEAD OF NIGHT allows us to see the flaws in human communication and their deadly consequences.

6. DOUBLE DEAD by Chuck Wendig. Wendig’s voice and style are unobtainable, and leave an impression that will stay. His ability to spin a yarn that keeps the reader employed and wanting more is only part of the reason this, another spectacular debut novel, made the list. A unique take on the zombie apocalypse leaves a vampire among the midst of the undead hordes. Here we see much more than the usual band of survivors. There are many dynamics at play, which give a thorough and in-depth view of humanity, and not just from the humans.

7. BLEED by Ed Kurtz. Once more we have a debut novel poking its head through the scores of authors to make it onto the top ten. This story starts with an innocent stain on the ceiling that grows in intensity and complexity. A monster story, to be certain, but also one reminiscent of decades old horror that is not revisited much anymore. Kurtz’ ability to keep the action slowly and successfully building, while allowing readers to have feelings for the monstrosity, showcase just a few of his talents.

8. DEAD BAD THINGS by Gary McMahon. Full of shocks, this story that is part of a series, is written tight, not easing the reader into the madness, but throwing them in the deep end, headfirst. McMahon’s ability to write in an organic fashion is part of the magic. His novel guides itself brilliantly, pulling the reader into his twisted, black world. Set in a bleak, Gothic atmosphere, it will leave you wanting to turn the light on at night.

9. HOUSE OF FEAR: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HAUNTED HOUSE STORIES edited by Jonathan Oliver. I love a good story about a haunted house, and in this anthology, you get that and so much more. The stories, ranging from traditional to terrifying, run the gamut of fear. There are nineteen tales included, more than enough to get your haunted fix.

10. THE WHITE DEVIL by Justin Evans. Another Gothic inspired beauty, THE WHITE DEVIL is a mystery of possession and ghosts. Revolving around the famous poet Lord Byron, Evans delves into dark history and the trepidations that come with growing up in two separate, and very different, periods of time. Each chapter keeps you wanting to know more, as the chills build.

Enjoy some of these wonderful tomes, if you get the chance. There were many others that I wanted to include but there simply wasn’t enough room. Here’s to looking forward to another year of horror in literature.

1. ATTACK THE BLOCK – When you have a neighborhood under attack by aliens, you have an under the radar hit with classic leanings. This film is especially successful at employing subtle hints or small glimpses of the aliens themselves, along with spine chilling moments. The cast of characters is rich, and carries the film with depth and the occasional hilarity. The energy carries, building to a climactic end. The aliens have a unique and terrifying design, which lends itself to the overall beauty of the film.

2. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN – This film may be debated about making it to this list because it is classified as a thriller/drama, but in my opinion it is filled with horror elements. I had a hard time deciding if it should have been number one, and eventually settled on giving it second place if only because of the previously mentioned issue. In reality it tied with the number one spot. This movie chronicles the life of a psychopathic child from his earlier years and the effects on the family, to the horrifying conclusion. It is a gripping and visually satisfying movie that instills inevitable emotions in the viewer. The cast is spectacular, and the director did a phenomenal job of bringing his vision to the screen. This is not one to be taken lightly.

3. STAKE LAND – In a world ravaged by a virus that turns people into vampires, this film shows us that it really isn’t the vampires that are the worst thing out there – it’s the humans. Here we have an apocalyptic vision that is not as much about the creatures of the night as it is about the misguided and damaged survivors. The films’ all around high quality is what makes it surpass others of its nature.

4. MIDNIGHT SON – Finally we have a vampire flick, which is more along the “classic” lines. This indie film delivers on many fronts – writing, directing and acting. After letting us in close to the main character, the vampire, we are later introduced to his love interest. Their journey becomes one that the viewer is invested in; we want to see them together.

5. THE SKIN I LIVE IN – A sad, grieving yet amazing plastic surgeon is perfecting a synthetic skin that could be used to help people with deformities. As he works on this discovery, he also keeps a woman locked away in his spacious home, a woman who has a facial disfigurement that he can experiment on. Far from a twisted, mad doctor flick, this film is beautiful, touching and filled with deep, terror filled moments.

6. THE INNKEEPERS – Here is a delightful movie touching on ghost stories and peppered with creepy moments. The two main characters work very well together, and their chemistry is apparent as they carry each scene forward. As the movie continues, we feel more on edge wondering what is going to happen next. The directors’ unique style works with the storyline and stellar acting to bring a horror film unlike any other.

7. BLACK DEATH – During the Bubonic plague, in fourteenth century England, one village seems to be untouched by the disease and its deadly consequences. Add in the premise of something otherworldly happening in this village, and you have a wonderful motivator to venture and check it out. The raw, visceral atmosphere during the plague scenes is very effective, and the quiet wait after we see the village both serve to set the tone. There are many fascinating themes explored rounding out the overall feel of the film.

8. TROLL HUNTER – A group of university students decide to document what they think is a bear poacher on film. Once they find out that its not bears the hunter is after, but giant trolls, this is where the film becomes a fun ride. The scenery is beautiful, and the effects used to make the trolls are more than acceptable – a quirky, energetic film, indeed.

9. SUPER 8 – A small mid-western town is in for the fight of its life when an alien is unwittingly let loose, and a group of filmmaking kids just happen to be witness. One of the more mainstream films on the list, this movie is a shout out to the 80s and to Spielberg himself, who happens to have been a producer. A particularly spectacular opening train wreck sequence was a pleasing start, and the dynamic between the kids, along with their solid performances, combine to make it an enjoyable experience.

10. INSIDIOUS – A family searches for help for their young child who has fallen ill with no real medical explanation. Their desperation leads them to more unconventional methods. The realization that the child is in a dark and scary place called “The Further” serves to pull the viewer in deeper and allows for a trip to this frightening dimension. The father must journey there himself in order to save the child, and the shocks do not falter.

It was an interesting year for scary movies, and I hope to see more fresh, innovative indie flicks come our way in 2012.

Girl Games – Play Free Dress Up, Cooking and Decorating Games

Monster Make Up

Game Details
Description: Build your monster from scratch, and create either a fierce creature from the depths of space or a monstrous sweetie from the deep caverns of Earth. These monsters haven’t been discovered yet, so get as creative as you want!
Instructions: Use your mouse to click on and through the floating hair, arm, body, and accessory options for this monster.
Channels: Decorating Fantasy Fantasy
Tags: games decorate girl monster creature decoration funny fun monsters create design
Plays: 5,845 players

Apex Books Guidelines
We are not accepting submissions or queries for any book length projects at this time.
Dark Faith 2 – Open Call For Submissions

Apex will be publishing a follow-up to the Nebula, Bram Stoker, and Black Quill-nominated anthology Dark Faith. The book will be 80,000 words and pay five cents a word (up to four thousand words). It will debut late-summer 2012. We buy First World anthology print rights and digital rights (for three years).

We’re looking for the story only you could write, something deeply personal and at the same time universal. Everyone believes in something and we want you to put those beliefs to the test. We’re looking for smart, literate stories that don’t proselytize or stereotype. Stories that make you think, that comment on the human condition and the social order. Stories that are rich in their use of language.

However, as much as we love social commentary, don’t forget to entertain us. The best way to get a feel for what we’re looking for is to read Dark Faith.

Submissions will be accepted from 1/1/2012 until 1/31/2012. Unsolicited stories received outside this timeframe will be deleted, unread.

Please include a cover letter with your submission–even if we know you. Please send no more than one submission at a time. No reprints. Simultaneous submissions will be accepted as long as you tell us up front (and immediately withdraw the story if you sell it).

All submissions must be emailed as an RTF file to Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon at darkfaithantho@gmail.com.

Submission Guidelines

Pseudopod is always looking for quality fiction to feed our listeners. If you’re a writer with a short horror story that you’d like to hear narrated by one of our talented performers, we’d like to see it. Probably.

What We Want

Pseudopod is a genre magazine in audio form. We’re looking for horror: dark, weird fiction. We run the spectrum from grim realism or crime drama, to magic-realism, to blatantly supernatural dark fantasy. We publish highly literary stories reminiscent of Poe or Lovecraft as well as vulgar shock-value pulp fiction. We don’t split hairs about genre definitions, and we do not observe any taboos about what kind of content can appear in our stories. Originality demands that you’re better off avoiding vampires, zombies, and other recognizable horror tropes unless you have put a very unique spin on them. What matters most is that the stories are dark and compelling.

Since we’re an audio magazine, our audience can’t skim past the boring parts, so stories with beautiful language at the expense of plot don’t translate well. We’re looking for fiction with strong pacing, well-defined characters, engaging dialogue, and clear action. It can be beautiful too, if you’ve got all those other bases covered.

Dark humor is just fine, and we run it on occasion; but we are more interested in tragedy than comedy, and comedy is better received the more sick and morbid it is. Above all, we want stories that make us think, that stick with us, that make us catch ourselves checking the locks a second time before bed.

More tips here.

>Holiday-themed stories (regardless of which holiday) are ideally submitted 4-5 months prior to the holiday in question. The same guideline applies if you have a book coming out soon and want to publish a short story with us to coincide with its release, and we’re always happy to delay publishing if the resulting timing is better for author promotion. (Although for a sure bet, you can always just grease our palms with a sponsorship two months beforehand — contact amanda@escapeartists.net.)

Length

We’re primarily interested in two lengths of fiction, which we’ve somewhat arbitrarily dubbed “short fiction” and “flash fiction”.

Short Fiction: This is the heart of our weekly podcast. We want short stories between about 2,000 and 6,000 words; we are quite hesitant to produce stories any longer than that, although we may occasionally consider exceptional stories as long as 7,500 words. Anything longer than that will not be considered at all. (You are almost certainly better off cutting it down to 6,000 or less, even if it has been published previously at a greater length. The longer a story is, the more brilliant it needs to be to sustain audience interest in audio, and Pseudopod stories in particular tend to be no longer than 5,000 words as a rule.) We currently pay $100 for short fiction at this length.

Flash Fiction: We sometimes podcast short five-to-ten minute “bonus” pieces between our weekly main episodes. For this we’re looking at fiction under 1,500 words, with a sweet spot between 500 and 1000 words. Yes, that’s really really short. That’s the point. Our flash pieces are frequently quirkier and more experimental than our weekly features. We pay $20 for flash fiction.

If you have a story between 1,500 and 2,000 words, we’ll make a judgment call, based on whether we think the story would work better as a featured story or a bonus. But most of the time we’ll buy it as flash fiction.

“Reprints”

We do not discriminate between previously published and unpublished works. We’re an audio market, and we buy nonexclusive rights, so it doesn’t hurt us if a story has previously appeared in another market. In fact, we encourage new authors to send their work to other markets first, and then send it to us for audio rights after the story has appeared. You’re welcome to give us first dibs on anything you like, but consider: if your story’s good enough for us to buy it, it’s probably good enough to sell to another market first. Why not try that, and get two audiences and two checks?

If the text of the work is currently available online for free, that’s great! Let us know in your cover letter so we can link to it in the web post if we publish your story.

Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions

We do not accept multiple submissions. Please, one story at a time! Unless you’re specifically told otherwise, this is the rule at every fiction market.

We do consider simultaneous submissions (a story sent to us as well as one or more other markets at the same time), but we appreciate being advised that the story is under consideration elsewhere. In the event it is accepted by us as well as the other market(s), you’ll just need to let the editor know in response to your acceptance letter what other market(s) are slated to publish it and when. That gives us the chance to mention the fact in the intro to the story. We will also try to delay publication so as not to “scoop” the other market(s) before the publication date over there, but it will be up to you to communicate with the other market(s) to find out whether they insist on this or not. Unless you tell us so, we will consider delaying publication to be optional on our part. (In our experience, since we use audio format most other markets don’t seem to care one way or the other, and even appreciate it if we go live with it around the same time or sooner because it acts as publicity for them. But you never know, and should always check. For our part, though, we have no strong preference either way.)

The only exception to this is simultaneous submission of a single story to multiple Escape Artists podcasts (Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod), which we ask that you avoid. When submitting to one Escape Artists podcast, please wait to hear back about it before submitting the same story to another.

How We Want It

Example:

---

From: Edgar Allen Poe

Date: Dec 13, 1889

Subject: Submission: The Pit and the Pendulum

To: submit@pseudopod.org

Dear Pseudopod:
I would like to submit my horror story “The Pit and the Pendulum” for

your podcast.  My work has appeared in numerous online and print venues

including _The Norton Anthology of Literature_, the Project Gutenberg

Web site (http://www.gutenberg.org), and _The Simpsons Halloween

Special_.   This particular work is in the public domain since it was first

published over a century ago, and all rights are available.  It has

previously been adapted into a shockingly strange movie by Roger

Corman.  Thank you for your time and consideration.
Edgar Poe

poeman@gmail.com
6200 Words

The Pit and the Pendulum

By Edgar Allen Poe
I was sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at

length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses

were leaving me. The sentence — the dread sentence of death — was the

last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the

sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy

indeterminate hum.  It conveyed to my soul the idea of _revolution_ –

perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel.

This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more.  [. . .]

---

We accept stories in plain text pasted into the body of an email, sent to the address submit@pseudopod.org. We don’t want Word files, PDF files, scanned images of a book, or sound files of you reading the story. Messages with any such attachments will probably get bounced. We will accept messages that are HTML formatted, but if you know how to turn it off, we greatly prefer plain text. Send it from the email address to which you want us to send correspondence to you!

Please be sure to include the word “submission” AND the title of the story in the Subject: line of the message. Most of our workflow involves bouncing your email message from one folder to another, and we use the email subject to identify the story. A subject like “story submission” doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.

In the body of the message, we want:

Your name. (Your real name. The story can have a different byline, and we’ll credit that byline in public, but we need to know who’s legally offering us this story and to whom the check should be written.)
>A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits (your top five or six publications at most), and in particular telling us whether this story has been published before or adapted into audio. If there’s anything we need to know about available rights, tell us that too. If the full text of the story is available online, that’s great — let us know what the URL is so we can link to it.
The word count of the story, rounded to the nearest hundred words. Don’t go nuts over which word count method to use, or whether to round up or down. We pay flat rate; we really don’t care. We just want a ballpark.
The title of the story.
The story’s byline.
The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ or *asterisks* (or whatever) for emphasis.

Once again, that address is submit@pseudopod.org. Any stories sent to any other address will be trashed, most likely without a response.

---

(The rest of these guidelines are basically just legalese.)

By sending us your story you understand and agree that:

You are the original creator of the work submitted to us;
You are the copyright holder of the work;
You are not prohibited by any prior agreement from the transfer of non-exclusive electronic and audio rights to the work;
All information in the contact and cover sections of your email is accurate and truthful;
You accept sole responsibility for any false statements or encumbrances upon rights not disclosed to us.

If we buy your story we’ll send you a contract, and you’ll be bound to all of the above.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering whether you have audio rights to your stories: unless you’re doing work-for-hire for a game company, all reputable speculative fiction magazines of which we’re aware acquire serial print rights, often with non-exclusive electronic or anthology options. Some online markets may insist on electronic exclusivity for a certain period of time, and if so, you can’t publish it with us until after that period ends. However, we know of no regular short fiction market that contracts for exclusive audio rights. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen; always check your contracts.

What We Do With It

Once you’ve sent us your story, we will review it and respond to you via email in about two months. If it takes longer than that, please query.

If we decide we’d like it for our podcast, we’ll send you a contract as a PDF file in email. You will sign it and send it back to us either via email (after scanning it), fax, or postal mail. Then we’ll pay you via check or PayPal, whichever you indicated on the last page of the contract, and we’ll start producing.

During the production process we may contact you with questions about the story, its background, or pronunciations. We hope and expect that you’ll be available to help us, as a good performance makes all of us look good. Unfortunately, as everything we do is on a somewhat fluid schedule, we usually can’t give you an accurate timetable of when your story will appear in the podcast.

What the World Does With It

The audio files Pseudopod produces are released under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way. Transcribing it, extracting portions from it beyond fair use, and mashing it up are all prohibited. This license applies only to our audio performance of your work, for which we’ve contracted and paid you. It does not apply to your story itself; you retain your copyright and all rights to any other use of the story.

We’ve had some questions about this from the writing community, so we’d like to make our reasoning clear. We know that Creative Commons licensing is scary to many writers, and it’s certainly a radical break from traditional rights that expire after a period of time. Our take is this: when we create a podcast, we are putting an MP3 file on the Web. That MP3 file is going to get downloaded and copied onto thousands of hard drives, CDs, iPods, and other portable devices across the world. That’s the point. We want people to listen to it. But once you’ve done that, you can’t take that file back. There is no way to delete the file everywhere it exists. There are some highly fallible ways to lock things down, but DRM sucks, and even if we believed in it it’s too complicated for us to implement.

So from a purely practical perspective, we can’t make our content expire. And we can’t stop people from copying our files, nor should we. Given that reality, why not give our listeners the full legal right to do what’s totally natural for an audio file (copy it, share it with people, and listen to it whenever they want), but make equally clear to them what they can’t do (share the story outside the podcast, or alter it in any way at all)? That’s our reason for the Creative Commons license. We’re not trying to plant a philosophical flag in the ground here; we’re just trying to reflect reality.

We hope you’ll agree with our reasons and choose to share your story with us. If you don’t, then we’re deeply sorry, but we feel it’s better that you know this now, before you make the decision to submit.

Any questions?

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, or criticism (but not stories) send them to our staff at editor@pseudopod.org. We’ll do our best to get back to you within a few days.

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