written by David Steffen
Diabolical Plots opened for submissions in August to purchase six months’ worth of stories to publish. This submission window marked quite a few new things. This window was two weeks instead of a month. We only allowed one submission per author this time, instead of two. We allowed simultaneous submissions. Kel Coleman joined Ziv Wities on the assistant editor team. We did a recruiting run for first readers to help us manage the submission queue–we took applications and took on thirty first readers.
For the submission window we received 1074 submissions. 6 were disqualified, 98 were held for the second round. The second round of 98 submissions was narrowed down to the final 14 acceptances.
In previous acceptance announcements, we’ve announced the month-by-month lineup. This time we’re just listing the story titles and the author names in simple alphabetical order by author name, and we’ll announce the months for each as they get closer.
All right, on to the list!
- “The Grammar of City Streets” by Daniel Ausema
- “The Hotel Endless” by Davian Aw
- “She Dreams In Digital” by Katie Grace Carpenter
- “Dear Joriah Kingsbane, It’s Me, Eviscerix the Sword of Destiny” by Alexei Collier
- “21 Motes” by Jonathan Louis Duckworth
- “The Twenty-Second Lover of House Rousseau” by C.M. Fields
- “The Restaurant of Object Permanence” by Beth Goder
- “Midwifery of Gods: A Primer for Mortals” by Amanda Helms
- “Heart of a Plesiosaur” by Andrew K Hoe
- “Downstairs at Dino’s” by Diana Hurlburt
- “Take Me To the Water” by Sarah Macklin
- “A Stitch in Time, A Thousand Cuts” by Murtaza Mohsin
- “Timecop Mojitos” by Sarah Pauling
- “Of the Duly Conducted and Mostly Unremarkable Meeting of Don Quotidene and the Giants of Andalia” by A.J. Rocca