We Open in May for Novels and Story Collections

3/27/2019

MAHLLC will open to novel and story collection submissions on May 1st. So, let me tell you a little bit about what we’re looking for.

First, while we are always open to a story collection that grabs our imagination, we've already heard from two authors interested in submitting theirs to us this year. We'd like to see some novels, too. Please note that an overarching storyline with a group of tales counts as a collection in our eyes. We love them, but would like to mix it up a little.

So, what are we looking for in a novel? Your story should fit into the horror or mystery genre and should run from 40,000 to 75,000 words. The lower end of this technically counts as a novella, but if it’s a good story we’ll consider it.

We require that your story be interesting and that it be well-written. Grammar and spelling are important, but the author should also be able to string sentences together into a coherent story. If we trip over a bunch of awkward phrasing, we will reject it. If we can't tell which character is speaking, or the viewpoint changes from one character to another in the same paragraph, it won't get very far. If you get your history wrong, and it's important to the plot, we will reject it. Many authors want to write about the Salem Witch Trials, but you would be surprised at how many of them think the witches were burned (Europe) instead of hanged (Salem).

Next: In your query, we would appreciate a notion of your intended audience and ways you intend to promote the book. We purchase (affordable) ads and promote via social media, but there's a lot more to book promotion than that. Our most successful authors have their own Internet presence, work with other authors to cross-promote, sell their work at conventions, or have some contacts with their local media.

Finally: Terrible things happen in mystery and horror, but if you use hate speech (anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-women, etc.) in your story, we'd better be able to tell that it is a character with a problem and not you, the author. Also: no ‘on-screen’ depictions of rape (adult or child). Implication is one thing, depiction is another.

If this doesn't scare you off, or you regularly send out your (mystery or horror) trunk novel despite the odds, send it to us.

1 Comment

Andrew Darlington link

3/28/2019 12:53:58 pm

Dear MAHLLC Press, please allow me to introduce…

BEAST
OF THE COMING DARKNESS
EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY

(A Novel of 124,000 words)
by

ANDREW
DARLINGTON

ANDREW DARLINGTON
44 Spa Croft Road
Ossett
West Yorkshire WF5 OHE
ENGLAND
(Tel: 01924 275814
Email: andydarlington@talktalk.net
Twitter: @darlingtonandy
Website: www.andrewdarlington.blogspot.com)

3,000 WORLD-WIDE
PUBLICATIONS LATER,
AND NOW A NEW FULL-LENGTH NOVEL
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON...
BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS
Rebels at the End of Time. Insurrectionists of Earth’s Final Days. But are they the unwitting agents of the coming chaos – or the force that will provide ultimate salvation? They must journey to the lost Lunar City Of The Dead to discover the truth... about themselves, and about their doomed ‘Cluster’ of worlds...
BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a vividly detailed richly imagined Science Fantasy in the tradition of Michael Moorcock’s Elric sagas, Robert Silverberg’s epic ‘Majipoor Chronicles’, and Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ novels
BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS is a novel of the third millennium. Yet it is also one that makes real the mythopoeic dreams of Science Fiction’s lost worlds.
The novel stands alone as a single volume, complete in itself: but also forms the first third of a trilogy of self-contained but interconnected novels.
When, as an adolescent, I first began reading Science Fiction, I was seduced by rich poetic imaginings set in a Solar System that the advancing blade of science and the technological magic of long-range space-probes has laid to waste. The beauty of Mars as envisaged by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanley G Weinbaum, and Leigh Brackett - an ancient world of dead sea bottoms, planet-wide canals and fantastic cities, has receded further into impossibility. Just as the jewelled jungles, volcanic flame-belts and bizarre civilisations of Venus have been inexorably extinguished by the same process. Even asteroids and the tiny Martian moons once harboured a surrealist phantasmagoria of fictional life-forms...
As JURASSIC PARK resurrected dinosaurs, scientific potential now makes it possible to recreate the Solar System’s lost worlds...
With BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS I have written to the expectations of the third millennium...
The framework of The Cluster, its Last Empire, and its history, is internally consistent. It is grounded in science-based speculation and not fantasy (while drawing on the symbolism that gives fantasy its psychological lure). But the concept of The Cluster validates an unobtrusive sampling of the Science Fiction image-banks by setting various stages of the novels on worlds as mysteriously beautiful, as magical, and from the same continuity as those that seduced my adolescence.

Hence this first novel reaches its conclusion on the kind of Lunar surface that H.G. Wells’ protagonists of ‘THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON’ would not find unfamiliar. The second novel uses the asteroid Ceres and a Mars reverted by future Terraforming to the conditions imagined for it by Nineteenth Century Astronomers like Percival Lowell, as its location. The third novel visits Venus before returning to Earth for the final confrontation.
...excerpts from ‘BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS’ have already appeared as works-in-progress and short stories in various magazines, while related short stories drawn from the same continuum continue to appear...

BEAST OF THE COMING DARKNESS
EXPLOITS IN FUTURITY (Précis)
...with the aid of ARTANIS VAS KRATZ, GRENAMAN TAAD realises the significance of his - and ANSOR A-HYLCA’s journey through the TIME MARSHES. That significance lies not in their fragmentary and confusing conversations with the ‘Waterlords’, but in the things they saw and experienced during their journey. All of which are ‘clues’.
...ANSOR A-HYLCA is being held in the NAWS TENRAB Hold, where WAR CHAO finds himself increasingly repelled by the methods used by the ELECTOR OF MARS to extend CHLOREL ET-SNAAR’s life.
...DYESPAAR is using NAWS TENRAB’s experiments to infiltrate ‘FORTUNATES’ into BAAL-SHADAAM in preparation for a coup.
...meanwhile, MAREEH is contacted by TENGIZ MKHEDRIONI, former leader or her insurrectionist group - and former lover. Deprived of the signature drug imprisoning her in the corrupt imperial city of ASHIRI her memory returns, but such deprivation will also kill her.
...far from being the important revolutionary figure he has intimated himself to be ANSOR A-HYLCA was deliberately seduced and recruited - on MKHEDRIONI’s specific instructions, with the single objective of using his family connections to bring about the assassination of A-HYLCA’s father, who supplies narcotics for the routine interrogation, torture and control practised by the SPIRIT DOMAIN.
...rather than face death through drug-deprivation MAREEH absorbs th

We Open in May for Novels and Story Collections

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