🔥 Campfire Stories: Abjection ($50 Prize)
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🎃 This October, Cosmographia Books invites you to share your most chilling, playful, or uncanny short fiction. We’re looking for bite-sized terrors and strange delights — stories short enough to tell by firelight, but haunting enough to follow us home. 🎃
Theme: Abjection
In Gothic tradition, abjection is what gets pushed to the margins — the cast-off, the unclean, the monstrous, the shameful. It’s what we fear becoming and what we can’t stop staring at. Think of the shiver when the familiar turns strange, when the body betrays us, when love curdles into revulsion. Abjection lives in that tension: fascination and disgust, desire and dread.
Interpret it however you like: literally, psychologically, metaphorically, or playfully. Let it stalk the edges of your story, or howl from its center.
🔥 Submission Guidelines
- Length: about 1,000–2,000 words
- Deadline: October 10, 2025 (11:59 PM EST)
- Cost: $3 submission fee (supports prize and production costs)
🕯️ Publication & Performance
- 🏆 First Prize: $50 honorarium + publication in The Cosmographia Codex (free to read, not paywalled)
- ✨ Selected Stories: Publication in The Cosmographia Codex, each featured in its own issue
- 🎭 Performance: Select pieces may also be performed in Halloween episodes of our podcast WKOZ: Camp Cosmographia Radio
🎉 A Special Anniversary
This October marks Cosmographia Books’ 10-year anniversary — and we’d love for you to be part of the celebration. Whether you’re sending us your creepiest tale or simply gathering around as a reader, we hope you’ll help us make this Halloween one for the books. You can follow along at the Cosmographia Codex.