Editor Interview: Trembling With Fear

All Speculative Fiction!

Horror Tree's Trembling With Fear editorial team loves all forms of speculative fiction, from horror to fantasy to science fiction. We also have multiple editors to truly embrace every form. We're primarily supporters of indie presses, so publishers such as Cemetery Dance Publications, Eerie River Publishing, Crystal Lake Publishing, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Brigids Gate Press, and Black Spot Books. As an ongoing market, we have nothing but love for others that have stood the test of time, such as Electric Spec Magazine, The Quiet Ones, Escape Pod, and Apex Magazine.

Oh, that is a tough one! I'm going to skip over the bigger names. No one needs to hear Stephen King, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, etc. Some of my personal favorites from the past decade are Gabino Iglesias, Gwendolyn Kiste, V. Castro, Ania Ahlborn, S.P. Miskowski, Aaron Hodges, and H.M. Long. This is barely scratching the surface and I could probably list another 30 easily.

We're very community-orientated. A lot of the Trembling With Fear submitters get in contact with the Horror Tree staff. We try to work together and really deliver a solid story. We've had many writers really flourish working with us over the years and we've seen amazing progress in their work!

Don't panic. We're pretty friendly! If we don't take your story, we may share a bit as to why and never do so in an insulting manner. Some things don't work for our readership, some don't work for our editors, and some pieces need just a little work, and we're willing to reconsider with edits. We're truly open to all forms of speculative fiction. We do tend to print darker work as the original intent of the website was horror before we grew to all forms of speculative fiction but we do feel that a good story is worth being told and we love to take a look at it all!

The submission page is followed, and the story is submitted through our form on it or the contact page. The story is attached in a word document, is speculative fiction, has been edited (or at the very least already run through a grammar checker,) is in our word count range, and doesn't include anything on our "None of this, though" list.

The two main hiccups we see are stories submitted outside of the form and word counts all over the place outside of our listing.

Previous publications don't really matter to us. We love experience authors and new authors if there is a story to tell, and we enjoy it. While personal information isn't necessary, we do love knowing a bit about the author when we can! A well-put-together bio helps us get an idea of who you are and where your story might be coming from. It is by no means a dealbreaker, though we do enjoy having the bios and potentially social links up front!

It is RARE that we don't read a piece to completion before rejecting it. Usually, if this happens, it is from including a topic that we refuse to print that is in our "None of this, though" list or from it being unreadable from grammar barriers. We don't require any kind of MLA standard, dialogue especially can be vastly different between regions, it has to be readable, though.

All of our stories have 2-3 editors weighing in on them. An initial editor, and a final say. If there is a large disagreement between the two and no rules are being broken, we will bring in a third editor to break the tie. This has only happened once or twice from the thousands of submissions that we've gone through at this point. After we agreed if a story was being accepted or not, it progressed. If there is no real editing needed, we accept it as is. If there are some minor edits that we'd like to see, we let the author know that we want to accept the story and have a few small requests (which can be changed or denied, and we go from there.) If major edits are needed, we usually work with the author and will take 1-2 revisions if the author is open to making changes and is amenable to the edits. At the end of any of these paths, if an agreement is met on the story, we accept, and contracts are sent!

I work 8-5; I tend to spend half of my lunch break working on Horror Tree as well as half an hour before work and about an hour 3 nights of the week after my two children are in bed. MUCH of the day-to-day responses and contracts are out of my hands at this point. For me, it is reading stories and leaving my comments on if we should move forward or not (and with edits I feel are needed or not.) Outside of this, I also help in scheduling the posts for our releases, make sure authors are tagged on social media, and help put together our yearly physical releases.

Editing honestly depends on the story. We prefer stories that require minimum effort. However, if there is an amazing story buried under poor grammar or sentence structure, we're willing to put in the effort to get more eyes on it!

We have not yet worked on nominating our work for awards. However, we've been starting to explore both awards and Best-Of releases for future nominations.