Editor Interview: Cast of Wonders

YA SF/F/H short fiction

Foreshadow, The Future Fire, Strange Horizons, Fiyah, khoréo magazine?, and of course our sibling publications Escape Pod, Podcastle, Catscast and Pseudopod

Monte Lin, Angela Liu, Maria Haskins, Riley Tao, Wen Wen Yang are just a few!

We are a progressive and inclusive publisher of YA speculative fiction in text and audio. What sets us apart is our support of younger authors - we have specific submissions windows just for teenage writers, and try to offer helpful feedback to new authors.

Read our prior publications, and read the submission guidelines carefully! We provide a lot of guidance on our likes, dislikes, and how to submit successfully. Do not self-reject! If you have a story that fits our publication, send it in!

The ideal submission is anonymised, of course. Beyond that, it has an innate sense of wonder that sparks adrenaline and emotional connection in the reader. It is well paced for audio production, does not hit any of our do-not-wants, and is appropriate for a YA audience.

We only accept anonymised submissions via our moksha portal for specific submission windows. Stories should not be submitted to our audio portal, which is only for narration audio of accepted stories in production.

We have a cover letter field on our submissions form, but it is for your benefit, not ours. Use it to tell us about important context to your story - is it Own Voices or informed by a particular theme or event? We do not want to know about your publication credits, and the cover letter field is only visible to the editorial team, not the slushpile readers.

We read a story until something makes us stop. We endeavour to provide useful feedback to new authors, younger authors, and authors from marginalised backgrounds so do try to read to the end where possible. But, yes: it is generally clear quite quickly whether a story is in with a strong chance. Your work WILL be read by multiple people unless it is clearly wrong for us.

We may suggest a sensitivity read in some cases. For shorter pieces, we tend to produce anthology episodes/issues and acceptance of these pieces requires appropriate matching with other flash stories.

Depends on the story. All original fiction gets a line edit. If a deeper structural edit is needed we would suggest a revise and resubmit. The author always has the final say.

Yes, always!