You Need to Know:

SmokeLong publishes flash narratives--fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid (somewhere between fiction and nonfiction)--up to 1000 words. This word limit is firm.

Please use this form to send ONE previously unpublished narrative at a time and wait until you hear from us before sending another. We consider multiple submissions through the paid multiple submissions form. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please consider that we usually reply within a couple of weeks (and usually much sooner). That's not long to wait for a reply.

Include a print-ready, third-person bio and the word count of your submission as your cover letter. There is no need to include a personal note in your cover letter. We will not see it. 

Please do not include your name or other identifying information anywhere on the story document, in the filename, or in the Submittable title. Your name and bio should appear ONLY in the cover letter on Submittable, which is hidden in our anonymous editing process. We believe that the unpublished, unknown writer should have equal footing with the established writer. If you need to let us know that a narrative is fiction, nonfiction or hybrid, please put this information directly at the top of the story document.

We are a scrappy bunch with lots of reading experience under our belts, but if you are submitting a narrative to us that includes (sexual) violence, we would appreciate a content warning at the top of your submission.

We pay $100 per narrative or $150 per story with audio upon publication in the quarterly issue. Payment will be issued via PayPal or Zelle, and the writer may be responsible for any associated fees if applicable.

Online Rights: If we publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 3 months and non-exclusive rights indefinitely so we can include it in our online archives.

Print Rights: We require non-exclusive print rights, for potential anthologies and promotional materials. All other rights remain yours.

You Might Want to Know Before Submitting:

As with any literary journal, the best way to understand what we're looking for is to read the journal. We have thousands of stories archived on our site. Why not spend a couple of hours browsing the quarterly issues from the last 22 years? The SmokeLong aesthetic remains an ever-changing set of principles, but it most likely has to do with these kinds of things:

          * language that surprises and excites,
          * narratives that strive toward something other than a final punch line or twist,
          * pieces that add up to something, often (but not necessarily always) meaning or emotional resonance,
          * honest work that feels as if it has far more purpose than a writer wanting to write a clever story.
 

We publish spring, summer, fall and winter quarterly issues, featuring each story with an interview in the subsequent weeks. Our intent is to respond as quickly as possible. Please allow us two weeks to inform you if we have accepted your work for publication. Rejection will sadly come much more swiftly.

We gladly consider simultaneous submissions, but please consider where you'd like your work to appear before you send it to 10 journals. We work hard to respond within 7 days. Please inform us immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere for publication.

Finally, if you appreciate what SmokeLong does to further the art of flash, please consider making a donation through the tip jar feature, either here on Submittable or on the site itself. Although we don't charge our readers to subscribe or our potential contributors to submit, we are a paying market ($100 per narrative/$150 with audio). A tip jar donation is a much appreciated thumbs-up, and we are so grateful for your generosity.

Our decision regarding your submission is, however, in no way influenced by whether or not you donate. We also offer general feedback from three of our senior editors for $30 or detailed feedback from one senior editor for $45. If you're interested in receiving feedback on your work, please have a look at these options in Submittable. Check out our shop for our current workshops. 

We look forward to your words. Before you hit SEND, please make sure your name is removed from the story and that your word count is 1000 or fewer.

Christopher Allen

 

Please use this form to submit up to THREE narratives each under 1000 words. Please put all narratives in the same document, and please make sure you submit THREE narratives. If you are submitting one narrative, please use the form one submission. 

Paid multiple submissions are read by Christopher Allen, the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong, and passed directly to the senior editors if Christopher decides they deserve further consideration. If this happens, you'll receive the message "We'll need a few more days" and a message from Christopher within the first three days.

You Need to Know:

SmokeLong publishes flash narratives--fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid (somewhere between fiction and nonfiction)--up to 1000 words. This word limit is firm. Starting May 11, 2025 we also consider hybrid narrative works, hybrid being a mix of poetry and narrative. 

With paid multiple submissions, we try to respond within 3 days. You'll also receive a $20 coupon to use in the SmokeLong shop. 

Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please consider that we usually reply within a couple of weeks (and usually much sooner). That's not long to wait for a reply.

Include a print-ready, third-person bio and the word count of your submission as your cover letter. There is no need to include a personal note in your cover letter. We will not see it. 

Do not include your name or other identifying information anywhere on the story document, in the filename, or in the Submittable title. Your name and bio should appear ONLY in the cover letter on Submittable, which is hidden in our anonymous editing process. We believe that the unpublished, unknown writer should have equal footing with the established writer. If you need to let us know that a narrative is fiction, nonfiction or hybrid, please put this information directly at the top of the story document. Please be aware that recent changes at Submittable mean that you might be referred to as "Applicant" in our automated responses. We know you're not an applicant. 

We are a scrappy bunch with lots of reading experience under our belts, but if you are submitting a narrative to us that includes (sexual) violence, we would appreciate a content warning at the top of your submission.

We pay $100 per narrative or $150 per story with audio upon publication in the quarterly issue. Payment will be issued via PayPal, and the writer may be responsible for any associated fees if applicable. We are constantly looking for ways to increase what we pay to authors, editors, workshop leaders, and content providers. 

Online Rights: If we publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 3 months and non-exclusive rights indefinitely so we can include it in our online archives.

Print Rights: We require non-exclusive print rights, for potential anthologies and promotional materials. All other rights remain yours.

You Might Want to Know Before Submitting:

As with any literary journal, the best way to understand what we're looking for is to read the journal. We have thousands of stories archived on our site. Why not spend a couple of hours browsing the quarterly issues from the last 21 years? The SmokeLong aesthetic remains an ever-changing set of principles, but it most likely has to do with these kinds of things:

              * language that surprises and excites,
              * narratives that strive toward something other than a final punch line or twist,
              * pieces that add up to something, often (but not necessarily always) meaning or emotional resonance,
              * honest work that feels as if it has far more purpose than a writer wanting to write a clever story.
 

We publish spring, summer, fall and winter quarterly issues, featuring each story with an interview in the subsequent weeks. Our intent is to respond as quickly as possible. Please allow us two weeks to inform you if we have accepted your work for publication. Rejection will sadly come much more swiftly.

We gladly consider simultaneous submissions, but please consider where you'd like your work to appear before you send it to 10 journals. We work hard to respond within 7 days. Please inform us immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere for publication.

Finally, if you appreciate what SmokeLong does to further the art of flash, please consider making a donation through the tip jar feature, either here on Submittable or on the site itself. Although we don't charge our readers to subscribe or our potential contributors to submit, we are a paying market ($100 per narrative/$150 with audio). A tip jar donation is a much appreciated thumbs-up, and we are so grateful for your generosity.

Our decision regarding your submission is, however, in no way influenced by whether or not you donate. We also offer general feedback from three of our senior editors for $30 or detailed feedback from one senior editor for $45. If you're interested in receiving feedback on your work, please have a look at these options in Submittable. Check out our shop for our current workshops. 

We look forward to your words. Before you hit SEND, please make sure your name is removed from the story and that your word count for each narrative is 1000 or fewer.

Christopher Allen

 

Beginning May 11th, SmokeLong will be searching for prose that is troubling, that explores our darkest fears. We're not quite sure we're ready for this to be honest, but that's part of the appeal. We are looking for literary prose. We do not want to weather gratuitous violence or cruelty, but we do--or at least we think we do--want to feel fright, unease, a racing heart. If you are a writer of stories that do this, this call is for you. Think Shirley Jackson.

Our usual guidelines apply. 

-- Submissions must be 1000 words or fewer, excluding the title. 

-- You must be 18 years of age or older.

-- Submissions should be in English or in any other language accompanied by an English translation, but we do consider French and German narratives through their respective forms. Please indicate that your submission is for the Dark Fantasy and Psychological thriller submissions call. 

-- Your submission should be double spaced, 12pt Times New Roman, and dark. Please no light fonts. 

-- You must remove ALL identifying information from your story document. Your name should appear ONLY in the cover letter. Our submissions editors read anonymously. They have no access to cover letters or messages.

-- Simultaneous submissions considered, but please keep in mind that we tend to respond quickly. 

-- Multiple submissions are considered through our Multiple Submissions form for a small fee. Simply indicate that your submissions are for the Dark Fantasy and Psychological Thriller Call.

-- If you need to make changes to your submissions, you'll need to withdraw it and resubmit it. We cannot consider edits submitted through the messages on Submittable. 

-- Deadline: August 15, 2025 

 

Payment: 

This special call for submissions pays $300 for each accepted story. 

 

Use this form to receive three senior editors' comments from the Submittable queue on ONE story under 1000 words. These comments are general but actionable feedback regarding what's working and what's not. If you are looking for more specific feedback, please see below. If you do not want feedback, we offer a free submissions option.

Use this form also to receive actionable feedback on a story that has been rejected by SmokeLong, especially if you received a second-tier rejection indicating that the story sparked a discussion among our editors. Please indicate RESUBMISSION in the title. 

For more detailed feedback from one editor, please use the Senior Editor Critique form. We also offer a variety of workshops and webinars including SmokeLong Fitness, the year-round community workshop of SmokeLong. If you would like to be on our workshop mailing list, please send an email to editor@smokelong.com. 

To help us give relevant and targeted feedback, please let us know whether the story is fiction, creative non-fiction, or hybrid. Please put this information directly in the story document.

Please be aware that we are editors/writers competent to give feedback on literary flash fiction (narratives under 1000 words). We may not be the right sounding board for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, children's lit, etc.

Although you should use this form with the understanding that your story will in all likelihood not be accepted by the journal, if we decide to accept your submission (obviating the need for feedback), your fee will be reimbursed.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, you will receive a response through Submittable marked COMPLETED, and the editors' comments will be included in the response. We try to respond with feedback within 7 days, and we would appreciate a brief note letting us know you received our message and feedback. 

As a thank-you for using this service, we are offering a $7 discount coupon to be used on anything in the SmokeLong shop anytime before December 31, 2024. To receive this discount, please use the coupon code THANKS. Please be aware that this discount is not available on events already discounted. 

Christopher Allen

Publisher, SmokeLong Quarterly

 

SmokeLong Quarterly Senior Editors

Christopher Allen is the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly. He is also the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O'Type. His work has been published in over 100 journals including Booth, Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, and PANK. Allen has judged The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Cambridge Flash Fiction Award, and flash portion of The Bridport Prize. A teacher and workshop leader for over two decades, Allen is a nomad. 

Shasta Grant is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project and was selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, wigleaf, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and divides her time between Singapore and Indianapolis.

Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and wigleaf, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction,and New Micro. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 with guest editor Aimee Bender and is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.

Helen Rye lives in Norwich, UK. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Reflex Fiction contest and third place in the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Best Small Fictions 2020 and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, nominated for The Pushcart Prize and published in many journals and anthologies. She has an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2019/20 Annabel Abbs Scholar.

Jan Elman Stout’s fiction has appeared in Pure Slush, Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pidgeonholes, 100 Word Story and elsewhere. Her flash was nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Jan’s flash appears in the Best Microfiction2020 anthology. Jan is currently working on a story collection. She can be reached on Twitter @janelmanstout.

Erin Vachon writes outside Providence, RI. They are the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large forThe Rumpus. Their writing appears in theWigleaf Top 50,Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Brevity, andThe Anarchist Review of Books, among others. Their writing was nominated for The Pushcart, Best of Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. They were aSmokeLongFellow for Emerging Writers, and they received an MA in English from The University of Rhode Island.

Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Quarterly West, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Matchbook, Bluestem, Sunlight Press and Cutleaf Journal, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and look out for Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.
 

General Guidelines:
 

SmokeLong publishes flash narratives up to 1000 words. This word limit is firm. We do not consider poetry. On our blog we publish essays on craft and teaching flash. Please see the appropriate Submittable form.

Please send ONE previously unpublished story at a time and wait until you hear from us to send another. Include a print-ready, third-person bio with your cover letter. 

Our editors read blind, so please do not include your name or other identifying information anywhere on the story document, in the filename, or in the Submittable title. Your name and bio should appear in the cover letter on Submittable, which is hidden in our blind editing process.

We pay $100/story, upon publication in the quarterly issue. Payment will be issued via PayPal, and the writer may be responsible for any associated fees if applicable.

Online Rights: If we publish your work, we require exclusive electronic rights to it for 3 months and non-exclusive rights indefinitely so we can include it in our online archives.

Print Rights: We require non-exclusive print rights, for potential annual anthologies and promotional materials. All other rights remain yours.

You Might Want to Know Before Submitting:

As with any literary journal, the best way to figure out what we're looking for is to read the journal. We have thousands of stories archived on our site. Why not spend a couple of hours browsing the quarterly archives? The SLQ aesthetic remains an ever-changing, ever-elusive set of principles, but it most likely has to do with these kinds of things:

         * language that surprises and excites,
         * narratives that strive toward something other than a final punch line or twist,
         * pieces that add up to something, often (but not necessarily always) meaning or emotional resonance,
         * honest work that feels as if it has far more purpose than a writer wanting to write a story.

We publish spring, summer, fall and winter quarterly issues, featuring each story with an interview in the subsequent weeks. We invite an editor/teacher from the flash fiction community to join our team each quarter as a senior editor and workshop leader.

Our intent is to respond as quickly as possible. Please allow us up to four weeks to inform you if we have accepted your work for publication. Rejection will sadly come much more swiftly. (Note: Our emails sometimes get caught by spam filters, so please add "smokelong.com" to your allow list. We also can't respond to any third-party spam filter programs, so please don't submit to us with an email address that has that kind of security set up.)

We gladly consider simultaneous submissions, but please consider where you'd like your work to appear before you send it to 10 journals. We usually respond within 7 days. Please inform us immediately if your work has been accepted elsewhere for publication.

We look forward to your words. Before you hit SEND, please make sure that your word count is 1000 or fewer.

Christopher Allen
 

Please use this form to receive a thorough critique from one of SmokeLong Quarterly's senior editors on one story under 1000 words. Our actionable feedback will include line editing as well as a general statement concerning larger issues such as voice, point of view, tone, and characterization. This price does not include a back-and-forth with the editor. We do offer workshops in which we offer detailed feedback and lots of interaction with the workshop leaders. If you are interested in taking part in a workshop, please let us know by sending an email to editors@smokelong.com. 

But maybe you don't have time for a workshop these days. Maybe all you really need at the moment is feedback on one story. Then this is the service for you.

To help us give relevant and targeted feedback, please let us know whether the story is fiction, creative non-fiction, or hybrid. 

Please be aware that we are editors/writers competent to give actionable feedback on literary flash fiction. We may not be the right sounding board for fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, children's lit, etc.

Although you should use this form with the understanding that your story will in all likelihood not be accepted by the journal, if we decide to accept your submission (obviating the need for feedback), your fee will be reimbursed.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, you will receive a response through Submittable marked as COMPLETED, and the editor's feedback will be attached to the message. We try to respond with feedback within 7 days. 

As a thank-you for using this service, we are offering a $7 discount coupon to be used on anything in the SmokeLong shop anytime before December 31, 2024. To receive this discount, please use the coupon code THANKS. Please be aware that this discount is not available on events already discounted. 

Christopher Allen

Editor, SmokeLong Quarterly  

 

SmokeLong Quarterly Senior Editors

Christopher Allen is the publisher and editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly. He is also the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press) and the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O'Type. His work has been published in over 100 journals including Booth, Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, and PANK. Allen has judged The Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Cambridge Flash Fiction Award, and flash portion of The Bridport Prize. A teacher and workshop leader for over two decades, Allen is a nomad. 

Shasta Grant is the author of the chapbook Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellowship. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project and was selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, wigleaf, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and divides her time between Singapore and Indianapolis.

Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and wigleaf, as well as the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction,and New Micro. She served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 with guest editor Aimee Bender and is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.

Helen Rye lives in Norwich, UK. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Reflex Fiction contest and third place in the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Best Small Fictions 2020 and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, nominated for The Pushcart Prize and published in many journals and anthologies. She has an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she was the 2019/20 Annabel Abbs Scholar.

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum. Their work has won awards from Ploughshares, NANO Fiction, Fractured Lit, and Press 53, and has appeared in such journals and anthologies as Norton’s Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf. Their book, The Anchored World, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis.

Jan Elman Stout’s fiction has appeared in Pure Slush, Literary Orphans, Jellyfish Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pidgeonholes, 100 Word Story and elsewhere. Her flash was nominated for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. Jan’s flash appears in the Best Microfiction2020 anthology. Jan is currently working on a story collection. She can be reached on Twitter @janelmanstout.

Erin Vachon writes outside Providence, RI. They are the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large forThe Rumpus. Their writing appears in theWigleaf Top 50,Black Warrior Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, Brevity, andThe Anarchist Review of Books, among others. Their writing was nominated for The Pushcart, Best of Net, Best Microfictions, and Best Small Fictions. They were aSmokeLongFellow for Emerging Writers, and they received an MA in English from The University of Rhode Island.

Have you participated in a SmokeLong workshop or attended a SmokeLong webinar? Have you subsequently published a narrative--or even more--born in one of these SmokeLong workshops/webinars? Then we'd love to hear from you. You might just win some money. 

Guidelines: 

• Your narrative or narratives–fiction, nonfiction or anywhere in between–must have begun in a SmokeLong workshop (from 2019 to the present) and must be published by December 31, 2025. You’ll be required to indicate the workshop, the workshop leader, and the writing task when you submit. Please also let us know where the piece was published. Please enter your work in this competition only AFTER the piece has been published. 
• Your narrative must be 1000 words or fewer.
• You must be 18 years of age or older.
• You may enter all narratives that qualify, but you must enter each separately as an acceptable file on Submittable.
• Due to the nature of this competition, we won’t be able to assure that entries are blind. Your work might have already won a prize, for example. With this in mind, however, we do ask that you remove your name from the story document itself.
• SmokeLong staff and current fellows are not eligible. 
• Annual Deadline: December 31, 2025.

 

The Prizes:

First Prize: $500

Second Place: $100

Third Place: $50

 

Entry Fee: 

There is no entry fee for this competition. This one's on us. 

SmokeLong publishes essays on the subject of flash fiction on our blog. Essays will be considered for the Flash in the Classroom, Why Flash Fiction? and Flash, Back series, but we also consider craft essays and flash fiction collection Reviews. 

The Why Flash Fiction? series explores what draws flash fiction writers and editors to the form. Send us your essays about the first time you wrote a piece of flash, why flash resonates with you, your favorite piece by another writer, your experience writing a particular published flash piece, or any other topic that broadly answers the question "Why do you write flash?" We normally do not publish Why Flash Fiction essays that exceed 2000 words. Read our past essays on flash (which can be found on the blog!) to get a better idea of what we’re looking for.

Our Flash, Back series asks writers to discuss flash fiction that may be obscure or printed before the term “flash fiction”  became popular, and tell us how these older or not-widely-known works are meaningful. 

The Flash in the Classroom series invites creative writing instructors to discuss how they use flash fiction in their classrooms with the aim of inspiring other creative writing instructors around the world. We pay $25 for accepted Flash in the Classroom essays. 

Please submit a completed draft for consideration.

Book Reviews

SmokeLong is interested in reviewing flash fiction collections from emerging writers, famous authors, independent presses, big publishing houses, and everything in between. Authors and publicists are welcome to submit queries and/or books for consideration through our Submittable portal. If you are a reviewer, please submit a completed review or query letter detailing your interests and qualifications as a flash fiction reviewer. Please note that we are a flash journal and that the reviews and interviews we publish should also be 1000 words or fewer. 

Please note there is no monetary payment at this time for blog content unless otherwise stated above. 

Infos:
SmokeLong Quarterly veröffentlicht Kurzgeschichten bis zu 1000 Wörter. Für den Global Flash Feature haben wir dies auf 600 Wörter beschränkt. Bitte senden Sie uns EINE noch nicht veröffentlichte Geschichte und warten Sie auf unsere Rückmeldung.

Eine kurze Beschreibung über sich selbst könnten Sie zum Deckbrief beifügen, bitte aber KEINE persönliche Informationen im Story Dokument einfügen, da die Auswahl der Geschichte vom Gastleser anonym erfolgt.

Elektronische Rechte:
Falls wir Ihre Arbeit veröffentlichen, fordern wir exklusive elektronische Rechte für drei Monate und weiterhin das unbefristete nicht-exklusive Recht die Geschichte in unseres Archiv aufzunehmen.

Druckrecht:
Wir fordern nicht-exklusive Rechte für potentielle jährliche Sammlungen und Werbematerial. Alle weitere Rechte bleiben Ihnen vorbehalten.  

For original cover art, SmokeLong pays $200. Please use this form to submit up to five works of art, keeping in mind our cover dimensions and general feel (see archived issues HERE).

Please include a third-person bio. Starting in 2025, we will also be doing a quarterly "Artist Spotlight" interview if the cover artist is in agreement. 

Submission deadlines for each issue: 

March Issue: February 15

June Issue: May 15

September Issue: August 15

December Issue: November 15

We look forward to your viewing your work. 

Christopher Allen and the SmokeLong Team