There’s a vast universe out there filled with new lifeforms, unique places, and an endless supply of stories to tell. We want to hear your story.
We’re looking for your best furry Science-Fiction, Science-Fantasy, and Space Operas for an anthology benefiting the ALS Association (https://tinyurl.com/ALS-FTM). When we say “furry”, we mean that the main character(s) in your story must be anthropomorphic, having both traits of humans and animals. Feral-style animals with a human-level of intelligence (like Watership Down or our own Beyond Acacia Ridge (https://www.goalpublications.com/store/p68/beyond-acacia-ridge-print.html)) are acceptable. As with the other stories in our catalog, we require your furry characters’ animal attributes to mean something. They can be humans with fur/ears/tails, but think of things like:
• How would space suits have to be different considering the different species?
• What sort of challenges would having shed fur in a zero-gravity environment create?
• Without a suit, what sort of climates could certain species tolerate?
• You’re in outer space, so how could you make an alien character fit into the “furry” category?
These are, of course, just a few examples that could be in your story.
All stories you submit must be in the “Young Adult” category, meaning that someone as young as 14 would be able to read your stories without any issues (it must be SFW). Stories able to be enjoyed by an even younger audience are encouraged, but all stories also need to also appeal to an adult audience. If you have any questions about that, all titles under our Goal Publications imprint are within this range, so any of those publications would give you a good idea of what we are looking for.
Submission Requirements and Formatting:
Submit your story using the form at the bottom of this page. Make sure that all submissions follow our submission guidelines (https://www.goalpublications.com/submissions-guidelines.html) for formatting. Failure to follow these submission guidelines may result in your story not even being read.
Submission Period: September 15th, 2019 – December 31st, 2019 (essentially before we wake up New Years morning). Do NOT send your stories to us before or after the submission period. We may allow a short extension on this deadline if you email us in December 2019.
Word Count: 1,000 – 8,000 words. This is a fairly hard limit, and stories outside of this limit will have a very low chance of being accepted. If your story goes off the rails and ends up over 10k words, we have a separate, standalone market (https://www.goalpublications.com/submissions-guidelines.html) for that. Don’t submit that to this anthology, as it won’t get read. Anything shorter may be submitted to the Fur the More convention book (https://www.furthemore.org/programming/conbook/).
Editor: Sean Gerace
Payment: One copy of the finished anthology. This anthology is for charity and no profits are being collected (we are only keeping enough to pay for printing, shipping, and cover art).
Rights: We are asking for first rights on all original stories, non-exclusive as long as the anthology remains for sale. For reprints, non-exclusive rights as long as the anthology remains for sale.
Multiple Submissions: Maximum of two stories submitted per author. We will only be accepting a maximum of one story per author.
Response Time: Initial responses will be sent out by Sean within 48 hours of submission (please note that if you don’t receive a response in this time frame that your response may either be in your junk mail box, or your email has blocked our reply, so get in touch with @goalpublication on Twitter). Final judgments will be sent out by January 20th, 2020.
Expected Release: at Fur the More 2020 (March 6th, 2020)