We’ve been working a lot more on the second volume of Hot Dish recently. I hope many of you saw that the first round submission deadlines are coming up at the end of September.
We often pitch Hot Dish to readers as “like Heat, but bigger.” Given Heat’s long-running popularity, it draws a lot of interest to Hot Dish. It can also feel restrictive from the writer’s perspective. We have long called Heat an “erotic and romantic anthology” and expect most of our stories to have a reasonably strong erotic component (although as readers of Heat 11 might notice, that does not require a fully fleshed out sex scene). Most all the stories that have been submitted to Hot Dish so far have followed this pattern, but they don’t have to. Given its length, Hot Dish can be a bit more flexible in leaning towards the romantic side.
The only other real requirement for a Hot Dish submission is length: ideally, between 10,000 and 20,000 words. So if you have a great story or story idea that hasn’t fit into other anthologies because it did not fit the theme, consider submitting it to Hot Dish.