Welcome welcome! Hybrid Ink is happy to announce that, over the next few months, we will be opening up submissions for several anthologies. Interested in writing some shorter fiction? Read on!

As time goes by, Hybrid has, admittedly, languished somewhat, due mostly to the vagaries of day jobs. However, I’d like to change that. Bringing the business more into focus is going to take some effort and careful planning, and the first step of this is to bring out more publications.

Editing novels is a big task. A lovely one, of course, which I’m always pleased to do, but a big one. It takes a lot of time, and often there aren’t really good stopping points to be found — something which is fairly important when you’ve got work in the morning!

With both of these in mind, I am pulling together several anthologies over the next few months. Editing an anthology provides you with automatic stopping points, as you’re dealing with perhaps 15,000 words at most per sitting. It makes it much easier to chunk one’s work up when one’s time is more limited.

I have six anthologies planned which I am excited to share:

• Small Loves: A Queer Microfiction Anthology — Submissions open December 1, 2019 and close on February 1, 2020

  Small Loves is an anthology of micro- and flash-fiction focusing on LGBTQIA+ lives and experiences.

• Acethetic — Submissions open December 1, 2019 and close on March 1, 2020

  Acethetic is an anthology focused on short stories that explore the lives of our asexual friends and family. The stories should focus on characters anywhere on the specturm of asexuality.

• Genderful — Submissions open December 1, 2019 and close on March 1, 2020

  Genderful is a furry fiction anthology in two parts which aims to explore how furry and gender interact.

• Future//Tense — A series of anthologies focused on identity in the future.

  • Future//Tense: Gender — Submissions open January 1, 2020 and close on April 1, 2020
  • Future//Tense: Love — Submissions open February 1, 2020 and close on May 1, 2020
  • Future//Tense: Sex — Submissions open March 1, 2020 and close on June 1, 2020

The submission opening and closing dates are staggered to hopefully give folks the chance to work towards one or more of them (and give me a chance to actually produce them!), and I look forward to seeing work from a wide variety of authors.

Now, you may notice something about the anthologies listed above: they all deal, in some way, with LGBTQIA+ topics. This is intentional, and something of a shift for the direction of the house. While we will always accept anything that falls under the purview of “thoughtful fiction, exploratory poetry, and creative non-fiction”, as specified in our tagline, I think that focusing my own efforts a bit more narrowly on topics that are important to me can be a good way to give a small publishing company a bit of a leg up in a market filled with small publishing companies.

When we re-open for queries — hopefully soon! — please don’t let this stop you from submitting works that do not focus on LGBTQIA+ topics! We obviously still want to read all of your thoughtful and carefully crafted writing. However, if you are shopping around for a house to work with your writing that does focus on those topics, I hope that you will consider as an option.