It’s time again for our annual AE Micro contest: We give you a one-word theme. You send us a very short story. We pick the best and publish a special edition microzine.
This year’s theme is “senses.” Write us a tale that revolves around hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch, or a sixth one of your choosing; come to your senses or take leave of them; basically, take any sense of the word and run with it.
We will select five entries for publication in the microzine: three Canadian stories and two international. We will pay our standard rate of $.06 CAD per word for each of the five selected stories, with a minimum of $10 for any one story.
Entries must be no more than 200 words, including the title. They must be recognizably science fiction and inspired by the theme. (Using the word itself in the story is not required.) One entry per person. All entries must be previously unpublished in print or online.
Submit entries to: micro@aescifi.ca. The subject line should contain your byline and nationality (“CDN” if you are a Canadian citizen or resident, “INT” if otherwise). The body of the email should contain the title and text of your story and nothing else. Entries that do not conform to the above guidelines will be disqualified.
Deadline: Monday, February 24, at 23:59 Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5)
By entering, you agree to the following terms should your story be chosen for publication: You agree to license your story under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives license. You grant first print and digital serial rights to the story to AE, these rights to expire twelve months after submission of the entry if unused. You also grant AE license to edit your story as necessary for publication, as well as to create and share an audio recording of your story online. AE claims no rights on stories not selected for publication.
As always, we recommend that you check out the previous editions of AE Micro for inspiration:
Also be sure to see our Over the Transom piece on how to write a successful Micro story.
A few final notes:
- You can submit to AE Micro even if you currently have an open submission to AE. However, if you submit more than one entry to AE Micro 5, only the first entry will be considered.
- The submission address does not have an auto-reply set up but we do check the Spam folder and are confident that we will receive all entries sent to the correct address.
- The selected stories will be announced in early April on the website.
Good luck to all who enter!