Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and summer/winter break. I went up in the mountains, to Takayama in Gifu. One of my favorite places in Japan! It has a lovely historical town, plus nice onsen (hot springs) and snowy mountain peaks. And the food is amazing. I highly recommend a visit.
As the first post of the year, I thought I’d just do a little update on what’s in progress here at Insignia and what’s planned for 2021. So let’s have a chat!
OPEN CALLS
Submissions are open until February 15th for Mythical Creatures of Asia, which is the 3rd drabble anthology in the Insignia Drabbles series. It’s half-way full at the moment, although there isn’t a fixed upper limit. I’m just aiming for about 80 drabbles so that it’s a similar length to the first 2 volumes. Read the full submission details here.
Our online poetry series Instincts is always open, but sadly has a very low submission rate. I usually post 1 poem per month, and would love to increase that to 2 or 3 per month this year. Please spread the word to your poet friends! Full submission details are here.
I don’t have a submissions page for non-fiction, but I’d be interested to post book reviews occasionally (for Asian SFF books, or by Asian SFF writers). Please get in touch with me via email (insignia.submissions(at)gmail.com), Facebook, or Twitter to have a book review that would suit.
PLANNED CALLS FOR 2021
To follow on from Mythical Creatures of Asia, I plan to open a new call for Mythical Beings of Asia, likely in February (after Mythical Creatures closes). This will focus on tales of Yuki-onna, churel/churail, djinn, Asian vampires, and so on. I will make an announcement about it as soon as I finalize the schedule.
Two other planned anthologies this year will be Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2021 and Horror Matsuri 2021. We did both of these last year, and I’d like to continue them as annual series’. The Best Asian Speculative Fiction 2021 anthology will open in early April and be released sometime in June. It will be for reprints only, same as last year. So if you have an Asian SFF story that was published in a non-Insignia market that you’d like to reprint with us, mark your calendar and follow us for updates!
View Insignia 2020: Best Asian Speculative Fiction here. And Pssst! It’ll be on sale tomorrow, Jan 11th! (there’ll be another post coming with all the details).
View the Horror Matsuri 2020 anthology here.
Horror Matsuri 2021 will run in October, with online publications (flash and poetry) and an anthology. If there’s enough interest, I may do a longer anthology this year, with bonus stories that are too long to be published online. I’ll probably open this in early August. (I might need a little break between each project – it’s a lot by myself!).
OTHER NEWS
I’ve just added two new pages to the site this weekend. Both can be found in the HOME drop-down menu.
The Author Spotlight page is a list of the all the author interviews that we’ve published to date.
And there isn’t much on the In the Media page just yet, but if anyone is kind enough to write about our projects or interview myself (or contributors) about Insignia, you’ll find the new article links added to this page.
That’s a long post! I hope that it has sparked some interest in reading our anthologies, browsing our site, and maybe submitting to our projects this year.
Be well, and safe. It’s still crazy out there!
~Kelly~
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