ATTENTION AUTHORS: Sea Lion Press World War One Anthology call for story submissions!

[Thande]

Crossposted from the Writer's Forum with the permission of mod @CalBear.

Dear all authors of AH.com,

Are you interested in the First World War?

Do you like writing short stories?

Do you want to combine these two interests?

Sea Lion Press, the home of Alternate History Publishing (founded by authors who cut their teeth here on AH.com) hereby announces an upcoming anthology of short stories about the First World War.

Thank you to David Flin (author of the many excellent WW1 articles on the SLP blog) for writing the guide below for prospective authors:

OK, it’s fairly self-explanatory. AH stories revolving around the Great War.

What follows is a guide rather than fixed rules.

I’m aiming for a total word count of around 50-70K, and around 10 stories. That doesn’t mean stories of around 5-7K; I expect some to be significantly longer, and some significantly shorter. The story should be as long as it needs to be.

I don’t want the Great War theme to become diluted. This is Alternate History, so clearly it will not be OTL, but it needs to be recognisably an Alternate Great War. Early start, delayed start, different line-up, not a problem. Unexpected locales, not a problem. Political level stuff, fine. One might have a Britain that applied the suggestion made by Flashman in Mr American, of not getting involved in the ground fighting in Europe, but using the Navy to “do things”. There are thousands of options.

That’s not to say that something that’s a bit of a stretch to include as a *Great War story won’t be acceptable, but such a story would need to be exceptionally good and the connection to the Great War should be made apparent within the story.

The second guideline is that I envisage the collection being “Hard” AH. By that I mean that it should pass the “It might have been” test. It might be a very unlikely turn of events; it might be something where the likelihood can be debated. It does, however, need to be something that one could plausibly read as a true story in a world where different events happened.

That means that dragons and time-travel and Titanic being used to bridge No-Man’s Land and so on are out. I don’t have a problem with ghost stories here, but I do have a problem with Vampires. The focus is on the Great War.

Now, there is a place for a Supernatural Great War, where there are Forces of Darkness, and so on. But not in this collection. If in doubt, ask me.

The guideline is: “Could the Great War have been like this?”

Home Front, Western Front, War at Sea, war avoided, Revolutions within the War, other Fronts, overview of a Grand Scheme of Things, very low-level face in the crowd, war in the Air, different technologies, whatever feels right for your story. I'll look closely at things like steampunk - it's a matter of keeping the premise of the collection clear and simple. The emphasis is to be on the Great War, and not on the steampunk chrome. Humour, romance, fine if you can manage it.

If I want to summarise it in a nutshell: Hard AH, Great War.

The 'no supernatural stuff' rule should be considered somewhat flexible, it depends on what the focus of the story is (but that's harder to define in words - just ask if unsure).

If you want an idea of what this collection will look like, why not check out SLP's three existing published collection of short stories - the one most similar to this will be "Fight Them On The Beaches", stories about the planned German invasion of Britain in WW2 (Operation Sea Lion, from which SLP takes its name!)

10 Leaders Britain Never Had
Remain Means Remain and Other Stories
Fight Them On The Beaches: Short Stories of Operation Sea Lion

One other point: this collection will be headlined by the story "N'Oublions Jamais", by @Doctor What and myself, which was originally published in the Martinus Publishing collection Altered Europa and reached the shortlist of 4 for the 2018 Sidewise Award for Alternate History Fiction (Short Form). In the end we lost out to Harry Turtledove himself, so no shame there. Martinus has kindly given us permission to reprint it here on SLP as the lead story for this collection.

If you wish to express an interest in submitting a story, as a first point of contact please send a personal message here on AH.com to me (Thande) and we will work out a better way of doing it from then on.

OVER THE TOP!

 

[thekingsguard]

Oh this is just awesome.

 

[Baldrick]

What kind of deadline is there for this?

 

[water123]

@Thande
Can we get a deadline? I'd love to contribute but I probably will have to wait for school to be out before I can meaningfully contribute anything.

 

[Thande]

Oh this is just awesome.

What kind of deadline is there for this?

@Thande
Can we get a deadline? I'd love to contribute but I probably will have to wait for school to be out before I can meaningfully contribute anything.

Thanks for your interest!

I can't commit to a strict deadline at present as some of this is out of my control, but I'm advising authors to aim for a soft deadline of December 31st.

Bear in mind, I'm getting a lot of submissions (which is great!) so if we get a lot of publishable ones, I may delay some to a second anthology on this topic!

 

[water123]

Bear in mind, I'm getting a lot of submissions (which is great!) so if we get a lot of publishable ones, I may delay some to a second anthology on this topic!

Do you all have plans for another anthology based on other subjects? I'm not particularly well versed in WWI but if y'all had a "underutilized POD" or "highly divergent non-magic worlds" collection I'd be all over that.

 

[Thande]

Do you all have plans for another anthology based on other subjects? I'm not particularly well versed in WWI but if y'all had a "underutilized POD" or "highly divergent non-magic worlds" collection I'd be all over that.

We're working on more anthologies all the time, you can see three we've already done pictured in my first post, so those are possibilities yes. A good way to get involved is to join the Sea Lion Press forums ( http://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php ) and take part in our monthly Vignette Competitions which are on a variety of subjects, including the sort of thing you mention here. Typically if we get a lot of interest in one of these, it then may become an anthology and we open it to submissions from elsewhere as well.


I somehow forgot to mention this in the OP, so everyone please be aware that further updates for SLP publications etc. can be found on the SLP Announcements Thread in Books & Media which I update a minimum of once weeekly.

 

[Odinson]

How many submissions have been sent in currently?

 

[Thande]

How many submissions have been sent in currently?

I have about seven completely written up and three to five on the way. Please do feel free to send something in (PM to me with the text is probably the best format, or send a message to our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/sealionpre...jIe9kuBooOFtFJDQeZxyOew38WIRg_FFffl7IlWB-Naa0 with adocument attached) if you want to contribute - no guarantee of publication of course but we'd be interested to hear from you. I won't be online to respond again until just before the deadline of Dec 31st, just bear in mind.

 

[Thande]

Happy New Year everyone. The call for submission to this anthology has now closed, with all stories either submitted or in the final editing stages.

Look out for more Sea Lion Press anthology calls for stories in the future! I will be posting updates on the SLP Updates Thread in Books & Media as this collection nears publication status.

 

[Thande]

If you are interested in contributing to a new SLP anthology, this one with the theme of Australia, please see the thread here: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...med-anthology-looking-for-submissions.482633/