Writing Competition: The Masters Review Novel Excerpt Contest

 

The Novel Excerpt Contest quickly became one of our favorite contests, so of course it’s returning for the sixth consecutive year. Writing a novel is tough work, and we want to encourage everyone who’s undertaking this arduous journey to share their most exciting excerpts. We’re looking for resonant narratives, memorable characters, a voice that’s uniquely yours. We’re looking for excerpts that stand alone, that do not require a synopsis for understanding. Most importantly, we’re looking for excerpts that grab us from the get-go and refuse to let go. As always, we have no limitations on genre, though we are primarily interested in literary fiction. 

Submissions for the Novel Excerpt Contest will open on September 1 and close on November 8, 2026.

This year’s guest judge: Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Tree, the forthcoming This Impossible Life, and more! Okparanta will select three finalists from a shortlist provided by The Masters Review’s editorial staff. 

The winning excerpt will be awarded $3,000; online publication; and an hour-long consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency. Second- and third-place excerpts will be awarded online publication and $300 and $200 respectively, in addition to written feedback from Takikawa.

Submission Guidelines

• The winner receives $3,000; online publication; and a consultation with Marin Takikawa, a literary agent with The Friedrich Agency.

• The second- and third-place finalists receive cash prizes ($300/$200), online publication, and agent feedback.

• Submitted excerpts must be under 6,000 words.

• Submitted work must be previously unpublished. This includes personal blogs, social media accounts, and other websites. Previously published excerpts will be automatically disqualified.

• Simultaneous and multiple submissions are allowed, though each submission requires a $20 entry fee.

• Writers from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups are invited to submit for free until we reach fifty submissions in this category. NOTE: Submission cap has been met.

• If your excerpt is accepted or contracted elsewhere, please withdraw your submission on Submittable, or contact us otherwise to let us know the piece is no longer available.

• We do not require anonymous submissions for this contest, but the judge will review the shortlist anonymously.

• This contest is for emerging writers only. Writers with single-author book-length work published or under contract with a major press are ineligible. We are interested in providing a platform to new writers; authors with books published by indie presses are welcome to submit unpublished work, as are self-published authors.

• International submissions are allowed, provided the work is written primarily in English.

• No translations, please.

• All submissions must be double-spaced with one-inch page margins and use 12pt Times New Roman or Garamond font.

• Excerpts from novels under contract for 2026 or 2027 are ineligible, but novels under contract from 2028 and beyond are eligible.

• The contest’s deadline is 11:59pm PST on Sunday, November 8, 2026.

• All entries are also considered for publication in New Voices.

• Every submission will receive a response by the end of March 2027. The winners will be announced in May 2027.

• AI-generated or -assisted submissions will be automatically disqualified.

• Friends, family, and associates of the guest judge are not eligible for this award, nor are past winners of the Novel Excerpt Contest.

Submit your entry here. 

Call for Submissions: The Dodge

Submission Guidelines

The Dodge seeks fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, visual art, and translation focused on place and environment. We’re excited by a wide range of forms and approaches, including hybrid and experimental work. We especially seek creative works that imagine a just future for the planet, and among other things, we’re interested in broadening the scope of stories, poems, and essays about nature, animals, and nonhuman life; we hope to see translations across borders, time, and space.

Given our focus on environmental justice, we’re eager to champion emerging and marginalized voices underrepresented in magazine publishing and eco-writing, including writers and artists who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, people who are trans, gender-nonconforming, and LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, women, and others.

A note on writing about animals: We receive a lot of work focused on dogs, cats, and charismatic megafauna. Obviously, these nonhuman animals are important in our human lives, and people write great things about them, many of which we’ve published. But we’re really excited to read about other less explicable creatures as well. Eco-writing as we see it can include minerals, fungi, forests, insects, fire, etc.

Cover Letters

We encourage you to include a short cover letter with your submission with a brief biographical statement (50-200 words). If your submission is selected for publication, your bio will appear beneath your piece on our website. In your cover letter, please also let us know if you have an association with one of our editors, have corresponded with us, or have been previously published in The Dodge. Cover letters are optional for all genres except translation and visual art.

Manuscript Guidelines & Formatting

• Up to 7000 words prose, typed, double-spaced. For fiction and nonfiction, please send a single longer piece or no more than three flash pieces (under 1000 words each) at a time.

• Poetry: Up to five poems in one document. Single-space poetry is fine.

• Translations: up 7000 words prose, typed, double-spaced, or up to eight poems in one document. (Poems can be single-spaced.)

• Visual Art: Submit up to five pieces of visual art.

Please include content notes for any material in your submission for which you think readers may appreciate advance notice. Examples include: violence, sexual assault, racism, suicide, self-harm.

Mail Submissions. We take submissions online through our Submittable.

We only accept hard copy submissions from incarcerated writers and those with accessibility needs:

The Dodge, Dept. of English

The College of Wooster

1189 Beall Ave

Wooster, OH 44691  

Simultaneous Submissions. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your piece on Submittable promptly if it is accepted elsewhere. (Exceptions may apply to visual art submissions; please contact us at:

editors@thedodgemag.com 

with your questions.) If you have submitted multiple works, send a Submittable message to tell us which works you must withdraw. We do not publish previously published work at this time.

Response Times. We aim to respond within six months. If you have not heard from us after six months, feel free to reach out. Once you have submitted work, please wait to receive a response from our editors on that submission before submitting again. Please limit your submissions to once or twice a year. If your work has been published in The Dodge, we ask that you wait twelve months from your date of publication to submit again.

Restrictions. Submissions that do not relate to the magazine’s eco themes will be declined. Readers and editors of the magazine may not submit work, and we do not consider work from the College of Wooster faculty and staff.

We do not consider submissions created with the assistance of generative AI. In our Submittable portal, submitters will be prompted to affirm that no generative AI tools were used in the creation of their work.

Deadline: Dec. 1, 2026

Call for Submissions: Whisk(e)y Tit Journal

Whisk(e)y Tit Journal

We like: Weird, devious, melancholy, smart, experimental, and playful. We aim: To publish diverse voices. To publish work that responds to the mad world around us. To publish work that’s literary, but not your usual literary fare, including SF, Horror and intelligent fantasy for adults. We dislike: Bigotry, monotony, and people who don’t read the submission guidelines. Failure to follow the guidelines is instant rejection.

We accept submissions through: Submittable. Simultaneous submissions are fine. Please let us know if work is accepted elsewhere. We retain: First North American Serial Rights. You can read more about what that means here. Only submit once per cycle. If accepted, wait one year to submit again. Please include a short bio of less than 100 words.

Manuscript: all submissions in 12pt Times New Roman, title and author’s name on every page; paginated; no space between paragraphs; standard margins; name, contact info and title on first page. Please proofread your work carefully.

Send us:

• Fiction (any genre, including literary, up to 5,000 words)
• Flash fiction (up to 600 words each—up to four flash pieces in a single submission)
• Non-fiction/memoir up to 5,000 words (travel, serious non-fiction especially; no political screeds or moronic manifestos)
• We accept one book review or author review per issue, especially about an author you love. No academic analyses. Book reviews should be under 2,000 words; author reviews up to 5,000
• Poetry: any kind at all (up to four poems)
• Hybrid genre pieces are welcome

We’ll respond within two months. If you haven’t heard from us after that time, please query.

Deadline: Nov. 1, 2026 

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions on Theme of "Love": Neon & Smoke

 

Annual Love Issue

Opens soon

Oct 1 – Oct 30, 2026

This call is for all our hopeless romantics. The ones who believe love can arrive in a moment and, quite frankly, those who say fuck love.
We call those folks hopelessly unromantic.
You're invited too.

We want the bliss and the heartache.
We want the erotic and the intellectual.
We want the love that saves us and the love we probably should have left alone.

We don't want black-and-white love. We want love that sits in gray. We want messy, complicated shades, and absolutely Black love.

Tell us about when the gay became straight and the straight became gay. Tell us about the ten men who boarded a rocket ship only to discover there are no women on Venus.

Give us strange love.
Give us bad luck.
Give us love that makes us cry.
Just give us love—however you understand it.

PS. We interpret love broadly. Romantic, platonic, familial, sexual, obsessive, lost, found, regretted, imagined... we could go on.

Genres

Fiction & Poetry

Publication: February 2027

What We’re Looking For

Neon & Smoke is a home for bold fiction. We’re especially drawn to: Stories that move. Not just emotionally, but narratively. Give us stakes. Give us story.

Stories that mean. The kind where a sentence lands and you need to sit with it for a second.

Stories that sound. Bold voices. Quiet voices with teeth. Characters who command attention.

Stories that blend. They might wear the clothes of genre—revenge, horror, speculative—but underneath, they’re about something deeper: grief, identity, morality, transformation.

Fresh perspectives. We elevate marginalized voices, including BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and incarcerated writers—but we welcome all voices.

Unforgettable characters. Give us flawed humans (or monsters) navigating strange, beautiful, or broken worlds.

Emotional resonance. We love stories that linger—whether from laughter, heartbreak, terror, or awe.

Emotional range. Give us sorrow and joy. Stillness and chaos. Anger, love, weirdness, release. We want fiction that reflects the full spectrum of being alive.

Clarity with depth. We value accessibility. You don’t need to write for a panel of editors. Write for the reader who feels it in their chest. 

What We’re Not Looking For

Fiction that relies on harmful stereotypes or gratuitous violence without narrative or emotional purpose

Work so abstract or insular that it leaves readers adrift—if the meaning is buried under a dozen metaphors and only visible to the writer or a lit journal editor, it’s probably not for us.

Stories that dwell in a single emotional register without transformation. We've read enough grief without movement, rage without reflection, or sorrow without spark.

Rights

For accepted work, we request First North American Serial Rights
First Online Rights

All rights revert to the author or artist upon publication. We ask for credit as the original publisher if the work appears elsewhere in the future.

We pay a flat rate for accepted fiction; poetry is unpaid.

How to Submit

• Submit your work through our online portal: Duotrope.

• Include a brief cover letter (no bio required unless you'd like to include one).

• Expect a response in 6–8 weeks, unless you’ve selected expedited review.

• We evaluate submissions holistically based on character depth, plot, pacing, genre fusion, voice, and impact.

• We can’t wait to read what you’ve been working on.

• Check out our stories to see what we like, and then bring us your best misfits.

• Because we are Neon & Smoke, half-genre/always lit.

Expect a response in 6–8 weeks, unless you’ve selected expedited review. Submissions go through our Duotrope listing.

Call for Submissions: The Offing Magazine

 

The Offing Magazine

Thanks so much for your interest, and we look forward to reading your work. Please be familiar with the magazine and our mission before you submit.

For 2026, there will be no submission fees thanks to our generous donors.

In your cover letter, we encourage you to include information that you would like us to know, such as whether, if we choose to publish it, this submission will be your first publication.

***If a department is not listed below, that means it is not currently accepting submissions.***

Please DO NOT email any submissions. We will not accept any submissions via email, only those sent through this portal.

Just a few additional things:

Upon publication, contributors will be paid a $25–$100 fee, depending on department and number/length of works published. 

All pieces should be original, and previously unpublished in any format in English.

We acquire first serial rights worldwide in English and non-exclusive anthology rights.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; please be sure to withdraw your piece promptly if it’s accepted elsewhere.

Please don't send more than one submission per department; wait until your work is accepted or declined before submitting again.

We'll do our utmost to respond within six months, but due to the volume of submissions we receive, and the careful & collaborative nature of our review process, that may not always be possible. Thank you for your patience.

If you have any questions regarding your submission or our submissions process, please contact us at:

info@theoffingmag.com

However, please do NOT email any submissions, as they will not be considered via email, only through our submission links.

As a journal that publishes literature and art, we want to allow writers and artists to explore and critique AI explicitly. Therefore, any submitted piece created using AI must do so as part of an intentional engagement with or critique of AI and must be accompanied by or marked with explicit denotation of where and how AI was used in the piece. Otherwise, we will not generally accept AI-assisted work (including assistance for editing or “reader feedback”), unless the assistance is used due to a disability. If you submit work using this assistance, please state so explicitly in your cover letter. Any piece found to otherwise use AI without our knowledge is subject to automatic rejection or removal from The Offing.

We would like to be up front about a contributor's rights in the event that they are published at The Offing. Here is the relevant portion of the contract:

"In consideration of the above-described Work, the Contributor identified above grants to The Offing (“Publisher”) the following rights to the Work: (a) for the website, theoffingmag.com, and as a part of the archives of The Offing and (b) the non-exclusive right for use and re-use of the Contributor’s name, image, and biographical data in advertising and promotion of all Publisher’s publications in all media. Except as above, Contributor retains all other rights.

Contributor represents and warrants that (a) the Work is the Author’s original work; (b) the Work is accurate and factually correct, (c) he/she has full power to make this grant of rights, (d) that the Work contains no matter which infringes copyright, trademark or other rights, is defamatory or otherwise unlawful, invades the right of privacy or publicity, or which infringes any other proprietary right of any third parties; (e) the Work has not been previously published in English by Contributor or any third parties, except in such cases as are previously agreed to in writing by Publisher and Contributor; and (f) if the consent and permission of any third parties are required for the use of the Work described above, including persons depicted in the Work, Contributor has obtained such consent and permission in writing and will submit copies to Publisher on delivery of the Work. Contributor agrees to cite The Offing as the source of original publication if Contributor licenses the use of the Work to other publishers or publications in any media."

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions on Theme of "People, Places, Things!": Catalogue Zine Magazine

Catalogue Zine Environmental Magazine

People, Places, Things! is a study into the nouns and identities that are defining modern sustainability and social justice.

We want to see works on the people that have changed life as we know it, the people driving the world forward, the places that hold a special place in the public conscious or how different places and systems are more or less conducive to sustainability. We want to hear about the things in life that bring you joy, and the things that we need to do away with.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION

We accept any submission type in any format. This includes, but is not limited to:

Nonfiction Fiction Audio Memoir Criticism Drama Photography Essays Graphic Novels Humor Interviews Reviews Visual Art Graphic Design Poetry Translation Research Fashion Food

in Print, Digital, Audio, Video, File, etc.

No more than 5 pages in total, and please no more than 3 works.

Please provide an email for which you will be easily contactable at.

Accepted contributors will have their work published in the upcoming issue and can also have their work featured on this website for one week. They will also receive an online or print copy of the issue they were accepted for.

YOU MUST HAVE YOUR NAME ON YOUR SUBMISSION!

We do not accept AI Generated work.

It is your responsibility to ensure your submission does not infringe any other magazine or publication's submission/publication rules.

Submissions are accepted until EOD November 30.

YOU MUST INCLUDE A COVER LETTER WITH YOUR NAME, THE TITLE OF YOUR WORK, AND YOUR EMAIL.

Please ensure your submission relates to the overall concepts of our zine (climate advocacy) and the current issue theme (currently "Lifestyle").

Simultaneous and pre-published works are accepted for all submission types.

Submit your work here. 

Call for Submissions: Common House Magazine

Submissions to our fall issue are now OPEN until November 30.

Common House accepts rolling submissions for its Fall and Winter issues:

FALL SUBMISSIONS PERIOD: August 24 to November 30

WINTER SUBMISSIONS PERIOD: December 1 to March 31

SUMMER PERIOD (Spotlight and Contest): [subscribe to our mailing list for updates]

Please ensure you review our submission guidelines before submitting. Note that submissions that do not comply with our guidelines will not be read.

I. Who can submit

We accept works from anyone, anywhere in the world. We reserve up to a quarter of each issue for uOttawa students exclusively.

We will not consider works from those who have been published within that same year. For example, those published in Fall 2024 will not be considered until Fall 2025. Summer Spotlight remains open to all uOttawa students and the summer contests open to anyone.

II. What to submit

Please submit:

1 work of prose up to 3000 words or 2–3 flash pieces up to 1000 words each

OR up to 5 poems

OR up to 5 works of art or photographs

OR audio and video submissions of up to 3 minutes

Pieces must be original and unpublished. Published pieces include those posted on personal blogs or social media. If visual art pieces have appeared publicly in galleries or personal portfolios, please indicate so in the submissions form.

We will consider excerpts from longer work, but we are unlikely to accept an excerpt that doesn’t work well on its own.

We accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify us by email:

 commonhousemag@gmail.com 

if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

We do publish genre fiction (e.g. fantasy, mystery, etc.) but generally lean towards literary fiction. We recommend scrolling through a few of our previous issues before submitting to know whether we're a good fit for your piece.

III. How to submit

Please only submit through our Google Forms. Submissions sent via email will not be considered. If there is something wrong with the link, please contact us, and we will get it up and running as soon as possible.

Please submit your piece(s) as a:​

Word document (.doc or .docx) or PDF (.pdf) for written work

PNG file for art and photography

MP3 file for audio

MP4 file for video​

Name your document: LastName_Title and include all pieces in a single document. The inclusion of additional information such as full name, bio, address, or artist's statement violates this guideline.

Use 1.5 spaced, 12-pt plain text font such as Times New Roman unless font is used as a creative visual element in the piece.

​If your work does not fit into one of our five main genres—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, visual art, or multimedia work—simply choose the genre you feel fits best.

IV. After submitting

Our response time is 1–4 months. Feel free to inquire by email about the status of your submission after 4 months have passed.

Monetary compensation has been offered in the past for our summer contest winners due to successful fundraising during the academic year. Compensation is currently unavailable for contributors to our seasonal issues. Common House is an entirely volunteer-run operation; as we continue to grow, we hope to be able to compensate contributors in the future.

Submit your work here. 

Statement about the use of AI:

We at Common House celebrate the originality of human thought and creativity. We support authors, poets, and works that make readers feel connected to a broader humanity. The use of AI betrays these values and contributes to dangerous developments against ingenuity, critical thought, and the natural world. We prohibit submissions that have been written with the use of AI tools, and have updated our contractual materials to reflect this policy.

Statement about diversity in our publication:

Common House is committed to representing a wide range of voices reflecting the diversity of human experience and artistic expression. While our evaluations begin anonymously, we recognize the existence of systemic and institutional barriers actively restricting underrepresented artists. Thus, at the highest stage of our vetting process, we do take personal bios into account. We strive to compile issues that remain inclusive and we hold ourselves responsible for showcasing varied perspectives representative of the vibrancy of our world.

We particularly welcome submissions from marginalized and underrepresented artists, including Black artists, Indigenous artists, artists who are people of colour, 2SLGBTQIA+ artists, artists with disabilities, as well as artists who are unpublished and/or emerging. If you are comfortable identifying yourself as one or more of the above, please indicate so on the submissions form or in your personal bio.