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.
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