Tag: Doctor Who

Open submission calls for writers: June 2025

Here’s this month’s list of the most interesting open submissions calls for writers I’ve found!
Sign up for my email newsletter if you want advance notice of open calls like these.

Dracula Beyond Stoker
I’ve featured this well-established magazine in previous round-ups, but it’s worth flagging again, as the current issue will feature stories about one of the most interesting characters in Dracula: Mina Harker.
Word count: 1500–5000 words
Payment: 5 cents per word
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Bending the Arc
This excellent new Substack zine is dedicated to ‘thrutopian’ fiction, which the editors describe as imagining ‘ways through to a world we would be glad to leave to future generations. It tells stories about tangible change and walks us along the challenging path from now to a more hopeful, liveable tomorrow.’
Word count: Up to 2030 words
Payment: None
Deadline: Open 7–31 July 2025
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Tractor Beam
Following on from thrutopias, this online magazine specialises in ‘soilpunk’ – speculative fiction focusing on farming, food and earth science, with an emphasis on positive outcomes.
Word count: Up to 6000 words
Payment: $1200
Deadline: Ongoing
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Enter Here
This anthology is subtitled ‘An Anthology of Portals’, and will feature speculation-fiction stories of physical or magical doorways of all descriptions, by writers who identify as marginalized.
Word count: 2000–4000 words
Payment: 1 cent per word
Deadline: 15 June 2025
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Anomaly
This venue publishes very short SF stories on its Patreon.
Word count: Up to 300 words
Payment: 8 cents per word
Deadline: Open 1–7 June 2025
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Encounters with Cryptids
Have you written a horror story involving some sort of creature not scientifically proven to exist, but which is believed to exist? Then send it here.
Word count: 2000–4000 words
Payment: 3 cents per word
Deadline: 9 June 2025
Find out more

America’s Slide Toward Authoritarianism
The title makes the theme clear, but the editors of this anthology to be published by the International Human Rights Art Movement would also like submitted stories to suggest what can be done about it, which is a tricky brief.
Word count: Up to 2500 words
Payment: $50
Deadline: 1 July 2025
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Deep
This anthology from Death’s Head Press will feature tales of ‘the unexplored depths of our planet and the universe’.
Word count: 2500–10,000 words
Payment: 5 cents per word
Deadline: 31 July 2025
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Dirty Magick
Urban fantasy was a hot buzzword a few years back, but I don’t see so many submission calls focused on the sub-genre now. But here’s one!
Word count: 2000–12,500 words
Payment: $50
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Allegory
This well-established online magazine of SF, fantasy and horror is open for submissions for its next volume.
Word count: Up to 5000 words
Payment: $15
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

The Pink Hydra
The new minizine ‘Something Old, Something New’ will appear on this venue’s Ko-fi site, and will feature stories that revolve around some aspect of ‘unreality’.
Word count: Up to 10,000 words
Payment: $10 per 5000 words
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Cooking Up Death
A fun challenge for mystery writers! This anthology will feature cosy (or rather, ‘cozy’ with a ‘z’) mysteries in which food is used as the method of murder.
Word count: 6000–9000 words
Payment: Share of royalties
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Kozy Krampus
It’s tough to get in a festive mindset right now, but if you can manage it, the editors at Underland Press are on the search for Christmas-themed gothic horror stories.
Word count: Up to 5000 words
Payment: 1 cent per word
Deadline: Open 15–30 June 2025
Find out more

Writing contests

In addition to the usual short story open submissions, here are four writing contests which all seem worth your time:

Sustainable Story Award
This new award organised by online book reseller World of Books will celebrate the opening chapters of novels that tackle urgent environmental and social themes.
Word count: First three chapters
Payment: £15,000 first prize, £5000 runner-up prizes
Deadline: 6 July 2025
Find out more

Big Finish
Have you ever wanted to write for Doctor Who? (Of course you have. Who wouldn’t?) This year, audio publisher Big Finish’s annual Short Trip contest requires writers to conjure a story for the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.
Word count: Synopsis and first 500 words
Payment: None, but the winning story becomes an official audio release
Deadline: 12 June 2025
Find out more

The British Fantasy Society
The annual BFS short story contest is open now! It’ll be judged by Steven Poore and Pete Sutton, the editor of BFS Horizons, which will publish the winning stories.
Word count: 500–5000 words
Payment: £100 first prize, £50 runner-up prize
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Art of the Near Future World
This new contest rewards the best flash fiction, which, in the words of its judges, relate to ‘our near future world, the world a few months to a few years away.’
Word count: Up to 1000 words
Payment: $250 first prize
Deadline: 30 June 2025
Find out more

Good luck if you submit a story to any of these venues! And remember, you can sign up for my email newsletter for monthly open submission calls direct to your inbox.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Doctor Who – The Lack of Time

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I’ve been resisting this.

Since its return in 2005 I’ve followed Doctor Who, on and off. Like many fans of the ‘classic’ series, I wasn’t too sure about the form the regenerated show had taken. First Christopher Eccleston’s wild pantomime and then Russell T. Davies’ increasingly sloppy series arc plotting kept me holding the show at arm’s length.

Again, like many fans of the original series, I had high hopes for this year’s sort-of reset, with highly dependable Steven Moffat in the script editor and executive producer role, and Matt Smith as the Doctor. And, I feel that we now have what we wanted. Series 5 has far more of the hallmarks of classic Doctor Who, it appears to be gradually unravelling RTD’s more questionable decisions, and I see in Matt Smith flashes of Patrick Troughton and even (he was my Doctor) Sylvester McCoy.

But it’ll never be quite right, and I think I now see what’s wrong.

At first I thought it was just the cliffhangers. Watching the recent 2-parter ‘The Time of Angels’ / ‘Flesh and Stone’ and last week’s ‘The Hungry Earth’, it’s obvious that Doctor Who revels in leaving the audience hanging. In classic serials, much of the time in each episode was spent engineering a tantalisingly open ending (often hastily resolved in the next episode, I’ll admit). It’s a huge shame that the showrunners allow themselves this luxury in just a few stories each series.

But more and more, I feel sure that the real obstacle is the 45-minute run time for each episode. Recent, much-hyped, episodes such as ‘Victory of the Daleks’ and ‘Vampires of Venice’ have felt rushed beyond belief, allowing 20 minutes to set up the scenario, 15 minutes mid-crisis, then madly racing about to wrap up the story within the final 10 minutes.

Far more successful have been the 2-parters, for good reason: approximately 25 minutes set-up, 50 minutes crisis, 25 minutes resolution. The scripts have room to breathe and there’s time for character interaction rather than just plot-furthering.

Equally successful, in my opinion, are many of the ‘minor’ episodes in recent years. While perhaps now seen as a scene-setter for the full invasion at the end of Series 1, for me the most effective recent Dalek episode has been Rob Shearman’s punchy, lone-Dalek story, ‘Dalek’. ‘Father’s Day’, ‘Blink’, ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and ‘Amy’s Choice’ are all terrific and, I‘d say, some of the best standalone episodes that the new series has to offer. But they’re very unlike most classic Doctor Who serials: they play to the strengths of the time restriction. The number of stories in the past that restricted themselves to this time limit can be counted on one hand (I think): for example, ‘Black Orchid’, ‘The Edge of Destruction’ – both similarly curbing the ambition of the stories to fit the timescale. Conversely, many New-Who stories have appeared to cram a full 90-minute tale into half the time.

Russell T. Davies and now Steven Moffat have taken the approach of introducing series arc, presumably to counter the briefness of each episode, to allow a story to take shape over several episodes. RTD’s arcs were largely spurious – lazy signposting that led to surprise, deus ex machina conclusions; Steven Moffat’s first attempt may yet prove more coherent. As well as the series arcs, both script editors have ensured that characters, especially the Doctor’s companions, have matured and adapted to circumstances. Much of the discussion on fan forums and podcasts revolves around character relationships and revelations (‘Does Amy prefer the Doctor to Rory?’, ‘Is River Song really the Doctor’s wife?’), which is all well and good. Modern Doctor Who is excellent at exploring the mythology of the programme, and, increasingly, prodding at characters’ motivations, including the Doctor’s.

But it’s a shock to realise that what Doctor Who doesn’t do at all well any more is adventure.