Blaze Ward Presents

Dystopia is not the falling apocalypse. It is a world where all the bad choices people have made have piled up and left us with a tomorrow darker and bleaker than yesterday. And one where every tomorrow will be worse.

A group of Egyptian friends, writing in English, challenged me with a collection of dystopian tales. In turn, I intend to challenge the writers I know to give me their dystopian dreams. Horror. Failure. Kafkaesque. Hopepunk.

It is often a matter of degree, whether one allows the bastards to grind you down, or emerges from the suffering with one’s spirit intact.

What dark worlds call your name, when things turn to their bleakest?

And how will you respond?

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Blaze Ward Presents #7/2023: Every Tomorrow Worse

As with previous issues of this series, a royalty-share, themed anthology. The publisher will take 25% of incoming funds from the distributor. All authors with accepted pieces will evenly split the remaining 75% without reserves.

Call opens March 2, 2023. Stories are due to the editor no later than May 31, 2023, with an expected publication date of October 1, to catch people in the right frame of mind as their thoughts to turn to fall and the bleak season.

Stories may take any form. Previous issues of the anthology have included graphic novels, musical scores, and we got that close to convincing someone to create a Cthulhu knitting pattern for us one year. Fiction will be limited to 20,000 words, because I have to read the damned things.

Editing will be, as usual, light, mostly correctly spelling and grammatical mistakes. You will be signing your name to the final product, so it is your job to deliver the best manuscript or product you can.

Submissions are to be sent to blaze AT blazeward DOT com, subject line “Tomorrow Anthology” so the spam filters don’t capture you. Questions may to be addressed to the same location. We look forward to your answers to the question, “How bad can it get?”