Benefit Anthology

The origin of this idea goes back to my Grandmother’s funeral. A large chunk of my family came down for it, including my cousin and her husband from Toronto. We got to talking about Canadian stereotypes and I said something along the lines of “what do you do, feed the mean ones to polar bears?”. This resulted in a tweet, which resulted in a short story idea that I banged out in Evernote. My cousin was diagnosed with Crohn’s recently, so I thought it would be a cool thing to sell the story and donate the proceeds to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of Canada.

Sadly, I don’t yet have the audience to make that into something significant by myself. Also, it seems, short stories in general aren’t the hot sellers that longer works are. Are there exceptions to the rule? Sure, but I thought I’d raise the bar a bit. So I put out the call to authors who call Canada their home. I figured that it would be somewhat likely that they’d already have some short stories that take place there. The response so far has been great.

Now I’m opening the door to submissions. I’m not going to go the duotrope route, not yet and probably not ever. That’s a good way to get a lot more slush than I want. For now it’s limited to this blog post. What am I looking for?

Story: 2000 to 7000 words.

Genre: Science fiction or fantasy, all sub genres except for dark and erotica. Literary fiction or autobiography may be acceptable as well.

Original work or reprints.

Include your submission in the body of an e-mail.

If you cannot, or will not, submit in the body of an email, please submit the document in .rtf format with the following:
1) A title page separate from the body of the text, with your Name, word count, story title and contact information in the top left corner. You may include a synopsis of your story, but it is not required.
2) Make a page break ()
3) Then the body of your text with the title at the top and centered.
Use industry standard manuscript formatting. (See this example for more details)

Email all submissions to scott@scottroche.com

What I am looking for in a story – There are really only two requirements outside of length. The story must take place in Canada. The story must also make me laugh. Becky, my cousin, has my sense of humor (I’m older so I claim it), and I figure what makes me laugh will likely make her laugh. If you can’t do both of those things don’t send anything in. I’m a genre fiction reader, but if you want to send me something real, or some straight fiction just keep those two things in mind. Submissions close when I get enough quality stories.

What I hope to produce – I’d like to get around fifty to seventy-five thousand words worth of work. That’s anywhere from ten to twenty stories, maybe a few more. From that I will produce an ebook, a print book, and an audio book. As a contributor you’ll get the audio and the ebook and my heartfelt thanks. If you want a print book I can likely get you one at cost.

This benefit anthology is in no way affiliated with the CCFC or any other organization.