Heart of a Dragon

I will remove this is people want me to, but I thought a few people here might like it.

The link in the text takes you to a Tumblr page.

We are also considering extending the deadline.

Authors wanted!

The Headweasels are proud to present Heart of a Dragon!
Inspired by this post, Heart of a Dragon is an anthology of short stories based around the premise that sometimes it’s the dragon who saves the day by rescuing the princess, or that the princess can rescue herself thank you very much, and that it all depends on whose point of view you hear the story from. There will be no payment involved (because we are not publishers, just people who like to tell great stories), only the satisfaction of a job well done and a .pdf of the anthology at the end of the project.

The stories can be of any genre as long as they are tasteful, of a reasonable length (around 5,000 words maximum, we aren’t looking for novellas or longer) and directly address the core theme. Stories concerning LGBTQIA+ characters are welcome, as are stories concerning disabled characters and people of colour.

This anthology is open to all UNTIL OCTOBER 31st 2018.

Depending on the success of this call, we may end up having to select a shortlist from all the entries, but we will contact all authors who have submitted entries should this be the case.
If you have any questions or submissions, please contact theheadweasels@gmail.com with the subject line “Heart of a Dragon Submission” or “Heart of a Dragon Questions”.

Feel free to share and increase the visibility of this project.

 

That sounds really cool...might give it a go :D.

Please do. We haven't had a great response :P

So basically, it's a 5000-ish-word-long story that has to involve at least one dragon and at least one princess but subvert all the stereotypical "Waah the princess is a wimpy girl in a sparkly dress who needs rescuing by a big brave man and then marriage and babies" nonsense? Sounds like something I can do ;). I'll have to see if I can get some time to knock something out, if I can think of a decent idea...

Up to 5000 words (the less there are, the less I or my friend have to do :P) but essentially, yes. It also doesn't have to be explicitly a dragon and a princess as long as something similar can be inferred.

Alright, I'll have a think :).

Would anyone be willing to read my submission?  I'm not really a writer, and it's part of a larger story, so I'm concerned that it's layed out poorly or paced badly, or that the plot in general is not explicit enough, and that anyone other than me would need to have already read something that doesn't exist to understand it.

EDIT: If, despite my insecurities, you are interested in giving me your thoughts, feel free to email me at marksimmons@heflingames.com

You're welcome to e-mail it over to us. One half of the team is an English language graduate who works as a proofreader and I'm a part-time copy-writer/full-time written word nerd so we'd be happy to help you get it to a place where you're happy with it.

 

Also, I'm a terrible forumite, sorry for the delayed response.

I realised I'd forgotten about this when the previous post was made a few days ago, and remembered again randomly today while at work - I have actually come up with some vague idea now, so hopefully I'll get around to writing something in the time that's left...

We've had exactly 0 responses so far so the deadline isn't really in effect.

Aaww :(. No-one else showed any interest?

Not yet. A few people said they'd write something, but nothing as of yesterday.

As an update, I've been speaking to the other Headweasel and we think our plan is to have a permanently open submission window for this and host everything on a website with new story themes going up every few months.
So if you still want to submit for this, you can!

Yeah, sorry, been suddenly busy the last few days - we had a house fire just over six months ago so had to move to a temporary house while they fixed our actual house, and most of our stuff got sent away to a storage place (once we'd taken the stuff we'd be needing at the other house)...and yesterday it all got delivered back again since the work at our house is now done. So I've had to go and move a bunch of boxes around and stuff and generally been busy alongside going to work as well (though I only work part-time). I haven't completely forgotten about this and I did come up with an idea - just haven't got around to writing anything yet (and I'm not sure my idea is enough to fill 5k words, lol).

Don't worry about it. I haven't actually gotten around to writing my own...

5K was just an upper limit to help the other Weasel and I with proofing/offering feedback so don't feel like you have to hit it.

Glad to hear you've got your house back though!