Historical fiction contest update
These are exciting times! At the time of this writing, we’ve surpassed our Kickstarter goal for the new Ancient History Magazine by nearly €2000, which is very gratifying indeed. Clearly, many of you are looking forward to this new magazine. Jona, Jasper, myself, and the rest of the team here at Karwansaray are naturally very excited to push ahead with this new project. If you haven’t pledged yet, you can still do so as the Kickstarter runs until April 17th. We really appreciate your support!
Today is also the deadline for the Ancient Warfare historical fiction contest. I have received no less than 36 submissions, which has exceeded my wildest expectations. I confirmed receipt of every submission, so if you sent something a while ago and didn’t hear from me, feel free to forward that message to me and I’ll check to be sure.
I am happy with the overall quality of the submissions: it seems we have some very talented creative writers among our readership! Some of the comments from those who submitted make it clear that there is a market for short-form fictional treatments of the ancient world, but unfortunately most publishers seem to emphasize big novels – and, indeed, series of novels – instead. This is something that we’ll talk about in the office in the next few weeks.
The coming few days, I will be reading all of the submitted short stories and accompanying notes in order to prepare a good package of all submissions to send to our judges: Christian Cameron, Ben Kane, Anthony Riches, and Harry Sidebottom. Considering the large number of stories submitted, I’m contemplating giving each judge the option to examine a smaller subset of the submissions to make life easier on them.
The winning submission will be published in issue IX.4, which will be our fiftieth issue of Ancient Warfare (not counting the Specials). Looking at the Excel spreadsheet that serves as my planner, this means that we should be able to reveal the winner some time in July, if all goes well. My thanks to all who submitted a short story: best of luck to each and every one of you. And my thanks and well wishes also to the judges: I’ll be sending you an impressive amount of words to read soon!
