UNCHARTED begins today with the goal of publishing thrilling genre short stories; stories you can’t stop reading, stories you want to share with your friends, with the world. Stories that beguile, that investigate the shadows, that recalibrate how we see the world now and in the future. Stories that break our hearts or rebuild us with the jetsam of new technology. Stories that intrigue and entertain, that spike our heart rates, and leave us with the pang of nostalgia as tradition and experimentation compete for our headspace.
Storytellers, readers, fans of genre writing—we welcome you home.
We’ve got stories
Every Thursday, we’ll be publishing new stories—unsolicited, right from our slush. Read now our launch stories by Sutton Strother, Richie Narvaez, Paul Crenshaw, Ellen Rhudy, Ashley Bao, and Sequoia Nagamatsu.
We’ve got resources for writers
We’ll also regularly publish resources for our writing audience, including essays on the craft, interviews with writers and decision makers in publishing, and everything else that could possibly serve to uplift our genre writing audience. You’ll find much of these in our Writing Craft section. Go there now to check out Lincoln Michel’s “Genre Jargon” essay!
We want to publish you
Writers are our everything. We are writers ourselves—the very first idea behind this project began with the desire for creating a beautiful and modern space for folks who love to write what we love to write, love to read what we love to read. We accept stories for all three genres over at our submittable. These submission categories will be ALWAYS OPEN and ALWAYS FREE and every author is ALWAYS PAID at professional rates of $200 per story. From these submissions, we choose our stories to publish each and every week.
We also will be running contests for each genre category multiple times a year—connecting our writers with their favorite authors as guest judges and validating their writing with a giant spotlight on their winning work. We’re also proud to pay our winners considerable and significant prizes, thousands of dollars, to encourage them to invest that most precious thing of all into their writing: time. We’ve designed our contests to serve as professional accelerators for your progress as writer.
Meet the team
As UC’s founders, Tommy Dean and Josh Roark, we love genre writing. We want to create a space where writers and readers can truly gather together to share and experience outstanding stories.
Associate Editors: Elizabeth Crowder, Josh Sippie, Kate Tooley, and Maria Picone.
Our team of readers are: Caroljean Gavin, Tori Carl, Teal Fitzpatrick, Myna Chang, Kaitlyn Crow, Jess Koch, Anthony Maiorana, Barbara Lock, Stevie Edwards, Siarra Riehl, John Chrostek, Kriti Dhanania, Emily Behnke, Belicia Rhea, Barlow Adams, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Solomon Forse, Alex Ruby, Suzanne Craig-Whytock, Ellie Jacobson, Teresa Plana, Janet Smith, Erika Franz, Jared Benjamin, Jack Giaour, David Oje, Jacqueline Toland, and Marilyn Dees.
We are guided by our values
The Uncharted team believes that the power of stories and art serves as a medium to help us empathize and learn from others. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, ancestry, disability, family status, gender identity or expression, national origin, race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, or for any other reason. What we love about genre fiction is the ability to find truth through the imagination and defamiliarization of the normal, and to find common joy through shared experiences of discovery and terror and mystery. No boundaries exist around this joy—all people deserve to see themselves truthfully represented in our imagined worlds. We hold this core belief close: the joy of speculative fiction is only enhanced by the diversity of its characters and authors.
Therefore, we reserve the right not to publish works that dwell unnecessarily in or that are unchallenging of the discrimination categories listed above. We reserve the right to send back work unread and unevaluated if we find the work violates our vision of inclusivity and non-discrimination. This may result in banning individual works or writers from our submission queue.
We know that we have a unique platform to provide a space for marginalized or underrepresented voices, and we take this responsibility seriously and sincerely. Uncharted believes that Black Lives Matter and that publishers have a duty to push for sincere change in our overwhelmingly homogenous industry. We reserve the right to deplatform writers if we learn that they have broken our non-discrimination values elsewhere.