Theme for Fall 2022 Journal: Twilight Zone

Howdy all! I hope your summer of 2022 is going great. The theme for the fall 2022 journal is the Twilight Zone. Submissions open Aug. 1, 2022. We accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. Remember no short story should be longer than 20 pages, and we don’t accept prose poetry. 

For this theme, we want to see surrealism. Things that shouldn’t make sense, but do. An area of gray, where two different ways of life or states of existence meet, like what is between life and death, does limbo exist? Maybe it is the mental, emotional or physical state between reality and fantasy. We want to blur the lines of what people think is reality. What art do you see around you that is fantasy, unreal, but it exists and was made?

As always, if you have more questions about the theme, don’t forget you can always email the fantastic editors at editors@borrowedsolace.com.

The editors can’t wait to dive into the twilight zone!

Submissions Are Open!

To access the submissions guidelines, click here. To submit via Green Submissions, our submissions manager, click here.

We can’t wait to see what you submit!

Submissions Update

Hello borrowed solace friends and family! We hope you and yours had an amazing Thanksgiving. Please know that we are incredibly thankful for you and your continued support. Without the amazing authors in our community, we wouldn’t have the journal, and without the supporters who purchase each journal we wouldn’t be able to keep running–so thank you!

In other news, we are extremely excited to announce when submissions will be back open.

Submissions for the spring 2022 issue of borrowed solace will open up next Friday, December 3rd!

We will make the submissions manager available to you in the morning and will post to the blog and all over social media once we are officially open.

If you’re familiar with how our journals work, you’ll know that the spring issue of the journal is not themed, so now’s your time to submit anything and everything to us! We are excited to see those treasures you’ve stashed away for the next open submission period.

Be sure to read the submissions guidelines for your genre as you prepare your work to submit, and don’t forget to check out the podcast for some additional behind-the-scenes tips.

We can’t wait to see what you submit!

Say “Hello” to Issue 4.2, Tamed!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to let you know that issue 4.2, Tamed, has arrived! This is our ninth edition of the journal (can you believe it?) and is full of wonderful poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We’re excited to share this edition with you, so please snag yourself a copy by clicking on the cover below.

As always, thanks so much for your support over the years. We wouldn’t be here without you!

Important Announcements

The Fall 2021 theme journal tamed will be released this coming Monday, Oct. 4, 2021. We thank the authors and poets for their stunning works. The editors are excited to release the tenth edition of borrowed solace! It has been a lot of work and a lot of fun.

We are working on a collection of the best works published by borrowed solace, it will be an ebook and in print. So please look out for those announcements as you may be featured in this book! Special essays and interviews with the authors/poets/artists are a part of our goal for this book.

We will be coming back with the podcast soon. Stay tuned for new episodes currently in the works of being made by our host and editor Addey. If you want your story or poem read on the podcast, email me us and we will make it happen! Also, if you have an interesting topic or work in publishing, we would like to hear from you as well, you could be featured in an interview on the podcast.

Don’t forget our first edition of borrowed solace is available in print and can be bought from our store.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and social media Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to keep up with the latest news!

Your Attention, Please

If you are considering submitting to the fall edition of borrowed solace, now is your chance! We are closing submissions this weekend–your last day to submit is July 31st.

Remember to keep the fall journal’s theme in mind if you are submitting. The theme for the fall is tamed. You can find a bit more about the theme here.

That’s all I’ve got for today’s post–short and sweet so you have time to go write! See you next time.

Print Edition of Hinterlands Available for Pre-Order

Hello all of our wonderful borrowed solace friends! I have some exciting news–the print edition of borrowed solace 1.1, Hinterlands, is now available for pre-order in the store!

It’s a dream that has been a long time coming–publishing in print–and we are so excited to present you with the print edition of the journal that started it all, our very first publication–Hinterlands!

If you are interested in pre-ordering, please click on the image above to visit the store. As a thank you from us, you’ll also receive a sticker and an exclusive submissions tracker worksheet.

Thanks for all your support–we wouldn’t have reached this milestone without you!

What About the Theme?

If you’ve been following along with borrowed solace for a while, you know that we release two journals every year–the unthemed spring journal, and the themed fall journal.

We love our fall journals because they give us as editors, and you, as writers, something different to take into consideration as we put the journal together.

The theme for the fall 2021 journal is “tamed,” but what does that mean?

While I always think our themes are best left open to interpretation, that doesn’t mean you can submit a piece for the fall journal that doesn’t relate to the theme at all. What it does mean, though, is that you can be creative. Write about the opposite of the word, or juxtapose a tame character with a feral one. Think about the negatives and positives of being wild verus tamed, and write about how the two also can intertwine.

Think about the things we humans do to tame the wildness out of the world, and out of ourselves. Explore what it means to be untamable–at what point is breaking a wild horse a fruitless cause, and should it ever have been a cause worth putting time and effort towards in the first place? Explain the wildest place you’ve ever stepped foot into and how it made you long for your tamed suburban existence. Explain the opposite–how your humdrum and tamed life inspired you to take a few steps back and re-evaluate.

The possibilities when it comes to our fall 2021 theme, “tamed,” are endless… So get to writing!

Welcome to Issue 4.1

Happy last day of April 2021!

Today we are releasing our Spring 2021 journal. These stories and poems are sprinkled with a little bit of humor, a little bit of reality, a little bit of horror, a little bit of color added to the mundane, and so much more!

Take a moment of borrowed solace in this crazy time to sit down and read the delightfully creative fiction and poetry, and the relatable nonfiction that will pull at the heartstrings and your sense of wonder.

If you like what you see and read, don’t hesitate to submit to our next themed journal coming this fall. Addey has picked our theme. She chose “tamed.” We’re looking for nonfiction, fiction, poetry and art that encompasses how to make one or something less powerful; how to control, to master the will, to cultivate an imagination full of wildness. As always, we love unconventional interpretations of our themes–so bring on your creativity! We cannot wait to see what you have in store. Submissions will open tomorrow, May 1, 2021.

We will also be releasing dates soon for a contest that will entail our very first journal ever! We have it in print and it will be available to buy this summer. We will be giving away a few books to those who win the contest! Also, we are now venturing into the special edition of borrowed solace, we picked out the best of what we have published so far and will be turning those craft-filled pages into a book filled with interviews and craft essays from the authors and poets. Stay tuned for more on that too!

Say “Hello” to Issue 3.2!

We are live with the fall issue of the journal! 2020 has been a year for the books, and this journal is no different. There have been some bumps in the road and some trials to get here, but we are so happy to announce that issue 3.2: mystical, is live and ready for downloading.

We can’t thank each of our wonderful contributors and supporters enough. We are excited for you to read these stories and poems that are perfect for the month of October–a month that undoubtedly brings us all a little mischief and magic.

Visit the store to purchase a copy, or if you’d like to see a sneak preview of the journal, visit the “Current Issue” page. And please share far and wide–we can’t wait for the world to read what is within these pages!

Spookily,

your editors