SPECIAL CALL -- "Tiny Gods"
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FFO Special Call: “Tiny Gods”
Speculative fiction about small, personal rituals and moments of worship to the tiny gods in the protagonist’s life.
Flash Fiction Online is seeking speculative fiction submissions for our September 2026 issue, themed Tiny Gods. The guest editor for this issue is author and award-winning editor, Jennifer Brozek.
What We’re Looking For
For this special call, we are asking you to break from world-spanning, giant acts of heroism and sacrifice to focus in on small daily rituals and tiny acts of worship to personal gods—named and unnamed. Think about all of the small moments of belief, worship, gratitude, and entreaty that come about organically or are passed down from parent to child, from mentor to apprentice, or from friend to friend.
These can be anything as long as they are consistent and repetitive. Be it tapping the roof of your car to thank Joe, the parking lot god, to holding your breath as you pass that one cemetery as an act of protection against the tiny malicious god of rot, to ringing a silver bell when you enter your home to honor the hearth god who protects you, to smiling at the good omen of a perched bird of prey and thanking it for its message from on high, or the prayer you automatically say if you see an accident, roadkill, or hear an ambulance.
Extrapolate those moments into fantastic or science fiction settings or to the hidden world within our world. Let those moments mean something and have responses, consequences, and reactions from the tiny gods who listen—or don’t.
Stories that we feel are close to, or can be inspired by, what we’re looking for include:
- The Small Gods series (Instagram link) by Seanan McGuire and Lee Moyer.
- Reflective moments portrayed in Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi.
- Small Gods: A Discworld Novel by Terry Pratchett
- Stories involving yokai and kami
There are some things we’re just not interested for this issue:
- Revenge stories
- Vignettes (it has to be a complete story)
- Callous “-cides”
- Violence for violence’s sake
All stories submitted through this page must fit the theme! If you have a story that doesn’t fit this theme, please submit during one of our regular submission calls.
WORD COUNT: 500-1,000 words. Because we are focused on flash fiction, this word count is firm.
GENRE: All speculative fiction genres - fantasy, sci-fi, horror with speculative elements - these are all good. Slipstream and magical realism are totally fine.
SCHEDULE:
This call will be open from March 1-31, 2026
FFO reviews stories in two stages – a slush stage and a winnowing stage. In the slush round, first readers vote on stories to be passed forward. These top-tier stories are reviewed once a month in our Winnowing round. Final decisions on these second-round stories are generally made within 12 weeks from the date of submission.
Ebook release date: September 1, 2026
Each story then has its own release day on our website within the month of November.
ANONYMOUS SUBMISSIONS: YES. Do not include your name, address, email, or other identifying information on your manuscript (header, byline, file name, etc). This allows our First Readers to evaluate your story based on the work alone.
SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS – YES
MULTIPLE SUBMISSIONS – NO, one story per author for this call
REPRINTS – NO, we have a separate call for that
FFO's AI POLICY: NO. We are committed to publishing stories written and edited by humans. We reserve the right to reject any submission that we suspect to be primarily generated or created by language modeling software, Chat GPT, chat bots, or any other AI apps, bots, or software. We reserve the right to ban submissions from accounts, emails, or users who we believe or suspect have submitted AI-generated content.
PAYMENT & RIGHTS FOR ORIGINAL FICTION: For original (previously unpublished) fiction, Flash Fiction Online pays $100 per story for first electronic rights, with six months exclusivity, as well as a non-exclusive one-time right to publish the stories in an anthology. The author retains all other rights. Original stories must not have been previously published anywhere, including a blog or on Patreon. Payment is made via PayPal (preferred) or mailed as a check.