Submissions for Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Will Open at Midnight Tonight

 

 

Submissions period for Swords & Sorceries Volume 6

will open on the 1st April till the 30th April 2023

 

Payment is £25 per story regardless of length plus one contributor's copy of the paperback. The book will be published as a paperback and ebook. If a hardcover version is published we will pay an additional £25. Please send your submissions as attachments (doc, docx or rtf) headed  

"Submission - Swords & Sorceries 6" 

 to:

paralleluniversepublications@gmx.co.uk

Please send only one submission - the one you consider the best fit for us. 

Although we prefer original stories we are prepared to consider reprints. Just let us know where and when it was previously published. 

You can send in simultaneous submissions, but let us know if your story is accepted elsewhere as soon as you can. Bear in mind you will only have to wait a maximum of one month and a week in which to receive a decision from us.

There is no limit on the size of submissions.  

There is absolutely no need to tell us anything about yourself because the only thing that matters is the story. Everything else is irrelevant.

All rejections and acceptances will be sent out by email by the end of the first week in May. Please don't enquire about your submission before then.

AI has become an issue recently. Let's be clear on our policy with regard to stories written using AI: not only will they be rejected but, if proven to our satisfaction, the author using it will be blacklisted.

And good luck!

In the past we have received a number of stories that may be fantasy but are not swords and sorcery. If you are unsure what it is, why not get a better idea by checking out volumes 1 - 5. Saying that, swords and sorcery is a broad genre and we are more than willing to consider stories that stretch its limits, as we have in the past.

Also check our dedicated facebook group: 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy

 

   

The contents of Volume One are:

THE MIRROR OF TORJAN SUL - Steve Lines

THE HORROR FROM THE STARS - Steve Dilks

TROLLS ARE DIFFERENT - Susan Murrie Macdonald

CHAIN OF COMMAND - Geoff Hart

DISRUPTION OF DESTINY - Gerri Leen

THE CITY OF SILENCE - Eric Ian Steele

RED - Chadwick Ginther

THE RECONSTRUCTED GOD - Adrian Cole

The cover and all the interior artwork is by Jim Pitts. 

 

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

The contents of Volume 2 are:

The Essence of Dust by Mike Chinn

Highjacking the Lord of Light by Tais Teng

Out in the Wildlands by Martin Owton

Zale and Zedril by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Amulet and the Shadow by Steve Dilks

Antediluvia: Seasons of the World by Andrew Darlington

A Thousand Words for Death by Pedro Iniguez

Stone Snake by Dev Agarwal

Seven Thrones by Phil Emery

The Eater of Gods by Adrian Cole 

Illustrations by Jim Pitts.

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

 

The contents of Volume 3 are:

 

Sorcerous Vengeance by Lorenzo D. Lopez 

 

Seal Snatchers of Jorsaleem by Tais Teng

 

When the Gods Send You Rats by Chadwick Ginther 

 

Mother's Bones by Carson Ray

 

In the Lair of the Snake-Witch by Darin Hlavaz

 

The Rains of Barofonn by Mike Chinn

 

Wardark by Craig Herbertson

 

The Foliage by Rab Foster 

 

In the Lair of the Moonmen by Jon Hansen 

 

Sailing on the Thieves' Tide by Adrian Cole

 

Illustrations by Jim Pitts. 

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4 contains eleven tales:

In the Iron Woods by Dev Agarwal

My People Were Fair and Wore Stars in Their Hair by Andrew Darlington

At Sea by Geoff Hart 

The Flesh of Man by Frank Sawielijew

City at the Mouth of Chaos by Adrian Cole

In the Belly of the Beast by Edward Ahern

The Tracks of the Pi Nereske by Wendy Nikel

Slaves of the Monolith by Paul D. Batteiger

The Green Wood by David Dubrow

Demonic by Phil Emery

The Whips of Malmac by H. R. Laurence

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5 contains eleven tales:

The contents are: 

The Rotted Land by Charles Gramlich

Skulls for Silver by Harry Elliott

For the Light by Gustavo Bondoni

People of the Lake by Lorenzo D. Lopez

Free Diving for Leviathan Eggs by Tais Teng

The Black Well by Darin Hlavaz

Degg and the Undead by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Mistress of the Marsh by David Dubrow

Silver and Gold by Earl W. Parrish

Bridge of Sorrows by Dev Agarwal

Prisoners of Devil Dog City by Adrian Cole

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com 

This Sunday 2 PUP Books to be Reviewed on Big Hits Radio UK by Trevor Kennedy

Not one, but two Parallel Universe Publications books will be reviewed this Sunday, March 26th on Big Hits Radio UK by host Trevor Kennedy between 12 noon and 2 p.m. 

The books are Samantha Lee's dark fantasy novel Childe Rolande and David A Riley's A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead. 

One week to go till Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 6 opens for submissions

There's just a week to go till Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 6 opens for submissions on the 1st April. The period ends at midnight on the 30th.

Here are the full details needed for anyone submitting stories (please note the new proscription against AI written stories).

 

Submissions period for Swords & Sorceries Volume 6

will open on the 1st April till the 30th April 2023

Please do not send in any submissions before this date - they will automatically be rejected

 

Payment is £25 per story regardless of length plus one contributor's copy of the paperback. The book will be published as a paperback and ebook. If a hardcover version is published we will pay an additional £25. Please send your submissions as attachments (doc, docx or rtf) headed  

"Submission - Swords & Sorceries 6" 

 to:

paralleluniversepublications@gmx.co.uk

Please send only one submission - the one you consider the best fit for us. 

Although we prefer original stories we are prepared to consider reprints. Just let us know where and when it was previously published. 

You can send in simultaneous submissions, but let us know if your story is accepted elsewhere as soon as you can. Bear in mind you will only have to wait a maximum of one month and a week in which to receive a decision from us.

There is no limit on the size of submissions.  

There is absolutely no need to tell us anything about yourself because the only thing that matters is the story. Everything else is irrelevant.

All rejections and acceptances will be sent out by email by the end of the first week in May. Please don't enquire about your submission before then.

AI has become an issue recently. Let's be clear on our policy with regard to stories written using AI: not only will they be rejected but, if proven to our satisfaction, the author using it will be blacklisted.

And good luck!

In the past we have received a number of stories that may be fantasy but are not swords and sorcery. If you are unsure what it is, why not get a better idea by checking out volumes 1 - 5. Saying that, swords and sorcery is a broad genre and we are more than willing to consider stories that stretch its limits, as we have in the past.

Also check our dedicated facebook group: 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy

 

   

The contents of Volume One are:

THE MIRROR OF TORJAN SUL - Steve Lines

THE HORROR FROM THE STARS - Steve Dilks

TROLLS ARE DIFFERENT - Susan Murrie Macdonald

CHAIN OF COMMAND - Geoff Hart

DISRUPTION OF DESTINY - Gerri Leen

THE CITY OF SILENCE - Eric Ian Steele

RED - Chadwick Ginther

THE RECONSTRUCTED GOD - Adrian Cole

The cover and all the interior artwork is by Jim Pitts. 

 

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

The contents of Volume 2 are:

The Essence of Dust by Mike Chinn

Highjacking the Lord of Light by Tais Teng

Out in the Wildlands by Martin Owton

Zale and Zedril by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Amulet and the Shadow by Steve Dilks

Antediluvia: Seasons of the World by Andrew Darlington

A Thousand Words for Death by Pedro Iniguez

Stone Snake by Dev Agarwal

Seven Thrones by Phil Emery

The Eater of Gods by Adrian Cole 

Illustrations by Jim Pitts.

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

 

The contents of Volume 3 are:

 

Sorcerous Vengeance by Lorenzo D. Lopez 

 

Seal Snatchers of Jorsaleem by Tais Teng

 

When the Gods Send You Rats by Chadwick Ginther 

 

Mother's Bones by Carson Ray

 

In the Lair of the Snake-Witch by Darin Hlavaz

 

The Rains of Barofonn by Mike Chinn

 

Wardark by Craig Herbertson

 

The Foliage by Rab Foster 

 

In the Lair of the Moonmen by Jon Hansen 

 

Sailing on the Thieves' Tide by Adrian Cole

 

Illustrations by Jim Pitts. 

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 4 contains eleven tales:

In the Iron Woods by Dev Agarwal

My People Were Fair and Wore Stars in Their Hair by Andrew Darlington

At Sea by Geoff Hart 

The Flesh of Man by Frank Sawielijew

City at the Mouth of Chaos by Adrian Cole

In the Belly of the Beast by Edward Ahern

The Tracks of the Pi Nereske by Wendy Nikel

Slaves of the Monolith by Paul D. Batteiger

The Green Wood by David Dubrow

Demonic by Phil Emery

The Whips of Malmac by H. R. Laurence

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

 

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5 contains eleven tales:

The contents are: 

The Rotted Land by Charles Gramlich

Skulls for Silver by Harry Elliott

For the Light by Gustavo Bondoni

People of the Lake by Lorenzo D. Lopez

Free Diving for Leviathan Eggs by Tais Teng

The Black Well by Darin Hlavaz

Degg and the Undead by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Mistress of the Marsh by David Dubrow

Silver and Gold by Earl W. Parrish

Bridge of Sorrows by Dev Agarwal

Prisoners of Devil Dog City by Adrian Cole

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com 

Parallel Universe Publications March 2023 Newsletter

The March 2023 Parallel Universe Publications Newsletter was emailed today and made available online on our Swords & Sorceries and Parallel Universe Publications groups on Facebook. 

For International Women's Day let's celebrate 3 women authors published by Parallel Universe Publications

SAMANTHA LEE - Author of Childe Rolande

Samantha Lee began writing while she was still a professional performer. Her output is as diverse as it is prolific, covering both fact and fiction and including novels in the sci-fi and dark fantasy genres, self-development and exercise books, short stories and articles, TV series and movie screenplays, literary criticism and poetry. Her work has been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, German, Croatian, Greek and Chinese.

Of her eighteen books to date five feature in Scholastic's best-selling imprint 'Point Horror'. A regular columnist for 'Work-out Magazine' for five years and 'The Marbella Times' and 'Viva Espana' for three, she has had over two hundred articles published worldwide. Seventy-eight of her quirky short stories have featured on radio and TV as well as in various best-selling anthologies and popular magazines. A collection of her short stories is now available under the title 'Worse Things than Spiders'. Her black comedy screenplay 'The Gingerbread House' has been sold twice, first to 'Niagara Films' then to 'Random Harvest Productions'.

Sam has taught creative writing workshops in libraries and at literary Festivals all over Britain and acted as Master of Ceremonies at Fantasycon 11. In the Year of Literature she was writer in residence during the 'Welcome to my Nightmare' weekend in Swansea. In 2008 her team 'The Frankensteins' won both the jury and audience awards in the '24 hour challenge' at the Marbella International Film Festival for their five minute short 'Death Dancers'. Sam wrote the screenplay and played the villain, Mamma Sam, a loan-shark with an eyepatch and a bad attitude. She was a jury member at Malaga University's 'Fancine' Fantasy Film Festival the year the jury was chaired by Antonio Banderas.

She writes a romance strand under the pseudonym Petra Webb. Her latest romantic thriller set in southern Spain is 'The Marques'.

Website: www.samanthaleehorror.com

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

KATE FARREL - Author of And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After

Kate Farrell lives in Edinburgh. She was an actress for over thirty years, in a career that spanned everything from Chekhov to Chucklevision. As she is pathologically indisposed to describe a happy ending, she now principally writes ‘contes cruels’ wherein bad things happen to bad people; sometimes the innocent suffer too. Several of her stories have been published: in Charles Black’s Black Books of Horror, Paul Finch’s Terror Tales, The Screaming Book of Horror and Best British Horror 2014, both edited by Johnny Mains. Kate’s debut novella My Name is Mary Sutherland was published by PS in 2014. And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After for Parallel Universe Publications is her first collection of short stories. Two of her stories, Mea Culpa and My Name Is Mary Sutherland, have won awards, also one sonnet and one haiku. The opening chapter of the novel Or The Cat Gets It won the Linen Press award for their Beginnings Competition. For further information check out the website: mynameiskatefarrell.com and for updates try her Facebook page: mynameiskatefarrell.

"What distinguishes Kate Farrell’s work is the extraordinary accuracy and vividness with which she sets up her situations. She has an eye for detail and an outstanding ear for the way people think and speak. It is far from fanciful to see this at least partly as the product of her experience as an actress. In the theatre, a natural faculty for observing one’s fellow human beings is trained and honed. Listen to the narrator of “Waiting”. If you don’t know someone like that personally, you will have certainly heard her talking just behind you on a bus at some time. The intonation, the accent, the understanding, and the lack of it, are all so true to life. But the people Farrell evokes are not all from one social stratum, or one nation. Here is an ancient and corrupt Irish Priest (“The Way the Truth and the Life”), here is the wife of a notorious Argentinean dictator (“Las Cosas Que Hacemos por el Amor”), or the two Spanish schoolchildren in “The Efficient Use of Reason”, and they are all done with the same conviction, the same ruthless accuracy. Farrell’s eye is not heartless, but it is unclouded by any kind of sentimental affectation; her horrors emerge from what we sometimes call the commonplace. Very occasionally she touches on the supernatural, but when she does she does it superbly as in one of my favourites among her stories “A Murder of Crows” which shows that she can do an uncanny rural atmosphere with grim poetry as well as anyone. It is the gift of every worthwhile writer in this genre to make us realise that just beneath the surface of the banal and ordinary, there yawn great abysses of wonder and terror. I don’t know quite why this realisation, in the hands of a writer like Farrell, should be so thrilling, enjoyable even, but it is. There is not a dull page, not a dull sentence in And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After." From Reggie Oliver 's introduction to And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After

Amazon.co.uk 

Amazon.com   

 

JESSICA PALMER - author of Fractious Fairy Tales and Other Visions of Heaven and Hell

Jessica Palmer has had 30 books published, both fiction and nonfiction. Her novels – horror, fantasy and science fiction – were released by Pocket Books in the United States and Scholastic in the United Kingdom. She has written two textbooks about Native American history, which were published by McFarland, and an encyclopedia of natural history released by Harper Collins’ label Element Books and later by Thorson in the UK.
Palmer has also written ten science-and-technology manuals on the topics of explosives and radiation. These were distributed globally. It was this work that brought her to Great Britain in 1988.
The daughter of a professional clown, Palmer refers to her switch to writing fiction as an exercise in damage limitation. She taught classes and conducted workshops on creative writing and publishing at North Shropshire College in Whitchurch, Stanmore College and the Islington Arts Factory in London.
As a journalist, Palmer won awards in New Mexico and Texas for writing features, public service and breaking news – the most recent in 2013. Palmer has also written satirical columns for newspapers, including “A Slice of Life” and “How to Make Love to your Personal Computer.”
Her two loves are writing and animals. She started a nonprofit in Kansas for wildlife rescue and has held a wildlife rehabilitation permit since 2002.

 

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com  

 

amazon.co.uk 

amazon.com

A Handful of Zombies reviewed by Trevor Kennedy in Phantasmagoria magazine

Trevor Kennedy has written a review of A Handful of Zombies which is in the latest issue of Phantasmagoria magazine.

A HANDFUL OF ZOMBIES: TALES OF THE RESTLESS DEAD
(CHAPBOOK NO. 1) by David A. Riley

IF HORROR STORIES of the zombie variety are your thing – and it’s pretty obvious that David A. Riley rather enjoys them, too – then I would imagine that you would quite like this neat little near-60-page chapbook from the author, containing reprints of four of his undead tales, each one a different take on the sub-genre, and each with their own merits, the illustrations contained by regular collaborator and friend of Riley’s, Jim Pitts.
    The opening tale, ‘Dead Ronnie and I’, possibly my favourite of the four, sees two men attempt to escape the ensuing madness of the apocalypse in the UK by plane, but things naturally don’t go as planned.

    ‘His Pale Blue Eyes’ sees a young girl attempt to locate her parents and survive the wasteland, while ‘Right For You Now’ is a gritty one set in Britain and which also features Haitian voodoo practices.
    The chapbook is wrapped up with ‘Romero’s Children’, an obvious allusion to zombie maestro George (and which is also reprinted in the pages of this current issue of Phantasmagoria, by the way). It’s an interesting one which sees the populace infected by the “OM” virus, as opposed to the traditional zombie fare.
    The zombie sub-genre on film has seen something of a strong resurgence in the twenty-first century, from Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later though to several varying-in-quality Romero remakes, the Resident Evil series, and The Walking Dead, however in terms of literature I don’t believe it is a field that has ever really left us. David A. Riley is one of those authors who, it appears, is certainly attempting to ensure that it continues to stay around for a while to come.

    A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead (Chapbook No. 1) is published by Parallel Universe Publications and is available to purchase from Amazon and other outlets. 

Trevor Kennedy 

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

Phantasmagoria magazine  

Amazon UK link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BXNBF1XK

Amazon USA link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNBF1XK