 | OPEN FOR REGISTRATION:
DEADLINE: 07/08/26 |
| | | You’ve been agonizing over that first page for months or even years, revising and rewording until it feels perfect. Are you now ready to put your first page under scrutiny? For Uncharted’s Put Your Hook to the Test, imagine a version of America’s Got Talent but for first pages of novels in progress, judged by a panel of publishing experts who will kindly, but honestly, show us when and why they would stop reading. A limited number of registrants will have their first page chosen randomly to be read anonymously in front of our panel of successful literary agents!
This will be followed by an Ask Me Anything seminar with our agent panel. Want to know about word count limits? The currently hot genres? Curious how important comparable titles are? Our panel of agents is ready to answer your publishing questions. Here you can get honest, up-to-date responses from the people who talk to editors and sell books to publishers of all sizes! | | | Cost: $10 (to attend and/or receive the recording) The panel event will take place on Thursday, July 09, 2026, from 4-5:30 PT, 7:00-8:30 ET. A video recording will be made available to registrants who can’t attend the live event. You do not need to submit any writing to attend this panel. | Need a reminder to submit? Add the deadline to your calendar: |
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 | COMING SOON:Camp Summer Contest
DEADLINE: 08/30/26 |
| | | We invite writers to submit to the 2026 Uncharted Camp Summer from July 01 to August 30, 2026.
For this contest, we want stories or excerpts of summer heat, secrets by the campfire, killer mosquitoes, and everything we love and hate about summer camp and the dangers of summer! Take the elements of this trope and put them in new settings: spaceships, faraway planets, mythical isles, and don’t forget the horrific beasts and the liminal shadows. Make it serious or campy, or any register in between. Make us laugh until we cry; make us ponder the logic of your science. Tame the fantastical or let it roam. Final girls or final kisses, don’t be afraid to invite a bit of those firsts and lasts. We especially love stories that incorporate elements from multiple genres, so consider how combining these aspects might enhance your story.
This award is for all of our genres: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Thriller/Mystery/Horror, Young Adult, and Dystopian. | | | Need a reminder to submit? Add the deadline to your calendar: |
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Guest Judge Ai Jiang will choose the three winning stories from our shortlist. We’re excited to offer the first-place winner of this contest $2,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively.
Submission tips from Guest Judge Ai Jiang: From campy to quiet and haunting, I'm looking for stories that are emotion and personal, ones that really draw on the voice and style of the writers. I'm always a fan of more experimental formats, structures, and POVs in storytelling, and tales that offer a fresh take on tried and true tropes or are completely different and niche. Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist born in Changle, Fujian, currently residing in Markham, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, Clarkesworld, and The Masters Review, among others. She is the author of A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun, and I AM AI. |
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| Raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Elizabeth Conway has her MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula. She is former Editor-in-Chief of the university's literary journal, CutBank, and is currently a Fiction Editor at Literary Mama. Her fiction has been a finalist in Glimmer Train's Open Fiction contest, Reed Magazine's John Steinbeck Award and The Southeast Review's World's Best Short-Short Story Contest. More recently, her work is found in New Flash Fiction Review, Blue Earth Review, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere. Conway is a recipient of the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship for her novel manuscript, Bioluminescence. | | |
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| Patrick Hurley is a 2017 graduate of the Taos Toolbox Writer's Workshop and a member of SFWA, Codex, and the Dreamcrashers. Patrick has also had fiction published in Factor Four, Galaxy's Edge, New Myths, and Abyss & Apex. Find out more about his work at www.patrickhurleywrites.com. | | |
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| Arthur H. Manners is a British writer with a background in space science. His work is published/forthcoming in places like Analog, Strange Horizons, and Flash Fiction Online. | | |
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| Steven Bryan Bieler bats right, throws right, leans left. He likes dogs, chess, birds, his wife, and probably a few more things. His stories have appeared most recently in Lemonwood Quarterly, Spotlong Review, Fantastic Other, Prairie Fire, and Moment. Follow along at stevenbieler.com as he works on his chess noir novel, Down These Mean Squares. We are all just pawns. | | |
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We love stories that balance genre conventions with great writing! |
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| | | | 70 SW Century Drive, Suite 100442, Bend, OR, 97702 |
| | | You've received it because you've subscribed to our newsletter. © Uncharted Magazine 2026 |
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