A holiday flash fiction contest
The Winter Mile
We're looking for original holiday-themed flash fiction exploring the joy, heartbreak, humor, chaos, and complicated humanity of the season. 1,000–2,000 words, free to enter. We are choosing 5 stories to publish — here on January 31, and in a printed zine. 5 writers, paid, credited, and sent a copy. You keep the copyright.
4 days and 22 hours until submissions open.
until submissions open
- Opens
- Sunday, November 1
- Closes
- Thursday, December 31 at 11:59pm CT, or at 100 entries
Join the list and we'll email you the day it opens.
- Entry
- Free
- Length
- 1,000–2,000 words
- Entries
- One per person
- Limit
- First 100 entries
- Who
- US, 18 and over
All 5 are published here and in the printed zine.
What we're looking for
We welcome literary fiction, contemporary fiction, romance, comedy, satire, fantasy, and magical realism. Stories can be heartfelt, hilarious, bittersweet, whimsical, or emotionally challenging. Happy endings aren't required. Horror, historical fiction, science fiction, mystery, and thrillers will not be considered.
If your story is picked
- You're published twice. Your story goes up on secondmilepress.com on January 31, and into our first holiday-fiction zine in print — with your byline and your bio, and a copy of the zine in the mail.
- You get paid. $250 for the grand prize, $50 for each of the other 4.
- You keep your copyright. You give us permission to publish your story — including in the zine, which we sell — but you don't sell the story to us. It stays yours.
Exactly what that permission covers — how long, what we can print and sell, and what happens to the stories we don't pick — is set out in the contest rules.
How judging works
- Every entry gets two independent blind reads from our screening team. They see your title and your story — never your name.
- The top stories go to the final round, read by Second Mile Press.
- Winners are announced on January 31. Everyone hears by email either way.
- The selected stories go up on this site the same day, and the printed zine follows. We commission the cover after the stories are chosen, so the artwork answers to the writing rather than the other way round — which is why we are not pretending to know the print date yet.
Questions
- Is it really free?
- Yes. No entry fee, no catch, no upsell. Future contests may charge an entry fee, but this one does not.
- How many stories can I send?
- One. We cap the contest at 100 entries so every story gets read properly, and one per person keeps that fair.
- Can I enter something I've already published?
- No — it needs to be unpublished, including on a blog, Wattpad or social media. Simultaneous submissions elsewhere are fine; just tell us if it places somewhere else.
- What happens to my story if I win?
- You keep the copyright — you are giving us permission to publish it, not selling it to us. We pay you once, put it on the site and in the printed zine, and after 30 days you can publish it anywhere else you like. We keep the right to go on selling this one zine.
- Can I use AI?
- Not to write the story — that has to be you. Spellcheck and grammar tools are fine; nobody is disqualified for using one. The line is between a tool that checks what you wrote and a tool that writes it for you.
- What happens to my story if you don't pick it?
- Nothing. Entering gives us no right to publish your work — we only read it to judge the contest. If your story isn't selected we have no claim on it of any kind.
- Will I get feedback?
- No. Every entry gets two careful reads, but we don't send individual notes.
- When do I hear back?
- We announce on January 31 and publish the selected stories here the same day. Every entrant hears by email either way. The printed zine comes later — we commission the cover once we know which stories are in it, so the artwork answers to the writing rather than the other way round.