STRANGE HORIZONS MAGAZINE

Every once-in-awhile I find a short story market for writers that is worthy of posting here. Today it is STRANGE HORIZONS mag - http://www.strangeh orizons.com/ guidelines/ fiction.shtml

Guidelines:

We want good speculative fiction. If your story doesn't have a clear fantasy or science fiction element, or at least strong speculative- fiction sensibilities, it's probably not for us. We'd like to
help make the field of speculative fiction more inclusive, more welcoming to both authors and readers from traditionally underrepresented groups, so we're interested in seeing stories from
diverse perspectives and backgrounds.

We want stories that have some literary depth but aren't boring; styles that are unusual yet readable; structures that balance inventiveness with traditional narrative. We like characters we can care about. We like settings and cultures that we don't see all the time in speculative
fiction. We like stories that address political issues in complex and sensitive ways. However, we don't like heavy-handed or preachy or simplistic approaches. We like the idea of hypertext stories, but we have not yet published any. If you want to send us a hypertext story, query us to discuss how to submit it.

As with any magazine, the best way to get a sense of the kinds of things we like is to read some of the fiction we publish. Since our magazine is free, the only cost to you is some of your time. Visit our fiction archives to see what we've published. We're not generally interested in:

* horror (especially stories in which the main goal is to evoke feelings of fear, terror, or revulsion in the reader)
* stories that explain a scientific or technological phenomenon in great detail
* plots we see all the time
* stories with twist endings
Any sex or violence in the story should be artistically justified; no excessive gore.

Except as noted above, we welcome all subgenres and forms of speculative fiction. Please don't query to ask if we're interested in some particular subgenre; you can assume that if it's not listed above, it's okay. Sorry, no simultaneous submissions or unsolicited reprints. (Like most magazines, we consider material that has appeared on publicly-accessible websites to be published, and therefore cannot consider it.)

We welcome submissions from anywhere in the world. Material other than fiction should be submitted to the appropriate editor.

Pay Rates and Lengths
We strongly prefer stories under 5,000 words long. We will consider stories up to 9,000 words, but the longer the story, the less likely we are to be interested. We can't consider stories significantly over our wordcount limit, not even as serials. In particular, we can't consider
novels. We also can't consider partial or incomplete stories. Please don't send us part of a story and ask us to request the rest of it if we're interested.

We have no minimum wordcount requirement; we will consider short-short stories. However,
we generally aren't interested in stories with twist endings. We pay 5 cents/word, with a minimum payment of $50. SFWA officially considers us a professional market.

We buy first-printing world exclusive rights for two months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope (but do not require) that you'll allow us to post the story in our archives indefinitely after it's rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time.