Authors! Project Franklin Wants YOU to Write Halloween Flash!
The long-awaited call for Halloween-flavored stories is here! Seeking: contemporary flash fiction with a spooky theme, 500-1,000 words, set in the city of Franklin, USA.
It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally HERE!
Many of you have been waiting patiently for this very moment. A few of you have dared to poke at me about it. (How are the stubs of your fingers? Did you get the flowers I sent?)
Relax, my spooky glitches! The time has come, the form is here, and you may now…
Submit Your Story for Project Franklin, Collection Two: Halloween 2025!
Collection Specifications:
Rule 1: The unifying factors among the stories are the time (Halloween) and place, an American city by a river. The place is fictional… Its name is Franklin, and the state is intentionally unknown. (Franklin is the most common city name in the United States.) The river is only ever known as “the river” or “The River.”
Rule 2: The time is present day — October 31st, November 1st, and/or November 2nd, 2025
Rule 3: Each story will be roughly 500-1000 words.
Rule 4: Your story can be any genre, but at the end, we return to the present-day city of Franklin, a city that has gone largely untouched by the events of your tale.
Flash fiction, by necessity, tells a story with few characters.
Rule 5: Each story will have at least two identifiable characters, and after the story’s end, the reader will have two choices of whose story they follow next.
(In a recent story by Thaddeus, the second character was only identified as “the old woman”, and she would be a logical option to write about. The author of her follow-up story would give her a name.)
Rule 6: No politics. No erotica. No slurs. No extreme gore. Nothing that undermines a group effort, not matter how justified it might be in a standalone story.
Rule 7: You may not re-use any characters from Collection One; only new characters will be accepted for this collection.
I don’t want to bog you down right now, so I’ll go through this in more depth another time. Suffice to say, in order to build an audience for Franklin, we want many, varied stories. To this end, there will be no overlap in characters between the first three Collections (Summer, Halloween, and Winter Holidays).
Rule 8: Gone are the days of squishy deadlines. These are set in stone.
First Round Submissions: July 6 - August 2
First Round Voting: August 3 - August 9
Second Round Submissions: August 10 - August 23
Second Round Voting: August 24 - August 30
Third Round Submissions: August 31 - September 13
Third Round Voting: September 14 - September 20
Fourth Round Submissions: September 21 - October 4
Fourth Round Voting: October 5 - October 11
Fifth Round Writing: October 12 - October 18
Promotion, Promotion, Promotion: October 19 - November 26
FINAL PUBLICATION DATE: Tuesday, October 28
Story Paywall Date: November 27 (30 days after publication)
Need more information? Keep reading; I’ve got you, boo!
Project Franklin: A FAQ for Authors
Q: What is Project Franklin?
A: Conceived by Thaddeus Thomas and originally introduced via The Literary Salon with Thaddeus Thomas, Project Franklin is a collaborative, open-world fiction project that focuses on promoting authors. This promotion is done primarily through a story-web structure where a reader starts with one story and, at the end, may choose to follow one of two characters into the next story.
Q: What does “collaborative, open-world fiction” mean?
A: It means that authors work together—through writing and voting—to determine everything about the city of Franklin, USA. This fictional city is set somewhere in the Midwestern United States, on an unnamed river.
From time to time, we put out a call for authors to submit to a new collection of stories. These authors then contribute flash fiction pieces (500-1,000 words) over five rounds. Those pieces become official parts of Franklin’s lore and help fill in a bit more about the city, its secrets, and its residents.
Q: How is a collection structured?
A: A collection is a themed group of 31 stories, written over several weeks in five rounds, and published simultaneously on an official release date.
Here’s a handy infographic to help illustrate what’s going on, from the reader experience.
Q: How does it all work?
A: We start with a release date and a theme.
Next, we open the call for authors with excellent communication habits who can commit to (up to) five stories and a set of immoveable, stone-carved deadlines. (That’s where we’re at right now!)
Then, we begin writing.
When the stories are written, the authors vote on their favorites. The authors of the favorite stories then move on to the next round (one level up). ALL authors continue voting in subsequent rounds, even those who have been relegated.
In the second (and third, and fourth) round, the promoted authors write a story that includes an encounter between a character in their winning story, and a character in one of the stories by an author who was relegated. (These story pairings are assigned by the project’s Worldbuilding Deity, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️.)
This process repeats until the final story.
After all 31 stories are written, links are added (to index, first story, previous story, end-of-story choices) as well as the collection’s official copyright graphic. They are then released, all at once, on the release date.
They are available for people to read for 30 days, and then, the archive copies (kept in the Manuscripts on WorldAnvil) are locked behind a paywall, and authors are free to choose how to proceed with their works.
Q: How are stories in a collection copyrighted?
A: Each collection has a 30-day “public access” window. During this time, stories are required to display the Project Franklin Official Content copyright graphic and must maintain a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. In addition, stories written in rounds 2-5 must include a credit line, “Featuring original characters by:” and the names of the authors who first created the characters.
After that 30-day window, authors have a number of choices.
Edit the story, removing references to Franklin and changing character names. The original text of the story will remain in the Manuscript archive with the Official Content graphic. The author does not need to maintain copyright notice, as it is, in practical effect, a different story.
Edit the story, changing only character names but leaving it set in Franklin. The original text of the story will, again, remain in the Manuscript archive with the copyright graphic. The author needs to maintain a CC BY-SA copyright notice, but not the Official Content graphic. The author does not need to credit other authors specifically.
Edit the story, leaving character names, but changing the setting. Original text of the story remains in the Manuscript archive, with the Official Content graphic. The author needs to maintain a CC BY-SA copyright notice, but not the Official Content graphic. The author must additionally have a credit line “Featuring original characters by:” and the names of the authors who first created the characters.
This is a living document and will change as necessary.
Changes will be announced in posts released in the For Authors section. Adjust your account settings here.
Project Franklin is Proud to Be AI-Free!
In cities, suburbs, and towns across the Midwest, USA, communities are rising up to protest the building of AI data centers. AI companies want to strip the farmland and hinder America’s ability to feed itself, while poisoning the little water that remains for crops, herds, and people.
Generative AI is not welcome in Franklin, please and thank you!
Please notice that all of the graphics and .CSS editing have been done by
Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️and Perry Chalmers.
Out of respect for the people and places in the Midwest, the food that we eat, for our peers in the fiction community, and ourselves as artists please do not bring AI content into the project. Spell-check your writing, of course! But robots have nothing new to contribute to creativity, only regurgitations of previous iterations. They cannot create, only recombine as they destroy.
And to show our respect for you and your hard, human work and creativity, this publication has been set up to deny AI-training bots. This is a setting provided by Substack, and you can enable it for your own publication in the “Privacy” section of your “Settings.”
As you can see, this will hurt our discoverability and so we are relying on you to boost that. Feel free to cross-post, restack, and even forward emails to creative peers and fans who will LOVE this project as much as you and I do!