Head First into the Maw, Now Available!
Head First into the Maw: The Best of the TL;DR Press 2K Terrors short story Horror Competition Winners is a collection of horrifying, harrowing, and heart wrenching tales to benefit Scares That Care, a 501(c)(3) charity that has raised and donated over $300,000 to organizations and families with a child affected by illness, burns or women fighting breast cancer.
Head First into the Maw is our 17th charity collection to date, is now available in print and ebook here. Buy your copy now for 25 winning stories to help fund this amazing charity.
Buy your copy on Amazon via the links below, or search “TL;DR press 2K Terrors” on your country’s Amazon site!
Thank you again to our contributing winners of this collection:
The Last Sound You Ever Hear by C.M. Dulas
Safe Out There by Kat Veldt
A Mercy by Molly Wadkins
The Storm by Aggie Novak
Howling Black by Charlie Rogers
Off the Rack by Alex Atkins
Yosemite by Alyssa Beatty
Day Zero of Doomsday by Kris Schnebelen
Belly Bees by Sam Logan
Marion Wants to Dance by David Contara
Strange Frequencies by Jaime Gill
Ghost in the Machine by Abi Hennig
Consequence by Cuyler Meade
Splinters by Anne Wilkins
Cut Loose by Sean Fallon
The Gnashing and Buddy Hart by Jack Lennon
Mudlark by Josephine Queen
Hell for the Holidays by Courtney Danielson
Something on the Roof by Heather Santo
The Care and Maintenance of Roses by ZE Coonen
White Cat, Black Art by Linda M. Bayley
Cuckoo’s Nest by Emily Deutsch
Zone Interdite by Madeleine Pelletier
All You Can Eat by Sarah McPherson
Simon Says by Tracy Bradford
How we got here
We began in September with a call to writers to enter our short story competition: the TL;DR Press 2K Terrors short story horror Competition. We chose a competition to help fund our next anthology call and allow us to pay writers for the first time, showcase some wonderful writers, and to help fund our charity of choice, Scares That Care. Plus, participants always seem to have a great time taking part in the 1K Word Herd competition, and we loved making it happen!
This year we had our returning panel of six 1KWHC judges selected from TL;DR Press’s founders and editors, as well as the all-powerful Unholy Overseer to manage contact with our entrants and the dark lord, assign all of the stories, and generally make sure everything ran smoothly.
We were utterly blown away by the quality of the submissions to the competition! To say that it was incredibly difficult to narrow down our top 25 favourites would be an understatement. Had we the budget, we could easily have made a great collection with twice the amount of winners. So many of the entrants delivered wonderful and innovative ideas from across the genres and styles, and built on their prompts in ways that we couldn’t have imagined. It was an inspirational month and a half of judging, and we couldn’t be more grateful to all the writers who competed!
Our judges read all of the stories that we received, wrote detailed feedback to every entry, and compiled our shortlist of 25 stories. All stories were kept anonymous to the judges until after we locked in the winning stories.
Making sure that everyone who entered the competition got useful, detailed feedback was incredibly important to us.!
We were extremely pleased to announce that The Last Sound You Ever Hear by C.M. Dulas as our winner in January.
We want to thank the wonderful #tldrwriters and #tldrterrors communities for your stories and support while we read your work and selected our winners. This collection is the work of hundreds of hours, and we’re so pleased to share with the world!
Thank you to everyone who entered the competition for your wonderful stories. We sincerely hope you enjoyed being a part of this project.
Thank you to our judges!
Hannah Hulbert, Alex Laurel Lanz, Jenna Harvie, Joe Butler, Penfold, and Callum Colback.
Thank you to our Overseer and Head of Production!
Marie Kelly
Thank you to our Cover Illustrator!
Joe Butler
How to support our release:
- Buy our collection in eBook! US | Canada | UK
- Retweet our big news and tag @TLDRpress!
- Share with your friends, family, and followers in person or online.
- Rate and review our collection on Amazon and goodreads!
Watch out for more news about our next call for submissions, as well as workshops, resources, and more! Want to stay in the loop? Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, subscribe to our newsletter, and join our Slack writing group.