Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A state-of-the-art vessel with a passenger manifest composed of the era’s social elite travels at a dangerous rate of speed and hits a partially submerged object, resulting in the vessel sinking with few survivors. If you guessed the White Ship disaster of 1120, very surprising answer—you know your shipwrecks—but no, we had the Titanic sinking in mind.
The parallels don’t end there. Both were allegedly doomed from the beginning, with priests barred from boarding and blessing the White Ship, and the Titanic with its botched champagne christening (not to mention the rumored cursed mummy sarcophagus in its cargo hold). Both presaged periods of turmoil: the White Ship followed by The Anarchy and the Titanic, World War One. And finally, both were ultimately offerings to the sea, and while Poseidon may be its ruler, the true personification of the mausoleum of shipwrecks that is the ocean’s cold depths is
Serving as first mate for this maiden voyage down to Davy Jones' locker is Grant Wamack, author of God's Leftovers, The Frolicking, and The Scarecrows Will Watch Over Us, tarot reader, Navy veteran, and member of the Broken River Books collective, a veritable pirate band on the high seas of independent literature.
"There are more than 3 million shipwrecks in the world. Less than one percent have been located."
Please send submissions to contact@apocalypse-confidential.com as a Word or Google doc for written submissions and .jpgs or .pngs for visual submissions, with how you’d like to be credited, a short bio in third person, and any links for promotion (blog, portfolio, etc.). Include your Twitter handle if you wish to be tagged. Please limit fiction submissions to around 4k words. This special presentation is open in all categories. Due to our submission window and review period, simultaneous submissions are strongly discouraged. Please include “EREBUS” in the subject line of your email.
Deadline: September 13.
Publication date: September 24.
Artwork by Robert Voyvodic.
Note: This is our shipwreck special, not our general underwater special; we'll get to that eventually. As long as your tale of low lives and high seas prominently features a shipwreck or a ship sinking, it will be considered.