Note: any profits seen in 2025 will go to NAPS (https://www.pms.org.uk) - a UK-based charity for PMDD.

Please interpret this theme however you like. Write us a quiet mood piece or an action-packed powerful, character-driven story. Make it humorous or as dark as the night. Send us your best speculative, horror, dark fantasy or dark sci-fi stories, as long as it's full of the feels.

Some ideas: the pattern could be in the narrative technique (fragmentation, mirror writing, foreshadowing, meta-fictional repetition), the thematic composition (think cycles of death and birth, family curses, sin and retribution) for example. Or how about incorporating chants, supernatural rituals, or echoes in your prose? A story with temporal patterns in it might float our boat (although be careful, we don’t want our inbox flooded with time loops and cyclical stories, unless done exceptionally well or with a novel twist). Seasonal patterns, recurring times, patterns in nature, patterns in objects which feature in your tale, geographical patterns, repetitive architecture, patterns in weather, behavioural ticks, recurring nightmares, obsessions…any tenuous link will do, just make it your best work and give it a good edit prior to sending it our way. You get the idea. Surprise us.