Look Up: Submissions Are Open for EXALTED
When we opened the call for IMMORTALS, we asked for stories from the dark: vampire romance with appetite, patience and teeth. Those stories arrive in 2027, and we can’t wait for you to meet them.
Now we’re turning the other way. We’re looking up.
Today we’re opening submissions for EXALTED: Stories of Light and Longing, an anthology of angel romance from Mirari Press, publishing in October 2027.
Why angels
The angel is one of the oldest images we have of something greater than ourselves – vast, winged, burning, impossibly bright. Fantasy has borrowed it for as long as there has been fantasy: the warrior orders of epic fantasy, the radiant guardians of tabletop games, the many-eyed, terrible things at the edges of cosmic horror. Every one of them asks the same question the vampire asks, from the opposite direction. The vampire wants to consume you. The angel wants something stranger: to be devoted, to be perfect, to keep its law. What happens when it wants you instead?
That’s the story we want to read, six times over.
Angels without religion
EXALTED is not a religious anthology. No gods. No heaven or hell. No fall from grace, no scripture, no figures borrowed from any faith.
That isn’t because faith isn’t worth writing about. It’s because we want angels who belong to the worlds you build, not the one we inherited. Ask what an angel is when there is nothing above it. What does it serve? Who made it, if anyone did? What does its order demand, and what does it forbid? And what does it cost when a being made for a single purpose discovers a second one?
Give us winged hosts guarding the borders of a realm. Give us angels forged by a mage for one war, still standing centuries after it ended. Give us celestial castes with their own politics, armour that has to be built by mortal hands, a being of flame who cannot lie falling for someone who has to. Secondary worlds, far futures, other planes – the angel just has to belong to the cosmology, not to scripture.
Romance first, at any temperature
The love story is the story. The angel can’t be a love interest who happens to have wings; its nature has to shape the desire, the stakes and the change at the heart of the piece.
IMMORTALS was open door, on the page, no apologies. EXALTED is different. Spice is welcome but not required. A slow burn that never leaves the battlements, a single kiss that breaks an oath, an open-door night beneath the wings – all of it belongs in this book. What we care about is that the longing is real.
Every kind of love
We want the full spectrum. Stories of every orientation, gender and configuration are welcome, and queer love stories especially so. Mirari Revel has always been a home for them, and EXALTED will be too.
Two lines we won’t cross
Every character in a romantic situation must be an adult, in appearance as well as age – that includes cherubic and childlike angels. And while the gulf of power between an angel and a mortal is part of what makes this romance electric, the love itself must be freely chosen. A command, a binding vow or a glamour is not consent.
The details
Length: 8,000–12,000 words, in English
Heat level: any, from closed door to open door
Unpublished work only – no reprints, blogs or self-published pieces
Open to writers anywhere in the world
Payment: a standard publishing agreement with royalties on every print and ebook sale
Submissions close: 28 February 2027 at midnight (UTC +2)
Selected stories announced: 30 April 2027
Publication: October 2027, in print and ebook worldwide
Read the full guidelines and submit here.
And if you’d like to know the moment IMMORTALS is out – or hear first which six stories make it into EXALTED – subscribe to Mirari Mox, our newsletter, at the bottom of this page.
Look up. Be exalted.