Season Themes

Why themes? Readers play favorites, you know. Everybody has their favorite genres and our contest’s season themes are here to assemble winning story collections that readers will love. These themes function as story prompts for our author base, suggesting fun mashups and settings for the most creative, hard-hitting fiction. We only accept stories that fit these themes, and we wish you much Havok as you craft your best work!

UPDATED April 24, 2025: We have prepared a downloadable/printable PDF of the monthly themes and deadlines (click the thumbnail to download). We highly recommend checking out these resources for ideas as you craft your story! Feel free to tag @havokauthornews on Instagram or email authorcentral@gohavok.com with any questions about our themes and guidelines. Sign up for our author newsletter (see sidebar on this page; scroll down on mobile) for tips from our editors and news about author contests.

Our Season 12 flash fiction contest features a character prompt. We challenge you to take the character of the month — each designed by one of our stellar featured authors — and work it into your story in some way. And by “some way” we’re tapping into the theories of the fictional multiverse. Your interpretation of the character and how you write them to fit our five genres will be unique!

• Take the character and make him/her your own. The core traits listed here in the prompt should not be violated, but everything else is up for grabs. If the character profile includes genre-specific details you are allowed to adjust them to suit any of Havok’s accepted genres.
• The character must appear in your story, but does not have to be the protagonist. They could be a side character, an antagonist, or even just appear as a cameo. But keep in mind that your portrayal of the character does impact our selection of contest winners.
• We need stories for ALL FIVE HAVOK GENRES: mystery, science fiction, humor, thriller, and fantasy. How does this character appear in a mystery story? If they existed in a sci-fi or fantasy universe, what would that look like? In what sort of thriller or suspense plot did they get caught up? What’s the funniest scenario you can imagine for them?

For reference: All the past, present, and future Season 12 character profiles on one page.

NOTE: Deadlines are always for 11:59pm Pacific time on the date indicated. Get those stories in by midnight, or they’ll turn into pumpkins!

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Alice by Lewis Carroll stories: SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

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Harmony Star by J. M. Allison (Deadline: June 20)
SUBMISSIONS OPEN

Physical Description: Long straight blonde hair, blue eyes, age 23, tall willowy figure, wears a lot of orange, teal, and olive green. Loves nature and has a fierce desire to save all animals (no matter the kind—after all, dragons need love too).

Personality traits: She is compassionate and outgoing. Often trusts her instincts and feelings over logic and reason. Always up to try a new activity. Can’t say no to helping those in need.

Core Values: Will fight passionately to rescue any animal or aspect of nature. Believes sing-alongs and music will make everything better.

Deepest desire / motivation: She dreams of one day opening a nature preserve and animal rehabilitation center.

Greatest weakness: Any creature with sad eyes, or a musical performance.

Worst habit: Suffers from short term memory loss. She will often forget what she is doing part way through the task, or forget what she just said and thus repeats herself. She is also known for randomly pulling out her ukulele and bursting into song.

Deadline for Harmony Star stories: Friday, June 20, 2025

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Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Deadline: July 18)
SUBMISSIONS OPEN

Physical Description: Dorian is a remarkably handsome and perpetually youthful young man looking to be in his early twenties with flawless features, often compared to a statue made of ivory and rose petals. He has “finely curved scarlet lips,” “frank blue eyes,” and “crisp golden hair,” giving him a soft, angelic appearance… on the outside.

Personality Traits: Charming and pure with a simple and beautiful nature—at least at the beginning. However, these child-like traits of uninhibited openness often lead him to be volatile, selfish, manipulative, deceitful, and even cruel at times in his pursuit of hedonistic fulfilment.

Core Values: Dorian values beauty for beauty’s sake. Whether he’s admiring a rose in a garden or himself in a painting, he is ever searching for self-gratification through the physical form.

Deepest Desire/Motivation: Dorian desires to remain forever young and forever happy. He does have a moral compass, but his quest for pleasure and beauty comes first.

Greatest Weakness: Vanity and self-superiority. And also his painting. If it were to be destroyed, all of Dorian’s past sins would come back on him, destroying his beauty and his immortality.

Backstory (optional): Dorian’s story begins in Victorian England, where his friend Basil Hallward paints a portrait of him to capture his exquisite beauty. A young and wealthy libertine, after seeing the painting Dorian becomes obsessed with his own beauty to the point of selling his soul so his portrait will age instead of him. He uses his newfound immortality to explore all that London has to offer. However, he quickly notices his portrait taking on the physical manifestations of each of his sensual transgressions. Soon, the painting is so hideous that he has to hide it to avoid seeing its decay. Some say that Dorian became so desperate to hide the truth of his painting that he murdered his best friend Basil and stabbed his portrait with the same knife, putting an end to his own eternal life. However, immortality is a hard thing to give up, and there’s a lot to enjoy in the farthest reaches of the multiverse.

Remember! When using public domain characters, be careful not to include any details or characters from later works (retellings, movies, TV shows, etc) that may have come later and still be under copyright. Use the original source material only as your inspiration.

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Deadlines close at 11:59pm Pacific time on the date shown.

The themes below will open for submissions ~2 months before their deadlines.

Luke James (aka Therrus) by Olivia Gratehouse (Deadline: Aug 15)

Physical Description: He looks like a man in his mid-twenties, who’s just a little taller and more muscular than average. He’s completely bald and devoid of hair on any part of his body, with bright golden eyes that are just a little larger than normal, and six fingers on each hand.

At least, that’s what his human disguise looks like. Because Luke James is actually an alien in disguise, whose real name is Therrus.

Therrus is a Civaran, a green-skinned, reptilian race of humanoids. They are the only species in the galaxy who have the closest shape and build to humans, so they are frequently employed to take on human disguises in order to study Earth.

Therrus’ disguise is based on holographic technology, which projects the image of human skin over his Civaran skin. For some reason, they can’t get the hair right, so instead he wears a baseball cap to hide his bald head, and thick rectangular glasses to hide his eyes and lack of eyebrows.

Personality traits: A dreamer and an explorer, Therrus is a bright and eager young man who loves to learn and is VERY enthusiastic about his undercover job on earth. He’s positive to the point of being unrealistic, but his optimism is infectious to those around him.

He’s part of the Earthan Initiative, a Galactic Union-sanctioned group of scientists and researchers whose primary function is to study pre-space flight worlds that have not yet “joined society.”

Therrus has studied earth culture for ten years, but has only been on earth for two months, so he’s still pretty naive and hasn’t fully learned how to blend in. But he LOVES earth culture and is obsessed with earth scifi media, particularly Star Wars and Star Trek (hence the human disguise name, Luke James).

Core Values: Chaotic good, Therrus values knowledge above all else. There’s only so much one can learn from a spaceship hovering above a planet, so he’s excited to learn anything and everything he can about earth culture. He refuses to harm a “primitive” human, even if his life is in danger. Which it would never be, because he absolutely follows the primary rule of Do Not Engage With the Primitive Humans. Absolutely.

Deepest desire / motivation: He hopes the earth people will hurry up and figure out space travel so they can join the Galactic Union, and he can live out his life on earth as a Civaran ambassador. He dreams of one day exchanging knowledge with humans and sharing more about his own culture.

Greatest weakness: Caffeine is a deadly poison to Civarans, which is annoying since humans are so obsessed with it. He’s optimistic to a fault and to the point that other people think he’s naive and even disingenuous. Despite his orders to Not Engage with Primitive Humans, he LOVES humans and always goes out of his way to try to talk to and learn from them.

Worst habit: He’s supposed to regularly check in with the Earthan Initiative and give reports, but will go weeks on end in radio silence. Extremely messy, his living area is in a constant state of disarray. Loves to try human food but forgets to take his immunity pills and ends up sick for days due to the bacteria. Regularly messes up human words or makes references to scifi movies and shows. (For example: instead of goodbye, he might say “May the force be with you” or “live long and prosper.”)

Backstory (optional): While the Earthan Initiative mostly sticks to space travel, their technology is portal based and can sometimes “take a wrong turn” so to speak. Therrus mainly travels via a “portal hopper,” which is a device on his wrist, made to look like a watch. As such, there’s been more than one occasion where a portal hop has landed him 500 years in the past, or into an alternate reality. Fortunately, the homing signal in his portal hopper always allows him to get back to the right timeline. Well, almost always.

Ebenezer Scrooge by Charles Dickens (Deadline: Sept 19)

Physical description: “Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him.”

Personality / traits: Selfish. A greedy, miserly, joyless workaholic. Unmoved by external appeals. Clever strategist when it comes to making money. Cruel in his complete lack of care for the well-being of others.

Core values: Take care of yourself, because nobody else is going to do it.

Greatest weakness: Blinded by fear of falling into poverty. Unable to see what his obsession is costing him–and others.

Deepest desire / motivation: To build and keep enough wealth to avoid poverty and suffering. But secretly, so secretly that he doesn’t admit it even to himself, he is desperately lonely and afraid that it’s too late for that to ever change.

Backstory (optional): As a child, Scrooge wanted to enjoy Christmas as much as anyone. But he was also neglected as a child, left at boarding school during the holidays. He suffered from the hardships of poverty, so later Scrooge decided money would solve all his problems. This single-minded pursuit of wealth as protection against suffering caused all other considerations to fall aside. The obsession destroyed his relationship with his fiancee, Belle. He had no compassion on his employees when they were in need. Even his deceased business partner, Bob Marley, warns Scrooge from beyond the dead about the ultimate end of the path he has chosen.

Remember! When using public domain characters, be careful not to include any details or characters from later works (retellings, movies, TV shows, etc) that may have come later and still be under copyright. Use the original source material only as your inspiration.

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Now Go Write!

Using the season theme above for ideas, go write and then send us your best story that fits any of our Accepted Genres. Be sure to download and use our Manuscript Formatting template and follow the Submission Guidelines!