In today’s Editor Pick: When Euan swears he’s seen an old woman riding a hyena across the Zimbabwean plains, everyone laughs—until the night laughs back. It’s “The Clever Girls” by Masimba Musodza. Read it for free on www.gavagai.com

In today’s Editor Pick, the Ouija board gets an upgrade—and a body count. From the dusty patents of 1891 to a modern neural-network séance, this story drags the talking board into the digital afterlife. Airvalve Semilunar Astern by Nick Mamatas: read it for free on gavagai.com!

My most difficult-to-spell story "Chrysalis in Chrysanthemum," a short pregnancy cosmic body horror story, is an Editor's Pick at Gavagai, a new site for horror writers and readers. I have invites if anyone wants any, but here's the link to the story: www.gavagai.com/posts/386

For today’s Editor Pick, we jump from the darkly culinary to the deep sea with Fishing by Chris Wilcox: a creeping maritime horror about infection, obsession, and the pull of the sea. Read for free on gavagai.com

For Halloween, treat yourself to Colleen Anderson’s disturbingly toothsome tale of hunger and obsession. Let yourself be consumed by Love Bites. Read it for free at gavagai.com!

With today’s Editor Pick we move from the swamp to seamstress with Revenge Dress, a poignant quiet horror tale by Susan J. Lin where existential threads spiral downward to an inevitable end. Read it here for free: www.gavagai.com

Cassondra Windwalker’s Saved by the Water is our first Editor Pick! A heist gone wrong, a euphoric romance and a doting mother, all carried by Cassondra’s authentic voice. What more could you ask for? Read it for free at gavagai.com

An update on story acceptances: we're good to start sending these out today or tomorrow. The only obstacle to moving stories forward in the queue was verifying the time it takes for Stripe payments to push through to authors. We've been doing some test payments in a "live" mode and are still 🧵 1/2

A Question of Images — by Gavagai For everyone on Gavagai right now, the site you're using is in private beta. That means there are some rough edges that we're hoping to smooth before opening to a wider audience. It also means experimenting with various tools to keep the community safer when it ope…

Story Acceptances: What to Expect — by Gavagai Though yesterday's AWS outage set us back a bit in both reading and tech, we're still hoping to get some story acceptances out this week! Having placed some paid stories in both horror and non-horror markets, I wanted to make sure the process was secu…

We're still seeing some fallout from this morning's AWS outage on the site. For the nerds out there, we are smack dab in us-east-1; even though we don't use the specific technologies affected, the blast radius is probably significantly larger. Thanks for your patience.

FYI, on Gavagai we allow 1000-character posts. When you opt to cross post to Bluesky, we automatically break up long posts and thread them, as you see here

Just to give a rough idea of schedule, we're hoping to select the first group of stories and publish them by October 31. I think we're all pretty stunned at the number of submissions and we'll have a long reading time after that as well. It might be too aspirational to think we'll have some 🧵 1/2

There is some amazing writing being submitted here. I feel very privileged.

Gavagai Tips and Tricks #1 — by Gavagai One cool feature we built into Gavagai is the ability to embed your feed—all the posts that you see below your profile info—in another page. This was totally the result of laziness, because I'd never get around to updating my "author updates" on my author pag…

Good news everyone! We've made the submission process much easier for those who just want to submit their work for the current call. We still require an account, but you can opt to bypass the story editor if you find it's a barrier to submitting your work.

We updated our AI policy to better reflect our position on using your aubmissions or other data for AI purposes. In short, we don’t and won’t use your work for any such purposes. www.gavagai.com/posts/10

Omg what have I gotten myself into. Reading time!

If you have any technical/logistical issues with the site, feel free to mention us here and we'll address the issue asap. You can also hit us up through the suggestion box. It's the lightbulb icon in the header (obviously not an option if you're not able to sign up or have invite code issues). TY!

We sent out the first batch of invites overnight and already had a great response for the horror submission call! Thanks to everyone who submitted. There were a few technical issues, but thankfully nothing too major. We’ll be keeping our eyes on the site logs and the suggestion box tho.

I may actually like the light theme on the site better than dark mode. This is so unlike me.

Just under a week before we start sending out invites and open for our first submission call! Jump over to gavagai.com to request an invite now if you want to submit! While this one is horror in honor of Halloween and our October 13 launch, we’ll be reading subs well into November #WritingCommunity

Thanks for all the interest thus far in both the site and the #horror submission call! We're very excited for launch day on October 13! #writingcommunity

Content warnings are critical in ensuring readers' mental health. It's somewhat surprising that they were ever controversial. We made them a core part of the composition tool on Gavagai, and they are subsequently displayed as badges on the rendered story.

The 15 minute edit window for Quick Posts is not something I hate, either. We are limited to posting a followup when cross-posting to Bluesky, but in-site it's a great feature

It was important for us to have Bluesky integration on Gavagai from the very beginning. It's so nice to be able to post something on Gavagai and have it quickly cross-post to Bluesky. But we still want to have a presence on other platforms, which means lots of duplication. Not so fun 😞

Gavagai AI Policy — by Gavagai Gavagai is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating human-authored creative writing. We believe the process of human thought, emotion, and unique expression is central to the art of writing. Our community is built on the foundation of writers sharing their authentic vo…

I mean, check EVERY browser to make sure EVERY page is rendering the way you want? Who does that? 😬

If you submit your work to Gavagai, please make it the product of the human mind. I'm writing: Gavagai’s AI Policy — Non-fiction · drafting #amwriting

Submissions open October 13 for #horror! We’re a new paying market for short fiction and a Bluesky-adjacent writing community. Join in the fun! #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WriterSky

Gavagai Horror Story Submission Call — by Gavagai We’re thrilled to announce that Gavagai, a brand-new social platform for writers and readers, officially opens its doors on  October 13, 2025 . Gavagai is a place where writers can share work, connect with community, and get their voices discovered…

#WritingCommunity #WriterSky #AmWriting We’re opening submissions for #horror short stories!

Gavagai Horror Story Submission Call — by Gavagai We’re thrilled to announce that Gavagai, a brand-new social platform for writers and readers, officially opens its doors on  October 13, 2025 . Gavagai is a place where writers can share work, connect with community, and get their voices discovered…

Do you know how many hoops you have to jump through just to get a stupid logo to show in the native iPhone mail client instead of a “G?” ♾️, friends. ♾️.

Writers: how often when you get a story acceptance are you asked to provide your tax information? #WriterSky #WritingCommunity #AmWriting

We’re launching on October 13! For an invite to the private beta, request an invite code at gavagai.com 🐰 #WritingCommunity #AmWriting #WriterSky

Text & Taxes — by Gavagai From initial concept, Gavagai was about literary citizenship , community and artist support. Or really, support for art from the community of artists itself with Gavagai as an agent of that support. For better or worse, "support" is oftentimes synonymous with "payment." Wr…

One of the features we added to Gavagai kind of late in the game was the ability to save drafts of stories and collections. I don't know how I lived without it now

First! — by Gavagai This is it! The first post on Gavagai! If you're reading this, it's probably before the site officially opens its doors (we're shooting for October 13). While there's still a decent-sized laundry list of things to be done, they are (hopefully) for the most part minor. But we th…

Gavagai supports several different kinds of posts. Quick posts are great for sharing quick thoughts or impressions, story posts are for longform stories or essays with rich content and embedded images, and collections are like anthologies or short story collections.

Hey #WritingCommunity #WriterSky #AmWriting! Gavagai is a new Bluesky-adjacent community specifically for writers! We're using an invite code system for new accounts. If you're interested, give us a follow and visit gavagai.com and click the link to request an invite! Doors open October 13!

This guy gets it. Full disclosure: this is me.

We're getting closer to our private beta! We'll be using a combination of invite codes and additions of followers of this account here on Bluesky to the allow list for the beta. We're still working out the kinks in our Bluesky integration so that using Gavagai from Bluesky is seamless and fun!

Here’s hoping, Panda Express. Here’s hoping.

(1/9) Sharing some thoughts on the recent age assurance regulation discussions across the world…