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January Smoke Cover Art

Corrugated Faces

Roger Camp

Enter the January Smoke

January Smoke is Here | Writing Can Be Lonely

Hello friends,

Our January issue is live, and we’re excited to share it with you.

This release is loosely built around home and family—loving them, losing them, not always understanding them, and the friends we come to call family. These stories live in that tender, complicated space, and we think many of you will find something here that lingers.

We also want to take a moment to celebrate Tyler Lee, an emerging author making his first-ever magazine appearance with “Good Bones.” Please be sure to read his story, along with the work of all the brilliant writers and artists featured in this issue. Their voices are what give Neon & Smoke its shape and heartbeat.

As always, we encourage you to read the newest Letter from the Editor, titled “Writing Can Be Lonely,” which reflects on the quiet, often solitary work of writing—and why community matters so much.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, we’d love your help spreading the word:

Follow us on Instagram and/or Bluesky at @neonsmokemagazine
Share the stories you love with your readers, your fans, and your friends

That kind of sharing is how small magazines grow—one connection at a time.

A few quick notes on submissions:

Fiction and Poetry submissions are now closed
All categories will reopen in March

Thank you, as always, for reading, supporting, and being part of this community. We’re grateful you’re here.

Warmly,

T and J

New Artist Spotlight

We are honored to present Tyler Lee’s first-ever published piece in our January Smoke release. His debut story steps into the haze with intention. It is an arrival worth witnessing.

Step into the Smoke

Where the Glow Meets the Haze

Flash Fiction

We publish bold, layered flash fiction—stories that move, that mean, and that linger. We welcome all genres, as long as there’s emotional resonance, narrative stakes, and a voice that leaves a mark. Surprise us.

Digital Art

Each issue, we feature a curated selection of digital art around a central theme. This time, it’s People Like Us—a call for visual storytelling that explores identity, intimacy, kinship, difference, and the quiet (or loud) ways we gather, resist, and belong. Think vibrant, strange, layered, raw. Interpretation is welcome—we want to feel something.

Poetry

We’re looking for poems that pulse with energy, voice, and emotional honesty. For this issue, we invite work that engages with the theme Ritual—daily or divine, inherited or invented, personal or shared. Whether lyrical or narrative, formal or experimental, send us poems that break and mend, that think and feel, that earn their place.

Editor’s Light

Writing Can Be Lonely

Writing can be lonely. Not metaphorically lonely — literally lonely. It’s hours spent inside a mind no one else can access. It’s choosing silence when the world wants noise. It’s disappearing into a story only you can hear, only you can hold. Most days, it’s just you at a desk, trying to say something the way it deserves to be said. And even when you finally finish a piece, the loneliness doesn’t end. You send it to a friend, a partner, a writing group, hoping they’ll feel wh

Why We Exist for the In-Between

Every magazine has its lane. Some publish horror that bites. Others prefer fiction that aches quietly in the corners of the human heart. The literary ones say they want realism; the genre ones want monsters. But what about the stories that blur the line? The ones that live somewhere between the real and the imagined—between faith and fear, grief and transformation? Those are the stories we love. Neon & Smoke was built for the in-between. For the stories that don’t quite belon

Editor’s Letter: Every Story Has Its Place

A reflection on literary rejection, alignment, and finding the right home for your stories—from the editors at Neon & Smoke.

your editorial voice guiding readers through updates and insights.

Our Story Unfolded

Neon & Smoke is a home for bold, voice-driven fiction with emotional weight and narrative fire. We publish stories that don’t sit quietly—tales where the plot might thrill, chill, or make you laugh, but always reveals something deeper. We crave characters who leap off the page, language that crackles, and stories that blur the line between genre and literary not for the sake of novelty, but it’s the most honest way to tell the truth.

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