What We Mean By “Half Genre / Always Lit”

At Neon & Smoke, we publish work that is half genre, always lit.

Writers ask us what that means.

I suppose it’s a reflection of how we see the world: most people, in real life, are hybrids.

We are soft and hard.

Tender and sharp.

Holy and unholy.

Poetry one minute and curse words the next.

Horny but ashamed. 

We want connection and we want distance.

We want safety and we flirt with danger.

We are brave and terrified, loving and cruel, often in the same breath.

Human beings don’t fit cleanly into categories, and we’ve never understood why fiction should.

When we read submissions, we’re less interested in what category a story belongs to than in what it’s doing to the human being at the center of it.

So, when we say “half genre,” we don’t mean spaceships or spells (though we’re happy to see those).

We mean stories where something is pressing, moving, breaking. The way it happens in real life.

And when we say “always lit,” we mean the story has a thoughtful pulse.

Interiority.

Characters who don’t just sit under pressure; they feel it.

We love emotional stakes, quiet moments, and the bruises that burn.

We want stories that show humans in all their glorious shades: the beautiful, the broken, the blunt, the spiritual, the strange.

So is it hard to get into Neon & Smoke?

Not really.

If you write in that place where human contradiction meets emotional truth, where the speculative amplifies the interior, where meaning rises from tension and character rather than twist, we’ll feel it. We’ll recognize it.

And we try to make as much room as we can.

Because what we publish isn’t about categories.

It’s about people.

The way people live.

The way people break.

The way people return to themselves.

Half genre.

Always lit.

Fully human.

If you write from that place...

we’re ready when you are.

T & J