Welcome to this week’s edition of Submit Your Stories Sunday! Every week I bring you a unique call for submissions to help you find a home for your stories or inspire a new one. Each call will contain a speculative element and will offer payment upon acceptance.

Spaceports and Spidersilk

Eligibility: Entertaining genre stories with a maximum of 3 000 words, poems 25 lines or less, written for children aged 8 to 17-years-old.

Take Note: adventures preferred. No swearing or sex, obvs.

What makes this call stand out: Spaceports and Spidersilk has a special place in my heart because this is where I got my first acceptance. Editor Marcie Tentchoff is accepting of writers with no publication credits which makes this an excellent place for beginning writers to get their start.

Payment: $6.00 per story, $2.00 per poem or reprint

Submit by: submit anytime. Spaceports is an ongoing, quarterly journal

Click here to go to the original call for details.

Writerly links worth sharing this week:

L. L. McKinley wrote this thoughtful article for Tor about representation in fairy tales, and who, if anyone, “owns” these stories.

What I’m Reading:

My daughter Evening and I read Sherry D. Ramsay’s Planet Fleep this week. Planet Fleep is a middle grade novel with a third-grade reading level. Evening is in grade one, but she loves science and science fiction so I read a few chapters to her before bed every night.

Planet Fleep follows two adopted siblings known as ‘the Science Twins’ as they crash into a strange planet with no one but an annoying robot named BIFT to watch out for them (Roald Dahl would approve, methinks). They soon befriend the local fauna, guinea pig-like critters who make a sound like a ‘fleep.’ When the twins discover an unfamiliar alien species is trapping the fleeps to sell for food and fur, the twins vow to rescue the gentle beasts, but how? And why aren’t their parents answering on the communicator?

Evening tells me her favorite part of the book was BIFT the robot. “And I’m glad that I know how to survive without my parents on an alien planet now.”

“Uh. I’m not sure that’s quite true, sweetie. You learned about surviving on Planet Fleep, but not all of the planets.”

“Nah, I’ll be fine. I’m a Science Twin now. I just need a robot, granola bars, and some fleeps.” She crosses her arms.

I consider the defiance in her expression. Pick your battles, Jennifer. What are the odds she’ll be crashing into an alien planet in the next few years? I let it go.

She goes on to tell me that she liked the book so much she plans on keeping it forever and possibly marrying it when she grows up. I’ve never asked her to rate a book before so I am unaccustomed to such… devotion. In terms of kid-speak, I believe this translates to a four-point-five stars out of five star rating.

Happy writing!