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. I’ll follow it up with the best read from my week to inspire your writing and a small collection of writerly articles to aid your craft.

Steam and Lace

Eligibility: The Steam and Lace anthology, to be published in print and ebook, is seeking noblebright, fantasy, steampunk stories from 1 000 to 10 000 words with a theme of ‘steam and lace’.

Take Note: the setting must be steampunk in some fashion, but reliance upon steampunk elements may vary. Editor’s notes suggest that the stories should be free of sexual content.

Payment: $0.01 per word, USD.

Submit by: November 1, 2018

Click here to go to the original call for details.

What I’m Reading:

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of J. B. Cameron’s steampunk novella, Flights of Fancy: the Great Atlantic Run. I do love a good airship adventure and Flights of Fancy is such fun to read I finished in one setting.

The story opens with Captain Fancy arriving late to the Great Atlantic Run, fumbling into another captain, and “accidentally” betting her ship against his lumbering behemoth of a ship. Fancy might have a gambling problem. By the time she finally makes it to her beloved Persephone, the race is on and she discovers the lumbering behemoth is, in fact, the fastest ship in the race. It’s going to take some serious ingenuity to keep the Persephone under her name, especially with a stowaway in her hold, a storm approaching, pirates ahead, and a renegade steam-bike gang out to get her. Fancy is just the lady to rise to that occasion.

This book is a lot of fun. Remember when books were always fun? This is book for those days. It reminded me of rainy, youthful days spent reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. If you’d like something to put a smile on your face and forget about your cares for a while, this is the book for you. I absolutely loved it.

Click here to learn more about Flights of Fancy: the Great Atlantic Run.

Writerly links worth sharing this week:

Have you ever considered consulting a sensitivity reader, or being one?  Click here to read Lila Shapiro’s interview with Dhonielle Clayton’s work as a sensitivity reader and a chief executive of We Need Diverse Books.

The Atlantic published Greg Manaugh’s fascinating article entitled How Police Will Solve Murders on Mars. The research here is noteworthy. Definitely a must-read for science fiction writers.