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. Next, I recommend a book to help inspire your story submission and finish off with a list of the best writing-related articles I came across this week.

Vampires, Zombies, and Ghosts

Eligibility: stories from 1200-6000 words in any genre containing supernatural beings

Take Note: despite the tentative title, Smoking Press is looking for stories of supernatural beings outside of vampires, zombies, and ghosts as well .

Payment: $20 USD plus two complimentary paperback for writers in Canada and the U.S., and/or $20 USD plus one complimentary paperback for writers outside of Canada and the U.S.

Submit by: December 15th, 2018

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A book to inspire your writing:

For purposes of supernatural inspiration, I recommend you pick up one of Hugo and Nebula award winning  author Seanan McGuire’s October Daye books. The twelfth book in this series came out last August (Night and Silence) and another is scheduled for 2019 release. The first book is entitled Rosemary and Rue and you can probably find it at your local library or on their overdrive app. This is urban fantasy at its finest and McGuire never fails to deliver the intricate and unexpected.

The series follows Toby, or October, Daye, a fairy changeling working as a private investigator. Her cases focus on the collision of fairy and human in a world with such depth I’ve often wondered if I’ll feel I’ve wandered through it all. Wonder and tension, magic and murder, cityscapes and fairyland are layered upon the page in stories you’ll wish your imagination had come up with.

Toby’s own history and personal flaws make her readable and identifiable. She’s only half-fae, standing on the outside, though not quite as outside as a mundane reader, which makes her the perfect interpreter of the fairy world. This isn’t Tinkerbell or teeny tiny angelic insects, this is the fae of Celtic mythology and you’d better be on guard for tricksters.

Though the series began in 2009, the early books still have a freshness to them that sucks you in with thoughts of “ooooh, I haven’t read THIS before.”

To the library!

Writerly links worth sharing this week:

This article in Gizmodo tackles the idea of utopias and why humanity may benefit from a break from all of this dystopia.

Happy writing!