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.

The People’s Preservatory

Eligibility: Anonobot is seeking strange, possibly humorous, speculative fiction up to 3000 words. Original fiction only, please.

Take Note: there is no specific theme to this anthology, however I recommend you read their wacky call of submissions carefully to get a sense of their taste.

What makes this call stand out: writers can submit up to three pieces for this call

Payment: $0.08 per word up to 3k, or $1.00 per line of poetry (minimum $15).

Submit by: March 15th, 2018

Click here to go to the original call for details.

Something to inspire your writing:

It can be tricky to get going on a story for a call without any theme at all. An abyss of possibilities yawns at your feet. So… besides weird and wacky, what do you do? This is part where I usually recommend a book.

Instead, I’m going to hone in on that weird and wacky element and point you in a direction to creatively “compost” some ideas with those same weird and wacky labels. Neil Gaiman says that stories are born of confluence, of two ideas colliding, and he knows his writing.

One place I like to hunt for that confluence is Magic Realism Bot on twitter. This is a bot account, following an algorithm of mishmash that can end up absurd, strange, weird, and occasionally, like something out a fairy tale. With upwards of 16k tweets under its circuits, I can always find a spark when I’m stuck for an idea. And they are usually weird and wacky.

Here’s a few screenshots I pulled to give you an idea:

If you like what you see, head on over to the blue bird and follow Magic Realism Bot for all the free story fodder you can retweet in a day.

News and Things:

Have you heard about Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass yet? Of course I signed up for my favorite writer’s writing class and I’m excited to review here on the blog for you. However, I am not willing to rush through it and miss a single delicious drop of Neil’s story sorcery.