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. Following the call, I recommend a short story along the same theme to help inspire your writing and get the writing wheels turning.
Predators in Petticoats
Eligibility: stories must feature a female predator, originality preferred over the usual tropes. Any genre is welcome, and stories should be 4 000 – 7 000 words or under 1 000 for flash fiction.
Take Note: petticoats are not required (though it does make for a catchy title I must say)
Payment: $0.04 per word pending successful funding on kickstarter
Submit by: March 31st, 2019
Click here to go to the original call for details.
A Story to Inspire Your Submission:
Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman is a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. In this version, Neil takes the concept of ‘lips as red as blood’ and ‘skin as white as snow’ to paint the girl a vampire. The immortal child-princess is a predator who preys upon her father, her stepmother, and her subjects.
What I like about this story is that it juxtaposes the evil predatory nature of a vampire with the little girl we have known since childhood. Who hasn’t heard of Snow White, poor wronged princess and friend to dwarves? She has long been a symbol of ultimate innocence in our minds, making her a dangerous predator indeed.
Snow, Glass, Apples is told from the perspective of the stepmother, giving us neither the beginning of Snow’s story, nor the ending, which leaves the reader with an uncomfortable sense of danger in the world. The vampire child and her pedo-necrophiliac prince have no right to live happily ever after, but we all know how Snow White’s story ends and this is no fairy tale.
You can find Snow, Glass, Apples collected in Neil Gaiman’s Trigger Warnings: Short Collections and Disturbances or you can read it online for free by clicking here and following the link. CW for necrophilia and sexuality.
Writerly Links Worth Sharing This Week:
The idea of “controlled digital lending” loomed large over the publishing world this past week. You can catch up on the controversy by reading this article from Publishing Perspectives.
Jennifer Shelby 