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’ll recommend a story to inspire your submission and help newer writers understand how to fulfill a call’s thematic elements.

This week we’re looking at Third Flat Iron‘s call for longevity submission and reading Kameron Hurley’s The Corpse Soldier as published in Uncanny Magazine.

Third Flat Iron

Eligibility: speculative stories from 1500- 3000 words on theme of longevity and how that longevity is won. Any horror should be light.

Take Note: submission formatting is precise and on a different page than the call for submissions – don’t miss it.

Payment: $0.08 American per word

Submit by: August 3rd, 2019 (submissions open July 10th, 2019)

Click here to go to the original call for more details.

A story to inspire your submission

This week’s story, The Corpse Soldier by Kameron Hurley, would be too long fit Third Flat Iron’s call for submissions, but it should get your imagination in gear thematically. The Corpse Soldier is available to read in Uncanny Magazine by clicking here.

The Corpse Soldier tells the tale of Nev, a soldier who shifts from body to body upon death. Certain he will not escape his current body and unwilling to kill the small girl near him, he gives her his summoning stone and tells her to return it to his masters. The stone gives his masters the ability to recall his soul from death. Ultimately, Nev escapes his dying body that night. Decades pass, he’s fallen out with his old masters, and now he hunts for the stone he gave the girl. Without it, his freedom can never be guaranteed.

Hurley’s spun a new legend of longevity with this story, offering up a mind-boggling weapon for war, a dark and cursed existence, and an excellent kickstart to our own imaginations to come up with our own ideas. What other ways can you play with this theme? What can you do with futuristic technology or endless magic at your disposal? Are their any other ways to live forever?

P.S. I did cover this submission call earlier this year. With an abundance of new readers, the opening coming up fast, and the pro-payment eligible for SFWA qualifications, I decided to showcase it again over some newer calls offering a pittance. If you need more mojo juice for your imagination, check out that original post paired with a science fiction story, to get you going.

Happy writing!