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 Cloaked Press‘ annual Fall into Fantasy anthology and reading A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies written by Alix E. Harrow and published by Apex.

Fall into Fantasy 2019

Eligibility: original fantasy stories of all sub-genres between 2-7.5K words.

Take Note: this is a wonderful place for new writers to build their publishing credits or get their first publication. If you write science fiction, bookmark this publisher as they put out an annual “Spring into SciFi” anthology as well.

Submit By: August 15th, 2019 (please note this is annual publication though the due date for 2020 may change)

Payment: $10 OR a contributor’s copy.

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A story to ignite your creativity:

We’re up for a fairly wide theme with this one, all genres of fantasy, a fair word count, and one teeny-tiny line in the print that reads “we want stories that delight.” Fair enough, I’ll give you a story which delighted me: A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow and published in Apex. You can read it on their website by clicking here.

This is, specifically, a story about portal fantasies and the bibliophiles who devour, who need, who long to get lost inside them. And a witchy librarian who feeds them to us-I mean those-bibliophiles. If you read portal fantasies, you may be familiar with the sort of restless ennui that comes with never finding a portal of your own. Harrow has turned that feeling into a story then flipped the tale and told it from the perspective of the person manipulating those portals, however subtly, and evokes nothing short of story magic. I love this story and I hope you do too. I hope it delights and inspires you to write your own magic. Good luck.

Happy writing!