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 Apparition Lit’s call for stories about euphoria and reading Tina Connelly’s A Sharp Breath of Birds in Uncanny Magazine.

Apparition Lit: Euphoria

Eligibility: original speculative fiction from 1-5K on theme of euphoria

Take note: this magazine has four openings per year, each with a different theme (watch their website for future themes)

Payment: $0.03 per word, minimum $30

Submit by: August 31st, 2019

Click here to go the original call for details.

A story to ignite your writing mojo

This week’s story, Tina Connelly’s A Sharp Breath of Birds, was published in Uncanny magazine. You can click here and go read that now. I must say, finding a story that captures the theme of euphoria is difficult in this timeline of doom, which is probably why Apparition Lit chose it. A Sharp Breath of Birds is not a euphoric tale, not at first. The protagonist struggles with her sense of self, her sense of belonging, her… feathers. In growing up she loses the one person who understands her, who might have feathers too. The euphoria of this story is not found until its ending, and then it is still left up to the reader to imagine.

How can you use euphoria to drive your story rather than ending it? It’s interesting to note that astronauts have been reported to experience a sense of inexplicable euphoria in outer space, how that could that be used to craft a story? Romance, always, has its own levels of euphoria. In researching this post I came across stories of drug use, self-harm, and various vices used to reach a euphoric state. I expected to find more stories of the euphoria of birth than I did and I’m excited to see what this issue of Apparition Lit offers.

Happy writing, and good luck.