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 Arsenika’s month long opening for flash fiction and poetry and reading The Stories of Your Name by J. M. Melican, published in Arsenika Issue 3.

Arsenika

Eligibility: unpublished, original speculative fiction only. Writers may submit two flash stories (up to 1 000 words each) AND five poems (line count limit not given)

Take Note: watching the Grinder suggests a quick response time of one or two days on average at time of publishing this post. If you need to be mentally prepared for any rejections, keep this in mind.

Submit by: this opening closes October 31st, 2019, next opening scheduled for April of 2020.

Payment: $60 USD for flash fiction and $30 USD for poetry

Click here to go to original call for full details.

A story to ignite your writing mojo

Sometimes I have to dig deep into a magazine’s archives to find a story that truly thrills me, you know the kind, your pulse quickens, your heart makes a little gasp of delight, and your eyes never dare to leave the page/screen for fear of breaking the magic. This time, I found The Stories of Your Name by J. M. Melican right away. I’ll make it just as easy on you – click here and have a read, you won’t regret it.

The Stories of Your Name begins with the romantic imaginings of a lover that travel beyond the expected, wooing and seducing as much as the imagined lover. Or perhaps it is the soft possibility that we are eavesdropping, or playing the lover ourselves. This lover takes us to distant worlds and unknown cultures, spinning tales of the elusive name, and all the while drawing us again. It’s a haunting, wonderful little piece.

This is the kind of story Arsenika seeks to publish; stirring, original, untamed, and written with an elegant prose. This might be a trifle intimidating to new writers, but you’ll never know if you don’t try and trying is how you get good at it.

I will like to add, a little off topic, that if you enjoy this story you’ll also probably like the book This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. To the library!

Good luck and happy writing!