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 covering Podcastle’s current opening and reading (or listening to) Samantha Mills’ heartbreaking story Strange Waters from Podcastle‘s recent archives.

Podcastle

Eligibility: fantasy stories of all sub-genres up to 6k words, reprints welcome but a flat free replaces per word payment (see original call)

Take Note: all stories will be published on their website and read for the podcast, so they are paying you for both print and audio rights

Submit by: the current opening runs until November 15th, 2019

Payment: $0.08 per word, USD. It appears as though the website submissions page might need an update on their payment per word, but their submittable page reflects the recent pro increase to $0.08 per word.

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A story to ignite your writing mojo

Today we’re dipping into Podcastle’s August episodes to read or listen to (it is a podcast, after all) Strange Waters by Samantha Mills. Click here to go there now.

Strange Waters is a haunting time travel fantasy of a mother and fisherwoman caught out of her time in a sea known for temporal portals. Once lost, she manoeuvres her craft into every possible portal, eager to go home to her children. She moves back and forth through centuries, guided by constant stars to her home city as it grows, changes, decays, and builds. This city knows its time travellers, eager to trade for fish now extinct, to question her for the history of the future, to capture her until she tells them what they want. Through her travels, she sees what damage knowledge of the future has done and refuses to share or learn what became of her children, because she’d rather be there than hear of it secondhand.

This story is deeply imaginative and absolutely heartbreaking. Maybe its my motherhood that clung to Mika’s story so tightly, leaving me in tears by the end, or maybe it’s the skill of Mills as she spun this haunting tale.

What can you do with all of fantasy at your disposal? Are you going to make us cry, laugh, or fall in love? I can’t wait to find out.

Happy writing!