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 submitting to Escape Pod and reading (or listening to) Elly Bangs’ The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera from Escape Pod‘s episode 697. TW for suicide ideation.

Escape Pod

Eligibility: science fiction stories from 1 500 to 6 000 words

Take note: All submission must be anonymous. Escape Pod publishes story texts on their website and produces an audio version for their podcast. They buy first print and audio rights. Also reprints, please navigate to their website linked below for those details.

Submit by: Escape Pod will close submissions for the summer season starting June 2020

Payment: $0.08 per word, USD

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

A story to ignite your writing mojo:

This week we’re rocketing into Escape Pod‘s archives to read (or listen to) Elly Bang’s The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera. TW for suicide ideation. Click here to go read or listen now. Trust me, don’t skip this one, it’s a delight. I picked this story because it’s easy to connect with and a lot of fun, which is rare and wonderful, and because it asks deep questions about what humanity might be like if we became immortal. Who will our heroes be? Who will we fixate upon and where will this hero worship lead us? And more importantly, if we don’t save those octopodes from being flash-boiled in a supernovae, who will?

And now for something different:

I rarely share calls that do not offer payment to writers, but sometimes ones come up for charities that capture my attention, like this one. Back from the Brink is a UK conservation agency seeking sci-fi poetry and fiction up to 2k words with a focus on saving endangered species. Science fiction has long had the reputation for inspiring tech, and this collection is seeking to focus that reputation to solve a worldwide dilemma. Have any ideas? Again, this is not a paying market, but you might be able to do some good. Check out that call by clicking here.

Happy writing!