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 answering a call for submissions from Canada’s new market tdotSpec and we’re reading Yoon Ha Lee’s The Second-Last Client, published in Lightspeed Magazine.

tdotSpec

Eligibility: “cool” speculative stories from 100 to 10 000 words, original or reprint (reprints have a reduced rate)

Take Note: submissions are accepted on Mondays only (that’s tomorrow!)

Submit by: new market with ongoing subs, but only on Mondays

Payment: $0.015 per word, Canadian funds (T-dot = Toronto)

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A story to ignite your writing mojo:

Our featured publisher is looking for, and I quote “cool $#!t” which is fairly open to interpretation. Send them the stories you’ll chuckle with your buddies over after work. But Jennifer, you say, my cool friends don’t want to talk about short stories. That’s because they haven’t THIS story yet. My response to this call for submissions is to share a story that I passed along to my friends this week, because I thought it was “cool $#!t.”

On that note, we’re reading Yoon Ha Lee’s The Second-Last Client, published in Lightspeed Magazine and available to read free of charge here. In some ways, this story wasn’t enough for me, and I want more from it, but I’m translating that into an earnest hope for more from this universe. This is the kind of story that takes something everyday and thwacks reality on the head, breaking open your imagination. In this case, we’ve got a pair of interdimensional… characters (?) who attend to the apocalypses of  what they call Seedworlds rescuing (get this) characters from books. Us? We don’t get saved, we’re just here to seed the stories. If that’s not cool $#!t, I’m out. I sent this story to every short fiction fiend I know, and I posted it on my blog (ahem).

Last week’s story, Elly Bangs’ The Last Stellar Death Metal Opera, would fit this submission call as well. Between this week and last week, our cool levels should be pretty high, so now it’s up to you to translate that into a new story and get submitting.

Happy writing!