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 Cantina Publishing‘s Silk and Steel anthology and we’re reading Tim Pratt’s A Champion of Nigh-Space in Uncanny magazine.

Silk and Steel: an Adventure Anthology of Queer Ladies

Eligibility: original fiction from 3 000 – 7 000 words, featuring a weapon-wielding lady with a love interest in a lady with softer interests. Trans and ace women welcome.

Take note: if you’d like to delve deeper into what Cantina wants for this anthology, be sure to click over to the kickstarter that funded this anthology.

Submit by: February 22, 2020

Payment offered: $0.08 per word

Click here to go to original call for more details.

A story to ignite your writing mojo

I’m not going to lie, I searched for hours for a story that would match this theme and I am flabbergasted at how hard it was. I’m so glad they are making this anthology. The closest I could find is this wonderful story about a heterosexual couple in a similar romantic entanglement, featuring a warrior lady with a softer love interest; A Champion of Nigh-Space by Tim Pratt. You can read this one at Uncanny magazine by clicking here.

This story has a few mature moments, so have your pearls ready for clutching if you need them. This is an engaging story of a lover who discovers that their partners isn’t quite what they expected. In fact, after a small kidnapping by some baddies, it turns out girlfriend might be an intergalactic hero. Meh, what are gonna do?

This story, while often cheeky, really shines in the way Pratt tosses out the tropes and surprises the reader and their characters with what we may not have realized we wanted to see. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Okay, time to get writing or… I don’t know, keel over from post-NaNoWriMo exhaustion. Take a nap, you wrote hard. Then get up and write a story to submit to Silk and Steel. You want to be in this one, trust me.

Happy writing!