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.

It’s been a tough week seeing more than one good market close but we’re still here. We’ll keep reading, we’ll keep writing, and most especially, we’ll remember to support our favourite magazines whenever we can. Sometimes that means a retweet or a share of a story we love, and often it means financial help when we can too. All of it counts.

This week we’re submitting to Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (CRES) and we’re reading The King of Flame by Janie Brunson.

Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores

Eligibility: speculative fiction 1 000 words and up, geographical diversity encouraged.

Take Note: anonymous, limited feedback is available

Payment Offered: $0.06 per word for new, original fiction, $0.02 for reprints

Submission Opening: December 21st -28th

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

A story to ignite your writing mojo

This week we’re reading a story that echoes the endless fires in the news, whether it’s Australia, the U.S., or in the Amazon, fires have been raging. In King of Flame by Janie Brunson, the author finds deep, mythological reasons for these fires.

There’s a blur here in the line between psychosis and myth, and if this is something you suspect might trigger you, please read one of the other wonderful stories available on CRES’ website. Otherwise, click here to go read Brunson’s story.

I’ve always been drawn to stories like this, of myths borne of insurmountable foes, that human desire to take something terrible and inconceivable and give it a story and a face we can recognize.  This is where humans first came into stories and this is still one of strengths of our collective imagination. It is the ability to empathize with phenomena and gain the ability to move forward despite a very literal helplessness. We’re screwed, but maybe there’s magic. And that magic – well, that can mean everything, especially in a story.

Happy writing!