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 stories to Flash Fiction Online and we’re reading Ephemera by Catherine George from the November 2019 issue.

Flash Fiction Online

Eligibility: flash stories from 500 to 1 000 words, original or reprint (reprints are paid at a lower rate)

Take note: authors may submit up to three stories at any given time. The editors also link to a list of hard sells on their submissions page.

Submit by: open to ongoing submissions

Payment: $0.08 per word

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A Story to Ignite Your Writing Mojo

Ephemera by Catherine George was published in Flash Fiction Online last November and is available to read here. I chose this story because it made me feel and remember-clearly-the painful details of break-ups. In Ephemera, the souvenirs of a relationship, those small things that are forever linked to that person, get up and leave, off to find that person who abandoned you, choosing them.

That’s a fine premise for a story, but George doesn’t leave it at that, moving us through realizations of the dark side of the relationship that Rose had ignored, made small, and put up with to stay with that person. We journey with Rose in her arc of newly dumped to her re-emerging sense of self, that precious, life-affirming remembering we all get which lets us know we are healing, we can navigate our life without that person after all. This is a lot to pack into a thousand words and George has done this well in so few.

What kind of journey can you pack into a thousand words? Do you know anything inner arc intimately enough? Give it a whirl, take a chance, see where you get.

Happy writing!