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 the Atthis Arts Community of Magic Pens anthology and we’re reading Michaele Jordan’s Antique, published in Abyss & Apex.

Community of Magic Pens

Eligibility: stories up to 3 000 words on the theme of ‘magic pen,’ both the magic and the pen aspect up to interpretation. Editors prefer hopeful over grim stories.

Take Note: the editors have tweeted being disappointed that few science fiction entries have been submitted, so if you have an SF idea, run with it!

Submit by: January 15th, 2020 (yes, this is close, but there’s still time if you start right away)

Payment: $0.08 per word

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A Story to Ignite Your Imagination:

This week we’re reading Antique by Michaele Jordan and published in Abyss & Apex. You can read it online by clicking here. While this story has no magic pens, it does contain many magical masks, each one with its own ability, which I think will serve to get your imagination thinking in different directions for creating your own magical instrument. Follow Elsa on her global search for the mask she saw in the cabinet of a childhood, around the world, gathering what skills other masks grant her, to her final and important lesson.

Happy writing!