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 subbing to Cast of Wonder’s Halloween special and we’re reading Natalia Theodoridou’s Of Pumpkin Soup and other Demons and Austin H. Gilkeson’s The Ghost of Granny Goneril from Cast of Wonder’s 2014 Halloween special.
Cast of Wonders: Halloween
Eligibility: speculative stories written for a young adult audience up to 6, 000 words, on theme of Halloween.
Take Note: writers can check out the Cast Wonders’ staff wish list by checking #ShortStoryWL on twitter
Submit by: this opening runs from March 1st to March 7th, 2020
Payment Offered: $0.08 per word
Click here to go to the original call for details.
A Story (or two) to Ignite Your Writing Mojo
This week we’re heading back to CoW’s2014 Halloween special, where not one, but two eerie and delightful tales await: Natalia Theodoridou’s Of Pumpkin Soup and other Demons and Austin H. Gilkeson’s The Ghost of Granny Goneril. Click here to go read or listen to those now.
Theodoridou’s story captures the eerie essence of Halloween, the thinned veil and the who-knows-what-may-come-knocking quality to the year’s spookiest night. We don’t get all the answer, either, leaving us to wonder who that boy’s father might be, and how a storm could have a child of it’s own, after all. It’s eeriness, unexplained, stays with the reader like a good ghost story should. Just enough reality to settle into your bones and too much supernatural mystery to probe too deeply for the truth.
Gilkeson’s story, coming second, is lighter fare, capturing the fun of Halloween horrors. That opening line “Dead grandparents give the worst candy” sets the tone right away. This will be more fun than creepy, it promises. And it delivers. This story is cheeky, delightful, and solidly YA. It hits many notes of a teenager’s life and shifting experience of Halloween, while tying in more traditional Halloween tropes and staples in an engaging way.
What kind of Halloween story do you want to write? Will yours be a trick or a treat?
Jennifer Shelby 