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 get you thinking about your own submission and to help newer writers understand how to fulfill a call’s thematic elements.
This week we’re getting ready to Cast of Wonder‘s upcoming Banned Books Week and we’re reading This is Not a Ghost Story by V. Medina.
Cast of Wonders: Banned Books Week
Eligibility: speculative YA stories up to 6K words along the theme banned books. Updated June 1st: this year’s theme is Lifelines: books that get us through isolation (click here to see further details on their moksha)
Take Note: all submissions must be anonymous
Submit by: this opens June 15th and closes June 30th, 2020 **please note these dates have changed since original posting**
Payment Offered: $0.08 per word for original fiction
Click here to go to the original call for full details.
A Story to ignite your writing mojo
This is Not a Ghost Story by V. Medina was published by Cast of Wonders in their 2019 Banned Books Week. What I like about for today’s story is the way it shifts our imaginations away from the usual ideas of what a banned book is and consider what stories may be suppressed without our awareness, maybe by our own selves. Click here to go read or listen to that story now.
This is Not a Ghost Story introduces us to a protagonist struggling through adolescence with a disability. They are frustrated that their presumed story is not their own, nor one they’d choose, and find solace telling stories to the ghosts in their room at night. As they grow, so their stories grow too, into an important and liberating part of their adult self.
Not all books are publicly banned, sometimes they are banned by presumption, prejudice, or our own lack of confidence. Our job now is dig them up, brush them off, and make them bold. Good luck with this one, writers. Stay safe.
Jennifer Shelby 
It always shocks me when a book is banned, or when someone says a book should be banned. I know a lot of people—people who are otherwise kind, open-minded people—who will still say that such and such book shouldn’t be allowed.
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I grew up in a strict household where my reading was seriously curtailed by what was allowed and what was not, so I have a sense that this kind of censorship is more prevalent than most people think. But as an adult, reading the books that I was not allowed to then, it just seems like it was such a foolish waste of energy.
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