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 I’m bursting with excitement to bring a call from Andromeda Spaceways, mostly because they’re the place where I got my second acceptance, AKA the one that means it’s not a fluke. However, it’s also because I’ve always wanted to showcase them here but, as many of you know, I don’t want struggling writers to face a paywall in the stories we use to showcase the magazine. So when I noticed that Andromeda Spaceways released a free Apocalypse Edition of stories written by Sean Williams, I had to take my chance. However, this is bit trickier than the usual click of a website, because you’ll have to follow the link and then download the story as a .pdf file. Ugh, Jennifer, don’t make us read an entire magazine of awesome science fiction. Right? Get reading, writers, its good for your stories.
Andromeda Spaceways
Eligibility: speculative stories of up to 10K words, although subscribers and authors living in New Zealand or Australia may submit stories of up to 20k words.
Take Note: all submissions must be anonymous
Submission deadline: the current opening is scheduled for May 1st until June 30th but at time of writ their website is still reading closed (checks date). I’m sure this will be rectified soon. time has been tricky to keep track of since lockdown began.
Payment offered: $0.01 (AUD), with a minimum of $20 and a maximum of $100
Click here to go to the original call for full details.
A Story to Ignite Your Writing Mojo
As previously mentioned, you’ll have to click here and download the Apocalypse Edition. Once you’ve got that handled, you should read this entire issue to get a strong sense of the editor’s taste, but for our purposes I’m going to focus on a flash piece that stood out to me: Tales About Today My Great-Great-Granddaughter Will Tell Me, written by Sean Williams.
This has lot to say for a flash, Williams deftly shining a mirror that will make you cringe on modern society. We see our everyday from four generations ahead, and (spoilers) they don’t hold up. We are almost inexplicable in our foolishness, and that’s hard to see, but… this is also a good time to see it? Our species, huddled into our Great Pause, is facing a major shift. We will grow beyond this – though in what direction we do not know – and the growing pains have already begun. Stories like this help us think about who we want to be on the far side of that growth, and spur us on to keeping the power of those choices instead of grinding forward to maintain our place in a machine that is falling apart.
That’s all for this week, folks, I wish you all good health, strong submissions, and a wealth of story ideas.
Jennifer Shelby 