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 submitting to And Lately, the Sun and reading Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Mid-term Ecolit Examination.

And Lately, the Sun

Eligibility: speculative stories from 2K to 8K words that re-imagine the future under climate change.

Take Note: the editors want stories that engage possible solutions, rather than point out concerns

Submit by:  June 30th, 2020 – please note this publisher is in Australia, which has a significant time change from say, Canada (where I am), and submit accordingly

Payment Offered: $80 AUD per story, with one chosen as the ‘editor’s pic’ which will receive $500.

Click here to go to the original call for full details.

A Story to Ignite your Writing Mojo

I am bending the rules on the usual story-that-meets-a-theme on this episode of Sunday. I’ve been hunting up cli-fi stories over the past few days and I keep coming back to this one: Mid-Term Ecolit Examination Paper by Priya Sarukkai Chabria. You can read this story by clicking here now. Now, with this story, the reader has to put in an effort to piece together the world, but it also gives you, as a writer, a lot of options to play with. And although I’m not sure Chabria’s story engages solutions enough for the editors of And Lately, the Sun I do think it can be an excellent catalyst for your story.

In much of our apocalyptic/climate change literature, we often engage the natural world as the antagonist, while Chabria turns that on it’s proverbial head, painting a softscape of nature and it’s beauties. We see the destruction, but the edges are softened by reveries of green. This softening is the same effect that nature has on human stress levels, so using this element to counter nature-as-antagonist is elegant and moving to me as a reader. This is an astounding story when you begin to dig into the meat of it and let go of a search for typical narrative structure.

Chabria has also juxtaposed what is clearly a world emerging from chaos with typical education structures. Someone is taking an exam in middle school, which suggests that ultimately, something of who we are now has survived, somewhere past the passion of political poems, burning tires, flooded cities, and volcanic eruptions.

Now it’s up to you to engage some solutions and frame up your story submission. I hope you are well, washing your hands, wearing your masks, and I wish you good writing.

and in my personal writing news…

I have a space mythology story coming out in the June issue of Metaphorosis magazine, entitled Zsezzyn, Who is Not a God. It’s the story of a girl who is poised to inherit the universe only to discover it has been destroyed in a bid to maintain her family’s control over it. To save the stars she loves, Zsezzyn must reach deep into the wells of her own creativity. Here’s the cover, giving me big grins to see my name on it:

This issue won’t be out until June, but pre-orders just opened for the e-book.