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 subbing to All Worlds Wayfarer‘s  Through Other Eyes anthology and we’re reading John Wiswell’s Tank at Diabolical Plots.

All Worlds Wayfarer: Through Other Eyes

Eligibility: 1500 to 5K word speculative stories that show the reader the world through non-human eyes “to discover new ways of looking at our own {lives}”

Take Note: All Worlds Wayfarer states that they love stories that explore identity, so be sure to emphasize this as you explore your non-human POV

Submit by: tentative deadline of June 15th, 2020, “but may run longer”

Payment Offered: $20 honorarium

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

A story to ignite your writing mojo

This week we’re reading a story by an author who has a serious knack for writing non-human voices: John Wiswell. Specifically, we’re reading his story Tank as it was published by Diabolical Plots. You can click here to go read that now. It’s worth noting Wiswell has another story that would fit this anthology call coming out any minute now with Diabolical Plots called Open House on Haunted Hill, a beautiful story that I also recommend you watch for and study as an example of making a non-human voice work (it was sent in DP’s last newsletter but hasn’t been published to the website at time of writ).

Tank is the story of a socially awkward tank trying to navigate a Con. They struggle with revolving doors, forms, invasive questions, crowds, and the dreaded small talk. Here’s where Wiswell works his magic: he makes the reader empathize with Tank, a hunk of metal and tracks, by putting tank in human situations and humiliations that all of us been through in one form or another. Their actions are the actions of a tank, but the emotions are our own. Wiswell got me when Tank saw someone they immediately wanted to befriend based on first impression, only to fail to think of something to say and lose the chance. And then there’s the clumsiness… sigh.

Martha Wells employs the same tool in her Murderbot series; while readers may struggle to empathize with a cyborg killing machine, we can certainly understand Murderbot’s yearning to sink into their media files and make the world go away.

To break it down: Wiswell and Wells make their non-human POVs come alive by focusing on what they have in common with humans, rather than what makes them different.

That’s it for this week, writers, happy writing and I wish you good health. If you live in the U.S. and you’re protesting, please be safe, and remember the rest of the world is watching and we think you’re brave AF.

I know there are difficult financial burdens in the world right now, but if you can, here is a link to a gofundme for the medical bills of a friend of my good friend who was hurt in the protests. Feel free to add more related fundraisers in the comments and I will share them on my social media.