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 storing to Space & Time and we’re listening to The Feline, the Witch, and the Universe by yours truly.

Space & Time

Eligibility: speculative stories, including creative hybrids, up to 10k.

Take Note: Space & Time has recently begun releasing an audio version of their magazine and writers are able to share these audio versions of their stories as they like.

Submit by: July 6th, 2020

Payment Offered: $0.01 per word

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

A  Story to Ignite Your Writing Mojo

Traditionally I spend the week leading up to these posts reading through back issues to find the right story. However, as Space & Time does not publish their stories to read online for free (and there is nothing at all wrong with that – I just don’t want a paywall for struggling writers here) I’m going to flip things around. I am a fan of Space & Time and I think they are a wonderful market to work with so I want to show them off to you. So instead of reading someone else’s story, this week we’re going to listen to the audio version of my story published in Space & Time‘s December 2019 issue, The Feline, the Witch, and the Universe. Click here to go listen to that on my soundcloud.

This is the awkward bit where I dissect my own story, or??? Yeah, I’m not going to pretend I could pull that off. My imposter syndrome is raging hard enough just writing this post, thank you very much.

That said, if you listen to the story, you’ll soon discover that this is the story of a witch biking around outer space in search of her missing cat. Fantasy, in space. Space fantasy! This falls into the category of creative hybrid that Space & Time says they welcome. In their submissions page, on the left, they also write, in bold no less, “we seek the literary outliers.” Send in those weird tales that don’t fit into the neat categories of science fiction or fantasy or horror. Send in those stories that keep getting those “we liked this but it’s not (insert subgenre) enough for us” rejections.  Pull out those gems of weird you still have feelings for, and send them in.

WriteAThon

This post publishes on day 8 of Clarion West’s WriteAThon and I am writing my butt off. I have three new stories and one poem drafted and somewhat polished from the past week alone. The folks at Clarion West are amazing, providing us with writing workouts, sprints, panels with Big Names, and tonnes of advice. I lucked out and got a coveted spot in a Flash Fiction Critique Group, so I am committed to a new flash piece based on a given prompt and seven critiques per week for the six weeks of the WriteAThon. We’re doing all of this to raise funds for Clarion West scholarships to help writers in need attend their workshops. I think I may have stumbled upon the best way to ‘give back’ imaginable, tbh. That said, if this blog has ever benefited you and you have some spare cash, please considering sponsoring myself or one of the other 508 participants in this year’s WriteAThon. Here’s a handy link for that and thank you for reading.

Happy writing!