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 you get a feel for the editor’s tastes or the theme of the anthology.

This week we’re subbing to Frozen Wavelets and we’re reading Waiting for Beauty by Marie Brennan and published by Frozen Wavelets.

Frozen Wavelets

Eligibility: speculative stories or poetry under 750 words

Take Note: on Frozen Wavelet‘s blog, they mention they are particularly interested in drabbles (100-word stories) and poetry for this call. All submissions must be anonymous.

Submit by: August 16th, 2020

Payment Offered: $0.08 per word or $1 per line of poetry

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

A Story to Familiarize You With the Editor’s Tastes

This week we’re reading Waiting for Beauty by Marie Brennan from Frozen Wavelets, which you can read by clicking here. Spoilers ahead, so please, read the story first.

This is a twisty story, laden with subverted expectations that work well together. We venture to the castle, unsure what’s happening, suspecting we might be in a Sleeping Beauty story, but no, wait, it’s a Beauty and the Beast tale. And the moment we’ve decided we’re comfortable, it’s not Beauty and the Beast after all, we’re in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and hoo boy this got dark.

As readers, we get a lot of emotions tying us to this ongoing tale, and the mix-and-match keeps us guessing. Waiting for Beauty achieves a in few words, something always important to good flash fiction, and part of how it does this is by manipulating what we know of the familiar stories. Everyone likely knows the Sleeping Beauty and the Beast stories, and while fewer may be familiar with Emily, they don’t need it to grasp the true horror of the scene of they’re witnessing. The horror is also magnified against the happy ending we’ve learned to expect from the stories.

That’s it for this week, folx, but before I go I’d like to share a tweet that clearly resonated with other short story writers, so it may with you as well:

be well and happy writing!