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 Uncanny‘s once-a-year open call and we’re reading  Tina Connolly’s Once More Into the Breach (But Don’t Worry the Inflatable Swords are Latex-Free).

Uncanny

Eligibility: intricate, experimental, and speculative stories from 750-6,000 words

Take Note: Uncanny is not open to poetry submissions at this time

Submit by: September 9th, 2020

Payment Offered: $0.10 per word

Click here to go to original call for full details.

A Story to Familiarize You with the Editors’ Tastes

This week we’re delving into the strange birthday nightmare that is Tina Connolly’s Once More Into the Breach (But Don’t Worry the Inflatable Swords are Latex-Free) published by Uncanny. You can read this story online by clicking here.

This story reaches some out-of-control proportions that somehow perfectly encapsulates the surreal experience of navigating children’s birthday parties as a parent. At least, it does in my experience. The bewilderment, the horror, the what-in-the-actual-ness of the spectacle, the dread of offspring on sugar, the unbridled excitement making wild beasts of our carefully groomed children. The heady get-me-out-of-here desperation (that’s not just me, right?). I laughed, I cried, I nodded “hell, yes.”

Connolly has clearly made some bold choices in this piece and she pulls it off, but the real magic, for the rest of us, is in the attempt at this kind of experimental writing. We’re probably going to fail spectacularly several dozen times before we get it right, but there is so much to learn as we push that proverbial envelope and see what we do if we fold it this way, then that, and suddenly – an origami delight. Uncanny as a market is so big and so revered you have to take big risks and wild leaps to reach the level required to be there – and if this market falls within your goals, have fun with those risks and leaps because it’s going to take practise to reach this one. Write your heart out, take the chance you never take with your writing, and see what happens.

Have fun with it.

In the meantime, be well, and happy writing.