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 inspire your submission and get you thinking of the theme in original ways.

This week we’re submitting stories to The Reinvented Heart anthology and we’re reading Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s How To Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps.

The Reinvented Heart

Eligibility: original stories along the theme of a reinvented heart (more details are in the guidelines linked below) from 500-5000 words

Take Note: this call is open to female and nonbinary writers. If you do not fall into those categories, here’s another great call you might enjoy.

Submit by: October 31st, 2020

Payment Offered: $0.08 per word

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

A Story to Get You in the Groove

This week we’re reading Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s story How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps. TW for suicide ideation. You can read this story at Lightspeed by clicking here.

This story is fairly loaded with metaphor and I’ll let you interpret them in the way that suits you best, but for the purposes of getting you thinking about your own submission, Tesla is in love with a robot. Since they secretly consider themselves a robot, this isn’t too far a stretch for the reader to believe.

One day, when Tesla returns to the coffee shop where the object of their affection works, they find the robot gone. After they manage to track the robot down in a scrap yard, Tesla is desperate to repair the damaged bot, even as their lives fall apart around them.

In the call for The Reinvented Heart, the editor asks us to consider how romantic and aromantic relationships may change with technological advances and the possible distance of galaxies. Taking a lesson from how Wolfmoor weaves Tesla’s humanity with the idea of her robot self in this story can give us a roadmap for making new ideas of love and technology work.

Happy writing!