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 submitting stories to Apparition Lit‘s themed call and we’re reading The Limits of Magic by Samantha Mills.

Apparition Lit

Eligibility: unpublished, speculative stories from 1,000 to 5,000 words on the theme of Satisfaction

Take Note: all responses will be given by the 15th of the month following the call’s closure

Submit by: August 31st, 2020

Payment offered: $0.03 per word with a minimum of $30

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

A Story to Familiarize Yourself with the Editors’ Tastes

This week we’re reading (or listening to the audio version of) The Limits of Magic by Samantha Mills and published by Apparition Lit. The magazine has included an “creator spotlight” after the story is finished, so be sure to read through that section below the story for encouraging stats and submission drama. You can click here to go to read those at Apparition Lit now.

One thing that stands out to me in The Limits of Magic is its depth. We begin in a narrow world, thinking we’re reading a certain type of story, but then it shifts, expands, and reveals a new depth, a new view of the world of the story. More than once, the story evolves like this in unexpected ways.

The Limits of Magic is also a story of sustained oppression, of lives so terrible they cannot be contemplated for fear of becoming unbearable, or more unbearable, than they already are. The scaffolding of a fictional religion is set up to be the main oppressor, or the tool of oppression, while women, and children, bear their suffering. Fear not, it’s not all doom and gloom, this is a story of hope and what happens when you decide you won’t be complicit in your own oppression anymore.

I hope you enjoy this week’s story as much as I did, and good luck to everyone submitting to this call. Be well, and happy writing.

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.

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!

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 the anthology Water: Selkies, Sirens, and Sea Monsters and we’re reading Nibedita Sen’s We Sang You as Ours from Cast of Wonders.

Water: Selkies, Sirens, and Sea Monsters

Eligibility: stories about magical beings who live in the water under 7500 words

Take Note: final versions should follow Canadian spelling

Submission deadline: September 30, 2020

Payment Offered: $50 CDN and a paperback copy

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

A Story to Ignite Your Writing Mojo

This week we’re reading (or listening to) Nibedita Sen’s story We Sang You as Ours as published by Cast of Wonders. You can click here to listen or read that story now.

Sen’s story follows the struggle of a siren coming of age into a life without agency. Cadence’s mother has disappeared, abandoning her and her sisters to the care of their other two mothers. There’s a new brother growing inside an egg in the bathtub and Cadence must go on her first hunt soon, seducing a human from the beach to feed her father.

This is a strange, uncomfortable story in many ways. Cadence is only now coming into an understanding of her species, touching on elements of incest and forced labour. She recoils, but she feels responsibility to look after her younger siblings and seeks to create her own agency with the few tools she has. Its this creation of agency that made this story stand out for me, the idea that the most hopeless, bound situation can still have small gaps for a rebellion. It’s a siren call for freedom (pun intended, shamelessly).

The story works because it captures the element of responsibility that can come with rebellion, yet finds a way to keep it from stopping the necessity of rebellion in its tracks. There’s an empathy here that Sen has threaded into non-human characters. Yes, we read on in a sort of horror to see the life of secretive human predators revealed, but we keep reading because we forget that we are the prey in this story, deep in the perspective of the siren. One could almost say the reader is held in the siren’s song…

**shakes head** whew, okay, I’m safe, I’m safe.

It’s your turn now, writers, to choose your mythical being, get to know them, and write their story.

Bonus submission opportunity: Pro market Apex magazine has opened for submissions after more than a year away. There is no indication of how long this opening will last, so don’t delay! Click here to go to their submissions page.

Happy writing!

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 to Beneath Ceaseless Skies and we’re reading The Augur and the Girl Left at His Door by Greta Hayer.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Eligibility: “Literary adventure fantasy” stories that take place on secondary worlds,  historical fantasy, steampunk, or Weird Western up to 15, 000 words

Take Note: editors prefer close POV (as opposed to distant, such as in fairy tales), no .docx submissions

Submit By: ongoing, open call

Payment Offered: $0.08 per word

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

A Story to Familiarize Yourself With the Editor’s Tastes

This week we’re reading The Augur and the Girl Left at His Door by Greta Hayer and published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can go read it now by clicking here.

The Augur and the Girl Left at His Door is the story of augur who tells the future by reading the marks, wrinkles, and oddities of a person’s body. He can tell how a person might die with a glance at their back, and read their lives in the marks of their scalp. This career has kept him alive but also brought him anguish. When a baby girl is left at his doorstep, he adopts her himself and raises her with much freedom, but he does not teach her his trade. Knowing the future has brought him much pain and he wishes to spare her the same. The girl, of course, fights him on this respect, wanting to know the outcome of her love affairs and her life, each of these mirroring the augur’s private pain, but he holds fast. There is no hope if the future is known, he says again and again.

This story’s strengths lie in its voice and character. Written in close point-of-view, the reader sees the world as a series of interpretations of moles and freckles, painting a vivid picture of the augur’s trade and the repercussions of this kind of knowledge. If Hayer chose to tell this story from the daughter’s perspective instead, it would not be the same story and while we might keep the anguish, the unique world of the augur’s magic would be lost. It takes considerable skill to wield a fictional magic system in this way, and I’ve half a mind to write up some characterization exercises for myself based on what Hayer has done here with my own characters and trades.

Thanks for tuning in this week, writers, and I hope you are well. If you’ve read any wonderful stories lately, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Happy writing!