Posted on by JenniferShelby

Submit Your Stories Sunday: Fireside and Fragile Things

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 book to help inspire your story submission and finish off with a list of the best writing-related articles I came across this week.

rawpixel-315198-unsplash

Fireside Fiction

Eligibility: original, unpublished, genre stories up to 4 000 words.

Take Note: content warnings should be noted in the cover letter

What makes this call stand out: this is a SFWA-qualifying market, they pay pro + rates

Payment: 12.5 cents per word

Submit by: the current call runs from yesterday (December 15th) to December 31st. Keep checking back on their website for future openings.

Click here to go to the original call for details.

A Book to Inspire Your Writing:

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman is, as described, a collection of short stories. I often think Neil’s short stories are best read twice to fully absorb, and this collection is no different. 20181215_132531.jpg

While all of these stories are worth reading, there is one story in this tome which every writer should read. It’s a short gem, a few thousand words, in a place where time is fluid. Other People is a masterpiece. You read it, absorbed, hanging on every word. What’s happening is awful, but the protagonist has earned his fate. Then the ending comes, and no matter how many times I read this story, that ending grabs me. There’s nothing to do but flip back to the beginning and read it again, with what you know now. This story is the old ‘song that never ends’, and if you’re not careful you could get trapped in this circular story forever.

Writerly links worth sharing this week:

This guide to fantasy subgenres wowed me with its detail. I learned more than I’d like to admit.

This week’s newsletter from the UK’s Writer’s HQ is NSFW but strangely uplifting in our troubled times, and especially with all the stress of December holidays looming large. Be the duck.

Posted on by JenniferShelby

Submit Your Stories Sunday: Neon Druids, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis

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. I’ll follow it up with my best read from the week to inspire your writing and a small collection of writerly articles to fuel your craft.

rawpixel-315198-unsplash

Neon Druid: An Anthology of Urban Celtic Fantasy

Eligibility: Original fantasy stories from 100 to 10 000 words that contain characters from Celtic mythology and are set in an urban environment. Writers can submit one short story or two flash pieces.

Take Note: this anthology isn’t paying great rates, but that can mean a better chance of acceptance for newer writers looking to get more experience and publishing credits. Use your judgement.

What makes this call stand out: Celtic mythology contains a huge range of lesser-known fairies, goddesses, and monsters to work from. The possibilities are staggering.

Payment: $10 USD for short stories, $5 for flash fiction, which they list as up to 1 000 words

Submit by: December 10th, 2018

Click here to go to the original call for details.

What I’m Reading:

I picked up a copy of Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings by Diana Pavlac Glyer at my local library. It was an impulse loan which ended up being a fascinating read.

The Inklings is a critique group in Oxford that included Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and many others. The writers met twice weekly, once for chatting and uproar, and once to read aloud their work and subject it to the criticism of their peers. Bandersnatch gives the reader a chance to be a fly on the wall of that group, to hear Lewis argue hobbits with Tolkien and Tolkien’s opinions of Narnia.

If you’re still on the fence of what a critique group can do for you, you should read this book. If you already have a critique group, you’ll find yourself nodding your head and commiserating with your heroes. My heroes, anyway. It might take the sting out of some of those harsher critiques when you see the greats suffered the same.

As a fan of Tolkien, I found myself thrilled with this book. As a writer, I felt inspired. While I read a library copy for this review, I’ve ordered a paper copy to keep on my writing desk to dip into when I need the inspiration.

2018-10-13 10-1.19.53.png

Writerly links worth sharing this week:

This article about a writer who won a prestigious writing award from the university that employs her as a janitor is nothing short of inspiring. I can’t stop smiling over how excited she is. She also makes an excellent point about choosing a stress-free job to keep one’s priority on writing.

Chuck Wendig was put in twitter jail this week, and he uses that experience to give an important warning for creative people on social media. NSFW: Chuck employs colorful language to make his point. The fallout from Wendig’s twittering, which you can read in subsequent posts, include his firing from three Star Wars projects and Marvel comics. There is a lot to unpack there as a writer with conviction. Wendig has long been outspoken against injustice.

Less writerly, more fangirl, Margaret Atwood published a review of my favorite book, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, in the Guardian this past week. Just in time for Halloween.

Happy writing!
Posted on by JenniferShelby

the mermaid’s return

I slip inside the waves, the sea kissing my skin. We’ve been so long apart. She soothes my aching senses, dulling the sharp sounds and smells of the open air.

My tattered feet merge into my tailfin. Out of habit my eyes hunt for the notch I earned from a run-in with a nurse shark when I was seven. I take comfort that my true form remains the same after so many years hidden away.

Everything turns inward. I am aware of my self in the water, my breath, my heartbeat. I swim deeper, reaching for the distant clicks and whale song of the sea, leaving the land and all its ghosts behind forever.

20180217_134741.jpg

Posted on by JenniferShelby

Submission Sundays: falling into fantasy

Welcome to this week’s edition of Submission Sundays. Every week, I bring you a unique call for submissions to help you find a home for your stories or maybe inspire a new one. Each call contains a speculative element and offers payment upon acceptance.

This week, we’re looking at:

Fall Into Fantasy 2018

Eligibility: fantasy tales of all sub-genres, 2000-7500 words. Diversity welcomed, but sexual content, violence, and gore should be avoided.

What makes this call stand out: Fall Into Fantasy is a great chance for new writers to mingle with experienced ones, build their CV, and see their work in print.

Payment: $10 U.S. funds, and a print copy of the book. A 3% royalty will be added after sixty copies are sold.

Submit by: July 1st, 2018

Click here to hear over to the original call for complete details and submission guidelines.

Happy writing!

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 4 Comments

hunting stories

I walk through the forest hunting stories in the fold of old bark, the twist of a leaf. That old beetled undergrowth. 

IMG_20180309_084019_633.jpgStumps rot away into miniature castles, old galls whisper of dark magics, and scars turn into doorways at the base of a tree. These doorways captivate me. Tucked away yet plentiful, turning entire forests into magic hidden villages.

If I knock, will someone answer? Who are they? How do they live their lives? Their stories weave themselves in and around my imagination.

If I don’t knock, if I just step inside, will I find myself outside of time? Will the world be changed around me? Will I be different when I return? Will you know me? Will you notice it in my eyes, in the way I wear my hair?

But then again, I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk inside without a knock, catching some poor dryad mid-shower, shocked and reaching for a towel.

Come on, then, knock. Let’s go.

I hesitate. If I don’t knock, the stories rule the day. If I do knock, then my imagination is limited to what it finds. My knuckles tingle. I shove them in my pocket and move on. My children need me. I need them. Mothers must tread careful with the risk of getting whisked away to other worlds.  I’m hunting stories, not adventure. For now.

Posted on by JenniferShelby · 6 Comments

The Scientist’s Apprentice

Baby blankets are soft. Halloween costumes are thin and catch on the unseen flaws of fingertips. Graduation gowns are the same, but thicker. You’re not missing much.

The lab coat is stiff, but they soften with use. Glass beakers are smooth and gently curved. They are pleasurable to touch. A lab should smell of disinfectant, never that iron scent of spilled blood or the rancid smell of death. Remember that.

A descent into madness smells like smouldering pine pitch. Expect to get the shakes. Everybody does. They’re just the last dregs of your sanity holding on too tight. You’ll feel better once you let them go. It’s half-pay till you’re good and mad, so take that as your incentive.

You’ll still see your children on your day off. Once per month. If they still want you in their lives, that is. Most don’t. But at least they won’t starve. Parenting is mostly self-sacrifice, after all.

Here’s the contract. Standard, but do sign it before you begin. It’s the only thing that can keep you out of the funny farm and in the lab. I don’t want to waste my time training you if you’re destined for the straight jacket swaddle. We scientists seek a different kind of therapy, don’t you agree?

Come on, give us a taste of your cackle before we begin your descent.

Ah yes, you’ll do fine.

Courtesy giphy.com.
Posted on by JenniferShelby · 15 Comments

eighty unicorns under the hood

When she was young, Granny volunteered at a retirement home for imaginary friends. She would read them books, listen to their stories,  and keep them company. Her favorite resident was an aging, black unicorn with an opalescent alicorn who’d been popular in the 1700’s.

“You know, I’ve always been jealous of horses,” he told her. “I was James Watt’s imaginary friend when he was a boy. He grew up to coin the term ‘horsepower’. I’ve never gotten over that. He could have used ‘unicornpower.’ No one would have minded. It sounds good.”

Granny tested it out. “This baby has eighty unicorns under the hood.” She whistled. “Oh my. That does sound good.”

“Doesn’t it? I think he did it just to spite me for not spearing his sister with my horn when he wanted me to. Told me he’d rather have a real horse that listened to him than an imaginary unicorn who wouldn’t.” He let out a sad knicker. “James never imagined me again. He was only five years old.” A few tears dribbled down the unicorn’s muzzle. “Stupid horses.”

Granny always referred to engines in units of unicornpower after that. When she took up farming with Gramps she liked to brag she was the only woman in the county with a thirty-two unicornpower tractor. Drove him absolutely nuts.

tractorpower

Posted on by JenniferShelby

the terrible thing I did to the selkies

Karen and I spent the summer making fun of the beach selkies and the girls who mooned over them. I dunno, maybe we were jealous. Those guys had rippling muscles and oozed sex appeal, but they never looked at us, two gawky girls whose breasts hadn’t budded yet.

At the end of the summer there were a few who’d had their sealskin coats stolen by lovelorn women. They stood o016n the beach, unable to go home, looking haunted and broken. Searching.

Giggling with glee, Karen and I ran to the thrift store, buying every seal fur coat we could find. That night we hid them all over the beach.

We set up our beach towels for the day to watch the selkies find them and rush around with mistaken joy, only to be crushed when they discovered the truth.

It’s still the meanest thing I’ve ever done.

Karen laughed at me when I told her I felt bad. “They’re not even human!”

I gathered up the remaining coats and brought them back to the store. It made Karen furious. We never hung out much after that.

 

 

*this post was first written as a comment on a writer’s prompt at the Write Practice

Posted on by JenniferShelby

the queen’s scepter

The noise of the crowd fell away as she stepped forward to accept her scepter. She forgot to breathe a moment when she first saw it. It would be the symbol of her reign and it was far more beautiful than she had hoped. She gripped it with her left hand and held it high. “Let the leafing out begin!” she called to the trees, and the forest filled with cheering.

006