Submitting Sunday #1

Welcome to Submitting Sunday #1

It’s Pikes Peak Pride this weekend and while I’m not much of a parade person, I’m so stoked to head out and enjoy the events, today!

June (honestly, 2026), has been a slow month for submissions for me. This time last year, I had 31 short stories submitted to various publications with 3 acceptances! The numbers are far fewer this year, but that’s largely because most of my energy has shifted from short forms to my novel. I’ve begun to query my Science Fiction/Romance (Astromance) novel, which is wildly exciting, and I’ve already gotten one very kind and encouraging rejection. Now that I’m in the querying phase, I am planning to dive back into some short story work again, and here are some of the open calls I am most looking forward to:

Passing Strange: Queer Weird Arthurian Tales – Queer, Speculative, Arthurian stories?! I have so many ideas for this one and I’m keen to get started. The deadline isn’t until the end of August (which will be here before I know it if I’m not careful). With a word count between 3,000 and 10,000 words I feel like I’ll have lots of room to play with a concept.

Writers of the Future, Quarter 3 – It’s good practice to submit to this contest every quarter. It’s free and serves as a consistent quarterly deadline to at least get something new written throughout the year. I have a couple stories started for this quarter, which closes at the end of June. One of my cohort from Western won last year and has detailed his experience in his newsletter!  

Little Ghosts Books – They haven’t announced their next anthology submission call yet, but I’m checking in frequently. I had a piece accepted by them last year and it was such a fun story and anthology, the team was fantastic to work with, and I would love to be a part of anything they do. If I ever make it up to Toronto, this is going to be my first place to visit.

One resource that I have found incredibly valuable in navigating open calls and submissions – particularly for publications that have no fee to submit and are paying authors – has been Angelique Fawns’ newsletter. She gathers so many open calls and links, interviews with editors and publishers, and fiction of her own.

Before the next Submitting Sunday, I hope to have sent off a couple of short stories while I work on the next big novel projects. I’ll be getting ready to graduate with my MFA from Western (and I can’t wait to see everyone in Gunnison!) and I’ll have just moved into a new apartment. Writing is an easy thing to let slip during big moves and changes, but I’m working hard to stick to it. One big goal I have for this year is figuring out what writing goals are reasonable (and attainable) as I juggle multiple projects – can I really outline one, draft another, revise a third while also creating new short stories? We’ll see.

Originally Posted June 14 at 4:03 PM