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Taking Submissions: Mythical Girls

August 1, 2019

Deadline: August 1st, 2019
Payment: Contributor’s copy, potentially pay as well depending on Kickstarter.
Note: Sorry for the short turnaround, this just hit my inbox!

You may remember a year or so back a girl found ‘Excalibur’ in Britain, in Dozmary Pool (where the Lady of the Lake lives), you may also remember a few months ago, another girl found a sword in Norway, which immediately made me think of Sigmund’s sword Gramr. This all got me wondering what other mythic weapons might be out there. Turns out there are a lot. So of course I had to wonder what happened if girls around the globe started finding these magical weapons.

I tossed out the idea to a couple of forums and got a huge response. So of course those stories have to be written. This is where you come in.

I’m looking for stories about those girls.

Let me start off by saying, do not use Excalibur. If you want to mention Excalibur, it is found by a girl named Aggie Farrier, a school girl who lives in council estate outside of London.

There are a huge number of other objects It doesn’t have to be a sword. Here’s a list to get you started:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mythological_objects

Be creative. A knife or ring from Asia could find its way into a house in North America. Some research will turn up other possibilities. A word about cultural appropriation, be sensitive about things like whether your object is still important to a group of people, do your research, if in doubt, maybe use something different. I would love to see lots of multicultural stories.

The story needs to be about what happens when a girl finds some mythical object. I’m more interested in the aftermath than the finding, so don’t’ spend most of your story on how they get together. After that it is up to you. There could be a god wanting attention again, or a dwarf being a troublemaker (that happens a lot in Norse mythology) It could be she stubs her toe on it. How does it change her life, the life of the people around her. That’s the story I want.

Keep it PG. I will leave it up to you what age ‘girl’ is.

So to nuts and bolts:

I’m going to ask for stories between 3000 and 6000 words, they can’t have been published previously. Please no simultaneous submissions. And only one story per author. The number of stories I take will depend on how many I get and what lengths they are. I will aim for around the 90-100k total word count.

Each contributor will get an author’s copy, and the right to order addition books at cost plus shipping. I plan on running a kickstarter campaign to raise money to pay for the stories, but there will also be costs for proof-reading and cover design. Supporting the kickstarter will make no difference in how I read the stories.

The deadline for submission is August 1, 2019. I will contact the people selected for the anthology after December 31st. My goal is a tentative publication date of June 1, 2020.

For the anthology I will be asking for first publication rights, and exclusive rights for one year from the publication date. After that you can publish your work somewhere else.

How to Submit:

Email me your story in either .doc or .docx format. Stories in the body of the email won’t be read.

Times New Roman 12pt font, one inch margins, double spaced. In other words, standard submission format. Put your name, pen name if you use one (and tell me which is which), address, email on the front page along with the title and word count. Then put name/page number in the top right header of each page.

In the subject line put Submission Mythical Girls and the title of the story.

In the email, give me any relevant information about your writing career. Email me at thecelticfrog(at)gmail.com.

Don’t send me your first draft. Take your time, edit, revise, polish. Expect there to be more editing if your story is chosen.

Via: Alex McGilvery.

Details

Date:
August 1, 2019