Write about retaliation in a specific type of setting, and other offers

The exciting part:
I actually found a working listing of opportunities for writers that clears expired deadlines and has rags that are on the up and up--AND it separates contests from calls for submissions for those of us interested in becoming published writers first before becoming award-winning writers and those of us that don't have money to just mail away.

This (like every functional tool for artists I've seen on the internet) was created for Canadians.
Oh, Canada. Here it is.
http://www.placesforwriters.com/calls/
Luckily many of these aren't regionally restrictive.

A paying call for submissions:

http://www.edgeofpropinquity.net/library.asp?id=61

This website wants 2-6000 word short stories (more on what kind, later.)
Submissions are selected monthly and will be accepted on this theme throughout this year.
Payment is $50 per story regardless of length.

There are a few things I'm getting tired of in this aimless search of mine. Why do so many of these rags have no specific guideline for the type of writing they're looking for? Isn't a cohesive issue like a mix tape? Can't there be some connective tissue? Well, this offer has some connective tissue, so much that there actually isn't a single half finished story idea in my warehouse of notebooks that I can jam into their framework, which is fantastic, in a way.

The framework is this: the theme for this year is retaliation, but the stories in this magazine must take place in a modern day setting and also a fantasy setting hidden in the modern day one. What's lovely is that they don't want any specific kind of fantasy, they just want something abnormal and exciting lurking behind an ordinary modern backdrop. In this restriction there is much freedom--as long as you stay in this decade and this planet, you can have mole men Mafiosos or soccer mom international spies or Jesus himself, and some retaliation, of course. None of those are recommended by the website in specific, but they aren't discouraged either.

And of course these guidelines are not so specific that they would have you create something you couldn't use in another publication or your eventual collection of short stories, just in case it takes you over a year to write or your story gets rejected but you remain convinced it's good for something.


The Secret Challenge
In this entry I have made the writing opportunity function of this blog nearly obsolete, so I will step things up a little tiny bit, by having my first Secret Challenge. It's only a secret because it has nothing directly to do with the publisher and they will never know anything about it.

The first secret challenge is simple.
You probably have a few people who will critique your work for you.
Our challenge is, find one more, show someone else your work and expand your pool of volunteer editors, assuming your new volunteer has some constructive comment. For some people this is a pretty tough thing to do, but no less necessary for being difficult.
I used to think that posting on a website was a good way to get critiqued, but showing work to just anybody is a lot like showing it to nobody at all. People give you critiques because you trusted them with your work--besides, creative websites are horribly cliquish, and people are more likely to complain that your work doesn't fit that websites' particular brand of sickness than to critique your work for what it is. Giving your work away online is a strong self promotional tool that many have used to great success, but it's not how you get critiqued
In the future I will try out different methods of getting critiqued, but I like to keep it at no more than one secret challenge per week, perhaps making this the first Weekly Secret Challenge.