After dithering for a while, I've decided to go forward with the podcast fiction series for a fifth year. The deciding factor (other than "five" being a nice number) was doing the proofreading of the remaining stories for this year and being reminded of the great work that people are entrusting to me to publish. For most of the stories we've included in the podcast, it's reasonable to say that they never would have existed except for having the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast as a market. That was one of my goals, although I'd also love to help stimulate a larger and more active market for commercial sapphic historical short fiction.
Just as in the last two years, the submission call is also open to certain types of historic fantasy (see the guidelines for a detailed explanation). I didn't happen to buy any historic fantasy stories for 2021, but that wasn't a deliberate choice. It was only that the best stories were all plain history. So don't let that mislead you.
In addition to the primary goal of choosing the best stories, I always have a goal of including a diversity of settings, plots, and characters. As an author, you can use this to your advantage, if you're deciding between several possibilities. Every year, about a third of the submissions are set in the 19th century, and most of those will be set in the UK or USA. So if you set your work somewhere or somewhen else, you already have an advantage in standing out. (Coincidences can happen, though. This year I had to choose between two excellent stories both with prehistoric settings. And while either would have made the cut, I couldn't see buying both of them.)
Another thing that gives your story a leg up (since we're assuming that it has solid writing, reserach, and characterization) is focusing around an interesting and not over-used plot. Find an event or situation that would make a great story on its own and then ask, "How would this be even more interesting if one or more characters were women who loved women?" That isn't to say that you can't get a great story out of circumstances specific to the sapphic condition, but the stories that start out by asking, "what sorts of things happened in history to lesbians" tend to be less varied than ones that start with "what sorts of things happened to people in history" and then add "but what if they happened to lesbians."
Last year I had some agonizing decisions to narrow the choice down to the number I could buy. Try to make my process even more agonizing this year!
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