May 2021

Some people rave about Boston in the fall, others love summer, but Kristin's favorite season has always been spring. (Donald's favorite is whichever is least likely to have a power failure that will make the internet go down.) This may have something to do with being a Canadian who hates winter. Spring means winter is over, at least for another year. The flowers and foliage are beautiful (we're at lilacs, tulips, and dandelions here in eastern Massachusetts), and it's neither too cold nor too hot.

The strawberries in Kristin's garden are also blooming.

Donald and Kristin have each gotten their first dose of the COVID vaccine, and are hoping to visit Donald's family in Louisiana in June once we're both fully vaccinated. So it feels like we're on the cusp of a lot of bad things ending besides winter.

If you haven't read it yet, be sure to check out our April story, J.L. Royce's "The Secret Place of the Lord". In this contemporary supernatural fantasy, an FBI agent and a small-town minister encounter mysteries hidden "in plain sight" among the forgotten places and people of the American Midwest.

We also have a review for you: Mysterion author Stephen Case reviews C.L. Clark's debut military fantasy The Unbroken, which might be of particular interest to readers drawn to stories about religious faith and experience.

Our May story will be Nigerian author Hannah Onoguwe's supernatural horror tale "Breaching the Distance", in which an expectant mother who lost her faith a long time ago is confronted by malevolent forces in an isolated hospital wing. You'll be able to read it here on the website on May 24th.

In June, we have supernatural science fiction from A.J. Cunder with "The Cure". After losing her father far too soon, Mira is determined to solve the problem of human mortality. But what will become of Death if she succeeds?

PATREON

Casual readers of Mysterion may not realize that we have a special subscribers' only version of the magazine over at our Patreon page. Access to content is tied to your subscription tier, but even $1/month subscribers get our exclusive behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to publish an online magazine and anthology series, plus the opportunity to participate in our monthly Discord hangouts with Mysterion authors and editors. At higher levels, we offer early access to all the fiction we publish, a special subscriber-only e-book edition of the magazine, and free books.

Patreon subscriptions are our main source of income for the magazine right now, since we make all our fiction content available to read for free online. We don't ever want to change that; but we're also at the limit of how much we can afford to publish each year without significantly expanding our base of paid subscribers.

Right now, we have 20 active subscribers, and $207/month in Patreon income. The next funding goal we're trying to meet is $275/month. Once we get there, we'll start publishing 16 stories a year instead of the 14 we currently publish. $68 a month seems like a lot, but it would only take 3 new subscribers at $25/month, or 8 additional subscribers at $10/month, or 15 at $5/month, or 25 people contributing $3/month (Patreon charges us fees to use their platform, in case you're wondering why the math doesn't quite work out.)

Also, we know it's annoying when people keep asking for money all the time, so from now on, any month where we see a net increase of at least 5 subscribers and $10/month income, we'll skip pestering our readers about it the following month.

Although one of our Patreon benefits for subscribers who contribute at least $2/month is to have their name listed as a supporter here on our website, just send us an email (editors@mysteriononline.com) if you prefer to remain anonymous. (We have to add supporter names manually, so as long as you send the email before you subscribe, you should be fine!) Signing up under a pseudonym also works.

No one else does what we're doing here at Mysterion: publishing fantasy, science fiction and horror about Christianity and the Christian experience without demanding that our authors either espouse or reject any specific beliefs, and paying professional rates. We've published the work of authors and artists from every continent except Antarctica, and are committed to featuring diversity of opinion as well as diversity of experience and background.

So if you want to see more of the kinds of stories we're publishing here, the best way to do that is to become a Patreon subscriber today!

(Another great way to support this endeavor is to buy copies of our two anthologies, Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith and Mysterion 2: Stories From the Online Magazine 2018-19. Available in paperback and e-book from Amazon and other online retailers.)

We're now entering our final push to read and respond to all the story submissions from January. Since we really do need to finish this up before the end of May in order to meet our self-imposed publishing deadlines (and provide Patreon subscribers with that much-lauded early access to stories!), we are confident that we will have good news for you on that front before our next monthly update. We may even be able to announce some or all of the stories that we'll be publishing in July and August. So, if you submitted a story and are still waiting to hear from us, thank you for bearing with us, and we hope to get back to you very soon now! We'll post on Twitter once we've responded to everything (and our Tweets show up on the left-hand side bar of this site, so you don't actually have to be on Twitter to see them).

Thank you for reading, and we hope you're staying safe and enjoying the spring weather (or fall, for those readers on the other side of the world)!

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