June 2025

It's always exciting for us when Mysterion stories are recognized by the fantasy and science fiction community, so we're delighted to let all our readers know that K.A. Wiggins's story "The Patron Saint of Flatliners" has been selected to appear in the next Year's Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction anthology. Congratulations to Kaie, and we're so glad that this will help her story reach a larger audience!

As always, we finished with the January submissions just in time to open again for July. Out of the 257 stories submitted, we accepted six, and are now editing the stories we plan to publish in July and August.

We'll be open to fiction submissions again on July 1st. We're always open to art submissions, and in fact will soon be looking for new artwork to display on the website July through September. If you have not yet sent us a link to your portfolio, now would be a great time!

Although we said we were only going to accept six stories rather than five if our Patreon funding increased to $275/month, that didn't actually happen. In fact, our monthly support decreased a bit. But we decided that, rather than accepting five stories from January and the usual seven from the upcoming July submission period, we would choose six now and six from the next batch. 

Unless we reach that $275/month milestone! Then we'll be able to accept seven stories from the July submission window, and eight from each submission window going forward. We're currently at $237/month, and although our Patreon income covered about half the cost of paying our authors and artists in 2024, that still leaves Mysterion sufficiently dependent on Donald's salary that we'll have to go on hiatus if anything happens to his job (including retirement, though we're still several years away from that).

So, if you enjoy reading our stories and aren't already a paid subscriber, please consider signing up! For only $1/month, you get access to our Discord, where we host monthly chats with our authors and Patreon subscribers. At $3/month, you get each month's stories sent to your inbox at the start of the month, weeks before everyone else can read them. And for $10/month, subscribers receive an eBook of the upcoming stories every two months. There are other support levels too ($25/month gets a paper copy of every book we publish, mailed to you), but those are the ones that are most like a magazine subscription, where you get new content on a regular basis.

Speaking of books we publish, the cover still isn't done, but we are making progress on that front. Cover design is unfortunately one of the few publishing tasks we aren't comfortable handling ourselves. This will be an anthology of the stories we published on the website in 2020-2021.

We'll be at LibertyCon later this month, though not in any official capacity (i.e., we don't have a book table or any panels; we did register!). But we look forward to meeting any of you who are there and want to talk to us. It looks like at least one Mysterion author will be there, plus a few other people we know from other conventions.

Here's why we don't let our cats outside:

It's possible that this coyote's range doesn't include our place, though Kristin did take this photo a short walk away. But we've seen a coyote literally curled up next to our house. Probably not this one, but who knows?

In other local wildlife news, a wasp tried to build a nest in Kristin's potted rosemary plant.

You can understand where it was coming from, as it's a similar hue to the rosemary flowers, especially once they start to dry out and their purple color becomes less vivid. So it blends in well, to protect those wasp larvae from predators before they can sting. But Kristin was not enthused about having an active wasp nest in the middle of her garden, so she pulled it off while the wasp was away. Then she returned a few days later and found that the wasp had rebuilt it, in exactly the same spot. This time, it took several days for the wasp to leave, but eventually it did, and Kristin pulled the nest off again. It hasn't been rebuilt since, unless it's in a different and better camouflaged spot.

The cats are fine, though they rejected the new litter we tried to switch them to, despite it being healthier for them, the environment, and our budget. (They use a crystal litter that's very expensive despite being made in China, and that needs to be changed at least once a week; and Kristin spent enough years as a chemist working in a lab to suspect that the silica dust can't be good for their lungs. But they've clearly voted with their paws against changing it.) Here they are in one of their favorite spots:

Thanks for reading, and be sure to stop by again on June 23rd for our next story. David A. Hewitt brings us a humorous take on Hollywood, as a young woman starring in her first feature film tries to duck out of becoming a real-life action hero. You won't want to miss "The Watcher Awakens"!

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