August 2025

July is over, so we're now closed to fiction submissions until January 1st. This time around, we received 304 stories, which might be a new record for us. Thank you to everyone who sent us something! We expect to respond to all submissions before the end of November, but if we do like your story and are seriously considering it, you probably won't hear back until then, as we don't accept anything until we've reviewed everything we received during the submission window.

Assuming our monthly support on Patreon stays around the same, we'll be able to accept six stories from the July submission window. However, if we can reach $275/month (from our current level of $238/month), we'll be able to accept a seventh story.

Please do check out our Patreon page if you aren't already a subscriber! We offer a range of subscription plans, from $1/month and up, and every contribution helps us pay our authors and artists. All subscribers are welcome to join our Discord server, where we host monthly hangouts with authors and Patreon supporters and chat about writing, publishing, and speculative fiction in general. For $3/month, Patrons get early access to all the stories we publish, and for $10/month, we also offer a bimonthly eBook edition (just like subscribing to a real magazine!).

We're especially trying to build up our subscriber base in the $3-$10/month range, but if you really love our magazine and want to support us at a higher level, $25/month subscribers receive a free paperback copy of every book we publish, shipping included. And we are very close to releasing our third anthology, which will include all the stories we published here on the website in 2020 and 2021. (Anyone subscribing at the $25/month level for the first time will also receive the first two anthologies.)

Longtime readers of our monthly update columns, and especially our Patreon subscribers, may be familiar with Kristin's long war against all the garden pests trying to eat or colonize her plants. The conflict recently expanded to include antagonists from the plant kingdom.

Kristin is still recovering from the poison ivy rash, which also got infected. However, she has learned her lesson about not trying to remove it while wearing a t-shirt, shorts and sandals.

MYSTERION AUTHORS IN THE NEWS

Congratulations to A.W. Prihandita, who won this year's Nebula Award for best novelette, for her Clarkesworld story "Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being"! (And if you haven't read it already, be sure to also check out her Mysterion story, "In (Future) Memory of an Absent Father".)

COMING SOON

Our next story, appearing here on August 25th, will be L.H. Phillips's "Timestorm", in which a man finds his comfortable solitude challenged by visitations from the past, and a long-ago catastrophe he can't possibly avert.

We're working on edits for the September and October stories, and should be able to announce them in our next monthly update.

Please stay safe and poison ivy free these last weeks of summer, and thank you for stopping by!

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