October 2025

Kristin went hiking in New Hampshire with a friend back in September and took this photo that's vaguely reminiscent of the new Mysterion anthology cover art:

We don't think the hiker in Kristin's photo is either a warrior or wizard, and New Hampshire mountains are smaller and less imposing. But the colors are similar, right? (The photo was taken near the summit of Mt Moosilauke, for any New Englanders who enjoy hiking and might know what we're talking about.)

Oh, and did we mention that the anthology has finally been published? It's now available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats, or you can get the eBook at a discount directly from our Patreon page. It contains all the stories we published on this website in 2020 and 2021.

You can also still buy the original Mysterion anthology, the first reprint anthology (Mysterion 2), and--for as far back as January 2025--eBook editions of the online magazine.

We're still reading fiction submissions from July. As of writing this post, 163 remain unread, 13 have been read by one of the two editors, and 3 have advanced to our short list.

Our next story comes out on October 27th, just in time for Halloween. In C. Dan Castro's "Lies of Omission", Caleb uses black magic to call forth a "truth teller" who can tell him where his mother is, not realizing that knowledge gained through magic always comes at a terrible price.

In November, we're publishing one of this year's two Christmas stories, despite Kristin being a stickler for not playing Christmas music before the start of Advent. In "Marshmallows", by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, an interruption in the AR (augmented reality) subscription that keeps Chunfei from having to see any unpleasantness or suffering on her way to work leads to a surprising encounter. Kristin loved this story when she first came across it on Clarkesworld, where it appeared in 2018, and we're delighted to be able to share it with you here!

(We're still working with the author on edits for our December Christmas story, but should be able to announce it in our next monthly update.)

Our monthly support on Patreon has dropped quite a bit in recent weeks and is now down to $151/month, so please consider signing up if you aren't already a subscriber. We'll have to cut back on the frequency of new artwork for the website if we don't get back above $200/month, and if we drop below $150/month, we'll need to go back to publishing 12 stories per year instead of 14 (and would only be accepting 5 stories from the July submission window instead of 6).

We still mostly fund this magazine through our own resources, though we had been edging slowly toward breaking even, and we will need to get much closer to that goal in order to keep publishing after retirement, or if anything else should interrupt our income. Our estimate of the point at which payments to authors and artists would be more or less fully funded is $700/month in Patreon subscriptions, though we might be able to get away with less than that if our Amazon sales increased significantly. And, of course, that assumes our pay rate for stories stays at 8 cents/word regardless of inflation.

We have no plan to lower our pay rate, or to put our stories behind a permanent paywall (though Patreon subscribers at $3+/month do get to read them early!); but if you appreciate the stories we publish, we do want you to be aware that this can't continue indefinitely without a higher level of financial support from our readers. (Of course, it can't continue indefinitely even then, as death comes for all of us; but that's a different issue.)

FELINE UPDATE

There's a hole in our downstairs bathroom ceiling, and Maxwell knows there are mice up there.

He mostly ignores it now, but initially spent some time frantically meowing and approaching the hole from different angles--including going upstairs--to see if he could find a different access point. The hole was left by the plumber after fixing a leaky pipe, and we haven't gotten around to patching it yet (though Kristin did buy supplies from Home Depot last week).

As you might imagine, our cats get a lot of hairballs. We recently started them on a tuna-flavored gel that's supposed to help with that, and it seems to be working so far (i.e., fewer hairballs, and they both really enjoy their new "treat"). This makes us less nervous when Marie decides to "help" with laundry.

The cats did make us proud recently by catching and killing their second mouse (perhaps weakened by a recent fall from the hole in the ceiling). After it was dead, Marie appeared to briefly consider trying to eat it, but ultimately decided she wasn't that interested and would rather eat more cat food instead. (Maxwell gave no indication that he even recognized the mouse as a potential food source.) We disposed of it quickly after the cats lost interest, as they do sometimes bring toy mice to bed with them.

Thanks for reading, and remember that new stories always come out on the 4th Monday of each month! 

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