April 2026

What a difference a month makes! The towering wall of snow pictured in our last update post has melted, crocuses and daffodils are blooming, and Kristin has started planting vegetables in her garden. Happy Easter!

We've been making good progress on reading the submissions from January. As of Monday, 23 remained unread, 9 had been read by one editor but not the other, and 13 had advanced to our short list.

Right now, we're planning to accept 8 stories. However, we're really close to our next Patreon funding goal of $450/month--only $15 short!--and if we reach it before we make our decision, we'll be able to accept 9.

We were thrilled to have been invited earlier this month to talk about Mysterion on Zoom with the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County's Writers' Space Saloon! SFABC seems to have a lot going on that would be of interest to science fiction fans and writers, with regular appearances by well-known authors and other SF professionals (a mix of in-person and Zoom), so we'd encourage you to check them out if you live in or near New Jersey. 

You may have noticed that we recently updated our submission guidelines to clarify that we are not interested in publishing AI-generated fiction or artwork. Please keep this in mind for our July submission window! We've been seeing more submissions that we suspect were written partly or entirely by AI. Although some readers don't mind if novels were written with significant AI assistance, short stories tend to be more of a niche interest, and our observation has been that short story readers are almost universally opposed to the idea. 

Another thing authors should keep in mind is that current US law does not seem to consider AI-written works to be protected by copyright--an issue that has come up with the recent leak of Anthropic's probably-AI-written code. When we pay an author to publish their story, we're purchasing the right to be--for a limited period of time--the only place people can read it, from the person who owns the copyright and can decide how they want their work to be used. But if no one owns the copyright, what are we paying for? Why couldn't someone else come along, copy the story from our website, and publish it on their own competing website and on Amazon; or even make an AI-generated audiobook or short film without the author's permission? People can do these things with human-written stories too, but there's probably a better chance of being able to complain and shut it down if you are actually the legal owner of the story. (The situation is a little different for stories that have been published before, as we're not asking for any exclusive rights; but the point about third parties being able to then use and profit from the work without the author's consent still applies.)

EBOOK EDITIONS NOW AVAILABLE

All our stories are available to read here with no paywall (except for the ones in the original 2016 Mysterion anthology). But if you prefer eBooks, we also have ePub editions available for purchase, starting with January-February 2025. Click here (or on the Amazon link in the upper left corner) to buy them from Amazon, or search for the "E-zine" tag on our Patreon page.

COMING SOON!

We have two stories for you in April, appearing here on the 2nd and 4th Mondays.

First, a new story by returning Mysterion author Jared Oliver Adams. In "The Skywhale in the Garden", a teenager facing an untimely death isn't sure he's ready for paradise. Then, in Tao Yuan's short fiction debut, "Sonata", a dead musician has to communicate an essential truth to the one living person he's never been able to communicate anything to: his daughter.

FELINE UPDATE

Another benefit of the warmer weather is that most of the mice who avoided falling for Kristin's traps in the attic seemed to have moved back outside. It's been weeks since we even saw mouse droppings on the kitchen floor near the trash compactor, let alone live mice running around inside the trash when we opened it.

Although our cats weren't much help with the mouse problem, managing to kill only one this past season, they did chase a few others around for a while. One lasting consequence is that, although Marie's favorite sort of toy used to be plastic spirals, it now seems to be toy mice. Unfortunately, they aren't much help at teaching her how to hunt the real ones.

Thank you for reading, and be sure to stop by next Monday to read the first of our April stories!

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