May 2026

Happy Star Wars Day! We're almost done reading submissions from January, and are now deciding between the 18 stories still on our short list, from which we expect to select 8. However, if our monthly Patreon funding reaches $450 before we finish choosing stories (possibly before the end of this week!), we'll be able to accept 9.

We're currently at $438/month on Patreon, so it's pretty close. You can sign up for an email subscription, where we send you each month's stories at least a week before any of them are published here on our website, for only $3/month. For $10/month, you also get an advance copy of the eBook edition (ePub and PDF), which comes out every two months. But even $1/month subscribers have access to our Insider posts, with a behind-the-scenes look at how Mysterion comes together, plus book and game reviews (and extra cat pictures), and can participate in our monthly hangouts on Discord.

Spring is here, and it's Kristin's favorite time of year. (She doesn't understand all you "I just love fall!" people. Don't you realize that winter is coming? Flowers beat dying leaves every time.)

We have two science fiction stories lined up for you, coming out in May and June. First up, Larry Ferrill's "From the Light" takes us to a dystopian future transformed by AI and "pharmechnology", where a man who's become homeless after job loss and personal tragedy has to decide whether to believe in a power that can work through him to bring true healing. Then, in "The Shepherd Circuit", by Rod A. White, a long-dormant AI core remembers events it shouldn't, and claims to have been transformed by trying to understand faith.

Although both stories arguably include "AIs can be people too!" elements, please don't take that as an invitation to send us AI-written stories. We recently updated our submission guidelines to confirm that we don't want them.

Stories are published here on the 4th Monday of each month; or, for a $10/month subscription, you can read them in an eBook available now on Patreon!

FELINE UPDATE

Our cats really love pineapple leaves.

And open windows.

It's still chilly enough most days that open windows are a "sometimes" thing, but soon!

The cats recently had a difficult weekend, as our next-door neighbor rented something akin to a jackhammer so he could remove part of a large boulder buried iceberg-like in his lawn, probably since the last ice age. Maxwell especially was quite distressed, and that we were out visiting friends on the Saturday afternoon when the loud noise started probably made it worse for him. We decided to medicate him with gabapentin at one point to calm him down. Marie was more chill about the situation, though no doubt as happy as we were when the noise finally stopped.

Thank you for reading! We expect to have chosen the next set of stories before our June monthly update goes up, and will likely be hard at work editing the ones we plan to publish in July and August. And, of course, we open to fiction submissions again on July 1st!

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