Judgment passed, trends noticed, and articles to come

We have now responded to all the stories we received in January. If you sent us a story, you should have received either an acceptance or a rejection. If you haven't heard from us, please let us know! You can use the contact form in the sidebar.

Next, we'll be editing the three stories we will be publishing in June and July, so that we can publish them to our $10+ Patreon supporters at the beginning of June. This usually involves some back and forth between us and the authors. Once we have a version of the story with which we and the authors are happy, we'll send out the contracts and pay the authors.

So, what stories are we publishing? We'll wait until we have the signed contracts before announcing them, but we can say something about the kinds of stories we received this time around.

When we were open to submissions for our anthology, we noticed that we received a lot of stories that had the same themes and concepts. Well, there were similar trends this time around. Once again, these are not necessarily concepts that we dislike, but we do see a lot of them, and we often find ourselves looking for something different:

• Stories with a Catholic priest as the protagonist. We have published a number of such stories, but it's worth remembering that there's more to Christianity than Catholicism, and more to Catholicism than priests. 
• Stories about deals with the devil or other demons. There were a lot of these this time for some reason. It's certainly a valid idea to examine, but we're not going to buy more than one per submission period.
• Stories in which heaven and hell are vast bureaucracies in eternal opposition to each other. Our 2016 anthology was subtitled "Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith"; if your story tries to take mystery out of the Christian faith, it might not be what we're looking for.
• Stories that aren't about Christianity in any meaningful way. We're not averse to publishing the occasional story dealing with more general questions around religious faith, the existence of God, and whether divine purpose is at work in our lives; but your odds are much better with stories that explore these questions from a specifically Christian angle.
• Cthulhu Mythos stories. 

Of course, there are also concepts and sub-genres we don't see enough of:

• Non-Lovecraftian horror.
• Well-researched historical fantasy.
• Action and humor. We get a lot of very serious stories in which characters spend a great deal of time thinking and/or talking about their religious beliefs.

What's next? Unfortunately, there won't be an interview this month. Our subject had to bow out for health reasons. There will still be a review next week, and a story the fourth Monday of the month. If you're a $3+ Patreon supporter, you can read the story now. For everyone else, we hope that "Job: A Fairy Tale of God, Satan, and Us" by K.D. Azariah-Kribbs will be worth the wait.

Oh, and if you haven't seen it already, check out the new artwork on the front page. This month we have another beautiful piece by Rob Joseph. It's one of the three pieces we licensed from him when we first started the webzine, enough art for the first year. Now that we've gotten through the stories, it's time to start looking at the artwork submissions!

---

Support Mysterion on Patreon!