Lent, Submissions Progress, and Patreon

As we write this, it is the first Sunday of Lent, the period from Ash Wednesday to Easter, when the church remembers the suffering of Jesus. Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions have a practice of fasting during Lent, though the particulars can vary. Evangelical Protestants like us, if they follow this tradition at all, tend to fast by giving up something personal. Kristin is giving up alcohol; though, since her birthday always falls in the middle of Lent, she tends to count it as a personal "feast day." Donald can't really mock her for that, since he's still deciding what to give up. He's sure to make a decision any day now.

Submissions Progress

We mentioned before that we received 256 stories this submission period. Of these, we've so far rejected 125 of them, 9 have been read by one of Kristin or Donald and are awaiting a second opinion by the other, and 10 have been read by both of us and added to our Final Round pile. The remainder remain unread, but this puts us at about the halfway point. We'll decide which 7 stories to accept once we've read through all the stories.

Forthcoming Fiction

Look for these stories here at Mysterion in the next two months!

March 23: "Reformed" by Caias Ward
April 27: "God-Eaters" by Joshua M. Young

Patreon

Our Patreon support has just dipped below $200 per month to $199. If you recall, $200 was the amount that allowed us to start paying 8 cents per word. Fortunately, we've reordered our Patreon goals so that we don't have to stop paying professional rates before the shine comes off our new, official SFWA status. But we will have to stop posting four new art pieces a year, and go back to three. We haven't yet decided whether this means the art we acquired for April will need to go up in May instead, but we may not have to. We are, you may have noticed, only $1 short. If anyone wanted to start supporting us on Patreon for even a dollar, we should be able to hit $200 again and continue to post art four times a year.

We'd also love to start receiving support from more patrons. Right now, we have a few high-dollar supporters, which is great. We love our Patrons! (We have to, most of them are friends and family.) But having more low-dollar supporters helps us in a number of ways, such as improving our visibility in Patreon searches. So, if you're reading this, please consider contributing $1 a month. And if you want to contribute more than that, you can also receive early access to stories ($3/month), a copy of the ebooks for our two anthologies ($5/month), bimonthly ezines ($10/month), and paperback copies of the anthologies ($25/month).

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