Happy New Year!
Here at Enigmatic Mirror Press, we're getting old. Kristin went to bed before midnight on New Year's Eve for perhaps the first time in her adult life. Donald did stay up until 4:00 am playing video games, but that's hardly a once-per-year thing for him.
In a normal year, we would attend a dinner party with some of Kristin's former housemates, including the one who's been cellaring wine since the 70s and likes to bring out 30-year-old Bordeaux for special occasions. Kristin usually makes a fancy dessert. Then, once we're home (the dinner party tends to be on the early side, as Kristin and Donald are, in their mid-40s, among the younger attendees), we watch the ball drop in Times Square (though with the sound muted until the very last minute, so we don't have to listen to any annoying celebrities talk, and muted again as soon as they all start singing "Imagine").
(We should confess that, in a normal year, Donald would also stay up until 4:00 am playing video games after Kristin went to bed, so there is some continuity.)
Was there a Times Square celebration this year? We didn't even bother to check. Maybe this is partly due to COVID malaise; but we didn't feel we were missing anything by not watching people we don't know excitedly celebrate.
We do miss the annual ritual of gathering together with old friends to reconnect over good food. And Kristin does also miss the 30-year-old Bordeaux.
Perhaps this past year can encourage us all to re-embrace the traditions we've really missed, once that becomes safe again, and let go of the ones we haven't.
Mysterion is now open for submissions!
We will be open to fiction submissions for the entire month of January (we're always open to art submissions). Send us your Christian speculative fiction stories! We pay 8 cents/word for unpublished stories up to 9000 words long.
Award-eligible stories from 2020
It's that time of year again. If you read a story here that you really liked and wanted to nominate for an award, this list will help you figure out which category it's eligible for.
("God-Eaters" and "Work in Progress" are reprints, and hence not eligible for awards that recognize stories first published in English in 2020.)
"A Moose for Jesus", Patricia S. Bowne (4790 words)
"In the Fields of Sin, Down Among the Dead", Brian Winfrey (6020 words)
"His Ministers a Flame of Fire", T.B. Jeremiah (4680 words)
"Reformed", Caias Ward (4320 words)
"Gordon's Knot", Jennifer Milne (5380 words)
"You Shall See Him in the East", Frederick Gero Heimbach (4680 words)
"The Woeful Tale of Sir Banana", Rachael K. Jones (4860 words)
"What Comes Before", John Nadas (6390 words)
"Michael", Em Liu (5870 words)
"The Original Sin of William Blackhand", R. Keelan (5690 words)
"Omnipotent Marble", Patrick Doerksen (3980 words)
"This Is the Way the Prayer Ends", Barbara A. Barnett (8470 words)
January and February stories
We've finalized our publication schedule for January and February, so be sure to come back and read these once they're out!
January 11th: "Did You Hear the Angels Sing?", H.L. Fullerton. An angelic visitation at a mini-mart reopening may change the world--if those who heard the angels' song can stay alive long enough.
January 25th: "Devil Dog", Len Bailey. Everyone has given up on Corky Sue's sick dog except a kind soldier home from the war. But it will take a lot of courage for this little girl to save her best friend.
February 22nd: "Salvation", John Nadas. Ephesians 2:8 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God." What forms may such grace take, and does it matter?
H.L. Fullerton's story "Too Poor to Sin" appeared in the original 2016 Mysterion anthology, and John Nadas's last story with us was "What Comes Before" from August 2020. We're thrilled to bring you more fiction by these authors!
Mysterion 2
We had a post about this when the book first came out in mid-December, but just a reminder that you can now get all the stories we published here on the website in 2018 and 2019 packaged together in convenient book format with a beautiful cover. It's available now on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions, with other marketplaces to follow.
Patreon
Thank you to the new supporters who've signed up in the last month! We now have 23 Patrons and are at $218/month. Since we're back above $200/month, we'll be able to have new art for our home page four times a year again instead of only three.
We have exclusive subscriber-only content for Patreon supporters, as well as (depending on your support level) early access to all our stories and free copies of the anthologies and any other books we might someday publish. Check out the details here! Even $1 or $2 a month helps a lot.
Sign up to help us reach our next funding goal of $275/month, at which point we'll start publishing 16 stories a year instead of 14!
We do have a plan to increase what we offer to readers as our Patreon funding goes up, at a rate that will move us toward breaking even instead of away from it. $700/month is the point at which our Patreon income would actually pay for the stories and art we publish.
Happy New Year to all, and may 2021 be brighter than 2020!
Support Mysterion on Patreon!
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