February 2023

Thank you to everyone who submitted a story in January! We are now closed to submissions again until July 1st. This time around, we received 272 stories, and we look forward to reading them and discovering some new favorites.

We do have some personal news to share. A long-time friend of ours passed away recently after a long illness, and her elderly cat, Belle, has come to live with us.

Our best guess is that Belle is going on 16 or 17, though our friend didn't know how old she was when adopted from a shelter in 2008 or 2009 (she had had at least one litter of kittens before being spayed). Belle has some health issues that we're working on with her new vet, but they're not primarily age-related. She's very outgoing with humans, but not especially fond of other cats--Maxwell and Marie, for instance. For right now, she lives in our guest room and ventures out to explore the rest of the house once or twice a day, either with Maxwell and Marie kept out of areas where she might roam, or under close supervision to manage aggression and territorial behavior. (Belle likes her personal space.)

Belle's human, Lynne, has been an important part of our lives for as long as we've known each other. She attended our wedding, and Kristin still uses a crocheted lap blanket that was a birthday present from Lynne several years ago. We look forward to seeing her again on that day when all things are renewed, when there will be no more sorrow or suffering, and we can hear her sing in the voice that she lost before either of us knew her.

Patreon

Thank you to everyone who signed up for our Patreon (or updated their credit card information) in response to our recent appeal! We're very grateful for your support. And we're up above $200/month again, so we can have new artwork 4 times a year instead of only 3 times.

Can you help us meet our next funding goal? We're currently at $201/month. If we reach $275/month, we'll be able to publish two more stories each year, for a total of 16. Although we have a few very generous Patrons who contribute $25 or more each month (and we really appreciate them!), most of our subscribers contribute between $1 and $5 per month. For $3/month, you get early access (via email and our Patreon page) to all the stories we publish, and for $10/month you also get them all in convenient e-book format (now with beautiful covers designed by Anne Horn!).

Current and Upcoming Stories

Our most recent story was Matthew P. Schmidt's "Daughter of Omega", a story about the persistence of faith in a world where one's senses can't be trusted. Prior to that, Andy Dibble entertained us with his dryly humorous "The Baptismal Status of Persons Wetted by the Sprinkler Deluge" (the International Theological Commission has its work cut out for it).

This month's story (appearing on the 27th) will be D.G.P. Rector's "The Binding and the Ram", in which a conflicted Fleet Chaplain in an epic future war learns that her own side's ethical compromises have been even darker than she had imagined. (While you're waiting, you can read D.G.P. Rector's earlier Mysterion story, "On Charis Station".)

Boskone

Donald and Kristin will be roaming around at Boskone over the February long weekend, though not in any official capacity. Feel free to say hello if you see us! (They do require everyone attending in person to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, but only with the original two-dose series, though they recommend the boosters. Masks are required as well.)

Roleplaying Games

Donald has been thinking through how to design a tabletop roleplaying game. He has some ideas, specifically about using a 2d10 mechanic and replacing damage dice with degrees of damage, but it's a lot of work. He may share the details someday.

Feline Update, Part Two

Kristin saw a mouse in the kitchen trash one night, but was unable to alert Maxwell or Marie before it could scurry into a new hiding spot.

They know the mouse is there, though.

We think Maxwell might have better luck if he backs off and gives the mouse some space. He and Marie may not have had enough time to perfect their hunting skills before we adopted them.

Unless they're hunting each other.

Yes, that's Maxwell under the paper.

Although Maxwell is more likely than Marie to get upset when he sees strange cats roaming across our yard, he seems more curious about Belle than hostile. Marie still seems a bit afraid of her. It doesn't help that Belle is bigger, and probably hasn't seen another cat in over a decade unless they were both in carriers at the vet. It might take some time before they can all hang out together in the same room and ignore each other, but we're working on it.

Thank you for reading, and please be sure to come back on February 27th for D.G.P. Rector's story! And please consider subscribing to our Patreon, if you haven't already, to help us bring you the best in Christian-themed speculative fiction.

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