September 2024

We are currently looking for artwork to feature on our website starting October 1st, so if you have anything that might be suitable, and have not yet sent us a link to your online portfolio, now would be a great time! See here for details.

Please keep in mind that, as this is being used for the banner at the top of our landing page, it needs to be wider horizontally than vertically. We get a lot of portfolios where every image is in portrait mode--suitable for the front cover of a book, but not what we're looking for right now. Square images don't work for us either.

A few other things to keep in mind. Christian themes are welcome but not required in art submissions, but they do need to be subtle. Speculative fiction content is required, however. People keep sending us portfolios that consist entirely of portrait or landscape photography. While many of these represent excellent work, we can't use them as header images for an online science fiction and fantasy magazine.

If you've already sent us a link within the last two years, you don't need to resend it unless the link will no longer work. We do keep all these links, and whenever it's time to look for new artwork again, we do go back and look at older submissions as well as newer ones.

We used to flatly refuse to look at anything posted on any site that required us to have an account on that platform to view images, but we will now make an exception for Instagram (since we do have an account there). But we still won't look at anything that requires us to follow or like your page on social media (how do we know if we like your work if we haven't seen it yet?). And our willingness to enter a password to view your password-protected page somewhere depends on what mood we happen to be in at that particular moment. (We also don't recommend sending time-limited links, as we are unlikely to be motivated to ask you to resend them if they've expired by the time we get around to trying to look at your work.)

If you don't have an online portfolio, you could just send us a few images as attachments. The problem with this approach is that the images artists tend to think we'll be most interested in are often not our favorites, so if you only send us five or six out of thirty or forty, odds are we won't like any of the five or six but might have liked something in the larger set. That said, please do not send us thirty or forty images! We don't want to overload our email account.

Since we are not currently commissioning new work, and only interested in using work that's available under a non-exclusive license, it's helpful if there's some way for us to tell, when we look at your portfolio, which images are available for licensing. 

Unfortunately, unless we want to license one of the images you've created, you probably won't receive any response from us except the initial automated reply to your submission email. We only use three or four images each year, and we don't usually know until a few months prior what will be a good fit for the stories we're publishing during the time your artwork will be featured. Sometimes it does take two years or more after someone sends a portfolio link before we want to use one of the images. So, as long as you followed our guidelines and sent us a link to images that are actually the sort of thing we say we want, our answer is almost always a "maybe". (This is, in part, why we're only asking for a non-exclusive license, because we don't want to be preventing you from selling your work to someone else while you're waiting to hear whether it will work for us.)

We hope this helps to clarify some things, and we look forward to reviewing any new art submissions that come in over the next week or so (and to taking another look at previous portfolios that we liked)!

What's New and What's Coming

Our current featured story is by Constantine Singer. In "The Interrupt", a socially awkward ministry student interrupts a stranger who's about to jump off a bridge, only to learn that the man has devoted his life to interrupting attempted suicides that he's supernaturally alerted to. Only now, the man has come to doubt that the source of these alerts has been benevolent.

In September, we'll have another story by Nigerian author Hannah Onoguwe. A young woman with a past who recently married a wealthy, influential, and twice-widowed pastor discovers that her husband is not the man everyone believes him to be, and that his first two wives have not entirely departed. If you appreciated Hannah's first story with us, "Breaching the Distance", you won't want to miss this one!

L.G. McCary's "The Willow" will be out just in time for Halloween! This eerie tale tells the story of a mysterious, undying tree that can take away everyone's sadness. How could it not be a gift from God?

Stories are published on the 4th Monday of each month (in this case, that's September 23rd and October 28th).

We'll be open to submissions again on January 1st, so please consider sending us something if you're a science fiction, fantasy or horror author interested in Christian themes (and writing about them in the story you submit to us, which is the part many authors seem to miss).

In the Neighborhood

For a few weeks, the two houses on either side of ours were vacant. The two-family house on the left has now returned to full occupancy, but that's unlikely to happen with the single family house on the right for some time.

You can't see it from this side, but even the chimney has been demolished, leaving a gaping hole in the roof. Piles of lumber have shown up, and are now sitting in the yard under protective plastic sheeting. So we expect we can look forward to plenty of exciting construction noise in the months ahead!

Feline Update

The cats have a particular morning routine, and part of that routine is getting into a fight while Kristin gets dressed after breakfast.

Patreon

We're now reading the story submissions we received in July, and expect to make our selections before the end of November (but not very much before). If you would like us to be able to choose eight stories instead of the usual seven, please consider signing up for our Patreon!

Our generous subscribers currently contribute a total of $249/month, which covers about half the cost of paying authors and artists. We contribute the rest ourselves, so we're not able to expand our offerings--more stories and artwork, longer maximum word count--without additional Patreon funding.

We aren't really that far off from being able to publish sixteen stories a year instead of fourteen! We would need to be at $275/month, so an additional $26/month would get us there. That's only three new $10/month subscribers, or ten at $3/month (more or less--keep in mind that Patreon takes a cut in order to fund the platform).

What would you get for that? Well, $3/month subscribers have early access to all our stories, which we send out by email (and post on our Patreon page) on the first of the month in which they'll later appear on our website. And our $10/month subscribers also receive a special edition ebook of forthcoming stories every two months.

You can subscribe for as little as $1/month, and even $1/month subscribers get monthly Insider posts where we try to share about some of the behind the scenes work that goes into putting the magazine together, plus occasional book, TV, movie, and game reviews. All subscribers also get access to our Discord, where we host monthly gatherings and are available to answer your questions. (We also have a $25/month level, for those who are feeling extraordinarily generous, and that includes free paperback copies of all the books we publish.)

Please take a look, and consider subscribing if you haven't already signed up!

Thanks for reading, and be sure to come back on September 23rd for Hannah Onoguwe's latest story!

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