February 2025

Thank you to everyone who submitted stories in January! We're now closed to fiction submissions until July 1st. We received 257 stories, which is typical for us (last January, we received 245). If you sent us a story, you can expect to hear back from us before the end of May, but not necessarily much before then, especially if it gets shortlisted.

As of right now, we plan to accept five stories, to publish between July and October of this year, but if we reach our next Patreon funding milestone before we finish selecting stories, we will be able to accept a sixth. (Usually it would be seven stories with the possibility of an eighth, but we accepted two Christmas stories from the July submission window, so...) We're currently at $260/month, and only need to reach $275/month in order to start accepting an additional story from every submission window going forward. That's only an additional $15/month!

We have multiple tiers at which subscribers can support us, with different rewards for each, so the exact number of new subscribers we'd need depends on which subscription tiers they select. But we could get there with one new subscriber at $25/month, or two at $10/month... if you aren't already subscribing to our Patreon, please check it out and consider signing up! (We have $1, $2, $3 and $5/month options as well.)

Art submissions are open year-round.

COMING SOON...

Stories are always published on the 4th Monday of the month (though we also publish "bonus" stories on the 2nd Monday of the month in January and July). Our next story, coming out on February 24th, will be Malaysian author Derek Kho's dark fantasy "Antu", about a 19th century English Catholic missionary to Borneo who is haunted, along with his local congregation, by his own family's history with the island. This will be Derek's first story for Mysterion.

AROUND TOWN

Can any of our birdwatching readers confirm whether this bird that Kristin saw one day while out biking is a peregrine falcon? One of the sub-plots in a 1970s science fiction novel Kristin recently read, John Crowley's Beasts, centers on the near-extinction of peregrine falcons, assuming that their population decline would continue as everything else in the US got worse and the country disintegrated. But peregrines have gone from endangered to a species of least concern. Make of that what you will.

FELINE UPDATE

Donald got a new monitor for his desktop computer. Marie decided it required some feline QC.

We hope to be able to announce the March and April stories, which we're currently working on with the authors, in our next monthly update. We've also started reading the January submissions. Winter isn't as busy a time for us, but there's still always a long list of things to do.

Be sure not to miss Derek Kho's story on February 24th, and please consider helping us reach the next milestone in our Patreon funding! And thanks for reading!

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