March 2025

Greetings from the suburbs of Boston, where we hope it will be getting warmer real soon now! We're currently reading the stories submitted in January. As of Sunday night, 189 remained unread, six had been read by one of us but not the other, fifty-one have been rejected, and three had advanced to our short list.

Although we weren't on any panels or trying to sell books at Boskone this year, we did stop by for the day on Saturday, and were able to catch up with a few people, including lunch with a couple of Mysterion authors.

From left to right: F.R. Michaels, Donald, Kristin.

We're still hoping to meet our next Patreon funding target before we finalize our story selections in late May. If we get to (and remain at) $275/month, we'll be able to accept six stories from the latest round instead of only five. We're currently at $259/month (down slightly from last month), so we only need a few additional Patrons. If you appreciate what we're doing here, and aren't already supporting us with a paid Patreon subscription, please consider signing up. You can subscribe for as little as $1/month, which gets you access to our Discord and to monthly Insider posts about our exciting lives as science fiction editors; or you can choose a higher tier for additional subscriber rewards.

Coming out on March 24th, our next story is from crime writer Charlie Kondek, making his Mysterion debut. In "The Gift", a Christian police officer who can sometimes use his prophetic gift to solve crimes is tempted to collaborate with a psychic--something frowned upon by his church--while working against the clock on his latest case. We loved how this story showed the protagonist's faith potentially both helping and hindering his work, and its portrayal of Christians from the Pentecostal tradition (we don't see enough stories that show--in plot-relevant ways--what makes different Christian denominations distinct from one another).

Our April story, appearing on the 28th, is D.G.P. Rector's historical fantasy "Honey-Fang's Confessor". A missionary encounters a legendary king who once slew monsters but now faces a more difficult challenge: providing for his people in a changing world. (Don't worry; it's not all talk and no monster-slaying!) This is D.G.P. Rector's fourth Mysterion story, but the first fantasy of his that we've published; the others have all been far-future SF set in distant solar systems.

INDIVIDUAL ISSUES NOW AVAILABLE

For as long as we've been publishing this online magazine, we've made bimonthly eBook editions that include all our fiction content. Until now, these have only been made available to short fiction reviewers, and Patreon subscribers contributing $10+/month. But now, you can also purchase the most recent one on Amazon or from our Patreon page.

New issues will be made available going forward once all the stories in them have appeared here on the website. (Patreon subscribers will still get them before they appear here!) Eventually, we hope to also add back issues.

They're basically the same price for you wherever you buy them, and there are advantages to us whichever vendor you use, so please do whatever works best for you!

Here's the cover, just to remind everyone who's in it:

FELINE UPDATE

Now that we've had our cats for almost four years, we don't feel the need to include pictures of them in every single From the Editors post. But they were especially cute this month, so here's one:

Thanks for reading, and please consider supporting us on Patreon so we can reach that next funding milestone and start accepting more stories!

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