Mysterion pays professional rates for science fiction, fantasy and horror stories up to 9,000 words with Christian themes, characters, or cosmology, and also purchases artwork for the website. Fiction submissions are accepted in January and July. Art is accepted year-round. Read the complete guidelines here.
SQF: Why did you start this magazine?
Mysterion: We published an anthology on this theme in 2016, and we thought it turned out well. We thought an online magazine was the next logical step . . . at least once our Kickstarter for a second anthology failed.
As for what inspired us to do the anthology in the first place, we were frustrated that speculative fiction, and especially short speculative fiction, seemed to have no place among Christian publishers, especially if those stories didn't follow strict guidelines in terms of language and theology. We also were frustrated by the lack of interest that most speculative fiction magazines had in engaging with Christian ideas meaningfully, and treating them as serious ideas deserving serious consideration. We are writers ourselves, and we grew tired of finishing up a story and thinking that it wasn't a good fit for either kind of market, so we created a market for those types of stories (though we don't publish our own fiction in the magazine).
SQF: What are the top three things you look for in a submission and why?
M: First, we look for good writing. We want words that flow easily when read, and that tell us what's happening in the story in a way we can understand.
Second, we look for whether the story fits our theme. Does the story engage with Christian characters and ideas in some way? Is it a way that shows understanding of Christian ideas and characters, regardless of whether it engages positively or negatively?
Finally, we want a good story. Too many of the stories we receive are people talking about philosophical or theological ideas, where nothing actually happens. Stories should have a beginning, middle, and an end, and a plot that progresses between them in a logical way to give us an ending that the story deserved.
SQF: What most often turns you off to a submission?
M: A lot of it's simply the inverse of the above question. Poor writing, not fitting our theme or not understanding it, and not telling a good story--or any story.
But other turn-offs are shallow characters, especially villains who have no discernible motivation beyond being a villain, or heroes with no flaws or internal conflict. We also tend not to be interested in stories where the main point is apparently to illustrate how stupid Christians (or atheists) are. (Or liberals/conservatives.) These don't usually have the thoughtful, nuanced characterization we're looking for. And, although we receive quite a few retellings of Bible stories, it's rare for us to encounter one we like, as they don't typically offer any new insight into those stories (and this is just as true of reinterpretations where the traditional Christian interpretation is shown to be false as those that stick too faithfully to the canonical narrative).
Finally, slow beginnings are often a turn-off. We'll give you a couple of pages, but if you're still giving us background information, or describing the setting, or stuck in a dialogue or internal monologue where nothing is happening, we're going to get bored and stop. If it's a particularly long story, you paradoxically have less time to get things moving. We're willing to give shorter stories more of a chance since we know something must be coming soon, whereas with a long story we suspect we may be waiting a while.
SQF: What do you look for in the opening paragraph(s)/stanza(s) of a submission?
M: Intrigue us. Raise a question that we as readers want to know the answer to. Why does no one go into the old wood? Why is the protagonist contemplating a suicidal last stand? What has the desperate gambler wagered that he's so afraid of losing? Give us a hook that makes us want to keep reading to find out the answer. And then keep doing that.
SQF: Is it really important to read the guidelines? Many are long and boring.
M: Eh, maybe. At least read the summary line at the top of the page or Submission Grinder before scrolling down to the Moksha link, so you can send us something that can plausibly fit our theme and not go over our word count limit. We understand, we're writers ourselves. We don't write stories to meet some magazine's or anthology's arbitrary guidelines. We write the stories we want to write and then start looking around for places that might want to publish them.
However . . . if you want to write or revise a story just for us, or if you have more than one story you think would fit and want to know which one we'd have the best chance of accepting, keep reading. We kept the Submission Guidelines to the bare minimum of what we want and how to send it, but we also have a link to the Theme Guidelines page that explains our themes more in-depth, and to the What We Want posts that explain our thinking, why we reject stories, and what sorts of stories we see too many of or too few of.
SQF: What one question on this topic do you wish I'd asked that I didn't? And how would you answer it?
M: Why is it so hard to get stories accepted?
Because there are many more good stories than there are places to publish them, and too many other things for people to spend their money on for publishing short fiction to be profitable. We get about 300 submissions each time we're open, and we can publish 7 of them. And, since our theme is more specific than most other short fiction markets that pay 8 cents/word, 300 is actually on the low side as these things go. We have a Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/Mysterion where people who like our project can provide ongoing financial support, but that brings in less than half of what it costs us just to pay our authors and artists. The rest comes out of our savings. This is more common in short fiction publishing than most people want to admit. So, there's a limit to how many short stories any magazine can afford to accept, unless there's a massive shift in the extent to which readers of short fiction are willing to subscribe to the magazines they like and/or contribute to their crowdfunding campaigns. There's also a time component. It takes time to edit and format all the accepted stories, and we owe it to both our authors and readers to do this well. But most short fiction publishers are also writers, and would like to preserve a little of their leisure time to work on their own fiction. At some point, you reach a limit to how much free volunteer work you have time for. No one has a good solution to these problems. But, in most cases, when you're waiting months for a reply to your story submission, and then you get a disappointing form rejection, it's not a faceless corporation you're dealing with, it's just an ordinary speculative fiction writer who either tried to help deal with the problem of not enough markets by starting a new magazine, or who is helping out some other writers who did the same (either as a volunteer, or for a token payment).
Thank you, Donald and Kristin. We all appreciate your taking time from your busy schedule to participate in this project.
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