A few months ago, I announced that the self-published book review column would be going on hiatus while I worked on a new project. It’s now time to talk about that project here.

My wife and I have decided that we have too much time and money. The obvious way to rectify this situation is to publish a pro-paying speculative fiction anthology. And as you can tell by the beautiful cover art we acquired, we’ve already begun our personal wealth redistribution program of transferring money from us to other artists.

The anthology is called Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith, and it is now open for submissions. As the name gives away, we’ll be publishing stories that engage with Christianity. While the phrase “Christian speculative fiction” occasionally appears on our website, our anthology is not what is often meant by “Christian fiction”: stories written by Christians and for Christians with nary a heresy nor a swear word to raise an eyebrow. We’re not looking for preachy stories, nor are we necessarily looking for unambiguously pro-Christian stories. There’s no need for the writer or the story to pass some theological standard for Mysterion. On the contrary, we’re hoping to be challenged.

We want stories that have Christian characters, themes, or cosmology, and that deal with them in ways that feel true to our experience of the faith, neither sanitizing nor vilifying. We hope to see stories that are thematically closer to Flannery O’Connor than C. S. Lewis. And we’re looking for speculative fiction — fantasy, science fiction, horror. Christian publishers have tended to shy away from all of these, for a variety of reasons, but we think that’s a mistake. The Bible is full of strange and unexplained phenomena; there’s room for mystery in the Christian experience.

You can read more about the anthology at www.mysterionanthology.com, especially in our Submission Guidelines and Theme Guidelines. Mysterion pays 6 cents per word, for stories up to 10,000 words long. We are now open for submissions, and will remain open until December 25^th.

We are also trying to raise money on Patreon in order to make Mysterion bigger and better (specifically, by increasing the number of stories and paying our authors better). Though if we raise too much money, we might actually fail in our wealth redistribution objective, and we’ll have to try it all over again next year. Pretty sure we’re never getting that time back, though.