Hey everybody, M. here,
Happy New Year! This year I am breaking from tradition and attempting to actually get my New Year’s blog post up on the first day of the year. Without further ado, here is a quick recap of what happened over the last 365 days publishing-wise, followed by a run-through of what I’ve got lined up for 2026 so far.
Stories that came out in 2025
2025 ended up being a very productive year, maybe my most productive one since I started getting published, but not a particularly high-volume one for anthology appearances. Such things can happen when acceptance dates and release dates line up in a particular way.
Over the summer, I appeared in Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, the un-themed multi-author horror anthology from Burial Books with my story #FireofLove. Then at the end of October, I was in Inkd Publishing‘s Cthulhu Mythos anthology Cthulhu Dreams with my story A Special Way of Doing Things. This was my first time appearing in an anthology from either of these indie presses, and I was really impressed at how both of the books ended up looking (and the work of the other authors found therein!).
#FireofLove is half social media-era tech tale told in snippets of o
nline video, half noirish revenge plot, with a demonic twist that ties together the two narrative threads. I could go into the details a little more here, but when the story came out, Burial gave me the opportunity to talk a little more deeply about where the story came from and what I was going for with it, in an article that you can read on the Burial Books website.
A Special Way of Doing Things is also now that I think of it, completely by coincidence, a story told from two perspectives; one of a woman who has just been hired on to work in IT at Miskatonic County, and of the author of a digital diary she stumbles on to written by a temp decades earlier.
While this dive into the Cthulhu Mythos deals with the denizens of Innsmouth, the semi-epistolary style of this reality-bender was more inspired by my favorite H.P. Lovecraft story, The Whisperer In Darkness. I think it’s a pretty idiosyncratic take on the Mythos that nevertheless plays with those classic Lovecraftian themes of madness and the loss of certainty about one’s own sanity, which I find to be the most authentically scary stuff in Lovecraft (and one of the most authentically disturbing things in general).
Sound interesting? You can pick up a copy of Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain here, and Cthulhu Dreams here.
Now on to some, but not all, of the stuff I’ve got lined up for 2026.
What’s On The Way in 2026
I’ve got a couple of things in the works that I’m not quite cleared to announce yet, so I’m going to restrict myself to what I can. First, as I just announced on Facebook, my short cosmic horror period piece The Magician will be appearing this month in the Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone: Curse On Axe and Bloody Thrones anthology of dark age pagan fiction from UK-based publisher Harvey Duckman Presents… The story is set in the Julio-Claudian period of the Roman Empire, which has long been one of my favorite historical eras.
Then, in the summer, I’ve got two more stories on the way.
My horror story What’s Behind The Walls is slated to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly, and is a thematic followup to my story Sticky which ran in the Winter 2024 issue.
My science-fiction comedy Kayfabe will be appearing in the sci-fi anthology coming up from Burial Books. It is a story much different from the on in Burial’s horror anthology, though it also deals in some sense with the madness of crowds. If you know the word in the title, you’ve already gotten a teaser into what it’s about, but that’s as far as I’m going with spoilers.
Other Miscellany
Other than the stuff I’m waiting for the go-ahead to talk about, I have a project I’ve been working on here and there which I was hoping to be farther along with by now but might still get into place this year. How’s that for cryptic?
Relatedly, I’ve sort of been considering a social media/web presence revamp. I’m torn on it, because I believe that maintaining a web presence that you, as an author, own and can point people to as a public-facing destination is important (dystopian issues and paradoxes surrounding what constitutes ownership online that have sprung up in the past few years aside). At the same time, expecting to draw much organic, non-bot traffic to this blog, let alone use it to generate a great deal of interest, might be an artifact of a kind of thinking stuck in the late-’90s. And since I’m far from being a WordPress developer, there are some annoying facets of upkeep that occasionally worry me.
We’ll see. If I end up actually getting myself onto an additional, more useful social media outlet than what’s left of Facebook, I’ll let everyone know here (and on Facebook).
Anyway, I’m trying to start out the year strong, so time to get back to reading! Much more news to come over the next couple of months. Take care everyone!
-M.
