Hey everybody, M. here,

With so many announcements in the last few weeks it seemed like a good idea to give a full rundown of everything publishing-wise that should be on the way this spring, summer, and early part of fall, and also recap what has happened this year so far. So without further ado, let’s get started:

Walpurgis Witcheries arrives at the end of April
As was announced last week, Walpurgis Witcheries is on the way on its titular day (April 30) from DMR Books, and my story The Wandering One and the Witchdance will be appearing alongside eight other tales of blood and thunder set in and around Germany’s Harz Mountains in Saxony’s pagan past.

And I’ve got some exciting company on the table of contents! Among the excellent authors slated to appear in the book, you will find the author of the classic Bard series from the ’80s Keith Taylor, author Ethan Sabatella who I appeared alongside in Die By The Sword I and II, and Justin Young, who is both an author and the host of the great Monsters, Madness and Magic podcast. And that’s only a few! You can see the full table of contents over on the DMR blog.

I’m happy to be appearing in this followup to the very well received Samhain Sorceries, and some other news about this book just broke: DMR is going to be releasing a special, limited-edition chapbook titled Two Tales of Witchery alongside Walpurgis Witcheries, featuring two additional authors.

Chthonic Matter Quarterly, Summer 2026 issue on the way this summer
Early in the summer (I think in June but I’m not entirely sure) my story What’s Behind The Walls is slated to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly. The story is a thematic followup to my story Sticky, which appeared in the Winter 2024 issue.

As I always mention when talking about this one, you can still pick up that issue if you want to get a feel for what you’re in for when the new one arrives! And as I also always mention, you can grab a subscription for a full year’s worth of CMQ over on the publisher website, so you don’t miss out on my upcoming story or any of the other fascinating, thought-provoking, and of course fear-inducing horror to be found within its pages.

My first sword & sorcery collection, Kingdoms Trembling, coming in June!
June is the month, everyone, when my collection of all-new sword & sorcery stories Kingdoms Trembling should be hitting the shelves. Featuring 12 previously unpublished tales set in the world that I first introduced in the Die By The Sword anthologies. We’re still a ways out, so there’s a bunch of stuff I still can’t reveal but suffice it to say you’ll have some amazing stuff to feast your eyes on as the release date gets closer!

Appearing in Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors in August
As I announced just a few weeks ago, I happy to say that in addition to appearing in CMQ later this year, I will also have a story in the upcoming themed anthology edited by CMQ editor and publisher C.M. Muller, The collection is called Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors, and my story is titled Sherman Dismantled And Afloat. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this one has all the paranoia, anxiety, body horror, and human drama you can expect from my work in CMQ, with only a fraction of the sleep!

You can see the full table of contents and pre-order the book over on the Chthonic Matter website.

Kayfabe makes it way to the squared circle in September
Get ready to rumble, because my science fiction comedy Kayfabe is going to be busting loose from the pages of the Burial Books science fiction anthology Strange Tales of Space and Time in September.

The anthology release was rescheduled from the summer but it looks like everything is on schedule for the fall. You can visit the Burial Books website to see the full table of contents for this one and some of Burial’s other upcoming projects. Pre-order for the book should be kicking off in May!

And don’t forget to grab a copy of Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain from last year while you’re over there, the horror anthology containing my short story #FireOfLove and a bunch of other great and disturbing tales.

So that is everything that is on the way at the moment, any new developments will, of course, be shared as soon as I can share them! There’s plenty in the offing, but in case you’re looking for stuff that you can read right this second, here’s a recap of what’s been happening this year so far.

Read The Tears of Blood for free in The Battle Rages On e-book
In March, I was excited to have my short story The Tears of Blood reprinted in DMR’s free digital sampler The Battle Rages On. The story, which originally appeared in Die By The Sword Volume I, introduces Ulxedomus the exiled Crown Prince of K’Zal and a whole world of characters, deadly threats, and weird phenomena that will be revisited in Kingdoms Trembling. If you want to get ready for the collection this summer, and you want to see what DMR Books is all about, you can download The Battle Rages On for free!

Find me on Substack!
After eons of having my only authorial social media presence be on Facebook, I have launched a Substack newsletter which you can subscribe to and/or find on-site at The Sternstack. It’s only been about a week, but I have to say I am having a lot of fun with it. I sort of surprised myself by starting to do reviews of old issues of Dr. Strange that I unearthed as I have been going through my boxes of comic books from when I was a kid, and I have more, different kinds of content planned for the near future.

I am still just figuring stuff out about the platform and I barely have anyone looking at my stuff right now (which hopefully will change), but I’m enjoying doing the kind of writing I do there a lot. It’s something I used to do quite a bit years ago, usually in venues where I felt like I was wasting my time because of the limited reach. Hopefully this will prove to be the right place to do it, and I’ll be able to both spread the word about my fiction there and entertain people further with the Substack exclusive stuff. We’ll see! So if you’re over there or just like newsletters, follow and/or subscribe to The Sternstack!

Knot on Tree, Fire on Stone anthology still available for purchase
And finally, if you don’t want to wait to read some of my most recent work, and particularly if you like period pieces, you can still pick up my short cosmic horror story set in Julio-Claudian Rome, The Magician in the Knot on Tree, Fire on Stone anthology from UK indie publisher Harvey Duckman Presents. I love the story, so check it out!

I think that about wraps it up for the moment, should have more news coming soon on all of the items mentioned above and hopefully even more! Take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

It’s been forever since I’ve started up a new social media presence. None of the other major ones, for whatever reason, ever really appealed to me, so I’ve continued using Facebook as my only online social channel for spreading the word about my fiction, just because i was there when it was relatively new and I’m a creature of habit. And I’ve done it while complaining much of the way, as the continued reduction of organic reach has rendered the attempt to get my updates to people who might enjoy my work oftentimes more frustrating than effective. Neither have the platform’s ongoing promotion of garbage content and AI slop, and the apparent desire to become a place where chatbots spam other chatbots given me warm feelings about it. That said, I’m still active on Facebook, still sometimes post stuff there that doesn’t make it over here, and it makes me happy to get a new follower every once in a while. So if you’ve enjoyed one of my stories and you’re using Facebook, check me out on there and give me a follow.

But I’ve been thinking more lately about the need to be in more places online, especially with an unprecedentedly big summer release schedule coming up for me (which includes a number of stories in anthologies and my sword & sorcery collection Kingdoms Trembling). The reality is that any social media platform can take a dump in a day and there’s nothing you can do about it, so it doesn’t hurt to diversify.

Beyond that, some of the ways Facebook has deprecated long-form content in the past few years has consistently irked me. And the overall shape of the internet has made the idea of driving a ton of direct traffic to this blog you’re now reading, much as I’d love for it to be otherwise, seem a little old-fashioned and unlikely if not quixotic. So all of this added up to me deciding to launch a presence on Substack.

Poking around the platform in the first few days of using it in earnest (after literal years of sitting there staring at the dashboard), I’m having mixed feelings. My imagining it as throwback to a different era of social media that had not fallen victim to the many things that make the online world agonizing and deleterious seems to have been a bit of a pipe dream. But I think I might be able to do some interesting stuff with it, so feel free to visit The Sternstack if you are so inclined.

I guess you could say it is more of a “soft launch” at this point, as I’m just figuring out the platform. I’m envisioning it as a place where I can both keep people who are interested in my work up to date with what I’ve got coming out via the newsletter, and send out additional exclusive content in topics that relate broadly to my fiction. With this in mind, I’ve just recently posted a review of a comic book from the early-’90s, a sort of writing I haven’t done in a long time but that I think some readers might find entertaining. I’ve got some other ideas I’m likely going to experiment with as well. So if there’s anything you read over there and enjoy, let me know, like and subscribe, share, etc. It’s really up to the readers how this one comes together and grows. I’m open to suggestions!

Take care everybody!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Earlier today DMR Books announced the table of contents for the upcoming Walpurgis Witcheries anthology (slated to hit the shelves on April 30), so I can finally reveal that I am going to have a story in this one! Among the nine brand new tales of might and magic in this collection you will find my story The Wandering One and the Witchdance.

Walpurgis Witcheries is the followup to the hugely popular Samhain Sorceries anthology, and like its predecessor features all sword & sorcery and dark fantasy tales themed around a particular festival with pagan origins (in this case, Walpurgisnacht, a holiday that has served as a celebration of St. Walpurga since the Middle Ages, but still draws costumed revelers to the Harz Mountains in Germany each year to honor its more ancient significance).

Along with the excellent stories there is, as you can see, an absolutely beautiful cover by artist Adam Burke, who also provided art for Samhain Sorceries (take a look at both and tell me those won’t look amazing next to each other on the shelf!). So get ready to ring in spring with weird witchcraft and the clang of sword striking against sword!

And since the release date lines up with the Walpurgisnacht festival in April, that also means that you’ll be able to get your hands on some new sword & sorcery by yours truly before the arrival of my collection Kingdoms Trembling in June!

Plenty more about Kingdoms Trembling on the way in the coming months, but if you want a taste of the weird world you’ll encounter when June comes around, don’t forget that you can find the story that introduced the fictional universe that the collection returns to, The Tears of Blood, in the recently released DMR Books digital sampler The Battle Rages On for free. Or if you prefer print, don’t mind paying, and want a bunch of other, different great stories along with it, you can still grab a copy of the story in the first Die By The Sword anthology (not to mention its direct followup, The Eye Within The Eye, in the second volume of DBTS).

More news soon, take care everybody!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Just wanted to share the news that you can now pre-order a copy of Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors. As I mentioned the other day, the anthology is scheduled to come out in August and will contain my story Sherman Dismantled And Afloat. Visit the Chthonic Matter website to see the just-announced full table of contents and put in your pre-order so you get a copy right when it hits the shelves!

And while you are there, consider picking up a 2026 subscription to Chthonic Matter Quarterly for a year’s worth of innovative and thought-provoking weird horror, and so you do not miss my story What’s Behind The Walls, which is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of the magazine (and which is a thematic followup to my story Sticky, which appeared in the Winter 2024 issue).

Should have another big announcement coming around the end of the month, stay tuned!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

First I’m happy to share the news that my new horror story, Sherman Dismantled And Afloat, will be appearing in Nyctalocos: A Collection of Night Terrors from Chthonic Matter Press, which is scheduled to hit the shelves in August.

And just in case you forgot, or have stumbled onto my work for the first time just now and did not know in the first place, my story What’s Behind The Walls is scheduled to appear in the Summer 2026 issue of Chthonic Matter Quarterly. That story is sort of a thematic followup to my story Sticky from the Winter 2024 issue, so if you want to prepare your mind for the madness coming this summer, pick up a copy and dig in if you dare!

You can also subscribe to Chthonic Matter Quarterly for a full year of some of the most terrifying and thought-provoking new horror fiction getting published today.

Burial Books science fiction anthology title And cover art revealed
I received some additional good news on Friday: Burial Books officially revealed the title and the cover art for their upcoming science fiction anthology. It is going to be called Strange Tales  of Space And Time, and it’s got this cool, fun cover by Betty Rocksteady.

As I first announced last year, this anthology will contain my science fiction-comedy story, Kayfabe. This will be my second appearance in an anthology from Burial Books, the first being with my tale of memetic and demonic forces, #FireOfLove, which can be found in Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, released last year and still available for your enjoyment.

Strange Tales of Space And Time is scheduled to appear in August, and it will be available for pre-order in May. A full reveal of the table of contents should be coming in the near future.

Get some FREE sword & sorcery in the new DMR Books digital sampler
I announced this in my previous blog on Friday and went a bit more in-depth, but since people love free stuff so much I thought it was worth mentioning once again: the new digital sampler anthology from DMR Books, titled The Battle Rages On, is now available to download FOR FREE.

Among the eight excellent tales therein, you will find a reprint of my story The Tears of Blood, which originally appeared in 2023’s Die By The Sword anthology (and introduces the world which reader will revisit in my book Kingdoms Trembling this June).

More news on the way, take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

Yesterday DMR Books released its new FREE digital sampler anthology titled The Battle Rages On, a followup to the popular sampler released in 2019, The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories. The ebook features a stunning cover by Brian LeBlanc and contains eight stories (six from contemporary authors and two from classic titans of years past) that showcase what DMR is all about. I’m happy to say that my story The Tears of Blood appears among them!

The story originally appeared in the first volume of Die By The Sword from DMR Books, and is also the first one that I set in the world that readers will revisit in my collection, Kingdoms Trembling, which is slated to be published in June by DMR Books. So if you want a feel for what you can look forward to this summer, download The Battle Rages On and charge headfirst into the weird world of action and adventure!

And you also get seven other stories that will get you familiar with the unparalleled force in sword & sorcery and dark fantasy that is DMR Books, including a previously unpublished story by Ethan Sabatella. So check it out!

Much more news on the way!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

It’s release day (or “Harvey Day” as the wonderful people over at Harvey Duckman Presents call book release day) for the Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone anthology! I’m thrilled to have my short cosmic horror story The Magician appear in this book alongside 14 other tales of dark pagan myth, magic, and mayhem.

My story takes place in the Julio-Claudian era of the Roman Empire (a favorite historical time period of mine ever since I first watched the 13-part BBC miniseries I, Claudius when I was 15). It is about Julianus, the one and only magician in the Roman province of Hispania. Celebrated and adored, he finds himself suddenly and inexplicably exiled when the prevailing mood throughout the empire shifts. Fending for himself out in the hinterlands of Pannonia, he comes into contact with forces of decay even more profound than the ones that drove him away; or perhaps a different shade of the same forces.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get a chance to talk about why I decided to write a period piece as I think that real-life tale is sort of an interesting one in and of itself. But for now, I’ll just encourage you to check out the story and the rest of the great tales in this volume. You can buy the book here in your preferred format.

Plenty more news to come, stay tuned. Take care everyone!
-M.

Hey everybody, M. here,

The other day DMR Books announced its release schedule for 2026 and made the news public, so I can officially share that my first sword & sorcery collection, Kingdoms Trembling, will be published by DMR Books in June. It contains all previously unpublished stories that take place in the same world as my stories The Tears of Blood and The Eye Within The Eye, which appeared in Die By The Sword and Die By The Sword Vol. II respectively.

I’ll have plenty more to say about the contents (and the cover, for that matter) as the year gets going, believe me! In the meantime, if you want to get yourself prepared for summer, grab a copy of Die By The Sword and/or Die By The Sword Vol. II and dig in!

-M.

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 online 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.

Hey everybody, M. here,

I was getting ready to write my year-end wrap-up post without making any of those big announcements I’d mentioned in my post earlier this month, but much to my excitement I got an email yesterday that crossed some t’s and dotted some i’s, so I can officially announce that my short story The Magician will be appearing in the upcoming anthology from UK-based publisher Harvey Duckman Presents! The anthology will be called Knot On Tree, Fire On Stone: Curse On Axe and Bloody Thrones. It is a collection of tales set in (or around) the Dark Ages and steeped in ancient pagan mythos. My story is a tale of cosmic horror set a bit before the Dark Ages, during the Roman Empire’s Julio-Claudian era, but it gets you ready for the fall.

I’d say more but I don’t want to veer into spoiler territory; but fear not, you will not have long to wait to see what this one is all about! The anthology is slated to come out in January, in fact you can already pre-order the Kindle version if you’re an e-book person (print should be on the way shortly thereafter).

Much, much more to come, on this story and a few other things I am still waiting to share the news on. Take care everyone!
-M.