And apparently got a nice review in Locus, which I just read about in the @kaleidotrope.bsky.social newsletter! Thanks to @unrealfred.bsky.social for spotting that, and for publishing the story!

My story made the 2025 Locus Recomended Reading List!

Never mind all those other memes, tell me 5 Kaleidotrope stories or poems you've really enjoyed.

i listen to his stories / and offer him tea

I feel like such a fraud! 😉

Don't go chasing waterfalls in Michelle Koubek's new poem "From Water." kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/...

Congratulations to both @plangdineple.bsky.social and @trailofleaves.bsky.social for being on Locus Magazine’s 2025 Recommended Reading List for their fantastic short stories last year in Kaleidotrope!

This is such a lovely thing to wake up to. Congratulations to everyone on the list!!

Some other stories, outside of Kaleidotrope, that I’ve recently enjoyed.

22. "Bullet was bottled by a sharpshooter, and she still loves the destruction, the shatterings, the sing of struck metal and the splurting of blood from a wound."

Incidentally, if you're voting in the Locus Awards poll, you can select either of these stories, or write in up to 5 others from Kaleidotrope 2025. You can also rank Kaleidotrope under your Best Magazine nominees or—even more shockingly—me, Fred Coppersmith, under Best Editor.

Congratulations to both @plangdineple.bsky.social and @trailofleaves.bsky.social for being on Locus Magazine’s 2025 Recommended Reading List for their fantastic short stories last year in Kaleidotrope!

Never mind all those other memes, tell me 5 Kaleidotrope stories or poems you've really enjoyed.

If you have a newsletter or magazine or website hosted on or by Substack...

And rounding out #goblinweek, my @kaleidotrope.bsky.social story The Red Cap Of Old Hobb Mill kaleidotrope.net/archives/sum...

A couple of good places to start: Kaleidotrope's 2025 archives, with poems in every issue: kaleidotrope.net/archives/ Strange Horizons, which published an intriguing range of poems in 2025 (use the LOAD MORE button at the bottom): strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

“Bottom-feeder! Traitor! False friend! May the things with many teeth rip the legs from your body! May your bones be dashed upon the crags! May the gulls shit out your offal! May your vile thieving soul be dragged to the black depths where memory goes to die!” kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/...

Halfway through the decade, what are your favorite short story collections by nonwhite authors of the 2020s?

Have you read my story "Dybbuk-Draw" over at Kaleidotrope?

hi friends, i've put together a short collection of SFF stories and set it free—i hope it can give you some encouragement, a smile, or even just a pause in the doomscrolling. art is resistance. <3 🐺 📚 ko-fi.com/s/f0da603a0d <— support/PWYW (free!) tiny.cc/2q7y001 <— direct download

each named and individual, and so the narrator has to bargain with each wind as she asks its assistance. It has shades of Elric summoning the aid of elemental powers (not derivatively). Add in the pirate vibes and the daughter-father dynamics of her past, and it's a really fun, well told story.

With that intro, I really enjoyed @amulderwrites.bsky.social 's "Rewilding the Many-Tethered Winds" in Kaleidotrope: kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/... The central image of winds as a not-entirely-renewable resource gives it a strong and clever base, but I especially liked that the winds are...

Should we have a party? I feel like we should have a party.

I see what generative AI can do and I think, *this* is what we’re destroying the environment, economy, and our brains for?

Oh, the strange and alchemical horrors that await you in @rkduncan.bsky.social's new story "Bearing the Good Fruit"! kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/...

"lamps tuned to elsewhere:/get into that red Mars glow/for motivation, or that cool/Saturn shine for staying in—" Packing Light, @kaleidotrope.bsky.social kaleidotrope.net/archives/spr...

Have you read? Take Flight by Dan Peacock at kaleidotrope Dan always writes the most heart-wrenching of stories. kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/...

I read The Hunting Of The Phoenix by S L Harris in @kaleidotrope.bsky.social a story about loyalty, betrayal and destruction. Also a phoenix. nightofthehats.blogspot.com/2026/01/i-re...

1. From my newest, released Jan 1! "...And it is a cesspit. Age-old sewage seeped in deep, black seawater. Through the smell of rain and brine, the air reeks, and despite their size, the titan storm trembles against every wall of the chambers far below me. A mouse pressed into a clogged drainpipe."

Kuang’s metaphor is you literally put yourself through hell to get a PhD and while I certainly made it out tolerably well-adjusted, I’m not unscathed either… exhibit a: kaleidotrope.net/archives/sum...

“The Savior of the Three Lands” by @kmveohongs.bsky.social (Winter ‘26) “does a wonderful job digging into the lead’s complicated feelings and the assumptions she’d never thought to question—it’s well worth the read!”

33. He traveled under the soubriquet Linden Byrne, Conjurer for Hire. She, his daughter and stage assistant, was never on the bills, but lately he introduced her in his patter as Delariver the Prophet Girl. From “Steel Holds the Heat’s Memory,” published in Kaleidotrope (Summer 2025).

26. In this one there’s a time traveler. (There’s always been a time traveler, except when there wasn’t.) From “Chcixulub Mixtape,” published in Kaleidotrope (Fall 2022).

-Hunt the moon through high mountain forest, Through the needles and ice and the fog. She will hide in the most sharp-edged valley. You can track her with coal-dust fed dogs.- From "Winter Picnic" in @kaleidotrope.bsky.social kaleidotrope.net/archives/win...

Or Kaleidotrope, links to the four 2025 issues: kaleidotrope.net/archives/

15. I am a boygirl thing, an all or neither shape / I am born of warm earth and deeprooted stone From “Shapeshifters’ Local,” published in Kaleidotrope (Fall 2025).

16. "He’s a string-cut marionette and I wrestle him over the uneven cobbles to the apothecary all the girls know." ~Mistempered Weapons (Kaleidotrope, 2022)

28. mushrooms did the weighty business of tearing it all down / still the beechwood lord found a glint of green within me From “The Beech King Down on Bartholomew Run,” published in Kaleidotrope (Summer 2022).

I've already plugged my bee story once today! ...okay then kaleidotrope.net/archives/aut...

“More and more of their poisons they fed into the earth, into the sky, into the veining rivers and streams, and more and more our kingdom withered and died, while they gutted it for glinting scraps.” kaleidotrope.net/archives/aut...

From “Friend of the Fanilae”: “The thing nobody remembers—” Dr. Denwa Lamark says slicing the air with the tines of his secca knives as if they were scalpels and the restaurant his operating theater, “is humans have been modifying their appearances since the advent of mirrors.

16. "He’s still weak. Massive, but meek. I can push my sand-skiff more quickly than his wind can. 'I’m dying,' he moans, crawling on ill-formed hands and knees. 'You’re whining.' I swat the nearest part of him I can reach, the way Father and his crew used to swat me if I tried to sleep in. "

“Take Flight” by @danpeacock.bsky.social (Winter ‘26) is “a story that expertly blends the small-scale storyline with big questions about family and morality…”

Merc is a phenomenal writer. This is the perfect time for a collection of their stories.

"sing sorrow songs/that hover in the water like anglerfish// beaming out grief, dangling it to tell our/scattered numbers “here we survive.” A Matter of Collective Survival, @kaleidotrope.bsky.social kaleidotrope.net/archives/aut...

“Confessions of the Little Seer” by Emily Linstrom (Winter ‘26) “is another ghost story [that may follow] familiar patterns, but it’s well-told and a satisfying read regardless.”

In other news: I grow old.

Two fantastic stories from Kaleidotrope are on the short fiction longlist—“The Nine Crashes of Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn” by @trailofleaves.bsky.social and “The Hunting of the Phoenix” by @slharris.bsky.social. If you’re a BSFA member, I hope you’ll consider voting for them by February 19th

For those who don’t want to click, that favorite of the month is “Take Flight” by @danpeacock.bsky.social, pairing a small-scale story of finding a thought-extinct bird with big family disputes about leaving a dying earth kaleidotrope.net/winter-2026/...

“Magie Vol, Ogies Toe” by @clhellisen.bsky.social (Winter ‘26) “is another loss story, in which the lead and their sister must find a way to satisfy the ravenous ghost of their mother.”