Jack of Harts

But I came out in 2023 and submitted the first two stories I had submitted to other people in many years. Raconteur Press accepted one for publishing and passed on the other.

I rolled into 2024 by submitting to twelve different anthologies at two different presses. Raconteur Press and Three Ravens. Five stories were accepted in all, but the Three Ravens story was not published until 2025.

2025 saw me sending to twenty-eight anthologies and twelve publishers. Only four were accepted, but the publishers willing to print my stories expanded to four. I consider that to be a major victory. I will note that many of my submissions were previously written stories that were reworked for other anthologies. And I’m still waiting on word from two anthologies. A few I never received a rejection letter, but when I saw that publication was moving forward without any contract coming to me, I figured I was not selected. No news is not always good news after all.

So far in 2026, I have submitted to six anthologies by four publishers, with two of those stories being freshly written in January, and the other four being previously rejected stories that I sent to other markets. I just found out today that four of them have been accepted for publication.

I was at Castlecon a week ago, a local gaming convention to my town, and I was talking to a guy I know who is an author himself. And so his daughter. And he was talking about this really good editor and publisher he likes who does a good job with their stuff, and he said he is really lucky that she chose to work with him. And he told me that she had some anthologies coming up that were really good. So I contacted her, she told me that she was coming up on the end, and that if I had anything I should get it in by the end of the weekend. So I looked at the three anthologies she was planning to publish this year, looked at my written but not accepted stories, and one that I thought could fit in each of those three anthologies. Well, she agreed and all three were accepted. And it seems she got such a good turnout of stories, that she’s putting out FOUR anthologies this year, instead of the planned three.

That makes FIVE publishers who chose to print my stories since 2023, by the way.

And I have plans to submit to five more anthologies this month, by five different publishers, two of which have chosen to publish me before.

This is a good day, and a good way to start a year of creating more stories.

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Gen X Watching

by Medron Pryde on February 1, 2026 at 12:01 am

Posted In: Diaries

I found out over the last couple days, that everybody is not like me.

Pretty much everybody in America knows that a guy who used to be a nurse joined a protest against ICE, got into a physical altercation with Border Patrol, and was shot dead during it. That is about the most sanitized description of the event that I can write.

And like the woman who drove her car into an ICE agent and was shot dead for doing it, there are a lot of narratives about it. The fact that two of these events have happened in a matter of weeks is disturbing. More disturbing on a different level, is the politics of what photos of the dead people are used.

For the woman, they picked a much younger picture to use. For the man, they created one. They used AI to give him a better tan, and more attractive facial features. That is what I saw and I thought that was dishonest of the media. But they are dishonest, so that was par for the course.

Other people saw something else. Other people saw the modifications and said that he looks like a Jew. The original picture. The modified picture that the media used for him does not, as many people are saying, look like Jew. They shorted his nose, changed his skin color, shifted his bone structure. They made him look more handsome. They made him look less Jewish.

I’m shocked that this is a thing. That people could act like this. And yet they do. I’d like to think it was not on purpose. But this is the Democrats here. Maybe it was on purposed.

What think you?

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Gen X

by Medron Pryde on January 31, 2026 at 12:01 am

Posted In: Diaries

I’m Gen X. I’m in what is generally considered the mid to older part of Gen X, so I grew up in a world of order where I HAD to get along with the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation. They were the people I was taught to look up to as examples of how to act, and they taught me in school. I was the first generation to be given a single letter as a description. X. And you know what? We liked it.

And as I was getting old enough to be considered a baby adult, I was playing with and talking to and dealing with the Gen Ys. They are my younger cousins. The kids entering school as I was looking at graduating. The kids we were trained to look out for and protect when they went out to the school yard to play. The kids we watched to make certain some drug dealer didn’t try to sell to them, or that we watched when strange vans rolled through our neighborhoods just in case they were one of those bad vans. The kids in church that us older kids were trained to watch and make certain they were safe at all times.

I grew up with and am comfortable dealing with a range of humanity that stretched across a century of birth dates. People who grew up in the ultra-racist times of Democrat-ruled America in the 30s and 40s and who went to war and came back home and wanted to do everything they could to keep that kind of world or war from ever happening again. They built a world where order was the base standard and disorder was not just frowned upon, but unforgivable. They built a world where no one was allowed to see race. Where even admitting you recognized that someone looked black was on the edge of the line that was not allowed. And you’d better have a REALLY good reason that you even mentioned it. Because if you didn’t, they were already reaching for the soap that was going to go into your mouth for daring to mention someone’s skin color.

I grew up in a world where the Reverend Martin Luther King’s words were gospel. Where we looked FIRST to the content of their character and then we refused to look at the color of their skin. To this day, I look to what someone is wearing and how they act before I ever look at the color of their skin. And even then I’m uncomfortable thinking about it. And when someone asks me what they look like, I describe their dress and their actions first. And then they have to ask me what their skin color. Because I was taught from the moment I first realized that people came in different colors that God loved variety, and everyone was equal in the eyes of God. Period. End of Line.

Jesus loves the little children of the world. Red, Brown, Yellow, Black, and White, they are precious in his sight. That was a foundational song we sang in church, and if it wasn’t every week it was often enough that I know it by heart.

The Greatest Generation, the people who taught me, saw what evils racism can do. They saw what Japanese racism did to the Chinese and American prisoners. They saw what German racism did to the Jews and so many other “undesirables.” They saw what Russian racism did to all the ethnic cultures around them. And they saw in America the honorable black men who rose up and fought in World War II, volunteering to serve in a military where they had been wiped out of the military by Democrat administrations of the early 1900s. They saw the evils of racism in a war that killed millions of people and sunk three quarters of the ships on the ocean, and they built a world where that would not be allowed to happen again. A world where that kind of racism was not only wrong, but unthinkable. Literal Wrong Think in the terms of 1984.

That is the world I grew up in. And I HATE that the Democrats have built up a world in the last two decades where the unthinkable is once again not only thought but shouted out by the loudest voices in our politics. I hate it. There are very few things in this world that I truly hate, and that is one of them. And I lose respect for those who celebrate that.

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