Bruce H. McCosar

Blog

  • Profile: Kaleidotrope
    Kaleidotrope, Summer 2026. Cover art by Brian Malachy Quinn.

    Profile: Kaleidotrope

    This article is part of my Recommended Reading profile series, originally written and posted 1-Sept-2026.

    Summary

    Kaleidotrope reads at times like a fable, a dream, a prediction. Each issue generates a consistent sense of wonder and surprise. I think if independent speculative fiction were a small town, this would be the town square.

    Find it at: Kaleidotrope.

    • Genres: Eclectic across speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, horror.
    • Content: Short fiction and poetry.
    • Publication Frequency: Quarterly.
    • Cost: Free, even including an extensive archive going back to 2012.

    If you find you like Kaleidotrope, you should become a supporter on Patreon. That’s the best way to ensure small presses and publishers will continue to exist. Period.

    Why Kaleidotrope?

    A long while back, I left social media entirely. When I came back, one of the first thing I did was try to find 1) new stuff to read and 2) places to submit my work.

    I hadn’t heard of Kaleidotrope. See, for a long time, I was a teacher. No one who hasn’t done it understands how that sort of workday can take everything from you. Once I got my life back, well, you might say I looked for places to live.

    Kaleidotrope (@kaleidotrope.bsky.social) maintains a strong presence on Bluesky, so I ran into them very quickly. After diving into the archives, I definitely put them on my list of places to watch. Flash forward and I’ve been a Patreon supporter since 13-April-2026.

    That got me a LOT of extras. The editor, Fred Coppersmith (@unrealfred.bsky.social) has the dual qualities of being a discerning editor and an observant wit. (Think Oscar Wilde in charge of Amazing Stories, but set in the 21st century.) With Patreon membership you get access to the frequent Kaleidonotes, a behind-the-scenes look at the magazine.

    And that by itself is interesting. Kaleidotrope has been a one-person-operation ever since its founding in 2006. Despite that—or possibly because of that—it’s on par with magazines with dozens of people on the editorial staff and much larger budgets.

    But hey. Enough from me. They have an archive, right? Let’s take a tour and let the magazine speak for itself.

    Selected Works

    Short Stories

    Here are a few of the best stories from recent issues.

    I have to admit my limitations here. I hate spoilers. That will make me very vague in the descriptions at times. Remember the whole idea of what I like—to be surprised. Hard to recommend something and at the same time take that option away.

    1. “A Song in a Minor Scale” by Gunnar De Winter. Had to put this one first; though it’s from the last issue, it’s easily my favorite of all of them. A tale of a girl given the name Lyra, a druid named Braze, and a dragon whose name is likely not Ormir.
    2. “A Family Forged” by Aaron Emmel. Here my spoiler-sense won’t let me say anything, other than that this is one of those stories where you have to read to see how the fictional world works, and how the narrative flows against those boundaries.
    3. “A Life in the Day: with Chris Wheeler, CEO of Tricentennial” by Matt Hornsby. In the vein of Merlin syndrome and the case of Benjamin Button, this is a tale of unusual aging.
    4. “A Tree That Can’t Be Chopped” by Timothy Mudie. Not just a fantasy story, but a self-contained thriller / mystery involving a missing friend and arcane secrets.
    5. “Full Fathom Five” by Gwendolyn Maia Hicks. Go fishing, accidentally net a merrow. (Fantasy folks might recognize this as an Irish name for the merfolk.) If I enjoy a story, a lot of times I will read it out loud, and the cadences of the dialogue perfectly match a soft Irish accent. I went to have a look at their bio, and found, just as I suspected, they’re a bit of a linguist (like me).
    6. “Water Softener People” by EC Dorgan. Yeah, this is the one I was thinking about when I said I don’t do spoilers. It’s an experience, a place you go ← (that was a hint).

    Now let me dive into the archives.

    I owe a lot of my experience with Kaleidotrope to bad traffic. I live in the DMV (District / Maryland / Virginia) area, with some of the most clogged and congested roads in the nation. (I-95, anyone?) Generally my wife and I trade out driving on long trips. During the times I’m in the passenger seat, I like to read.

    Here I have to give Kaleidotrope a LOT of credit for resisting the PDF format. Many times I’m reading on a phone (the same one running Google Maps). Reading the stories in Kaleidotrope there is the perfect web experience, the text conforming to the borders of the screen for easy reading.

    I appreciate that. Earlier this year I had cataract surgery, and there was a time I had terribly disorienting vision issues. Between surgeries, my left eye was farsighted, my right eye nearsighted, and neither could see up close. Putting on reading glasses was hot garbage, as I needed a different magnification for each eye.

    Thus, I got a lesson in the value of publications that make themselves readable to the vision impaired.

    Anyway! Here are some of my favorite stories I’ve found on the road.

    1. “Transits of Other Lands” by Marissa Lingen. As a new writer, you get bombarded with advice. Start the action quickly. Plant that hook. State the motivation immediately. This story has none of that, and that makes it great. Simply put, this is exactly what the title promises—an article on transit systems in other (fictional) lands. About the time I got down to Sorcerer Assisted Teleportation, we were stuck in traffic on I-495 near the Potomac. This story was a fantasy in more than one way at that point.
    2. “The Magician Deletes Her Feed” by Kate Lechler. Kaleidotrope distinguishes itself in being one of the SF/F/H magazines that allows and often features stories with an element of humor. I don’t know why that’s so hard to find. We live in pretty terrible times. Isn’t joy also emotional content? But the spec fic scene is awash in the grim and the apocalyptic. Here’s a nice respite: social media for mages. Delivers everything it promises, including a nice look at the academic / theoretical side of spellcasting.
    3. “Where There’s Magic” by Michelle Ann King. The first line of a story can be a promise of what’s to come. In this case it’s a lead-in to a tale that reads like a fable: “The witch had a favorite saying: where there’s life, there’s magic. There was a second part—where there’s magic, there’s death—but she usually kept that to herself.”

    Poetry

    I’m taking a different tack here. With short fiction, my journey was stochastic; here it’s deliberate. I’m a vertical reader, so I’ve chosen one particular poet to highlight.

    David Kopaska-Merkel recently passed away. According to the poetry archives he appeared in Kaleidotrope ten times. That makes it easy to assemble a top ten list!

    1. “Marbles” (October 2009) [Not Archived. This is from the print-copy version of Kaleidotrope, pre-2012]
    2. “Social Dinosaurs” (Summer 2016)—I have to admit an affinity for this one, as I like crows.
    3. “Dangerous Stuff” (Autumn 2016)
    4. “Even Their Fish” (Winter 2019)—In this and the previous, note the clever word choice and even use of coined words, e.g. effluviated / radio-frequensated. Further down this list you will meet the word Cinderellish.
    5. “Could’ve Been a Gerbil” (Spring 2019)—Read this one immediately. The last three lines were perfect. It’s clear DKM had a fantastic sense of humor.
    6. “Diplomatic Incident” (Spring 2020)
    7. “The Hungry Void” (Autumn 2020)
    8. “Post-Metazoan World” (with Kendall Evans, Summer 2021)
    9. “The Face in the Attic, the Voices in the Walls” (with Kendall Evans, Spring 2024)—I think one of the signature moves of a great poet is, as in gymnastics, “sticking the landing.” Reading through most of these, those final three lines bring the impact.
    10. “The Saucer Men” (Spring 2025)—Easily the best one in my opinion, very relevant to the world we’re living in. Maybe it resonates a bit extra with me, though, as the Saucer Men came to visit my people on three-masted ships, across the Atlantic.

    You might get the idea DKM was a heavy-hitter, and he was, if you read the bio link I provided above. Poetry, particularly in SF, is a tricky business—all the requirements of mainstream, with the additional speculative element. How many of the poems above told a complete story, just from the details in the verse? How many took you to another world, another place?

    Art

    In my opinion, the AI scourge has hit artists far worse than it has writers. I think the most telling thing I learned about the people who use LLMs to create images* is that on some sites, they hide the prompts they use from each other, so that no one will steal their ideas.

    Think about that for a moment.

    * Notice I didn’t call them artists. They’re not.

    That’s the problem, right? The theft of creative effort doesn’t hit home hard enough for them. Collectively, we need to 1) consistently support human artists and 2) consistently reject those who push the LAZY button and claim to be creative.

    Anyway. Did I mention Kaleidotrope has great art? You’ve seen the screen capture above, but check out some of these:

    An interesting bit of digital archaeology: Kaleidotrope started out as a print ‘zine, transitioning to electronic starting in 2012. It looks like the art really didn’t kick off until 2015. That makes sense. Needless to say, a webpage doesn’t require expensive color printing.

    I do miss the days of print magazines, but then I realize, after all the moving around we’ve done, I have exactly zero of them remaining. For a lot of publishers, the move to the web was problematic, but it at least enabled the possibility of building an extensive, accessible archive.

    Intelligence Files

    For Readers

    For Authors

    Time to admit I’m an obsessive stat-herder. In my own writing work, I’ve aggregated data for 77 fiction markets I’m interested in submitting to. (Sources: Duotrope, The Submission Grinder, Chill Subs.) The stats below were current as of 12-Aug-2026.

    • Favorite Factor: 488, comparable to Fusion Fragment among author follows and submissions. (Rank 29 out of 77).
    • Acceptance Rate: 3.41%, comparable to Pseudopod. (Rank 46 out of 77 in terms of difficulty, e.g. Interzone is at 2 out of 77 with a rate of 0.15%.) Caution! This stat is misleading in that it’s only gathered from writers who have the sense to track their submissions and enough professionalism to actually read the guidelines.)
    • Lag: 10.8 days, comparable to Fusion Fragment (Rank 15 out of 77 in terms of getting responses back to authors, so in the top 20%).
    • Submissions: by email during specific reading periods, posted in the Guidelines.

    That’s It! And Disclaimers

    Opinions presented here are entirely my own. Hopefully I provided proper attribution / links to everything I cited in the article; if I didn’t, please let me know and I’ll correct this post.

    I don’t take tips or collect names for an email list. If you appreciate my work, try donating to one of the following charities. Each of these has very personal meaning for me.

  • Reviews & Recommendations
    The place where the magic is made 😉

    Reviews & Recommendations

    These are the rules, and the reasons why.

    Soon I’ll have one of my first recommendations up. Later I’ll start posting reviews. What’s the point?

    I’ve been reading speculative fiction since age 6. Not first grade books, either. I came in knowing how to read, largely thanks to my mom, my grandparents, Sesame Street, and the Electric Company. Then I have to add in Star Trek, which got me interested in space.

    Tally that up and it’s 52 years of experience as a reader.

    You might think, hey, great. But it also means I’ve seen just about everything, and I seek out things that surprise and delight me. When I find them, it’s in my best interest to make sure they keep on coming.

    This is a terrible time for literature, period. The number of people who read for pleasure is down (Smithsonian, August 2026); jerks are using AI to pretend to be authors (and other kinds of creators as well), which floods submission queues with slop; and the economy is frankly the pits, with many people not being able to afford basics, not to mention extras.

    Face it. No one’s going to get rich writing short stories. People like me do it because they have something to say. Editors of small presses and independent magazines struggle just as much, year after year trying to keep afloat and keep making the magic words flow.

    This blog is for people who enjoy my work to come and learn more about it. One of the best ways would be to bring people in to the community I’m part of—the places and people that bring me joy. I think you’ll like the tour.

    So Here are the Rules

    Reviews are a touchy subject at times among authors. Again, presume good intentions. In general, my philosophy is not to point out the bad, but to highlight the good. But here are my guiding principles:

    1. Reviews and Recommendations are never solicited, but choices I make of my own free will. Something to consider: I used up precious writing time (hard to come by, some days) to write the article. Why? Because I seriously thought it was worth it.
    2. A Recommendation highlights the best parts. Think of it as if I’m an editor, assembling a list of things I like, a sort of virtual anthology. What editor goes out of the way to add in stuff they don’t like?
    3. A Review can be really harsh. I mean, it can be glowing and wonderful too, but the gloves come off. I’m a stickler for science and consistent in-world logic. In general, I will only review big projects that can take a hit or two from a minor leaguer like me. My biggest pet peeve is movies and TV shows. I can’t think of any recent show but The Expanse that didn’t get ripped a new one by me at one point or another. (The last one before that was Babylon 5.)

    So that’s it. I try to keep it simple. Hopefully you’ll find it entertaining and informative.

    Support the things you love, right?

  • You Have to Start Somewhere…
    Paris from the top of Tour Montparnasse, 2023.

    You Have to Start Somewhere…

    I resisted the idea of starting an author blog until I actually had something published. Well, now’s the time.

    On 23-Aug-2026, I got my first acceptance. My short story “The Good That Demons Do” (9200 words) is scheduled to appear in the Winter 2027 issue of The Colored Lens.

    Great news!

    So now, I really need this blog. Not merely for self-promotion, but as a place where readers can go to learn more about me and about the stories I create.

    For example:

    “The Good That Demons Do” is set on Taián. Although it’s a fantasy setting, I did a lot of world building. The planet itself orbits an F3V primary, with an orbital period of 2.6419 Earth years. The average temperature there is so high only the south polar region is inhabitable. Around 30° away from the pole, terrible storms blow in from the uninhabitable latitudes. To top it off, this is a young world, only four billion years old; plate tectonics are pretty furious there.

    Ah. Did I mention the sorcerers? And the trade fleets of Calsis? Or the treacherous waters of the Creig Mór, the Sea that Breaks Ships?

    Quite an interesting place. But a story is a story, and no one wants to stop in the middle of a sword fight or demonic invocation for a quick lesson in geography, history, or culture.

    That’s what this blog is for. The stories behind the stories.

    Also I’ll throw in some reading recommendations, the now-and-again review. And of course that promotional angle. Every time I’ve got a story coming out, I’ll post about it here. (Embracing optimism, there, since at the moment I only have one.)

    Ah. Why the photo of Paris, above? In a sense that’s where my writing journey began, the place where I turned wanting to write into actual writing. Long story, there. Stick around and you might hear it someday.

    Bienvenue dans mon monde.