Adventitious.

A Hubble image of the Red Spider Nebula. This planetary nebula harbors one of the hottest stars known.

The Soundtrack of My Afterlife A soul reincarnated as a car narrates this haunting, music-soaked speculative short story by P. A. Cornell.

Talk about beautiful stories that make you cry! Just read The Soundtrack of My Afterlife by
@cornellwriter.bsky.social
at @adventitiouswords.bsky.social This was such a lovely and loving story that built to a truly gorgeous ending.

www.adventitious.net/stories/the-...

Voting for the 2026 Locus Awards is open to everyone! Choose your champions and give a voice to your favorite works and authors of the year.

Vote online at poll.voting.locusmag... or via the link in our bio!

Poetry.

Hunter Mother Sailor Wife A Kraken-hunter struggles with settling down to family life or returning to the hunt in this fantasy short story by Catherine Tavares.

Okay. There's an Easter Egg in this story by @cjtavares.bsky.social -- a play on words that DELIGHTS me to no end (especially because it was unintentional).

I'll give a free subscription to the first person to reply to this with the right Easter Egg.

www.adventitious.net/stories/hunt...

Bittersweet Endings (for All Who Live to See Such Times) - Uncanny Magazine This is a story about the theatrical release of The Fellowship of the Ring, about finding hope in your despair and despair in your hope, and about the year 2001. I first read The Lord of the Rings at ...

Read this essay by @samtasticbooks.com in @uncannymagazine.bsky.social.

I felt so hopeful by the end, which isn’t an easy feat these days.

A pair of interacting spiral galaxies. On the left is a large spiral galaxy. It's disk is tilted, so that it appears as a oval rather than a circle. It has a bright yellow-white center that transitions into spiral arms. The arms are defined by dark brown dust lanes dotted with pink star forming regions. The area in between is filled with a haze of blue-white stars. Below and to the right is a second galaxy, a smaller, distorted spiral. In its center is a bright yellow nucleus surrounded by a ring of stars that transitions into two spiral arms that form an S shape. The lower spiral arm forks in two. They are all made of a haze of yellow stars. The lower left part of the ring and spiral arms have a concentrated area of dust and red star forming regions. Extending from the inner spiral arms are two much larger, thin spiral arms, dotted with blue star clusters, which lengthen the S-shape. The upper arm appears to touch the edge of the disk of its companion galaxy. On the black background of space are foreground stars, some with diffraction spikes, and tiny background galaxies.

Gemini North image of Arp 84, also known as NGC 5394 and NGC 5395.

Interactions between this galaxy pair funneled gas into the center of the smaller distorted spiral NGC 5394, which fuels a burst of star formation.

Credit: International Gemini Observatory, NOIRLab, NSF, AURA
Source

"Tavares, whose signature writing element is a flaming boulder,..."

Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? - now #2 on the trending list at @mcsweeneys.net !!

share.google/ZZA2vHOHIaLW...

Illustration by H.J. Ford from The Green Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, New York, 1906. #artsky #booksky

In Esoteric Ebb, men talk to men about manhood, and that's a good thing It does not shy away from the things many of us are always thinking about when we interact with others, like, “Who are you voting for?” and “What does being a man mean to you?”

The best D&D game since Baldur's Gate 3, *and* it contends with gender? Yes, please. By @zoehhannah.com
www.mothership.blog/in-esoteric-...

OR ARE THEY

A Love of My Own: Donna Deitch’s sapphic classic Desert Hearts at 40 • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine To mark 40 years of Donna Deitch’s trailblazing lesbian romance Desert Hearts, Marya E. Gates looks back on the legacy of this love.

Over at @letterboxd.social Journal, I wrote about the legacy of Donna Deitch’s trailblazing sapphic western romance DESERT HEARTS for its 40th anniversary. This movie is so dear to me. This was an absolute honor to research and write.

Image of text reading: You preferred the rantings of an angry witch. You’re either sharp enough to recognize a real curse, or you’re a lucky guesser. Angry witch writing is never clean. It comes scratched into bark with a bone splinter, ink thick as clotting blood, the room stinking of tallow smoke and bitter herbs. Take this line from the forest grimoires of Old Oma Bracken, stabbed into the page with a falcon claw: “As well ask men what they think of stone before damning them to become it.” Witches used to leave mistakes—bile blots, weird grammar, words bent out of shape by anger. But A.I. doesn’t rage. It doesn’t sweat over the page or grind its teeth through a sentence. Its language is boring, cold, obedient. So when a line snarls, when the writing comes out raw and interesting and poetic and pissed, you’re probably seeing the work of an incensed witch, not a machine.

Oh shit. Weird they had this option.

Hmmm...needs more flaming boulders.

Image of text reading: You preferred the rantings of an angry witch. You’re either sharp enough to recognize a real curse, or you’re a lucky guesser. Angry witch writing is never clean. It comes scratched into bark with a bone splinter, ink thick as clotting blood, the room stinking of tallow smoke and bitter herbs. Take this line from the forest grimoires of Old Oma Bracken, stabbed into the page with a falcon claw: “As well ask men what they think of stone before damning them to become it.” Witches used to leave mistakes—bile blots, weird grammar, words bent out of shape by anger. But A.I. doesn’t rage. It doesn’t sweat over the page or grind its teeth through a sentence. Its language is boring, cold, obedient. So when a line snarls, when the writing comes out raw and interesting and poetic and pissed, you’re probably seeing the work of an incensed witch, not a machine.

Oh shit. Weird they had this option.

Ya know, a lot of amazing speculative fiction isn't trying to explain or predict our world. It's just trying to make it weirder.

A bright red cardinal sits on top of the Sideview mirror of a car

The Cardinal jumps down to look at himself in the mirror

The cardinal begins furiously attacking his reflection in the mirror

“Look at that bird”

A Play In Three Acts

One of my favorite things I've written in the past year.

So excited to see it in @hexliterary.bsky.social!

Starting to plan my agency’s summer events, our free talks with industry pros.

Just floating it out there, if you work in publishing and would ever want a trip to Philly (on me!) to give a chat, do give me a nudge.

We’re doing lots of good! Come hang. www.neighborhoodliterary.com/neighborhoods

Poetry.

Also, I can't guarantee that all Adventitious writers are human, but I can confirm they definitely aren't AI.

Jupiterians? Mushroom-based gnomes? Racoon on a cactus in a bathrobe? All possible.

A Place For Everyone to Read: Opening a “Cultural Treasure” in Philadelphia Harriett’s was my last resort. I opened Harriett’s Bookshop, named for historic heroine Harriett Tubman, six weeks before the pandemic, and could have never predicted that my tiny shop would surviv…

Bookseller Jeannine Cook explains why she opened Harriett’s Bookshop, a “cultural treasure” in Philadelphia.

'A dream come true': Author from Arizona gets support from Stephen King, who inspired his writing career An author from Phoenix who spent brutal summers with a horror book in hand says a specific writer and Arizona's climate helped shape his path to becoming a published horror writer.

LOOK AT ME MA I MADE IT I'M A HUMAN INTEREST STORY

So grateful to my hometown ABC affiliate for this lovely and appreciated segment on I KNOW A PLACE! Huge thanks for letting me ramble about how much the desert, horror, and, of course, Stephen King mean to me.

I KNOW A PLACE publishes May 5, 2026

Adventitious | A Speculative Short Fiction Magazine - Adventitious. Adventitious is a speculative short fiction magazine publishing boundary-defying stories, novellas, and unclassifiable work.

Just in case a quiz tells you that you prefer human writing:

www.adventitious.net

"Something Strange Is Happening With Books. It Could Reshape Literary Culture."

Submission Guidelines - Adventitious. Submission Guidelines: "Surprise" doesn't only mean twists. We want stories that offer a sense of wonder...

This is surreal, but we're open to submissions in 23 days. Not an April Fool.

www.adventitious.net/submission-g...

submissions — neon hemlock

We have only 61 stories submitted for WHAT ELEGANT STARS so far. I suppose a lot of folks will submit in the last month, but that still seems low. Though the theme is more specific than some previous ones, so folks are less likely to have anything ready to go.

www.neonhemlock.com/submissions

The kids are calling it "Inserting robotic Dracula mushrooms into every book" and it's sweeping the nation

[Takes notes takes notes]