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Hello CYS!

With the publishing of this issue, the CYS Monthly Gazette has now produced news for the whole year of 2025. In fact, out first anniversary is coming up in just two days! Thank you to everyone who has supported this newsletter by reading, commenting and contributing! It's a joy to do this all for you guys, and we hope to do it continuing into the far future.

Thank you to all the staff members who continue to show their support with their amazing work: RKrallonor, Suranna, Yummyfood, Anthraxus, Benholman44, Mystic_Warrior and Will11. I'll never feel that I say enough how wonderful you all are and how privileged I am to share a creative space with you guys. Also, thank you to our guest writer for gracing our newsletter with their work! It was an unexpected pleasure to have you contribute to the Gazette!

The pictures here are clickable! If you want the slideshow of this article, here's a link.

Well done Milton and everyone, this is another great issue :D It's impressive that the newsletter has been continually sustained for a whole year: this has been a lot of great work by a lot of people and the contributions have always been interesting. Well done everyone :D

One year down, and hopefully many years to come!

Cool! :D

May I ask how voting works?

This is exactly like the Thunderdome. (Because they STOLE my idea, just like they slink around stealing pies off of windowsills and babies from cribs to sell on the black market, according to my alternate news sources.)

Congrats on another issue! Another 5 years of these Milton and you'll be among the top 10 Wardens!

And new stories, awesome, I was just thinking how I needed new material to hate the Gayzetteers over. Looking forward to reading these at some point when I can make them appear on a large enough screen.

Esteemed editors, congratulations on your anniversary, keeping the newsletter going (and on such a high level) is an outstanding achievement. I am looking forward to many more issues :)

Regarding the stories, you aren't making it easy for us, as the three pieces are quite similar. Clearly all authors knew what they were doing. (I was hoping for someone to screw up, to make this easier, but nope.) All the stories did a fantastic job conveying the chaos and mayhem of the situation. All started in medias res, a good choice, and all delivered fast-paced action. Also all had too many characters going for the few words in the format.

In my eyes the story A has a slight edge in terms of language. On the negative side it is the most humorous one. It instantly reminded me of writers such as Ian Rankin, but because I never smile the humor was totally lost on me. Perhaps as a result it also fits the prompt less well than the others as it felt like a comedy rather than proper historical fiction or sci-fi. On the positive side this story has a clearer arc than the other with notable escalation and surprising twists. Also the ending worked best of the three.

Story B is a proper neo-noir chrome-drenched cyberpunk tale that reminded me of the early works of William Gibson, so I was instantly in love with it. The use of "Bolivia" is great worldbuilding and switching between the different viewpoints was a good choice, as it conveys the urgency of the situation well. The author must have felt this urgency as well, or they would have edited some of the sentences more carefully. For example straight away in the first paragraph "The syndicate building he was parked just outside of remained as stoic as ever." is an unpleasant use of passive voice. Also the characters felt a bit uniform. The ending veered a little bit into the melodramatic, a bit "show-don't-tell" might have helped here. It's still a good ending but a bit too YA-ish for my taste. Overall this is a nice cyberpunk tale with a bit of mystery ("Why is this going all wrong") that made it a very enjoyable read.

Story C went full-on fantasy, and didn't spare us the DnD tropes, which make it feel a bit too much like fan fiction for my taste. On the positive side the over-the-top fantasy characters and well-established tropes meant that it was easier to tell characters apart than in the other two stories. Also this story felt warmer and more organic than the others as we saw a little bit more of the characters and their interactions. On the negative side the ending was a bit anti-climactic. The dung-collector joke was a clever attempt but didn't quite work for me, and it became a bit shallow with the our-friends-die-all-time dialogue. Or perhaps it's just that I am getting too old for this stuff, who knows.

So what do we make of this narrative Mexican standoff? The stories are similar enough that I am tempted to call it a three-way draw. All the stories are very good, and I am sure that for each one of the stories there are some people on the site that like it best, and with good reason. In my eyes, A wins in the category "arc, twists and pacing"; B wins in the category "worldbuilding and gritty action"; and C wins in the category "characters and interactions". But if I need to make a choice, and casting my preferences for certain aside I would say A, then B, then C.