A few recent short story appearances to mention.

First up is "The Temp" in Tumbarumba, a collaborative project by Ethan Hamm and Ben Rosenbaum and a bunch of writers. This was one of those things that when Ben told me about it in email I just sort of nodded and thought, "I honestly have no idea what he's talking about but it sounds cool."

ETA: Now that I think on it, I don't think Ben really explained it to me. I think he just described it as being something transformational or transitional or about change and surprise and maybe something to do with hybrids.

Anyway, here's an explanation:

Tumbarumba is an add-on for Firefox web browsers. It quietly sits in the background, occasionally inserts a fragment of a story into a webpage that is being viewed. The result is an absurd sentence that is reminiscent of the surrealist exquisite corpse game. If the inserted fragment (we call the fragments "tumbarumbas") is spotted and clicked upon, the entire story will emerge and eventually take over the page.

And once I understood that, I said to myself, "Why would I ever want to complicate my internet experience with such nonsense???" But then I turned the add-on on and forgot about it and one day I was reading a news story about Sarah Palin and the paragraph started telling me about how the wires in her head were giving her headaches when she jacked in and it was a surreal moment and then I went, "Oooh. Okay. I get it now. Cool."

Next up is "Frequent Flier Miles" in Flytrap #10, which will be the last issue of Flytrap (at least for the foreseeable future), since editors/publishers Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw have a kid and jobs and writing careers and lives and didn't want Flytrap to become a source of pain and obligation rather than one of pleasure and fulfillment. And who can blame them? I'll miss Flytrap, though. It's been one of my favorite markets to read and to appear in, and I'm proud to have been in the first issue as well as the last issue, and also one in the middle there somewhere.

Finally, "Shadow of Myself" in The Exquisite Corpuscle, an anthology edited by Jay Lake and Frank Wu, featuring interleaved fiction, poetry and illustration, available at Amazon or directly from Fairwood Press.

And now I release you from this infomercial.