To Make A Long Story Short

I received in the mail the other day the paperback version of After, an anthology of nineteen stories of apocalypse and dystopia, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I have the pleasure of being one of the nineteen.

The paperback comes out on November 5, and is available for pre-order at independent bookstores, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.

Ooh. According to Spellcheck, dystopia isn't a word. It offered "dustpan" as first alternative.

Clearly Spellcheck has been hanging out with some of my critics.

I decided the arrival of paperback After was a good reason to hold a reunion of all the anthologies I've been published in. So I gathered up the hardcovers and the paperbacks and the audiobook and the French translation and brought them over to the dining room table for them to party.

I invited the October 1976 Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as well, even though it's not really an anthology. It's the least likely place to find a story by me, but there's definitely one in there. My recollection is I got paid $100.00, which went further in those days than it does today, but still didn't go all that far.

As we all well know, Scooter is always happy to pose with my books, but not this time.

My guess is he looked up, saw The Dogs of Our Lives,* and refused to join in on the fun.

Instead, he decided to hang out with the dustpan, with its endless assortment of laugh out loud stories!

*You may wonder why I, a cat person through and through, would have a story in an anthology devoted to dogs. Actually, I have five stories in there- Five Brave Dog Fables. Here's one, in its splendid entirety:

Chi Chi, a dachshund, was attending a party where she knew very few of the other guests. They all seemed much smarter than she, and more socially skilled.

She wandered over to a group of people who were talking about the latest nonfiction best-seller, a book about the coming economic crisis and how it would affect wheat prices in Mongolia.

Everyone agreed it was the most brilliant book they'd read in a long time.

"Excuse me," Chi Chi said, "but I thought it was terribly boring, and couldn't get past the second chapter."

"Neither could I," all the other guests said in unison, and they laughed at their own pretentiousness.