Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Just in case any of y'all managed to miss it:

There is a new Fighting Pumpkins story in the world! Read "Fiber" now at Tor.com.

For those of you keeping track, this is the same iteration of the Fighting Pumpkins as appeared in "Gimme a 'Z'!" and "Turn the Year Around" ("Dying With Her Cheer Pants On" ended in a total party-kill). This takes us to four published stories about everyone's favorite genre-savvy cheer squad. (I estimate we need ten for a Fighting Pumpkins story collection.)

Gimme an "F"!
Gimme a "U"!
Gimme a OH SHIT RUN THEY'RE AFTER US GO GO GOOOOOOO--

If you want to support more Fighting Pumpkins in the future, "Fiber" also appears in the anthology Unbound, which is fine and swanky and would look great on your shelf!

I am still sick, which means that my attendance at this weekend's OVFF may be in question. I'm still planning as if I'll be better in time, and so I have a very important question to put to the floor:

Which of my two otherwise identical dresses should I pack for the Pegasus Banquet? The orange, or the green?

[Poll #1787596]

Some of my earliest memories of bookstores involve combing through the shelves while my grandmother looked tolerantly on, searching endlessly for more anthologies. Anthologies were the best thing ever, at least if you asked my reasonably limited book-buying power, because they gave you so many stories. If you guessed wrong on whether you'd like a book, you were stuck with a whole book you didn't like, but with an anthology, there would always, always be at least a few stories you'd enjoy.

A lot of those anthologies were published by a company called DAW, which must, I believed, have the smartest owners in the world. (At the time, I truly believed that anthologies made more money than any other kind of book, because they were so hard to find. I was a very innocent child.) And a lot of those anthologies were edited by a man named Martin Greenberg. Someday, I swore, I was going to be in one of those anthologies. When that happened, I would know, absolutely and for certain, that I was going to be a writer.

Yesterday, I went to the bookstore, and I bought the new Martin Greenberg anthology, co-edited with Stephen Antczak and James Bassett. It's called Zombiesque; it's all stories from the perspective of the zombie.

And I'm the sixth name on the table of contents.

There are viral zombies, pharmaceutical zombies, totally unexplained zombies, nanobot zombies, even black magic zombies. Zombie businessmen, fathers, policemen, doctors, authors, and cheerleaders. I'm reading the anthology cover-to-cover, that being what you do, and so far, the stories have been excellent. I'm the only one who's gone for black humor, really, but when you're writing a story about zombie cheerleaders (GO PUMPKINS!), a little black humor is sort of legally required.

I'm in a real DAW anthology, edited by Martin Greenberg, writing about zombie cheerleaders. Who belong to the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad.

So you're aware, there's every chance that I currently control the universe.