Thaumatrope: the first (and first paying) twitterzine (@thaumatrope), a twitter-based publication for microfiction. It is an idea that may almost seem frivolous to the uninitiated—stories in 140 characters? Why bother? What can you really say in around 20 words? Literary merits aside—with Twitter as a backdrop, would anyone argue that an intriguing or witty tweet-story is less engaging than someone’s personal struggle with productivity or the details of their latest bowel movement? Just kidding, I think Twitter is pretty neat. Anyway…

Thaumatrope also remains the most innovative of the twiction-pushers, including a unique program (the Thaumatrope Fiction Relocation Project) to include its fiction on the programs of conventions worldwide (really cool) and a special theme month with multi-award-winning guest editor Sean Wallace: Twitterpunk, a series of stories in celebration of cyberpunk and its related subgenres (steampunk, biopunk, et al.).  I was honored to have my story (probably coincidentally) kick off #twtrpunk this past weekend (click the link in Sean’s intro tweet to read the actual story).

While “-punk” themed stories of this length may be an homage that only fans of the genre will appreciate, nanofiction in general has a much broader appeal, at least for those of us with a few seconds to spare in between not doing work by reading the news and not doing work by playing addictive flash games. If nothing else, perhaps someone should go edit the “cyberpunk derivatives” article on Wikipedia and add “twitterpunk” to the list.

I have an edgy, mildly graphic piece in the new issue of SUB-LIT (“publishing the best in literary dissidence”), a site that specializes in awesome pieces that should (and do) have the tagline, Sex, Literature, and Rock & Roll.

I actually wrote “The Woman on the Sidewalk” over two years ago only to let it burn an erotic hole in my hard drive until I ran across SUB-LIT, at which point I metaphorically dusted it off and sent it out. I owe a big thank you to head editor Laurah Raines for working with me on this to make it even more awesome. Go read what my workshop professor might have called “an excellent, energetic tale about the effects of our hypersexualized society.”

Novels take time to write. What better way to catalog the essence of a story than by writing only the first and the last sentence? First and Last Sentence Magazine publishes just that: novels that don’t really exist by fictional authors offering up stories like mystery-meat sandwiches. Interesting premise. My offering, “The Gates of Leaven,” appeared today.

I’m really excited to see “Too Quiet on the Carpet” published as this week’s story at Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Bad Ass Speculative Fiction. Brain Harvest has been publishing one 750-word or shorter story each week since March, and each has been—in my reading—fully deserving of its “bad ass” designation.

As for my little story, it’s very odd but—I’m told—”really awesome” and “viciously sublime.” It’s a bit of a modern re-imagining of the basic premise from the story “Father’s Last Escape,” an amazingly weird magical realism tale by the early 20th-century Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz.

I have a letter (yes, an actual letter) published in this issue of The Dirty Napkin, which is an awesome publication with intimidating contributor bios. The wonderful editors have also decided to make my audio reading one of the handful available to non-subscribers—so anyone can listen to me read it (beware).

The epistle is an interesting form. The email missive, the AIM conversation, the cacophony of “tweets”—these successors do not quite make for a true spiritual supplantation. And, though the epistle has a practical purpose (to convey a message),  its literary merit (if it exists) can be unrelated altogether. It may even be a pleasant surprise.

An old-school New Yorker-esque self-consciously-super-pretentious non-fiction profile piece was published a few days ago in issue six of The Legendary.

On a related note, I actually thoroughly enjoyed that class. Granted, during senior spring, even reading a male classmate try to channel Jane Austen every week is better than biochemistry.

I have a piece in issue #15 of Six Little Things, themed “Captain McHurkeydurkey’s Utterly Masturbatory Prose Parade”—which is in fact the very best theme for any issue of any magazine, ever. When I saw it, I knew I had to submit (and that surely I had something really self-consciously masturbatory from my college writing courses that would make a good starting point).

SLT is a great little spot on the web that puts out exactly 6 very short stories/poems/things-made-up-of-words in each quaterly issue. Overjoyed to be a part of this issue.

“Memories of Life” appears in the Summer 2009 issue of Burst Magazine, a publication specifically designed for mobile phones (and including only pieces of 700 words or fewer). Even though iPhones and the like can handle normal web pages, there is something to be said for a magazine that knows what it does and who it’s for—subway commuters and the short-attention-spanned alike.

I wrote an even shorter first draft of this very short piece while listening to Nobuo Uematsu’s signature track “Melodies of Life” from the piano-arrangement of the soundtrack from Final Fantasy 9, of all things. Inspiration is everywhere.