The long-awaited day has come! Twenty Epics, the anthology I've been anticipating more than any other, is finally here! You can order it via Lulu or Amazon, and you really should.

Why? Well, it has one of my best stories, "Cup and Table," and if you're at all interested in my work, you'll want to read that one. (I don't think I'm done with those characters, either. There could still be a novel about them... though, of necessity, it would be a prequel.) There are also stories by many of my favorite up-and-coming writers, including Christopher Barzak, Alan DeNiro, Jon Hansen, Meghan McCarron, Sandra McDonald, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Christopher Rowe, and David Schwartz. (And more. There's 20 of 'em.)

Do you like epic fantasy? Do you like hilarious indices? Do you like maps? (Maps!) Do you like awesome short stories? Then you owe it to yourself to pick up this anthology, lovingly crafted by editors David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi.

Seriously, y'all. You know me. I don't go enthusiastically pimping any old anthology that passes by, even if I do have a story in it. This one is something special.

Here's what I wrote about the story when I finished it last year:

I wrote a bonsai epic! A toy epic! A mini epic! The first draft clocks in at about 5,500 words, but this one will shrink rather than grow in revision, so I should get it in under 5,000 words, which is good, as I plan to submit it to the Twenty Epics anthology. I've had an idea about these characters and this plot for ages -- I thought it was a novel for a long time, and honestly, it could've been. But instead I smashed the story with a hammer and picked out the brightest fragments and made a mosaic of them. And, oddly, the achronological non-linear structure makes sense within the logical constraints of the story-universe, which is better than being gratuitously experimental, I think, and there's lots of exposition-around-the-edges, and a world inferred rather than delimited, which is something I've been trying to do more in recent years. I have a tendency to over-explain, but some of my favorite stories are more enigmatic, so I'm trying to embrace the power of ambiguity and Mystery in fiction. Don't know if I succeeded. I read the first draft aloud to Heather, and she likes it, so I'm encouraged. It was a blast to write, at any rate, and I wrote about 4,000 words of it today, one scene at a time, in among filing, receipt-organizing, grocery shopping, and miscellaneous business. It's called "Cup and Table." I may change it to "Table and Cup." I go back and forth over which one I like better.

Want to see what other people said about their stories? Co-editor David Moles is posting a round-up of what the other authors have to say.