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.

Whee! Time for another ARC giveaway! Once again, I'm giving away an ARC of Late Eclipses, the fourth book in the October Daye series, which comes out in twenty-seven days. So you could get an early chance to find out what's going on! Also, I'm actually giving away two books this time. Curious? Read on!

If you've been to my website recently, you may have noticed that my Toby FAQs are a trifle, well, sparse. Whole books are missing. Since I'm getting ready to shuffle things around to make room for InCryptid, I'd like to fix this. So here's what you need to do to enter today's ARC giveaway:

1) Leave a comment on this entry containing a suggested question for one of my FAQs. FAQ-type questions only, please, like "Is the date at the beginning of An Artificial Night correct?" or "Why has Quentin's hair changed color?", not "Will Toby and Tybalt ever get together?" or "Is there going to be a movie?"

2) Leave the comment on its own, please, not as a reply to someone else's comments. Comments on comments can't win, even if they have the BEST QUESTION EVER.

3) That's all.

Now here's the twist: I will be choosing two winners. One will be chosen by the random number generator, cruel mistress that it is, and the other will be chosen by me, based purely on my personal "that's the BEST question" reaction. Also, I will use your questions to improve the FAQ, so really, everybody wins.

I will choose a winner at 2PM PST on Tuesday, February 8th.

Game on!