It’s time to wrap things up for me here and to pass you to the next guest blogger, Vandana Singh, whose posts I’m looking forward to reading. I apologize for petering out towards the end; I’ve had a bout of trouble with my wrists and have been treating them tenderly.

I didn’t deliver a few of the post I promised on literary fiction and games, but I’m sure those will eventually appear on my own blog. I’ve got fiction appearing in the next year in: Paul Jessup’s anthology, Hatter Bones; Abyss & Apex; and an anthology of my stories coming mid-2009 from Paper Golem Press. If you enjoy reading short fiction online, I’d like to steer you towards Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld Magazine in particular, but there’s a lot of great fiction out there. If you play online text-based games or are interested in collaborative storytelling/gameplaying, check out Armageddon.

So I called my mom to ask her to warn my grandmother that in the upcoming months we’re going to see an upsurge in scams aimed at people worried about their money and that the easily confused elderly are often a tempting target.

She said, well, let me tell you a story. A couple of months ago, your grandmother kept insisting that someone had gotten hold of her JC Penny’s card number and charged something on it.  And it turned out she was right, someone had charged something. And she got through to Penny’s eventually, even though she still has trouble with automated phone system. I keep telling her if she just keeps hitting “0″ eventually she will get through but she forgets that. Anyhow, she successfully got the charge taken off and a new card issued. I’m sure someone saw a 97 year old woman with a card and thought she wouldn’t notice, but she caught it right away when she looked at the bill.

I said I was reassured that she wouldn’t get scammed and that I was pretty impressed by that. My mom said yeah, I hope I’m still managing that sort of thing when I’m 97. We both paused to pull this over, and then my mother added, of course, the next month when the bill arrived, it was in Spanish and they issued her two cards.

Which had me howling because I can just imagine my grandmother stubbornly pressing but somewhat mistakenly pressing buttons on the phone until SHE GOT THROUGH DAMMIT, and merrily wreaking havoc on her data by inadvertently changing all sorts of information on it.

It’s so weird to be watching the vice presidential debate with laptop nearby — between Facebook, Twitter, and various IMs, it’s like watching it with dozens of other people in the room.

And now I am BLOGGING about it.

I like Joe Biden very much.

The new issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is up, which includes my story, The Fisherman’s Child.

Meanwhile, over at Fantasy Magazine, the feature I mentioned with the Kingsley reprint is up. It’s worth taking a look at just for the lovely photos by Zena Holloway. You’ll also find The Annie Oakley Show, by Ari Goelman, which draws on history for its inspiration.  Stories coming up in the next few months include works by  Samantha Henderson, Karen Heuler, Paul Jessup, and Erzebet Yellowboy.

Ann and I will be participating in this very cool convention with Jake Von Slatt among others. I’ll update this post with details when I have them.