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My short-short fiction piece, "There Are No Eaters Of Souls In America," is now up at Daily Science Fiction.

Fun fact: the protagonist in this story is named Hodel. Unrelatedly, I learned for the first time this weekend that Hodel was my great-grandmother's given name. I had always thought her name was Ada; apparently she didn't like Hodel, and took Ada because she thought 'Ada Adler' sounded elegant. Then, when she married, she talked my great-grandfather -- an Adler on his mother's side -- into ditching his father's last name and sticking with Adler so that she wouldn't have to give up her dream name.

Anyway all this is completely irrelevant to the story; my great-grandmother never immigrated to America and as far as I know she has had no communication with sea monsters of any kind.

(In other publication news, another story of mine, "Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen's Proposal to Bluma Zilberman," will be appearing in Diabolical Plots next May, but that is quite a long time from now, so.)

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So speaking of His Girl Friday, I've been meaning to write up Lia Silver's shifter-parody-screwball-rom-com novella Mated to the Meerkat, because:

a. were-meerkat. WERE-MEERKAT. If there was ever a romantic shapeshifting novel that was guaranteed to make me clap my hands like a seal and fall over laughing, this is it
b. what a fantastic homage to His Girl Friday!

Though everyone is less terrible than in His Girl Friday -- I mean, our heroes are paparazzi, so it goes without saying they are at least kind of terrible because paparazzi is a pretty terrible profession, but they do not actively cause anybody to jump out a window to their doom, so compared to the protagonists of His Girl Friday they are doing pretty okay! Also, Meerkat Boyfriend is a MUCH BETTER BOYFRIEND than Cary Grant, aka The Worst Smooth-Talking Ex-Husband Ex-Boss In the Universe. Also, there is no racist subplot. Instead there is a subplot about fancy molecular gastronomy. A VAST IMPROVEMENT.

I mean Mated to the Meerkat, while paying its affectionate due to His Girl Friday, is in fact a fun screwball romp, rather than a viciously satirical critique of the press disguised as a fun screwball romp. You might be getting a satirical parody of shifter tropes disguised as a screwall romp, but that's an entirely different proposition, and anyway I don't read enough shifter stuff to know or care where is the line between parody and loving over-the-top embrace! All I know is that it's ace reporters and hilarious meerkat love interests all the way down.

(WERE. MEERKAT.)