My very short story about choosing superpowers wisely, When a Bunch of People, Including Raymond, Got Superpowers, is up today at Daily Science Fiction. Comments there or here are always welcome.

Daily Science Fiction, a free electronic science fiction and fantasy magazine, published my short short story of aliens observing an Earth in peril, “Uh … Guys?” last week for their e-mail subscribers and today free for everyone at http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/aliens/luc-reid/uh-guys .

Escape Pod

I hadn’t actually realized this when it went live, but my short tall tale “Tornado on Fire” is up on the SF and Fantasy audio site Escape Pod: http://escapepod.org/2012/11/29/ep372-flash-collection/ , read with admirable twang and charm by Mur Lafferty.

There are actual tornadoes on fire, though they’re not quite as described in the story. If you’re interested, check this out:

One of the more thrilling short story sales of my career recently was of a quite short story called “Ways to Enjoy Nutrient Blend 14,” a tale about augmented reality and society change, which sold to the international science journal Nature some months back for their ongoing fiction feature “Futures.” The story appears in the new issue of Nature, and is available for free on the Web at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7410/full/488246a.html.

This makes two of my stories appearing for the first time on the Web in one day, and both in pro venues; that may be a first!

Daily Science Fiction, in case you don’t already know about it, posts one short speculative fiction story each weekday. E-mail subscribers get the stories first (subscriptions are free, by the way), and they appear on the Web site a week later. Editors Michele Barasso and Jonathan Laden showcase some major names and great talent among science fiction and fantasy writers. Often their stories are beautiful, poignant, and deeply meaningful. Today … not so much.

Fortunately for me, given that every once in a while I’m gripped with the need to write a story on some humorous (or at least intended-to-be-humorous) topic, they also publish some humor, like my story “Dear Editor, Enclosed Please Find My Story About Your Unfortunate Demise,” which appears on the site today. I wrote this story because I really wanted to send a submission that began “Dear Editor, enclosed please find my story ‘Dear Editor, Enclosed Please Find My Story About Your Unfortunate Demise.'” Why? That, my friends, is a question I am unlikely to understand any time soon.

I hope you enjoy the story and get a chance to dig into some of the marvelous work in the Daily SF archives.

At Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts a couple of weeks back, I got the opportunity to do a reading of a few stories from my collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories, which is available in paperback and Kindle format (see the link for more information, if you’re interested). While the equipment I had available was fairly limited, I did manage to get an audio recording of most of the reading, except for about 10 seconds in the middle, which I dubbed in after returning home. The applause at the end also was cut off due to technological limitations (the audience was terrific, actually).

In the midst of the stories from Bam!, I was also able to include a very unusual kind of reading in the middle, one that quite possibly has not been done before–certainly not that I’ve ever heard of. I’ll leave that one a surprise for people who decide to listen or download this audio. Feel free to share it with friends if you’d like.

I apologize for the less-than-stellar quality of the audio and the jarring change for that 10 seconds in the middle, but what can you do? Next time I’ll try to bring some decent recording equipment of some description.

Many thanks to Grant Carrington, without whom I might well not have any recording at all.

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Total time: 20:24

You can download this file at http://lucreid.com/media/LucReid_Readercon23_Reading.mp3 .

This weekend I’ll be attending Readercon near Boston, Massachusetts, and while there I’ll be doing a reading of stories from my flash fiction collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories. Bam! has been available for Kindle since last year, and the paperback ($11.95) is just coming out now, already available here and scheduled to show up on Amazon.com within the next week or two.

In celebration of all this, Bam! for the Kindle (and all devices that can run the free Kindle viewer, including PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android devices, etc.) will be available free today through Sunday. Feedback, good or bad, is always welcome. Enjoy!

Daily Science Fiction is a free e-mail and Web magazine that offers a new science fiction or fantasy story every weekday. Today’s new story on the Web (which went out to e-mail subscribers last week) is my 110-word story “You Can’t Come Here Any More”: you can read it here. Reader Dennis G Williams called this kind of story “snap fiction” on Daily Science Fiction’s Facebook page.

This week Toasted Cake, Tina Connolly’s weekly audio fiction broadcast, features two short stories of mine, “A is for Authority” and “B is for Bureauracy.” This is a series that I’d like to see through to completion some day (just 24 to go!), but frankly the stories are a little exhausting to write, so it may take a while. If you listen, you’ll see why.

I’ve been more energetic about sending out my fiction in recent months, and as a result I’ve been selling more stories, including one upcoming one to Nature, certainly the most widely-read and prestigious magazine I could land in this side of the New Yorker.

I’ve also done a long-overdue update of my bibliography here on the site, so that a nearly-complete list of my published short fiction is now available. Some of the stories are available free to read on the Internet; see the page for links.

Note: It’s only just at this moment that I realize why the initials of Tina’s site are T.C. Alas, I am not always quick on the uptake with these clever subtleties!

From February 24th through March 9th, I’ll be posting a free audio flash fiction story each Friday from my collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories. The stories are read by my father, voice, film, and stage actor J. Louis Reid.

Today’s offering is “Hunting for Ernest Hemingway in Kudu Heaven.”

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Photo by Werner Vermaak