When my short story “The Awful Truth About the Circus” was published in the British anthology with the complex title of Zencore!: Scriptus Innominatus, which could also be considered the seventh issue of the intriguing magazine Nemonymous, you would not have known that I’d been published there. That’s because the publisher believed that readers gain something by reading short stories unattached from the names of their authors.
You can learn more about the concept in the write-up for my story “The Scariest Story I Know.”
So even though this volume was released in June 2007, readers had to wait six months after that before I could announce which of the 17 stories inside was mine. That’s because the story titles on the table of contents weren’t bylined, though the names of the authors appeared on the book’s back cover, but not in the same order.
And if you’re wondering exactly what that awful truth was … it was both worse, and far better, than you might expect.