SR: I live in Sallyland, in a kingdom. I am the Princess Robot of Sallyland.

Be: Why are you called Semi-Robot? Are you only partly a robot?

SR: Yes, because if I was all the way a robot I wouldn't be a princess. Do you know how old I am?

Ben: How old?

SR: Forty-two and a quarter. I think that's right... forty-two and three months. Three months ago I was really forty-two. Instead of what is a princess? Guess!

Ben: I don't know.

SR: My buttons. I don't have any buttons. And I'm never turned off. That's the princess part. The robot part is, I have a metal brain.

Ben: Really.

SR: I can make anything better. Like, if you're having a fight, I can stop the fight. I talk, and that doesn't count as a fight. So then we're talking about that instead of doing the fight.

Ben: Wow!

SR: Because I have a magic rock inside of my heart. And whenever it shines, it means that. And then it tells the brain to do that, and the brain tells me.

Ben: So does Noah have a rock like that?

SR: No, Noah doesn't have a rock like that. I bought it in a store in Bolorol Land. Noah can't go to Bolorol Land. Well, he couldn't at that time. Bolorol Land was too far from Gukgukland. Noah lived in Gukgukland before he was in your wife's tummy.

So: how do you see this panoply of original fiction that I have been going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about?

You open Firefox. You go to tumbarumba.org. Under "download", you click on "download the extension", and install the add-on.

And then you go on about your web-browsing business, but a little more... carefully than usual.

Ideally, you forget all about Tumbarumba. And then at some point you're reading along and you say "what the heck?!!?"

And fiction begins to interleave itself into your day.

(There are more specifics under "Directions & Help", if you want them.)

Tumbarumba is Firefox-only at the moment, though we plan an IE version in January. If you are a Safari or Chrome or Opera person (I'm kind of loving Chrome, myself)... maybe you can make an exception?

(In addition to finding it at tumbarumba.org, if you want to be 'specially helpful you can get a free account on Mozilla's Add-On extensions site, and download and review it there. With enough positive reviews, it gets promoted to being some kind of standard Firefox add-on.)

The first thing the dead man spoke to was big rock. Big rock wasn't so big in absolute terms, but it was the biggest rock in that little copse of pines, and understandably proud of its place. "Hello?" the dead man said, in the soundless way of unliving things. "Hello, hello?"

"Yes, hello," big rock said. "How nice to hear from you! Such a pleasure to have new company!"

Tim writes, "I've always been fascinated by stories where inanimate objects have secret lives, from the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams to the Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson to Thomas Disch's Brave Little Toaster and the painted stick, can of beans, dessert spoon, and dirty sock from Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. But one day it occurred to me: dead bodies are inanimate objects, too, aren't they? What if they had secret lives?"

And here are the first lines of Heather Shaw's story, "Little M@tch Girl":

A new shipment of Tweak must have hit the Mission over the weekend. Em kept her eye on the woman in front of her who was shaking and staggering across the sidewalk. At a distance, the woman almost looked as if she were listening to some experimental music, her erratic movements accompanied by unheard notes, brilliantly interpreting the difficult tonalities. But as Em got closer, the absence of headphones and the glazed eyes shattered the illusion.

For those who don't know it, Heather and Tim are co-creators of Flytrap, the illustrious "little zine with teeth". Flytrap, in which Tim and Heather published my story "Night Waking", is issuing its last just in time to advertise Tumbarumba: it has been crowded out of the nest by another of their co-creations (and as much as I loved Flytrap, I am forced to approve).

Tim and Heather claim that it is entirely coincidence that their Tumbarumba stories are both Hans-Christian-Andersen-themed.

Next entry: Tumbarumba!

The first lines of John Phillip Olsen's Tumbarumba story, "Birthday":

Neil wants to drive faster, but the troop transport truck in front slows him down. In the back of the truck, the young soldiers point and laugh at Neil and his passengers.

And that of Jeff Spock's, "Of Love and Mermaids":

In the morning sun coming hard off the sea the two children are profiles, jumping and laughing on the sand. The seagulls circle above the palms, hunting unwary clams or unclaimed French fries.

We sit at a table on the hotel's terrace right by the edge of the sand, sipping coffee. My left hand lies atop her right, holding hands with the practiced indifference of people who have held the same hands for ten years or more. It is a comfort, a reflex; as re-affirming--and exciting--as pulling on an old pair of shoes or re-reading your favorite book.

I snagged these two (along with Stephen Gaskell's) at Villa Diodati 3 in Nice.

Tumbrumba ships tomorrow. I can't wait!

SEND ONE

Not the NEEDLEBOARD races on Dillinger Four or the SCISSORBALL playoffs in the Solomon system; not the solar sled slaloms of the Andromeda Games or Cosmos Flanagan's run at the smartdisc passing record. Not even the mag-hot excitement of the Team Orgy Invitational is this week's biggest sporting event. No, MAXFANS, the most-wanted assignment this week here at the mothernet is the BIG BIG BIG BATTLE ROYALE of the Second Moon Fighting League, and who do you suppose is Sending from a Wormcruiser burrowing its way towards the Jocelyn system? Me, GEIGERTRON GOGOMEZ, the most beloved chronicler of sport since Tolkien scrawled The Iliad on a papyrus scroll.

Three more days!

On Monday she wears Spandex and black leather. Unfortunately, her mask covers only her eyes, so after the bank robbers use spasm gas, she spends the rest of the morning with facial twitches. Later, her grappling gun comes apart in her hand, and crooks in a helicopter make off with a Michelangelo.

Four more days until your computer is infected with these intrusions.

(Did I mention Tumbarumba is sponsored by Turbulence and, apparently, funded by the Jerome Foundation? Apparently it is.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Peter slowed up, the streets unfamiliar.

He'd have asked for directions, but the narrow pavements were empty of life. Terraced houses packed both sides of the road, the dim flicker of televisions visible beyond dirty net curtains. He pictured an old couple, dinners on their laps, attention glued to the latest episode of Eastenders as they mechanically ferried some horrible slop into their mouths.

Stephen's was one of three stories that I snagged at the Villa Diodati workshop. Now wasn't that a productive little trip to Nice?

My Dad was inspired to do a little research. He notes, "the poem Tumba Bloody Rumba" -- which made "tumbarumba" a synonym for "tmesis" -- "seems to have been heavily influenced by Robert W. Service."

Five more days, until you can get your Tumbarumba on.

rattling. rattling snaking around in my ears. echoes of rattling erupting in my temples. I hear a pop like the little explosions of air that punctuate my ear canals when I’m nearing the ocean floor. reflex. by reflex, I try to turn toward the sound, but my head is tethered in one position. the rattling dies out with a slithering hiss. sharp parallel bands of light cut across the room. my head jerks back when light hits my eyes. behind me, somebody lets loose a low, raspy laugh.

Six more days.

There was a map of Mars on the wall of my apartment in Helium, souvenir of a previous tenant. Some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd just lie there staring at it, too tired to do anything but take off my breather and kick the compressor into gear. The map had been printed on Earth, in London; maybe fifty years ago, maybe more, like that first edition of Burroughs I saw an AFP stringer carrying in the rocketport on Phobos. The ink on the map had faded and the paper had gone brittle and shiny after years in the dry Martian air, laying a kind of veil over the cities and canals it depicted. On it Mars was still divided into its old territories, names like Bantoom and Okar and Jahar, and down at the bottom under the word MARS the cartographer had printed BARSOOM.

When he was guest-blogging at Jeff Vandermeer's blog, David explained the trick for generating story ideas out of discrete elements. See if you can guess what X and Y are, such that X po Y = "Martian Dispatches".

Seven more days.

"Sara?" Her husband stuck his head around the door of her studio. "Can you pick up Gaya from dance class this afternoon?"

"What?" Sarala blinked twice from behind her glasses, jarred from the image she'd held in her mind, the image that stubbornly refused to come out into the paint on her canvas. There was a body, she knew -- a body, and wings -- but more than that. Not as trite as a woman turning into a bird, seeking flight, freedom, escape. Along with the wings were powerful haunches, poised to leap, muscles tense and yearning. And claws, sharp and long; teeth, red at the tips. All caught at the moment of shifting, transformation, in that liminal space where every possibility hangs, glorious, waiting.

I asked Mary Anne for something in the spirit of her novel-in-stories, Bodies In Motion, "an interconnected narrative spanning two continents, two families, and four generations." "Sequins" picks up two of its minor characters. Mary Anne writes: "readers may enjoy tracing the sometimes hidden connections from one text to the other."

Eight more days until the intrusions begin frolicking...

"I'm sick of dusting her fans!" Jaya stepped out of her pants and tossed them at Hool, her djinn lover. They fluttered across the room and spun to rest under his bed. "Grinding pigment for that old crow's paint. Lugging bolts of silk from the market." She unstrung the laces of her shirt and let it fall from her shoulders. The damp, smoky air of the room seemed to cling to on her skin. It was a relief to be naked.

Nine more days.

Did I mention, by the way, what a tumbarumba is? It is a tmesis, as per the John O'Grady poem.

Does it really matter how I got here?

I got shot.

Haddayr writes:

Dora Goss told me that her piece The Belt was an ugly story, so she wanted to tell it in the most beautiful way possible. I decided to write a beautiful story in the ugliest way possible.

Ten more days until you can get Tumbarumba'd; and then you'll be able to find Haddayr's story.

Maybe.

(It will help if you're lucky, intrepid, and perceptive....)