My birthday isn’t until Thursday, but I got my best possible present two days early, in the form of an email this morning from Steve Jones, letting me know that my story “What Will Come After,” which appeared for the first time in my zombie collection called, well, What Will Come After, had been chosen to appear in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22.

And what’s more, Steve had decided to open the book with it!

This will mark my third appearance in one of Steve’s Best New Horror anthologies, and it occurs to me that all of my reprint sales to him were originally published in somewhat unusual sources, that is, not in traditional magazines or anthologies.

Steve’s first pickup, “The Suicide Artist,” originally appeared in Suicide Art, a small chapbook published by Necronomicon Press, and was reprinted in Best New Horror #4.

The next story he chose, “A Plague on Both Your Houses,” didn’t begin with any sort of professional publication at all, but was instead distributed as a Halloween card to 250 or so of my friends, after which Steve picked it for Best New Horror #8.

And now comes “What Will Come After,” a story written as an inducement so that readers already familiar with all my other zombie tales would still have a reason to pick up my PS Publishing collection.

So connecting the dots of those three reprint sales, what does it all mean? For one thing, that a story, no matter how humble its beginning, can get a chance at new life before a new audience. I’m sure that if I thought about it some more, I could make it mean a whole lot more, but it’s been a long day, and I don’t have enough brain left for that.

Besides … I’d rather spend the rest of the evening celebrating.