The novelist believes more in cause and effect. Epics, the slow culmination of events, make sense to the novelist. Short story writers tend to believe in epiphanic moments. One aspect of the epiphanic moments in several of your stories I want to discuss is their ambiguity. In some cases, the exact same story could appear in either a fantasy or science fiction magazine or a mainstream literary magazine and fit in perfectly.
Surrealism presents the reader with extraordinary events that occur in an ordinary world.
Science fiction usually involves extraordinary events in an extraordinary world that provides a causal explanation for those events. There's a triptych of stories in Sleeping in Velvet about cyberspace, and it strikes me that cyberspace itself is a very surrealist environment. For many people, it can feel like an alternate reality. I think doing the conference attuned me to the creation of a community in the ether, one where people don't have bodies, where time is a flexible fourth dimension, and where voice is extremely important. You have to become aware of how your posts are seen by the reader to thrive in that community.