In the Spotlight: Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story by Janine A. Southard
Author: Janine A. Southard
Publisher: Cantina Publishing
Pages: 265
Genre: Contemporary Lit/Humor
Format: Paperback/Kindle
What can
your phone do for you?
This is the story of a girl and her iPhone. No, that’s not quite right. This is the story of a middle-aged statistician and her best friend. Though she didn’t consider herself middle-aged. And the best friend was more of a roommate-with-whom-she’d-developed-a-friendship. And this description completely ignores the 6,000-year-old elf with whom the woman and her best friend enjoyed story gaming.
So let’s try this again.
This is the story of a woman who wished to find love, but who would rather play story games than actively look for it. Especially in the wake of a horrid break-up six months before from a man who had never sent her a single gift.
Until this Valentine’s Day, when she received a brand new iPhone in a box with his name on it.
Between story gaming and succumbing to the phone’s insidious sleekness, she learns that friendship trumps romance.
In Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story, award-winning author Janine A. Southard (a Seattle denizen) shows you how the geeks of Seattle live, provides a running and often-hilarious social commentary on today’s world, and reminds you that, so long as you have friends, you are never alone.
This is the story of a girl and her iPhone. No, that’s not quite right. This is the story of a middle-aged statistician and her best friend. Though she didn’t consider herself middle-aged. And the best friend was more of a roommate-with-whom-she’d-developed-a-friendship. And this description completely ignores the 6,000-year-old elf with whom the woman and her best friend enjoyed story gaming.
So let’s try this again.
This is the story of a woman who wished to find love, but who would rather play story games than actively look for it. Especially in the wake of a horrid break-up six months before from a man who had never sent her a single gift.
Until this Valentine’s Day, when she received a brand new iPhone in a box with his name on it.
Between story gaming and succumbing to the phone’s insidious sleekness, she learns that friendship trumps romance.
In Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story, award-winning author Janine A. Southard (a Seattle denizen) shows you how the geeks of Seattle live, provides a running and often-hilarious social commentary on today’s world, and reminds you that, so long as you have friends, you are never alone.
For More Information
- Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story is available at Amazon.
- Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
- Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
“Oh my god,
woman.” Morena slapped an ineffectual hand against Suzyn’s shoulder. “What are
you doing?”
Suzyn played with
the iPhone while, as usual, slouching in a broken chair. The steam from her
chai wafted past her wrists where they pointed toward the roof, her head thrown
back so that the ceiling lamps backlit the phone’s screen. “Finding you a new
guy,” she said. She would have shrugged, but it was hard enough to worm her
body into a slouchy sprawl that included the broken back of a wicker chair
without adding extraneous movement into the mix.
“Oh my god,” said
Morena again, this time in a hissing whisper. “You can’t just use that thing.
What if it’s forcing people?”
For that piece of
apparent stupidity, Suzyn sat up and looked her best friend straight in the
eye. “Morena. It’s an iPhone app, not a satanic love spell.”
Morena’s vertebrae
slumped, and she waved a permissive hand back at the phone. “Yeah, I know. I
just got worried for a minute there. Like, what did Vadim see in me to get him
started, you know?”
Suzyn arched her
spine and wedged it against the spikey pale wicker once again. “Dude, that guy
was so into you.” She forced out a laugh.
Trying to make any
talk of Vadim into a joke was harder than romcoms made it seem, Suzyn found.
Not that she watched romcoms much. Except at Christmastime when Disney, the WB,
and even the Hallmark channel made some horrible but funny ones.
A choked-off sob
came from the other woman, but Suzyn refused to look away from the phone. (She
was too unsympathetic to be a good friend when the messier emotions got
involved, so she prudently avoided them.) She set the age range for 21-26, then
thought the better of it and went for 27-35. That was still a little younger
than Morena, but not so young that it’d be weird.
“I’m going to be
single forever,” moaned Morena. “Why don’t guys want me?”
Magic Guy finally
came back with his hot apple cider and one of their Wash Bagels. “Because other
men are morons who don’t appreciate you.”
Suzyn kicked her
feet up onto Morena’s lap to provide her friend with more tactile reassurance
and to increase the area of her own sprawl. “Don’t worry, Ems.” Sometimes,
especially after guiltily watching Gossip Girl, Suzyn was taken by the
desire to give people diminutives based on the initial letter of their first
name. She didn’t do it often. “I’m gonna find you a hottie in a
point-three-mile radius.”
At this point,
Suzyn and Morena devolved into some good-natured bickering about whether or not
to increase the radius to 1 mile or reduce it to 0.1 miles, with a tangent
wondering why people who made geo-relevant apps didn’t think 0.5 or 0.75 seemed
like a good increment. Those were still walkable in the snow. One mile was
pushing it. And three miles as the next level up? That was where cars started.
There was no difference between three and ten miles, really.
But Magic Guy
didn’t notice this conversation, even if he might have been interested by its
insight into the casual city-dweller’s psyche. No, he was too busy reeling from
the vibrations in the air. Not the auditory vibrations from JACK-FM playing
over the speakers, or the imperceptible (to humans) spray from the milk
steamer. Not the shivering air currents from the people setting up Pathfinder
miniatures at the table next to them, nor the emotions focused in his direction
by the woman with an impeccably styled gray bob from the writers’ table in the
back.
No, these were bad
vibrations he was picking up. They were the opposite of the Beach Boys song.
His lungs lurched,
and his heart contracted as the vibrating sensation strengthened, then washed
over and through him. He grabbed the table to stay upright and was
half-offended that his companions hadn’t noticed. (The other half of him was
relieved he wouldn’t have to explain anything.)
Someone was
performing dangerous magics nearby.
The dark power
made his thighbones quake with the urge to run somewhere safe. But this was his
place, and his story game circle didn’t deserve to have him abandon them with
no warning. He sent out his magic senses through the room, trying to follow the
unfriendly wave that had so jarred him. He turned, following a ripple in the
ambient magic. There! He slammed his eyes open when he pinpointed the vile
practitioner, the better to catch them in the act.
His quarry was
Suzyn. Suzyn, whose feet still warmed Morena’s lap and whose fingers still
tripped over the touchscreen of a sexy new iPhone. She was saying, “No, I
haven’t liked any of the guys it’s sent you. I’m changing your underlying
search settings.”
Morena grabbed for
the phone, but she couldn’t reach the full length of Suzyn’s body and seemed
disinclined to shift her best friend from a supposedly comfortable position for
such a little thing. “You figured out how to get an options dash?” She made
frustrated wavy motions with her fingers. “Show me!”
And Suzyn
obligingly sat upright, tilting her chair in such an alarming manner that Magic
Guy was sure she’d fall over. The two women crowded around the phone, and Suzyn
poked at an icon while Morena jittered with anticip—
Magic Guy swooped
in and scooped the iPhone out of their hot little hands. Well, little compared
to his own hands, anyway. Well, Morena’s were. Suzyn had extremely long fingers
for a female of the human species.
“Hey!” Suzyn
objected.
“What gives?”
Morena’s slang was more out of date.
In his hand, the
phone felt oily and wrong, and not because it had one of those strange
military-grade cases (it didn’t) but more as though it had been molded out of
some unethical putty which had never once attended sensitivity training and
didn’t think it was important to discuss consent or permissible acts with a new
sex partner. This phone was the worst kind of PUA (pick-up artist), and he
didn’t know why such beautiful people (soul-speaking) as Morena and Suzyn would
own it.
About the Author:
The Hive Queen Saga books blend cultural experimentation with epic as they follow a formalized Hive of teenagers on a voyage to new lands and new cultures where their own ways seem very strange. The first novel in the saga, Queen & Commander, has been described as “like Joss Whedon’s Firefly but for teenagers” by the YA’s Nightstand. The second book, Hive & Heist, is a classic heist tale set on a space station.
Queen & Commander received an IPPY (Independent Book Publishers) Award for science fiction ebooks in 2013. Outside the Hive Queen Saga, the science fiction novella These Convergent Stars was selected as the short ebook recommendation of the week at Tungsten Hippo on 29 January 2014.
All Southard’s books so far have been possible because of crowdsourced funds via Kickstarter. She owes great thanks to her many patrons of the arts who love a good science fiction adventure and believe in her ability to make that happen.
From her home in Seattle, she is currently working on a half-contemporary, half-fantasy novel for adults, Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story, which releases in early 2015.
For More Information
- Visit Janine A. Southard’s website.
- Connect with Janine on Twitter.
- Find out more about Janine at Goodreads.
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