Cracked! A Magic
iPhone Story
Author: Janine A. Southard
Publisher: Cantina Publishing
Pages: 265
Genre: Contemporary Lit/Humor
Format: Paperback/Kindle
Book Description:
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 Seattle
Buy Links:
Excerpt
“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.
Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads
About the Author
Janine A.
Southard is the IPPY award-winning author of the Hive Queen Saga, as well as
other science fiction and young adult novels and novellas.
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
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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