Here’s an excerpt from the short story “Patti 209” from my new collection Patti 209: Fifteen Tales of the Very Near Future, available now:
I went ahead and made our cocoa, flavoring the drinks from a tiny bottle of vanilla I kept in the pocket of my robe. I loaded the cups onto a tray, covered the tray with plastic wrap to keep it dry, and headed cautiously out to the shed. We’d designed the back door to open level to the deck and pathway—no treacherous steps to contend with. That was fortunate, because in these days of short-staffing, the deck was untended and covered with slippery moss.
Oh, Rachel and I hadn’t been completely stupid. We’d understood the house. We’d understood old people. We just hadn’t quite grasped that the frail old people we were so tenderly designing it for would be us. Or that the country we lived in would wish we were dead.
When I entered the dark cottage the fragrance of potting soil and drying herbs rose up like fumes from an aged Scotch. No cleansers, no mopping solution, no stench of overcooked food and under-washed bodies. Couldn’t blame Sharelle for making this place her refuge.
The ebooks are up at Apple Books and Amazon.com, and print editions will be available May 9 at Amazon.com and (through Ingram/Spark) from your favorite bookstore or library. Check the UnCommon Sense page for up-to-date ordering linksand detailed information on the June 6 book launch and reading in Seattle.
Patti 209: Fifteen Tales of the Very Near Future (UnCommon Sense, 2025) is a collection of the short stories I’ve published over the past eight years about people who experience, and resist, the worsening political situation in the United States. They range from humorous essays (“Yoga for Protestors”) to satirical fantasies (“The Best Man for the Job”) to science fiction stories about individual protests (“Patti 209”) and civic disruption (“The Bodies We Carry”).
When I wrote these stories for various anthologies and magazines during the first Trump administration, COVID, and the run-up to the 2024 election, I fully expected them to become dated relics soon after publication. Surely the nation would return to normal, and outrages like violent deportations, suppression of free speech, unobtainable healthcare, and Project 2025’s proposed destruction of federal agencies would be of interest only to a few historians!
But, no. Here we are again. Several of the dystopian elements my characters face in these stories, considered pure science fiction when I submitted them to editors, are now elements of everyday life. Other plot points, intended to be far-fetched, now seem horrifically plausible (see “Wishbone”).
The new LED lightbulbs are amazing—a switch on the stem of the bulb lets you adjust them to select a visual “temperature” from icy cool (4000 Kelvin) to sunshine warm (2400 Kelvin). Choose from PAR LED (highly concentrated, narrow spotlight), R LED (older floodlight) to BR LED (newer, better floodlight) to control the way the room is lit. There’s also an ER LED bulb, which has a long neck to fit into deep fixtures. And an MR, with an extremely narrow beam.
I was surprised to discover that some people (mostly interior designers) prefer PAR LEDs to the BR bulbs because they create dramatic beams of light focused on artwork and decor. Me, I’d prefer to get the whole room—especially a work area like a kitchen or a laundry room—well illuminated.
So what’s not to like about these new adjustable LEDs? Well, the fact that big box home improvement stores don’t have most of them in stock—certainly not the adjustable ones! These stores don’t even stock many fixtures these days—just samples, and then they tell you to go online to their websites to get the actual fixture. So much for weekend home repair projects!
Anyway, here’s your Viribright.com guide to LEDs so you’ll have a better experience than I did this past weekend. While Viribright seems to sell in bulk to designers, 1000bulbs has great selection and great prices for the retail customer.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
The second half of that quotation is pretty clearly the underlying premise of Humphrey’s book. It’s a non-linear, richly illustrated and footnoted presentation of the author’s extensive knowledge of philosophy, history, politics, and pop culture. Each two-page spread (a “mini-essay”) takes on a topic. My favorites include “More Dada, Less Data,” “The Futile Wish for Order,” “Turn Off the Dark,” and “Dance Me to the End of Love”). And Humphrey doesn’t just take on a topic, he opens the topic and lets ideas pour into the reader’s mind. “Make Your Own Utopia” starts with Sir Thomas More, covers Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and ends with the ongoing journeys of the Star Trek shows.
You’ll come away with something fresh to think about, talk about, or act on (and, if you’re a writer, think of each spread as a juicy prompt to inspire your own work). You might be even able to understand opinions from “the other side” of a topic a bit better.
I’m reading a lot of articles and books about political dystopias and resistance these days (as well as getting ready to publish my own book of resistance short stories). The MISCosity Manifesto is the book doing the most for my spirit.
A story I wrote under the pen name Alma Emil appears in the new short story anthology Southern Truths.
I wrote “Delia’s Legacy” in January 2024, when we thought the 2024 presidential election would be Biden v. Trump. I suspected the Democrats would lose that contest. So my near-future story is about an elderly couple, possibly the only liberals in their small Southern town, and how they respond to that defeat.
After Kamala Harris got the nomination in July, we considered taking “Delia’s Legacy” out of the anthology. It was possibly through inertia that we left it in. On Tuesday night, to my surprise and dismay, reality caught up to fiction.
Publisher Bob Brown of B Cubed Press has given me permission to reprint the story online. If you’re curious, you can click to read “Delia’s Legacy”.
This weekend B Cubed Press released Southern Truths, an anthology (ebook and print) of short stories, essays, and poems about the politics and culture of the American South as seen through the lens of speculative fiction. I co-edited it with Bob Brown.
The stories in Southern Truths range from contemporary humor (“It’s Election Day in Texas and I’m a Democrat Rarin’ to Vote” by Larry Hodges) and alternate history (“The Gateway” by Zachary Taylor Branch) to near-future dystopia and fantasy. “Mascot” by Adam-Troy Castro explores the transformation of Florida’s famous theme park culture in the wake of a dark cultural divide. In the book’s opening piece, “They Hear,” Kay Hanifen imagines the mother of a child killed in a school shooting appealing to the Devil for help when it appears that no other supreme beings will listen.
We obtained rights to reprint Jim Wright’s “Antipodes,” an essay describing insights into Southern politics gained from his morning bike rides through a small Florida panhandle community. Sara Wiley’s essay, “The Great Georgia Lesbian Potluck,” is a heartbreakingly beautiful story about a young woman’s return to the traditional camp meeting she still loves.
David Gerrold, author of the famous Star Trek script “The Trouble with Tribbles,” weighs in with “The Trouble with Dribbles,” featuring mad scientists and greedy politicians. Cliff Winnig’s “Degenerates Against Memphis” pits a cadre of idealistic high school students against a repressive city government. In Allan Dyen-Shapiro’s “Welfare Bitch Is Here for Da People,” a fast-talking New Jersey super-heroine confronts a corrupt healthcare system.
Of course, Southern politicians—past and present, real and fictitious—make their appearances. Marleen S. Barr’s “Teaching DeSantis a Lesson” takes on the governor of Florida while Branch’s “The Gateway” resurrects H. Ross Perot. The Mississippi senator in Ronald D. Ferguson’s “Filibustering the Asteroid” ignores a threat from outer space while the Texas politician in Liam Hogan’s “Best of Five” is cutting deals with aliens.
That’s Southern Truths for you. What can I say but, “Bless their hearts.”
Southern Truths is the 18th book in the B Cubed Press anthology series that began in 2017 with Alternative Truths. Here’s the full list of Southern Truths stories:
They Hear by Kay Hanifen
The Great Georgia Lesbian Potluck by Sara Willey
It’s Election Day in Texas and I’m a Democrat Rarin’ to Vote by Larry Hodges
The Trouble With Dribbles by David Gerrold
Pantoum For Recy Taylor (1919-2017) by Elisabeth Murawski
Secondary Amendments by Alexander Hay
These Words Are Not for Sale by Leanne Van Valkenburgh
Mascot by Adam-Troy Castro
Filibustering the Asteroid by Ronald D. Ferguson
My First Gun by Alan Brickman
Best of Five by Liam Hogan
A Teacher’s Disillusionment by Leanne Van Valkenburgh
Healthcare Bitch is Here for Da People by Allan Dyen-Shapiro
Antipodes by Jim Wright
Degenerates Against Memphis by Cliff Winnig
The Gateway by Zachary Taylor Branch
Teaching DeSantis a Lesson by Marleen S. Barr
We Owe It to You by Maroula Blades
The Last Day on Earth by Heinrich von Wolfcastle
The Chatham County Blood Shower of 1884 by Anya Leigh Josephs
Watching Public TV in the South by Gary Bloom
In the Darkness, Defending the Wall by Allan Dyen-Shapiro
The Prodigal Sin by Tom Howard
The Southern Whyfors by JW Guthridge
Lot of Desert Between Us by Bill Parks
Greater Expectations by Manny Frishberg and Edd Vick
Foremost among the tales in the Madam President anthology from B Cubed Press is “War Zone,” David Gerrold’s story about a female politician handling an international crisis—only it isn’t the crisis she thinks it is.
Kamala Harris’ gender is almost a minor point in the current presidential contest. The two candidates differ so widely that the common ground may only be that both of them are adult humans. And even those attributes might be up for discussion.
To digress: Eight years ago I watched a debate, and later the 2016 election returns, with my then 98-year-old mother. Having accompanied her mother to the polls in Boston in 1920 after women got the vote (I’m pretty sure my grandmother voted for Harding) my mother was all set to witness history again. She fully expected to see Hillary Clinton become the first woman president.
Seeing Clinton stalked onstage during the debate had shocked my mother. The election returns (we were watching in Florida, where most folks in her retirement community were swaggering around in red hats) devastated her. My mom died in early 2023, at the age of 104. So she didn’t get to see what happened this July. It would have delighted her.
In June, just before Harris emerged as the Democrats’ candidate, I worked on and contributed a story (more on that, later) to the B Cubed Press‘ anthology Madam President. The short stories in the book, selected and edited by Debora Godfrey, are about the many ways that woman achieve and maintain leadership. The female protagonists in the book handle alien invasions, difficult book clubs, a contentious Home Owners Association, and intergalactic politics. Foremost among the tales, I think, is “War Zone,” David Gerrold’s story about a female politician handling an international crisis—only it isn’t the crisis she thinks it is.
Many of the stories, like “War Zone,” have breathtaking twists. I rarely write stories with dramatic twists, but for Madam President I told the story of a seasoned White House press secretary who doesn’t notice a history-making story that’s developing right under his nose. You’ll have to read “The Second Term” to find out what happened—and how the press secretary dealt with it.
If you buy Madam President, please leave B Cubed Press a quick review. And give us credit for the June-published cover that spookily appears to predict Kamala Harris’ candidacy.
Social media on the internet is rapidly devolving from Speakers Corner to the Tower of Babel to individuals howling in the digital wilderness.
Why is nobody listening?
With X (Twitter) rotting from the top down, most people fond of communicating via pithy snippets have migrated to Meta’s Threads, Bluesky Social, and the aggregation of Mastodon servers. Or maybe CounterSocial. (Remember the hacktivist app CounterSocial? I don’t, but apparently I have an account there. Sigh.)
Those of us who write at mid-length now have a choice of drowning in Facebook’s recent onslaught of repetitive ads (mine are for sweaters and Japanese snacks) while reading about our high school friends’ family vacations or reviving our moribund accounts on Tumblr, Medium, and Substack. We can take payments, or ask for tips via Ko-fi.
And, of course, there’s always Patreon where we can harness ourselves to a schedule of content production for a small-but-loyal paying audiencee—and end up spending half of our posts apologizing for not meeting that schedule. Talk about a self-induced guilt trip.
FROM THE Audience Viewpoint
If none of this sounds appealing to you as a content creator, I’ll point out that this fragmented array of platforms is even less appealing to readers. It used to be that if someone stopped following social media, they missed out on a shared experience, be it Twitter or Facebook. And the community missed them. Now…no one notices.
I’m sure that one or two of these platforms or communities make it easy to browse, find, read, and pay for interesting content. But platforms fall in and out of favor pretty quickly (often because they’ve changed their rules—see: Twitter). This does not motivate me, as a writer, to invest time and energy in one. And I certainly don’t have the time to check in on each of them every day to read what’s been posted by friends. I’m a follower, but usually a ghostly one.
It would be wonderful to have some kind of aggregator for all these sites, the way we used to have blogging aggregators (remember RSS feeds?). But if you look at the current aggregator software, it’s commercial stuff aimed at business clients who want to use it aggregate (often to rip off) other commercially produced content and offer it under their own banners. I haven’t found software that lets you aggregate content posted by individual creators who publishing via Automattic’s WordPress and Tumblr, Square’s Weebly, Google’s venerable Blogger.com, SquareSpace, Medium, and Substack. I doubt very much if such a thing would be commercially viable. (And if I type the word “commercial” one more time here, I’m going to gag.)
Bottom line: Reading social media content is not much fun these days. Particularly the bizarre posts generated by AIs, which seem to have a serious problem with gender-pronoun consistency.
Back to the Blog
As for writing, at this point I’m joining the personal blogging revival, going back to my own WordPress blogging here. You’ll notice that most of the affiliate-marketing bloggers have jumped over to visual platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and (to my surprise) Pinterest. That leaves blogging to the writers. So I guess we should get to it.
If any of the platforms mentioned above are providing a rich and comprehensive social media experience (for writers to connect with readers and readers to connect with writers), please leave a comment. What platform is meeting your needs, and why? And if you have a lot of neglected social media accounts out there, ‘fess up—and tell us why that happened. I’m here, and I’m listening.
I write to escape. Instead of looking around and asking “Why?” (which I find myself doing more and more often these days) I want to look into the mists and ask, “What if?”
Then my job is to clear away the mists and show people what “What if?” would look like.
Some fiction takes place in worlds where just about everything is different. Flatland, a story about a square living in two-dimensional space, is one of the most extreme examples. An example we’re more familiar with is Alice in Wonderland. I’m in awe of writers who can manage that sort of worldbuilding.
By contrast, the fiction I write usually takes place in recognizable worlds where one small element is different. For an alternate history, it might be a past in which two people who never met encounter each other. I’ve written time travel stories in which people from the past encounter each other and build a different future. This approach is certainly inspired by my fascination with Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworldseries.
Quite a few speculative fiction works examine humans in settings where a major physical or cultural rule is different: A world where gender roles are switched or societies have multiple or fluid genders, such as the one described in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Dystopian fiction, such as Stephen King’s The Stand, often looks at the ways in which humans might respond to a disaster (nuclear war, alien attack, or a pandemic).
One of the most fascinating variations on the “one change” theme involves the ways in which a completely isolated group of people build or maintain a culture. Would we do it better this time? This includes Riverworld (again), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and Mike Resnick’s astonishing short story “For I Have Touched the Sky,” (available online), part of his Kirinyaga novel. (If you are familiar with Resnick through his humorous space opera stories, Kirinyaga is quite different, and deadly serious. I recommend approaching it without reading any spoilers.)
I have more to say on the topic of writing to escape, but I’ll stop here for the moment. Go read “For I Have Touched the Sky.”
One way I break out of a writing block is to switch to a completely different art form—usually one at which I’m a pure novice. Trying to get a grip on the basics of an unfamiliar form often refreshes my sense of the essentials in fiction writing.
This is why in the summer of 2018 I signed up for a day-long mosaic workshop. I had no idea that the visiting instructor was a woman recognized internationally for designing and leading large community mosaic projects (walls, walkways, etc.). So I was astonished to find the workshop packed with attendees ranging from complete novices like me to well-known local mosaic artists.
We’d been told to bring small items (coins, stones, gems) to incorporate into our mosaic pieces. I soon discovered that several of the students had brought along a lot of ego and emotion as well. Some of the seasoned artists were highly competitive, busily snatching up the choicest of the tiles and glass pieces the teacher’s assistants had set out on the tables. And among my fellow newbies there were a few of a type that drives me bonkers: People who babble about how terrified and incompetent they are, literally begging people not to look at what they are doing, while all the time making such an ungodly racket that it’s impossible to ignore them.
I’m fairly confident about my design skills, but had to work hard to follow the directions and then master the techniques for cutting tiles, affixing pieces, and adding grout. I soon figured out a design I liked, came to grips with the results of my clumsy gluing technique, and turned my attention to what was going on around me.
The instructor was moving from person to person, offering some of the most tactful advice and heartfelt encouragement I’d ever heard from a teacher. A few of the attendees, completely wrapped up in their creations, were experiencing fear and frustration. One woman, who revealed that the small items she’d brought had belonged to a daughter who had died recently, simply melted down.
I was fascinated by the instructor’s almost magical ability to validate each person’s struggle to rise to their creative challenges—essentially transforming their roadblocks into stepping stones. In the long run, learning that approach to art would be far more effective than learning how to apply grout evenly. I now had what I’d come for—and it wasn’t a mosaic.
What I experienced in the workshop that day led to my story “Pieced Together,” which I am delighted to say will appear in the anthology The Art of Being Human from Fablecroft Press.
Note: Fablecroft is doing a Kickstarter campaign for the anthology (it’s now aiming for stretch goals). While the ebook will be for general sale, print copies will be available only to backers of the Kickstarter.
