Announcing the Diabolical Plots Year Four Fiction Lineup!

written by David Steffen

Diabolical Plots was open for submissions once again for the month of July, to solicit stories to buy for the fourth year of fiction publication.  1003 submissions came in from 720 different writers, of which 25 stories were accepted.  Now that all of the contracts are in hand I am very pleased to share with you the lineup, which will start as soon as the Year Three stories have wrapped up in March.

This year I think the overall submissions were more on-target to my peculiar tastes than ever.  Emphasis on the weird, with a lot of great stories that involve religion without preaching or demonizing it.  I am very excited to share these excellent stories with the world.

Since I accepted 25 stories instead of 24, there is one month that will have three stories (which I’d like to see as a regular thing if the recurring funding is there for it).

April 2018
“Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset” by Derrick Boden
“Her February Face” by Christie Yant

May 2018
“The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Divining Colleagues’ Coming Misfortunes, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University” by Amanda Helms
“Graduation in the Time of Yog-Sothoth” by James Van Pelt

June 2018
“Tank!” by John Wiswell
“Withholding Judgment Day” by Ryan Dull

July 2018
“Crimson Hour” by Jesse Sprague
“Jesus and Dave” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

August 2018
“Medium Matters” by R.K. Duncan
“The Vegan Apocalypse: 50 Years Later” by Benjamin A. Friedman

September 2018
“Glass in Frozen Time” by M.K. Hutchins
“The Fisher in the Yellow Afternoon” by Michael Anthony Ashley

October 2018
“Pumpkin and Glass” by Sean R. Robinson
“Still Life With Grave Juice” by Jim Moss

November 2018
“The Memory Cookbook” by Aaron Fox-Lerner
“The Coal Remembers What It Was” by Paul R. Hardy

December 2018
“The Hammer’s Prayer” by Benjamin C. Kinney
“For the Last Time, It’s Not a Ray Gun” by Anaea Lay

January 2019
“The Divided Island” by Rhys Hughes
“The Man Whose Left Arm Was a Cat” by Jennifer Lee Rossman
“The Dictionary For Dreamers” by Cislyn Smith

February 2019
“Local Senior Celebrates Milestone” by Matthew Claxton
“How Rigel Gained a Rabbi (Briefly)” by Benjamin Blattberg

March 2019
“Heaven For Everyone” by Aimee Ogden
“The Last Death” by Sahara Frost

DP Fiction #27A: “The Things You Should Have Been” by Andrea G. Stewart

“You should have been a doctor,” my mother said. She squinted at me through the screen, as though the new computer I’d bought her had some secret flaw. She never quite trusted that it was better than her old one. “You always liked stitching when you were small. Remember that shirt you made? So many compliments!”

“Mom, it’s a little late for that. I’m thirty-three.” I tugged at the hem of my jacket, my elbows rubbing against the chair’s metal armrests. Fidgeting usually helped me calm my nerves. It didn’t help now. It had seemed simple on paper: five years away from home. Now the only thing I could think of was the blackness of space beyond these metal walls.

“Never too late.” Wisps of gray hair escaped from her bun, brushing the sides of her cheeks. She turned back to the pan on the stove. “You put your mind to something, you can do it. All my children—very capable.”

I could almost smell the soy sauce and chives, the sesame oil on the edge of burning. It made me miss home, more than just a little. “Stitching isn’t the only prerequisite to become a doctor.”

She sliced the air with her chopsticks. “But you’re good at memorizing.”

I focused on the soft glow of the LED lights above my head. “Stitching and memorizing–I’ll be sure to put that on my application. Lei Wong: he once stitched his own shirt.”

“Lei,” she said, “I’m serious.” She disappeared from view and I heard the clink of bottles as she rummaged through the cupboards. I was pretty sure my colleagues’ mothers didn’t cook while they were on vid calls.

“I’m serious too. I’ll update my resume. First thing when I get back.”

She popped into view once more, her face taking up the entire screen. “A lawyer, then. You’re good at arguing. Also good at making your mother feel bad.”

“Do lawyers make their mothers feel bad?”

“The ones who don’t listen do.”

I sighed and shifted in my seat. The cushion was thin, and I could feel the cold metal beneath it. No luxury, here. “I’m trying to listen.”

“Who said I was talking about you? I was talking about lawyers.” She gave a triumphant shrug and lifted the pan, shoveling greens onto a plate. When she was finished, she leaned on the counter, her face in profile. The sunlight from the window trickled into the creases on her temples, highlighted the places on the counter where the laminate had begun to wear away.

A knock sounded on the door behind me. “Two minutes.”

My mother gave me a sideways look. She’d heard it too. Her lips pressed together; her fingers curled around the edge of the countertop. “You could have been a comedian. Just making jokes. All the time. Taking nothing seriously.”

“Mom…”

She pushed away from the counter. “You can still do something else. Anything else.”

“I’ve got two minutes before we leave.”

She shook her head, her brow furrowed. Her hands wove through the air, wildly, like broken-winged birds. “Still enough time! Tell them you changed your mind. They can bring you back.”

They could. They’d never let me leave Earth again, but they could. I thought of returning to California, having my feet on real, solid ground again, standing in my mother’s kitchen and pleating dumplings, the smell of pork and cooked cabbage thick in the air. I couldn’t say it didn’t tempt me.

I checked the clock in the corner of my screen. A little over a minute before we began preparations to initiate the warp drive, before we left the solar system and ventured into the unknown. “But this is what I want to do. I’ve worked my whole life for this.” Hours of study, of physical preparations, of navigating paperwork and interpersonal relationships. “I’ll stay safe.”

My mother closed her eyes. “Always higher, always further, ever since you were a boy. You never knew how to stay safe. You’re thousands of miles away from safe.” Her shoulders hunched. She set the chopsticks down and lined them up until they were parallel, a small space in between. “I know you want to do this, and I’m proud of you, I really am. I’m just not ready.” A wan smile flitted across her face. “Lei Wong: space pilot.”

I gave her a return smile–one I hoped was reassuring despite the flicker of fear in my chest. “I’ll come home.”

She jabbed a finger at the screen. “Good. Maybe then you can try stitching again, instead.”

“I can try. Bye, mom. Love you. Catch you on the flip side.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Probably not a comedian. Not very funny.”

The screen went black.

“Ready?” Susan, my copilot, peeked inside the door.

I put my hands to the armrests, rose to my feet, and took a deep breath, the anxiety in my chest finally easing. “I think so.”

I could have sworn the air smelled of sesame oil.


© 2017 by Andrea G. Stewart

 

Author’s Note: This story was inspired by my mom, who can be alternately critical and alternately amazed at what I’ve accomplished–and sometimes both at the same time! I think, for her, my life will always be one of possibilities, even if I’ve set my feet firmly on one path.

 

10981917_10155292391580397_7630903974659219700_nAndrea Stewart was born in Canada and raised in a number of places across the United States. She spent her childhood immersed in Star Trek and odd-smelling library books. When her dreams of becoming a dragon slayer didn’t pan out, she instead turned to writing. Her work has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Daily Science Fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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The Best of Strange Horizons 2016+

written by David Steffen

Strange Horizons is a freely available online speculative fiction zine that also publishes nonfiction and poetry.  Their editor-in-chief is Niall Harrison.  Their fiction editors are Lila Garrott, Catherine Krahe, An Owoyo, and Vajra Chandresekera, and their podcast is edited, hosted, and usually read by Anaea Lay.  They publish a variety of styles of stories and have regularly attracted award nominations in recent years.  All of the stories and poetry in the zine are published in the podcast.  This list covers all of the stories published since the last Best of Strange Horizons list posted here on November 9, 2015.  In that timeframe, Strange Horizons published 52 stories.

Since last year they have upgraded their website so it looks all shiny and new.

This year they added a new feature when they reached a fundraising goal to add Spanish translations.

Stories that are eligible for this year’s Hugo and Nebula awards are marked with an asterisk (*).

The List

1. “The First Confirmed Case of Non-Corporeal Recursion: Patient Anita R.” by Benjamin C. Kinney*
Story of hauntings from the point of view of the ghost, who in life had been a researcher, as she tries to research her own non-corporeal state.

2.  “Das Steingeschöpf” by G.V. Anderson*
A story of a new member of a sculpting guild, sent to repair one of the ancient living sculptures known as Steingeschöpf.

3.  “The Witch’s Knives” by Margaret Ronald*
The story begins as a woman ends a long quest to rid her husband of a curse that has made him into a beast.

4.  “We Have a Cultural Difference, Can I Taste You?” by Rebecca Ann Jordan*
Non-human POV as an alien (the last of its species) that’s primary sense is taste.

5.  “Water, Birch, and Blood” by O Horvath and Sara Norja*
A woman abruptly remembers her childhood trip to a portal world, and tries to find her way back.

Honorable Mentions

“Tigerskin” by Kurt Hunt

“Dragon-Smoked Barbeque” by M.K. Hutchins*

“Timothy” by Philip Schweitzer*

 

 

Introducing: The Submission Grinder Newsletter

written by David Steffen

Since the start of 2016 I have been working hard on completing some major upgrades to the Submission Grinder site.

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the Submission Grinder is a web tool for writers to find markets for their fiction: market listings, a search engine to find markets that fit your criteria, a submission tracker, and anonymized submission statistics to get an idea of what kind of response time can be expected from a particular market.

As part of the development work, in January the Grinder began sending out weekly Submission Grinder newsletters to subscribers which contained a list of recently added markets with links to the Grinder listing for each of those markets.  The newsletter also includes updates on Submission Grinder feature development, and fundraising updates.

Starting next week, the newsletter is expanding to also include lists of markets that have recently opened or recently closed, making it easy to keep track of changes in market status, all delivered right to your inbox.

And, best of all, each of these lists is filtered based on user preferences for genre and pay rate, so you only hear about the kinds of markets you have personal interest in.

To sign up for the newsletter you don’t have to be a registered Grinder user, or even have experience with the site’s features.  All you need to is sign up here and enter your preferences for filtering.

There is also a separate newsletter to talk about Diabolical Plots’s publishing projects, which you can sign up for here.

Diabolical Plots Fiction Lineup (Year One)

written by David Steffen

I have twelve short story contracts in hand, signed by the authors of twelve stories.  That means that I can announce the lineup of stories for Diabolical Plots first year of publishing fiction.  All of these were chosen with the author names hidden so all of them made it on the merit of the story, regardless of how well the author is known or their publishing histroies.

 

March:  “Taste the Whip” by Andy Dudak

April:  “Virtual Blues” by Lee Budar-Danoff

May:  “In Memoriam” by Rachel Reddick

June:  “The Princess in the Basement” by Hope Erica Schultz

July:  “Not a Bird” by H.E. Roulo

August:  “The Superhero Registry” by Adam Gaylord

September:  “A Room for Lost Things” by Chloe N. Clark

October:  “The Grave Can Wait” by Thomas Berubeg

November:  “Giraffe Cyborg Cleans House!” by Matthew Sanborn Smith

December: “St. Roomba’s Gospel” by Rachael K. Jones

January:  “The Osteomancer’s Husband” by Henry Szabranski

February:  “May Dreams Shelter Us” by Kate O’Connor

 

Slush Retrospective

written by David Steffen

For anyone who hasn’t been following along, Diabolical Plots was open for fiction submissions for the first time in December 2014 to pick 12 stories to publish one per month for a year as our first fiction offerings. This is my first time editing fiction or handling a slushpile of my own (as opposed to being a slushreader for a magazine run by someone else).

Also, this is a long post–I tried to give useful headings so you could skip to the parts you’re interested in.

WHY NOW?

Anthony Sullivan (my co-conspirator here at Diabolical Plots) and I decided together that we wanted to give this a try. We’d been talking about it off and on for years. So why did we actually move forward with it now? The answer to that is simple–money. We knew that if we wanted to do this, we wanted to do it big–professional rates as defined by SFWA (currently 6 cents per word). We don’t have anything against markets that pay less, but we figured the best way in our control to increase the upper quality of the slushpile is to pay professional rates. And we wanted to make a market that we would be excited to submit to.  We would love to become a SFWA-qualified professional market.

The reason we can go forward with this fiction venture now is because of generous donations both one-time and recurring from users of the Submission Grinder. Those donations go first to site maintenance costs like hosting as well as secondary costs that help us keep up with market news as well as we can. But we’ve been saving what we can to put towards projects that require money like this fiction venture. We could have run a Kickstarter campaign but we both liked the idea of providing something of value and then seeing if people would like to support it, rather than the other way around. We plan to launch a Patreon campaign in the near future–if that and the recurring PayPal donations combined reach a threshold, then we will keep publishing fiction past the first year, if we reach the next threshold above that we’ll buy 2 stories/month for the following year, and so on. I’m not opposed to something like Kickstarter, but I like the Patreon model better for what I hope will be an ongoing venture because its focus is maintenance funding, ongoing income instead of the one-off burst that Kickstarter will provide–at some point a magazine has to hit Kickstarter again and one success does not guarantee another.

MAKING THE GUIDELINES

Our guidelines are somewhat unusual for several reasons. One is that we were only open for a month to buy a year’s worth of fiction. Part of the reason for this is that we intended from the beginning to read all of the slush ourselves, and we knew this would be time-consuming, so we would rather do it on a short-term sprint than to be reading slush around the calendar.

Another oddity is that we only allow one story per author per submission window. There were a few reasons for this. One is to encourage authors to pick their very best work they have available that fits the rest of the guidelines. Another is to make any progress in the slushpile a permanent step–rather than rejecting a story by an author and getting another story from the same author again.

Of course the biggest oddity in our guidelines is the requirement for anonymity–there are a few markets that require this–among pro SF markets I believe Flash Fiction Online and Writers of the Future are the only others. But we’re even more strange in this respect in that there were only two staff members doing all the reading and there wasn’t a separate person to do author correspondence. Our homebrew submission tracking software had to be quite a bit more complicated because of this–it had to hide the author’s identity from us until we’ve made our final decision of accept or reject, and had to allow some basic way for an author to query us to make sure their story was received but without breaking anonymity.

The reason we wanted to make the slush anonymous is that we wanted story to trump all. We wanted to completely remove the possibility that personal relationships with an author would sway our decision one way or the other. And we wanted to remove the consideration of marketing concerns–it’s not uncommon for a publication, especially when starting up, to publish stories from established authors with big fan followings to attract readers. The reasoning behind cherry-picking known authors is that the fan following will get more eyeballs on the magazine and help make the launch more successful.  But personally, we felt that these stories can feel phoned-in because the story didn’t make it into the publication on its own merits. We have nothing against established authors with big names, of course. They got to be big names because they knew what they were doing. But if an author you recognize is in our table of contents, it means that we thought that story was in our top twelve and the name has nothing to do with it.

THE SLUSH

In the 31 days we were open, we received 378 submissions–34 of those on the first day of submissions, 27 of those on the last day of submissions.

17 of the submissions had clear violations of the guidelines. A few of those were stories with names attached against our anonymity requirements. Most of those were stories that were clearly too long for our 2000-word maximum, sometimes by several times. And the one submission that was a synopsis of a non-speculative children’s book that was also triple our maximum word count allowed. I did have to wonder, as I was rejecting these stories unread and with a note pointing out the guidelines violation, what these authors were thinking. Did they not read the guidelines at all? Did they think their story was so good the word count limit was irrelevant to them? Either answer is not particularly endearing . Because of our one-submission-per-author-per-window policy that was the only opportunity those authors got this time round.  Once those were taken out of the running that left 361 valid submissions.

I’ve read slush for a few different venues–Flash Fiction Online, Drabblecast, and Stupefying Stories. Overall the quality of the Diabolical Plots slush was much higher than I expect from past experience, and there wasn’t the glut of serial killer stories and stories about protagonists killing their spouses. This could’ve been because I tried to warn off these things in the guidelines, or because the one-story-per-author rule made authors more selective, or could just because we didn’t specifically ask for the offensive like the Drabblecast guidelines do.

The stories that were rejected in the first round were rejected for a variety of reasons. A slow or uninteresting beginning to the story is an excuse to start skimming–a bad sign, especially when dealing with stories less than 2000 words. Stories where nothing happened, or stories with low stakes. Or ones without strong characters. First and foremost we wanted stories that made us feel something, whether that was humor, fear, fun, love, but it had to make us feel something.

By January 8th we’d finished the first round of reading and held 67 stories for the second and final round of consideration. I didn’t keep statistics on the proportion of personal rejections–but I’d guess them at maybe 10% in the first round. I only commented if I had feedback that I felt would be useful to the author.

EDITORIAL CHANGE

Around this same time I started drafting up the contracts based on Lightspeed’s very author-friendly publicly posted contract. Up until this point we had been pretty focused on the editorial side of things and the technical side of things (tweaking the submission system), but at this point we started getting into the publishing side of things, particularly on the topic of risk and legality. We realized that Diabolical Plots should be registered under an LLC to minimize any risk to our personal finances. And as part of that discussion, Anthony realized that he needed to step down from the co-editor position. We didn’t have a falling out or anything like that. He just realized that his role as co-editor wasn’t going to work out with other aspects of his life. So from that point forward I am the editor of Diabolical Plots.

Anthony will still be a big part of Diabolical Plots and the Submission Grinder and will continue to fill the same invaluable role that he has filled since we first teamed up in 2009–handling all of the technical side of the website administration, and doing the lion’s share of the software development that has made the Grinder the useful tool it is today. In fact, he is hard at work on an overhaul of the Grinder site that will make it easier to maintain as well as providing a lot of shiny new features that will make it even better than it is now. We’re aiming to launch this site overhaul to the public around the same time that we launch our first fiction publication–that date is yet to be determined, but will probably be in a couple months.

THE HOLD PILE

By January 8th we had finished reading and resolving all the first round submissions and we only had the 67 stories in the hold pile left to resolve. By the time Anthony reached the decision that he needed to step down, I had re-read the hold-pile stories and ranked them numerically with plans to compare lists with Anthony. So when I became the sole editor, I was already ready to go and could resolve the whole pile in one fell swoop. I made sure to give personal rejections to all the stories that made it to the hold pile because I hate it when my stories are held for further consideration but then rejected without a word.

I had enough good stories in the pile, and planned to buy so few, that I didn’t venture into any major rewrite requests. If the story wasn’t good enough as-is, then I didn’t accept it–I have made a few small suggestions for small changes and will probably do a few more as I progress from acceptance to publication. There were a lot more stories in the pile that I would’ve loved to accept if the budget had allowed, so there were some very hard decisions in this pile.

In the final twelve stories I was interested to see that there were several author names that I knew from seeing their published stories in pro markets. For at least one of the authors, this was the first pro sale. Judging by names, of the final twelve, seven of the authors are women.  I’m glad to see both sexes so well represented–I know that some publications have a real problem with getting enough women-authored stories in their slushpiles (to the point where they have to make campaigns specifically to bring in more women authors) so I was glad to see that.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Before I do anything else, I need to sort out some business details, defining what Diabolical Plots actually is. Once that’s in place I can finalize the draft of our contract and send it to the twelve authors–in the meantime I’ve requested and gotten preliminary notes from all twelve to let me know the stories are still available.  The twelve authors are free to share their news as widely or as narrowly as they wish so you may have already heard a few of them.

Once the contracts are signed, then I can publicly announce the table of contents–I’m really looking forward to that. And then I can seriously consider what kind of launch date we can manage for the fiction offerings, but I’m still planning to coincide that with the launch of the Submission Grinder overhaul, so it will depend somewhat on that as well.

WHAT ABOUT YEAR TWO?

You may notice that all of our planning so far has been focused on providing a single year of fiction, talking about the budget for a year, the schedule for a year. That’s because, at this point, we don’t have the capital in place for another year of fiction. We’re hoping to change that. Ideally by gathering recurring donations of whatever size through Patreon and PayPal to give a steady stream of funds to kick off the second year and beyond. If the end of year one approaches and we don’t have this in place yet, then I’ll consider doing a Kickstarter campaign to get year two funded and continue to focus on getting recurring donations so that big one-off campaigns don’t need to be run every year. If we get enough to be able to afford to publish two stories a month, then we’ll expand to that. And beyond that we’ll consider expanding in other ways. The sky’s the limit if there is enough interest and support. I’ll be posting sometime in the not-too-distant future about our Patreon campaign to this end. In the meantime, recurring PayPal donations either on the DP page or the Grinder page are the best way to help support both our necessary costs and our harebrained schemes like this.

Father’s Day Fiction Special!

This week, in honor of Father’s Day, we’re posting something a little different. Since I started writing short stories, I’ve been sharing every single one of them with my dad, even the ones I should probably be embarrassed to show my dad. He reads each one and then we talk on the phone about what he liked and didn’t like, what he understood or didn’t understand, what themes the story brought to mind, etc. He’s enthusiastic but honest, and I look forward to every phone call.

Dad’s no stranger to writing. He’s a retired Lutheran pastor and has been writing a weekly sermon for decades, and for fun he has written up some short nonfiction tales about his life on the farm and other parts of his life. But he had never written any fiction. After reading so many of my stories, he decided to write a fiction short story. I found it entertaining and (with his permission) I wanted to share it more widely. I’ve edited for grammar and spelling, and things like paragraph size, but have otherwise left it unaltered. I hope you enjoy!

–David Steffen

PS: Dad wrote the story longhand, photocopied it page by page, and sent it to me in the mail. I typed it out for posting. I expect you’ll find that this medium of communication is very fitting for the story.

 

I Won!
by Richard Steffen

Technology tried to take over my life, but I won! I’ll tell you my story.

It all began innocently a number of years ago. My wife Fern got a cell phone. I asked her “Why did you get a cell phone? What do you need it for? What’s wrong with the phone on the wall?”

She sweetly pointed out that our old phone was stuck to the wall. She sometimes wanted to talk on the phone when she was away from home.

I asked her “What’s wrong with the pay phones you find at truck stops and hospitals? Can’t you make calls on them?”

She just smiled and said “I don’t spend much time at truck stops and hospitals. I like talking on the phone when I’m out in a park, or driving down the highway. I like to be able to make a call wherever I am.”

I asked “What is so important to say on the phone that it can’t wait until you get home?”

She winked at me and said “Sometimes I want to call you and tell you how much I love you. Sometimes I want to call you and tell you what I want us to do together after we go to bed.” She just winked at me again and gave me a big passionate kiss.

How could I argue with that? She was so smart! She kept her cell phone and I got one too. We had many wonderful talks on our cell phones. But I had this uneasy feeling that technology was trying to take over my life.

Technology has a way of sneaking into your life through the back door. My wife Fern got a computer. I asked her “Why did you get a computer? What do you need it for?”

She smiled and said “I can look up information on the computer for my teaching. It will be so handy.”

I asked her “What’s wrong with books? Can’t you look up things in a book?”

She smiled and said “Yes, I could look it up in a book, but a computer is much faster. With a computer I can find the information I need in less time, and then I will have more time to spend with you!”

What could I say! She was so smart! But I still had this uneasy feeling that technology was trying to ruin my life.

When my wife Fern was alive she took care of technological things in the house. When Daylight Savings Time began I would go around the house moving the old style clocks one hour ahead. Fern would reset all the digital ones, it seemed so easy for her. Fern saw technology as her friend; I have always felt that I am at war with technology. Technology tried to take over my life, but I won. I’ll tell you how I did it.

After my wife Fern died I went on the offensive against technology. The first thing to go was the computer. I couldn’t stand having a machine in the house that was so much smarter than me. So I unplugged the computer, boxed it up, and gave it away to Fern’s son Ted. I never regretted that decision. I felt I had won the first round against technology. When I needed to know something I turned to my old World Book set of encyclopedias and looked it up. I felt I had won the first round against technology. I turned to books, rather than the computer.

After I retired from being a parish pastor, I moved to an apartment in Owatonna, Minnesota. My battle with technology continued. After getting rid of my computer I decided the TV was next to go. It had always bugged me when the volume would go up during the commercials, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. The content of the programs wasn’t that great anyway, so I simply stopped watching TV. The TV still stands in the corner, but I don’t watch it anymore. I won round two with technology.

My kitchen stove was the next to go. The only time I used the kitchen stove was to fry eggs and boil hot dogs. One day the electricity went off in my apartment building. The digital clock kept blinking off and on and it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t find the directions of how to set the time, so I started turning dials and pushing buttons. Then a buzzer started going off, and I couldn’t get it to stop. I slid the stove away from the wall and unplugged it. I haven’t used it since.

With the computer, TV, and stove out of commission, I had now won round three with technology. If this kept up I would soon be living in a cave with no modern appliances at all.

The next to go was my car. I had always liked my old Chevrolet Malibu which I called James. It was easy to drive with none of the modern gadgets of the newer cars, but it was getting old, so my son David bought me a brand new car with all the modern technology you could ever dream of. It was very thoughtful of him, but my new car has been a disaster from the start.

To get in the car you need to press a number of buttons on a keypad to open the door. I usually cannot remember the numbers so I can’t even get in. When I’m lucky, I get in the car and there is a new sequence of numbers to start it. It usually takes me half a day to get the car going. When I finally head down the street the GPS system kicks in with a voice telling me where to go. With that voice yacking at me all the time I get so frustrated I just go back home and put the car back in the garage. I haven’t used my car now for six months. When my son David calls and asks how the car is working, I tell him it is working just fine. I don’t have any trouble with it at all. I don’t have the heart to tell him it hasn’t left the garage since last summer. Yes, I am really winning the battle against technology.

Without a car I need to walk everywhere. I’m doing okay because the grocery story isn’t very far away. But even walking can be a challenge these days. To get to the grocery store I have to cross a big street with a stop-and-go light and walk signal.

I wait for the walk light to come on and then head across the street. When I am halfway across the street a hand comes up and the light says “Don’t walk” so I head back to the curb and wait for the walk light to come on again. When the walk light comes on again I start across the street again, but only make it halfway. Sometimes cars’ horns are honking and the drivers are yelling at me to get off the street, so I just go back home.

After I ran out of groceries I started crossing the street in the middle of the block, but almost got hit by cars a number of times. Finally drivers were calling the police department about the old man that was crossing the street anywhere and causing traffic accidents. Finally a squad car came to my apartment and a police officer escorted me to the police station and had me transferred to the city jail.

I am now living in a padded cell in the Owatonna city jail. They are very nice to me here. I don’t have to deal with any electronic devices anymore. They bring me food and water and a change of clothes each day. They even give me a few magazines that I can read. My life is very simple now. I don’t have to worry about a computer, or a cell phone, or a TV, or a kitchen stove, or my car, or the stop-and-go light down the street. I can just sit and read magazines, sleep, and eat, and daydream about the good old days.

You see, I won! I am completely free of technology now. No buttons, no buzzers, no GPS voice telling me what to do. What I wonderful life I have. I won!

THE END

 

Editor’s note: For anyone who is concerned, although some of the story is based in real life events, my dad does not live in a padded cell.
–David

 

RichardSteffenHeadshotRichard Steffen is a retired pastor living in Owatonna, MN. His wife, Fern, passed away a few years ago.