Winner of the 45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest In a future hotter than today, people meet their needs through tailored forms of intelligence. From the cyborg security at the food mart to the ever-learning, ever-loving forms that can effectively, and acceptably, be a life partner. The processing nous of an AI spouse is all the more valuable in a world where everything's a game. An actual game. So We Blush Less When The Phone Rings presents a world where differences hinge on whether we're organic or customised, whether we're physical creatures or a controlled visualisation. This is a world where power dynamics are hazy and the old uncertainties of romance mean nothing in the face of reliable engineering. But no society can be all winners. In this world, "scarcity value" haunts everything and staying wholly natural is the only sure way to lose. Who benefits and who goes without is determined by iron rules, while commodities are acquired via an ongoing bidding game. The purpose of this society is to hold a bright blanket around chronic scarcity. The world is too hot to do anything more. And even a respectable happy married couple, once they step outside the game, find themselves talking to bullets.

Everything is just a little more difficult for thirty-something Margaret Rudge. Adjusting to single life after her no-good husband Tommy leaves her for a shrink, Margaret manages to snag a job slinging coffee on the street. "Everyone hooks up waiting for their latte," her sometimes-fabulous friend Cindy advises. And maybe it's good advice because it's while working at Frank's coffee cart that she meets a handsome young dancer and is drawn into the exhilarating and slightly unhinged world of a nyc modern dance company. Margaret is stuck in a jack-in-the-box, and author Mark Wagstaff expertly mans the crank, turning the lever over and over, letting eerie circus music slowly fill your head. Will she find what she's looking for? Is it hiding in the strangely lit aisles of her downstairs grocery store? Maybe it's avoiding her calls, holed up with a new girlfriend, the cognitive psychology graduate, in a condo in Phoenix. Or maybe, just maybe, it's coffee-stained and unexpectedly expected. In Attack of the Lonely Hearts, each character is broken in their own forlorn way. A master of the dark and witty one-liner, Wagstaff manages to spin a hilarious and off-kilter story about what can happen when lonely hearts discover they're attached to even lonelier bodies.