The Unsecured Present

Two novellas written during the "3-Day Novel Contest"
"The World's Most Notorious Literary Marathon"

After Fernando is a fictional dream about the life of Ophélia Queiroz after the death of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. When a young stranger appears at her house in Lisbon, Ophélia takes him on a journey of the "perfect day" she has been assembling in her memory room with the poems and letters of the four poetic heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

Crowd Theory is a twitter novella whose avatars post 140-character microblogs. Pitting individualist I_Scrivener against social psychiatrist Dr. Krishna Dhere, author of Crowd Theory, the Bible of The Collective, a dangerous intellectual game begins. The two stage a debate for very high stakes - suicide: the surrender of Scrivener's identity to merge with The Collective.
Between them, these novellas chart the territory between saudade - the portentous Portuguese longing for the past, and Futurism - the fervent Italian artistic movement that celebrated speed, a break with the past, and presaged Fascism.