Ghosts, Presidential Campaigns, and Nellie Bly

At the beginning of the year, I was asked to contribute to the historical fantasy/speculative fiction/hopepunk anthology Shifting, Swirling HERitage published this summer. The challenge from the editor was to create a story where a historical figure or event changed in a way which made life better. Imagine if women had been allowed to be astronauts at NASA in the 1960s and gone to the moon, she wrote.

In my resulting tale, the first woman to run for president, Victoria Woodhull Martin, returns to the United States to make a second run in 1900 (it's fantasy, although Victoria was a real person who did run for president once in 1872). Of course, she hires my favorite historical figure, the reporter Nellie Bly, to run the campaign's publicity. Then I added the ghost of Cornelius Vanderbilt (did I mention the real Victoria was a medium? also the first female stockbroker working on Wall Street?) who aids the venture as he aided Victoria in real life.  It all made for a great alternative history fantasy and one of my favorite short stories to write.

For this tale, I ended up reading three biographies of Victoria. Nobody can quite agree on whether she was an activist or a con artist. It's possible that she was both. She also broke barriers, brazened her way through a number of spectacular failures, and emerged reasonably victorious. I'd love to revisit her story in some future project.

For now, the HERitage anthology is available at Barnes & Noble and Amazon and full of amazing tales from its contributors. Enjoy!