According To Hoyt

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM CHRISTOPHER R. DINOTE: Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies)

The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .

Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.

A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.

From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.

Some of them come home.

FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: The Patient Dark (Expansion Book 2)

Thirty years gone. He wasn’t supposed to come back. The mission wasn’t supposed to change.

A signal comes out of the Belt, and the first person to recognize it hasn’t been seen for thirty years.

Jack Merrill and Francene Tailer get the call on a Saturday — Dr. Lisa Chen wants to talk about that vacation they keep putting off. What she actually wants is to send them out as supernumeraries aboard the Kuiper Belt Explorer, approved, built, and crewed for a different mission entirely. Chen scraps that mission and re-targets the ship at the signal’s coordinates instead.

The crew gains one more member: a man Jack and Francene haven’t seen in thirty years. He’s been places, done things, kept up with things — and answered exactly none of the questions that mattered. Chen doesn’t know and doesn’t ask — she trusts.

Six weeks each way. Seven people aboard a ring ship, headed toward something that found them as much as they found it. Whatever is waiting at the end of the transit has had a long time to decide what it wants to say — and even longer to decide who it wants to say it to.

The dark has been patient. It can afford to be.

FROM ROBERT MILLER: The Rabbit Hole Weirdness Itself

So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.

The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz

FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I

In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.

Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right

FROM DAVID BADURINA: Hold My Beer Heroes: Ten Comic Tales of Magnificent Overconfidence (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 82)

Every hero in this book is absolutely sure he’s got this.

He doesn’t. That’s the fun part.

Hold My Beer Heroes gathers ten comic stories about the overconfident, the underprepared, and the magnificently wrong, and the glorious moment each of them finds out. Curated by David Badurina, this anthology celebrates the oldest joke there is: the guy who says “watch this” right before everything catches fire. And then, somehow, wins anyway.

Inside you’ll find:

A would-be insurance fraudster whose PowerPoint has no slide for “we grabbed the wrong guy.”

A London art-crime inspector who calls himself The Fox and investigates like a wrecking ball in a borrowed tuxedo.

A park ranger who knows every inch of the backcountry and nothing whatsoever about crime scenes.

A farmer at war with a chicken-thieving fox and a plastic owl that refuses to stay where he puts it.

A weekend sword fighter who has never failed to call a clean hit, until he meets people who aren’t playing.

A washed-up musician in a zombie-overrun Bronx with four hours to throw his son the birthday party of the century.

A barbarian and a sorcerer banished to the worst hell imaginable: an outdoor jam-band festival that never ends.

A ship’s janitor, a sarcastic AI, and a mop he swears is a prophet, stranded on a planet built from the galaxy’s garbage.

A cocky boxer who takes an easy-money fight and finds out exactly who bought tickets.

An Australian monster hunter with twelve laminated documents and one very large problem in the lake.

Crime capers, monster hunts, space comedy, sword and sorcery, and a zombie apocalypse with a surprisingly good pizza place. No lectures. No hand-wringing. Just ten heroes who fail upward with enormous confidence, and the deep satisfaction of watching them get exactly what’s coming to them.

Grab a cold one. Somebody’s about to say “watch this.”

FROM KURT KELLEN: VIGILANTE: NEW YORK HELLSCAPE: AN AMERICAN VIGILANTE NOVEL

As Paris Burns and Europe Crumbles, A Warning to the United States…

New York is broken. Rats own the streets. Cops are just another licensed gang and the socialist mayor treats the city like occupied territory. A man can’t walk from the subway to his own deli without becoming a victim.

Thomas Goodman has had enough. When a knife-wielding thug comes into the shop, Goodman kills him in self-defense. It should have ended there. Instead activists, the media and the mayor’s machine decide a white deli owner who fights back is more useful as a racist murderer. The DA starts building a case. Goodman opens his mouth once on camera and tells the truth: what’s happening is not migration. It is a takeover. Islam is eating the city like a cancer.

Then they rape his woman and burn her face with sulfuric acid before they kill her. The mayor’s office wants to pin it on Goodman and ride the story to election day.

The mayor, activists, the media … they made one tragic miscalculation: Goodman is an ex-mobster who just wanted to be left alone. Instead of creating a patsy, they created a monster. A monster with a thirst for revenge.

New York Hellscape is a riveting new thriller by Kurt Kellen, and a horrifying look at America’s future.

FROM G.K. MASTERSON: Blood of the Fae (Cycle of the Eternals Book 1)

He came south for justice. He found his blood instead.

Assistant District Attorney Raúl Rodriguez left Queens with a broken heart, a sharp legal mind, and zero patience for small-town Southern hospitality. All he wants in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a quiet drink and a case worth winning.

What he gets is Thea Collins.

Blunt, brilliant, and allergic to small talk, Thea is a local private investigator who does astrophysics in a bar, insults people in a dozen languages, and keeps a crossbow handy for anyone who annoys her. She and her cousin Jimmy are also persons of interest in the disappearance of a mysterious doctor, a case that just landed on Raúl’s desk.

One night of conversation changes everything. Raúl starts seeing things: strange lights, shifting faces, crowns that shouldn’t be there. When he tries to break his oath to the court, his own throat closes and nearly kills him. Then Thea drags him home to meet the family, and he learns the truth no one ever told him.

He is Fae.

Not glitter and wishes, but the old blood of Arcadia, inherited from a grandmother who gave up eternity for love. Now Raúl is sworn to an ancient Earl and bound by oaths that can choke him and debts that must be repaid within a year and a day. He has to learn glamour, combat, and the laws of a hidden world from the two people who drive him craziest. The training is brutal. The nightmares are worse. And in one of them, he sees his own grave, dated just six weeks away.

Then Thea is found beaten and poisoned with cold iron, the one thing that can destroy a Fae’s very soul. Raúl and Jimmy are arrested for the attack. With Thea trapped in a coma and sending him cryptic visions, Raúl has to clear his name, outmaneuver a deputy with a grudge, bargain with a Fae secret-keeper whose price is steep, and accept help from the last allies anyone expected: a motorcycle club of werewolves.

The clock is ticking toward the date on that headstone. And the person who wants Thea dead has Raúl in their sights next.

Full of Southern heat and sharp humor, with a slow-burn romance and a fresh take on the Fae, **Blood of the Fae** is the first book in the Cycle of the Eternals, a sweeping urban fantasy saga that begins on the banks of the Mississippi and reaches all the way to the stars.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love (Building a Life Book 1)

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM HYEOK LIM: The Last Colony Builder

Rook Nine is being written off. To keep the Mars outpost breathing, a maintenance worker must turn damaged power lines, shrinking reserves, and a twenty-one-sol proof window into a case no corporate office can ignore. The Last Colony Builder is a tense, blue-collar science-fiction novel about survival, repair, and the people who decide a colony is more than an entry on a balance sheet.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: THEY

Who are They? They are shadows flitting across the desert in the moonlight. They are things you see only from the corner of your eye. They have haunted the Earth for thousands of years, inspiring endless tales of terror; They are the reason human beings have always feared the night. Until now They have made only brief forays into our world, but They have changed their plans; They now want the Earth for themselves. Young Aleksei Arbatov has discovered Their existence; he knows Their plans. He, alone, must face Them, with only a single ally – an ally that might, in the end, actually prove to be one of Them…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The War That Came to Houston

In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can’t afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.

Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer — and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.

Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don’t hold together.

Two people, one deadly secret — and an enemy from beyond time and space.

A novel of the Grissom timeline.

Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.

FROM LILANIA BEGLEY: Cataclysm: A Space Patrol Romance

A quiet maintenance man with dangerous reflexes. A brilliant botanist on the run. And a dead asteroid that is slowly waking up.

She knows him only as Lael and thinks him to be a grim, silent mechanic who pulled her out of a dying space station before it went dark. He claims he’s just trying to survive. But a simple maintenance worker doesn’t move like a shadow, track like a predator, or carry a sealed data drive taped to his soul.

The only name she’s willing to admit is Sanda, and she isn’t a helpless passenger. Fleeing across the sector, their only refuge is a massive, abandoned asteroid mine swallowed by cataclysm of unknown origins. Trapped together in the depths of space, Sanda begins to strip away his guarded walls, finding a man who would burn the galaxy to keep her safe.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: Found On Road Alive (Timelines Universe Book 12)

It’s Always About A Dame

Five years after he defeated a tong queen, and found a bride, and went back to chasing down cheating husbands and wives, New York City blue blood and private detective Clark Griswold is back on a case.

This time, the Russian Mafia is involved. And a general in the Russian Army, stationed in faraway Xinjiang Province in what used to be part of China. And a South Chinese army wanting to take that part back. With Americans sitting in between them, trying to broker peace.

And a dame. Because it’s always about a dame. And this time, Griswold and his wife Becca have no idea what they’re getting into when the particular dame in question is

Found On Road Alive

FROM NICK NETHERY: Arcane Intelligence: Ten Stories of Spycraft and Sorcery

Every service runs assets. Some of them are not human.

A forger raises a dead agent out of a pair of gloves and gives him four days. A vampire on the CIA

payroll takes the midnight train to East Berlin. A shapeshifter walks into the world’s largest collector

of magical artifacts wearing a stolen face. A ghost feeds MI5 perfect intelligence for thirty years, and

nobody thinks to ask what he wants.

Ten stories of tradecraft and sorcery, from Vienna in the ruins to a spin studio in suburban Virginia.

Forged papers. Blown covers. Debts that come due in something other than money.

No chosen ones. No prophecies. Just professionals, doing impossible work.

FROM ROB HOWELL: Giant Killer Kaiju: Ten Tales of Monsters and the People Who Face Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 83)

The monster is the easy part. Ask the guy who has to move it.

Giant Killer Kaiju collects ten brand-new stories about the biggest things that ever walked, swam, burrowed, or flew, and the people who end up underneath them. Not generals. Not superheroes. A circus roustabout. A dam engineer on the night shift. A salvage crane operator with a lapsed software subscription. A sanitation director handed an 80,000-ton corpse and told to make it look orderly before the evening news.

Inside:

• A Depression-era circus where the star lizard has hit breeding age and the ringmaster won’t let him go.

• A Gulf Coast salvage lottery where the crew draws the worthless tail and finds something still alive inside.

• A Bolivian salt flat where one tourist’s souvenir turns a sightseeing bus into bait.

• A Roman fort on the northern frontier , sealed shut against something with wings wide as the sky.

• A Colorado railroad tunnel, 1880 , where the drill crew keeps calling something out of the canyon.

• A city clearing a dead kaiju off the courthouse steps , while cultists chant, funeral lobbyists circle, and the corpse keeps roaring.

Plus a monster’s-eye view of waking up in a world that got very small while it slept, a steampunk sea serpent that is not what it seems, a dam built over something that remembers, and a detective on a far colony world tracking a sea beast with a very specific craving.

Ten authors take you from Roman Britain to the 1880 American West, from steam-age France to the Antarctic ice, from a Texas refinery to a colony world with three moons. Some stories will make you laugh out loud. A couple will make you wince. One ends with a sanitation director quitting mid-disaster and getting hired back at triple rate before sunrise.

Some of these monsters get killed. Some get outsmarted. Some just want to go home.

Big monsters. Real people–Ten stories that earn their roar!

FROM SHANE GRIES: The Dead Badge of Courage: The Line Book IV

WINTER HAS FORCED THE RETREATING ARMY TO STOP. WHAT’S HUNTING THEM HASN’T.

The march west was supposed to end at the Cascadia Redoubt. Instead, the passes through the Rockies are buried under snow, and Mark Foley and the soldiers of Bravo Company are ordered south, to wait out the winter in the one place still holding out: Colorado Springs.

They arrive expecting reinforcement. They find a city bleeding out.

The 1st Infantry Division links up with the scattered remnants of III Corps, only to learn how bad things really are. Ammunition is running low. Food is running lower. The perimeter is held by exhausted survivors patched together from a dozen broken commands. And past the wire, in the snow and the dark, something is moving that none of them have ever seen, undead who seem to know exactly how thin their lines have become. Facing starvation, plummeting temperatures, and a threat built to destroy them, the soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division dig in for a fight they didn’t choose and can’t afford to lose.

Book 4 of The Line is the next brutal chapter in a war fought as much against the cold and the clock as against the thing in the dark.

FROM THOMAS WOLOSZ: The Rabbit Hole Weirdness Itself

So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.

The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: CLUMSY.

By Holly the Assistant

One of the young men in the family (pursuing hard science degree on the cheap, living at home) had the experience for the first time in his life of calling for a tow. I’m kind of amazed, given what he drives, that he hasn’t had to previously: mostly probably based on being cheap and sharing rides, someone else called the last several times. (The old beater decided that oil was better on the outside of the engine than inside. This is widely acknowledged as contrary to continued operation.)

Things you don’t know how to do til you do it.

We raised our kids pretty country. They all learned to shoot a gun, butcher small livestock and/or game, fish, cook, clean, garden . . . it’s how both of us grew up, on opposite sides of the world. A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to have those experiences, to learn those skills, even poorly.

We could have a long discussion about what people should know how to do: Robert A. Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s mouth the words “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” I suspect most of us are missing at least one off that list due to old injuries if nothing else.

But the bigger thing is that people don’t have a chance to try, and we live in a society that says “leave it to the experts” for most of those things, and makes it cheaper to have it done by someone else than to do it yourself. And for children, well, if you’re in class for seven to eight hours a day, followed by extracurriculars, no matter how good those extracurriculars are, you’re not going to have time to learn to do very many things. Especially if they are things that have a long lead time–you probably aren’t going to go down to the market and buy a live cockerel and take it home to butcher, at least, not in most of the USA today. You’ve got to buy a chick at the feed store and raise it for several months first. Which you do learn a good deal more from doing, but you’ve got to have the several months. Also most urban areas, I hear, frown on slaughtering in your front yard.

This is why we keep getting young folks who very much know things that just ain’t so. They know what they know from what they saw or heard, not from what they did, and they never were exposed to the actual things they’re hearing about or seeing at a nice, sterile, electronics mediated remove.

For us adults, there’s also not enough time in the day to do all the things. We might take a first aid class now and then, but we don’t practice the skills regularly. We might in theory know how to change oil but not have done it in the last four decades. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with a spark plug, and I’d really rather pay someone to do that than try to figure out how the heck to get at them (I learned on a ’69 Chevy SUV, ok? It had a lot less stuff in the engine compartment).

The sum total of human knowledge is too great for one person to be able to even do it all as an amateur. If you tried, you’d never specialize enough in anything to make a living at it.

Let me encourage you to dust off an old skill or acquire a new one, though. It’s good for the brain, really, ask the neuroscientists, they get all enthusiastic. Several of my cello students took up music for exactly that reason. Maybe I’ll break out my spindle: I put it away when the first little someone figured out how to crawl and get into the wool, quite a while ago. It’s a nice, warm, indoors wintry sort of skill, and once upon a time I could even make even yarn. At this late date I’ll be starting over from vague memories and books. (Yes, I know there are you-tubes, no, my brain doesn’t work that way.)

What will you do?

Maybe don’t make it running a beater with the oil outside the engine, though? This one might get a touch pricey: we’ll find out next week if he pulled over fast enough or if we’re up for the learning experience of putting some other old beater’s engine into this old beater. It has been done before.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about how we’re all “so divided” and we need to be in the center, and how America’s true political orientation is independent and how– BROTHER!

This was brought home — this was brought OFFICE — to me while I was at work two days ago, and Dan was listening to Joe Rogan. He often listens to podcasts while he’s working, because his work is numbers, so hearing words doesn’t disturb him. My work, unless I’m working on covers, well…. So normally I slap noise cancelling headphones on.

The headphones were out of charge, so covers it was, but after a while he told me he couldn’t listen because I kept arguing.

Look, Joe Rogan, normally, doesn’t disturb me that much. I’ll snort giggle at some of his stuff, but it rolls over me, and doesn’t take a bite…

But this… He was with Joe Manchin at some “independent” conference, and just about everything he said was distilled stupid. And everything Manchin said was self-serving pretending-to-be-stupid. And I was fit to be tied.

Now, I don’t do media critique, and Rogan is Rogan, or as someone put it a barbarian who evolved yesterday and came in search of fire and legends of other people. (Honestly, that’s half of his schtick.)

BUT this slotted into all the talk about how “we’re so divided” and “The biggest political affiliation is independent.”

Let’s dispose of that last one first: bullshit. People register as independent because the left are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid weasels who will cancel anyone they even SUSPECT of being on the other side. I was registered independent all the years that I was working for trad pub, because being found to be “one of those evil people on the right” would end my career, and baby needed shoes (and eventually college textbooks.) There are other reasons, but usually the strongest is “I’m on the right and I don’t want to be cancelled.” Very few independents are actually independent. Right now my husband is independent because he didn’t want to say GOP to the blue haired young lady registering him. (I OTOH did, and she said, “Oh, thank heavens. I wasn’t sure, coming from Colorado.” Which goes to show you.)

At any rate, is that everyone? Doubt it. You can be very embarrassed of associating with either party, without being a centrist or independent. Sometimes it’s all about which party you hate more when you vote, but you don’t want to say “I’m with them” because they’re a bunch of bozos, and you know it.

Second, even if “independent” were the biggest self-identification group, it doesn’t mean there’s a great hunger for the center or for reconciliation. Perhaps all the independents are people who want something else. Say, a true constitutionalist government, which, alas, isn’t on offer. It’s as likely as that they’re all “centrist” or that these “centrists” all agree on the same thing.

What made the program infuriating and brought out my political tourettes is that all the solutions they “offered” were bullshit that has been tried, a lot of which is responsible for turning California into a one-party rule, such as open primaries and first-past-the-post elections. Seriously. I could dissect the mechanism by which this “delivers us bound to our foes” but I don’t need to. Look over at California. Do you want that? No? Your ideas will get that. To pretend that this has never been tried is either dumb or malicious.

On the dumb side, Rogan was doing his caveman impression “Tell me about these things I never heard of!” But Manchin? Manchin is malicious. Why do I say that? Well, he pretended not to know why we stopped using coal for electricity generation. It’s apparently a deep mystery and not the green obsession of presidents he supported, like Obama. Bah. Yeah, he kind of distanced himself from the Democrats in the later Biden years, but not wanting to trans kids doesn’t make you a centrist. It makes you a moderately sane, non kinky human being, for crying in bed.

Then there is “term limits”. Term limits, in the year of our Lord 2026 when we know how deep and how evil the evil deep state is! For the love of little children and the apples they steal! No, seriously. Sure, let’s have an ever-rotating wheel of incumbents who don’t know what they’re doing so the deep state can march on unimpeded. Heck, the only reason we have presidential term limits is that evil bastard FDR whom Joe Manchin still adores.

And then came the, of course, Joe Manchin would like to be president. When Rogan asked about that, I could taste the hunger for power in the creature’s voice. (Waves arms.) GAH. I guess I hadn’t got that out of my system yet.

Do I like the two party system? Well. I’m not in love with it. On the other hand I experienced the “as many parties as want to be” system in Portugal and this is the problem: Honest human beings will divide into parties on the slightest excuse:

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she is an adult, but no welfare.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, but no welfare.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans.”

“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans provided they’re legal residents.”

Etc. etc. You end up with fifty parties where the disagreement between them is very small. But you know who doesn’t divide that way? Socialists. Communists. I mean usually they divide from each other, though honestly, as with penguins, only they know the difference. (And no, it’s not the same as the theoretical difference. Crying out loud, I studied this in school. I know the text book definitions. BUT in practicality the only difference is the socialists going “I want that too, but slower so we don’t scare the rubes.” No? Well, ask yourself what the USSR stood for tovarish.) So in the end, the left wins. Because they’re not as worried about carefully defining anything, and they LIKE to march lockstep. (Also in their minds, when they win, it’s the other guys in the mass graves. Spoiler: it’s always them in the mass graves.)

Meanwhile the two party system has the drawback that any change — real change — is slow. Very slow. Because you have to take over one of the existing parties from within. This can be bad — we’re taking forever — but also, what? You want the DSA to take over the dems FASTER?

So do I like the two party system? As opposed to what? If the choice is cake or death, I’ll take cake, thank you, with chocolate sprinkles. But the choice is never between cake and death. It is at best between syphilis and gonorrhea, and you pick the one for which you have antibiotics handy.

And this is ultimately the issue. “Independent” isn’t a political movement because people who are “independent” are not a group. they don’t all agree on what they believe. They mostly aren’t sure which side will make them hold their nose LESS or, hear me out, they are on the right and afraid to declare it. And don’t underestimate the second group. For years, it’s been known if a public personality doesn’t ever mention politics? They’re on the right. Because only one side actually tries to punish your dissent. (Now this is known, so not speaking brings about retaliation, too. We’re almost a publish and be damned o’clock. I’m just glad I’m out of it.)

Second, “We’re all so divided.”

Yes. As opposed to? No seriously, think about it. We’ve always been divided. It’s just that while we were bound by mass media, which the left utterly controlled, people didn’t know that there were more dissidents from what appeared to be the only widespread opinion.

Even my priest at mass was lamenting, you can’t be in a hobby group without the hobby being political. Oh, yeah? And who made it so? I don’t mean the poor man, who is very young and seems to be unexamined college-left. I mean, the left has insisted that everything be political since I joined adult society, lo, over 40 years ago. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE’RE FIGHTING BACK.

I want to do this skit where people are having dinner while using other people as furniture, and it’s this idealized family dinner, and quiet and everyone is smiling. And then someone frees the “furniture” and a brawl breaks out and the former diners are going “Stop, stop. everything was so peaceful! How did this happen?”

It’s like “economic” (or any other kind) inequality. It’s not actually evil, unless it persists for centuries WITH THE SAME PEOPLE AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM. In which case the society is in deep trouble, as it is in much of Latin America. BUT not in as much trouble as societies in which almost everyone is equal, because the only way to do that is totalitarian, rigid control over people and the economy.

“Politics are so divisive” is nonsense. People don’t form political parties or join the political process to work on the things we all agree on. “We should wear hats on our heads, not on our left foot” is not a political position because most people agree with that, and the ones that don’t are locked up for their own good. (They keep slipping on that hat.)

Politics are supposed to be divisive. And a good brawl is how you know you’re still free. And I’m tired of the soft heads that pretend otherwise.

Let’s hope we can continue to fight back and stay free.

… keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/11/15/uncharted-wilderness/

Note from Holly: this post is just shy of two years old now. I was looking for old posts on Art, in keeping with the theme of the week as it’s turned out so far, and the search popped this up, and well . . . it seems like a good reminder? Not sure what it has to do with Art, but search serendipity shouldn’t be ignored.)

Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…

And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.

Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.

And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.

We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.

You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.

I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.

Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.

But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….

Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.

And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.

But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.

To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.

The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.

Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)

Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?

Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.

Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.

I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)

Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.

Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.

The rest? The rest is wide open.

Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.

What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.

Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.

Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.

And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.

What a time to be alive.

Recently I learned something I could have gone my whole life without knowing: the war on fun is a bipartisan affair.

What do I mean by that? Oh, this week on Twitter, several Voices of the Right TM came out breathing heavy about how not just the Malfoid fan fic trend, (which honestly is THE MOST WHOLESOME trend we’ve seen in fanfic ever) but in fact all of fiction, including people like Larry Correia and John Ringo are a sign that everything is corrupted, and evil, and we’re putting bad things in children’s heads and the left is winning.

Look, guys, I got my antique partner’s desk refinished and up in the new office. I don’t want more dents on it, again.

That the left are ridiculous scolds who had their sense of fun ablated at birth, we knew. As we can tell from the game, movie, book companies they control, they think everything should serve the Marxist agenda or be worthless. Which is why every game, movie, book company is in the crapper. BUT apparently the right looked at that and went “That’s why they’re winning!” and they want to do that too. I’ve actually come across an article complaining about the Hardy Boys. Which I grant you have gotten rewritten, but the solution is not to eliminate it, but to find the old ones used. (I never saw the attraction of that or Nancy Drew, because I preferred Enid Blyton, but I knew most American raised readers grew up on those forever.)

Here’s the thing: The left isn’t winning the culture war. It looks like it, because it’s all you can find in the grocery book shelf (WHY are you buying books in the grocery store?) or even at most bookstores, but that’s because yes, the left owns the cultural pathways, and that’s what they’re pushing.

However, from the inside, each year the print runs are smaller and sell less. You know what’s winning? Indie authors. Okay, most of us ain’t making a ton (most tradpub authors didn’t either) but in aggregate, we’re making a huge dent. And a lot of us are doing pretty well. BECAUSE WE WRITE FUN STUFF. Or at least fun for us, and apparently some people agree.

This got into the whole ridiculous debate of art. “But just because you enjoy it, it’s just cheap thrills, it’s not art.” Well, let me tell you, just because you suffer to consume it, it ain’t art, either. It’s JUST suffering.

So, let’s talk about it: When I was tutoring, I got girls in who were failing at everything. Inevitably, I found their parents allowed them to read two things: The lives of saints and the Bible.

Now, it is possible to write the lives of saints in a riveting manner (Because my brain is broken I’m writing the story of the first Ellyan saint, which is mental as I have…10? books in the world to publish first.) However, most of it isn’t written in a riveting manner, and also, frankly, after a while you kind of know the pattern.

Do I read lives of saints? Sure, but not as my whole reading diet, because that would be boring.

What I inevitably found is that if I convinced their parents to let them read other stuff, their reading AND EVERYTHING ELSE went up grade wise.

Now, I’m not a utilitarian when it comes to reading. I don’t think you should be a good reader because it’s good for you. But there is no denying that being a good reader gives you a massive advantage in life, but no one — NO ONE — has ever become a great reader by reading only the required stuff for school and maybe 2 very holy books. No, not even in the middle ages. Did you know that until the eighteenth century, people moved their lips when reading? Because there wasn’t enough reading material for most people to get past that point.

But besides all that, and because this is not just about reading: Who died and told you that humans should never have fun?

In the dystopian hellscape the left is trying to herd us toward, there is enough worry. In our economy cacked by multiple government interventions, there is enough struggle to stay afloat. And even for those of us who see opportunity everywhere? We’re working harder than we ever did. You want us to never let up? That’s not how humans live.

Look, I can understand disapproving of some people’s way of decompressing: those that are bad for themselves and others: alcohol, drugs, gambling, unbridled sex. (Yes, sex is better with bridles. Seriously? Can you be serious for ten seconds?)

BUT movies, games, books? Because they’re fiction and don’t have a “deeper message” (to your mind.) That’s crazy cakes.

First, if you want to sell your message, it best be wrapped up in a sh*tload of fun. When the left was actually winning the culture war, 40 or 50 years ago they knew how to do that. People will swallow poison if it’s wrapped in fun.

And now you’re saying that fun is evil. No. Fun is fun. The message you load it with might be evil, but then again it might be good, too. Removing the fun is not the way to improve things. The way to improve things is to make it GOOD.

Second- BUT! FUN ISN’T ART! Well, guess what? Peanut butter isn’t chocolate! Music isn’t painting! Shoes aren’t boats! Purple isn’t yellow! And other news of the obvious.

Sure, fun books/movies/games MIGHT NOT be art. And? Is only “art” allowed? WHY? Because we’re only allowed to create and consume “worthy” things? Worthy according to who? Exactly?

Because personally I don’t care. Yes, I’ve read “real literature” and even enjoy some of it, mostly Shakespeare and Austen, to be fair. BUT I also read fanfic. And everything in between. I read what interests me at the time, and I don’t care if it has the stamp of “art” or not.

Which brings us to “What is art?” And that got outright silly. I pointed out for most things the only real evaluation of “art’ is “that which has survived the test of time.” THAT’s IT.

And to survive the test of time, it needs to be FUN first. So it’s loved by a lot of people.

And then we got people arguing that’s not the only test, because you can look at something and know it’s art. (People, the Elgin Marbles, before being taken to England, were being used by the locals to make lime wash for their houses. No, seriously. And yeah, to me I look at them and they’re art. BUT obviously Greek villagers disagreed.) You can take reality apart and not find a single atom of “art” because that’s inside the human brain. And the “art” proclaimed by the elites is mostly stupid message bamf. And even the ‘test of time” thing, we won’t know until the decks are cleared, because in the age of mass media, it was easy to fake “popularity” and a lot of what’s now considered 20th century “art” your grandchildren are going to laugh themselves sick over.

So, the only test is “Has it survived the test of time” which means, to begin with, it was fun or enjoyable enough to a large enough group of people that it SURVIVED.

Oh, yeah, and let’s slap our foreheads for the people explaining to me that making a good screw is art (No, apparently phrasing is a dead art) and that making steel is an art and that… I had to point out that’s the OTHER meaning of art. Not worthy object/admirable product, but “art” as craft, as knowledge, and semantic confusing helps no one.

Though I suppose that person would love to go through a museum of art, admiring screws. (Start with la maja desnuda and… never mind.)

All of it to obfuscate that, as a wise rabbi once said “Not of bread alone lives man.” And btw, he spoke and taught in little fictional stories. Because it makes the “word of G-d” go down easier.

But fine, fine. If both sides of our utterly effed up political spectrum wants to make war on fun, let them come, they and their armies.

I’ll be standing here, holding stunt middle fingers aloft. Why stunt? Because otherwise it’s pretty hard to type and produce decent fiction that some people will find fun.

Probably not enough for me to ever be considered art. Which is fine. I don’t care. I’m having fun writing this stuff, and I hope my fans are having fun reading it.

In the end, that’s all that matters.

It is perhaps inevitable that we’re now being besieged by arguments on what art is, and what counts as art. AI has done a number on us. And before the shrieking starts, note that I’m not one of the AI haters or even one of the AI skeptics. (I’m a skeptic as to how wisely humans will use AI, but that actually makes me a human wisdom skeptic, and guys, what else is new?)

But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time. People used to paint to be as realistic as possible, so you could look at their picture and it would be like the picture their eye saw. And then– Cameras.

Decades of learning, people who had devoted their entire lives to pursuing this art, who were d*mn good at it, and who might be in their near-old-age and there, cameras nuked their lives. Okay, it was somewhat mitigated by the pictures being in black and white, but that wasn’t forever either. And what were they supposed to do now?

Well, obviously — though I don’t know enough of art history to give you names — some arts laid down and died, probably portraitists most of all. But I’ll be honest with you, out there, staring at the screen, it’s not actually that difficult to make an artist lay down and die. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to make them produce art, but that’s… something quite different from actually standing up the great wide world and staying “You, out there, buy my mad, beautiful thing” (I swear, if M. C. A. Hogarth doesn’t make t-shirts and stickers and bumper stickers with “Do your mad, beautiful thing anyway”, with a drawing of the tesla, I’m going to do it!) Because all of us have rats in our heads. To produce art you must simultaneously believe your mad, beautiful thing, is the best thing ever and also the biggest piece of crap ever produced. So, you see, putting it up to the judgement of an (at best) indifferent world is a bit difficult. (Not lying. To this day I ask my fans to read reviews before I even look at them. Yesterday it was a review for the anthology Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova, and incidentally that story is Brund and Skip and a different perspective on the future book The Worlds of Men.)

But we do know that not all artists laid down and died. A lot of them painted better, more expressive portraits than the camera back then could capture, on top of which, of course, a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph. And then this weird trick happened, and photography became art too. No, seriously, it really is. The funny thing is that I can draw (and could have been a contenda! if the fire in my belly went that way. It doesn’t.) but give me a camera, or you know, a phone, and I become a monkey with ten thumbs. Cedar Sanderson has a cat that looks almost like mine (They’re sisters, two consecutive litters, her Toast and my Muse) but she takes pictures of Toast and makes her look alive, and expressive, all personality coming through. Me? I take a picture of Muse and she’s a pretty flame point. You can even sort of see that, but definitely not her feisty, commanding personality. (She’s Greebo’s heir and was just herding me to my desk to write, because she knows which side of her tuna is buttered.) I’m also in awe of her insect/nature pictures. I don’t even try, even though I life in a woodland area, where … so many interesting spiders. My younger son, when he visited, captured an image of a spider eating a colorful insect, and it was like a painting. If I’d done it it would have been “Oh, it’s a spider. Ick.”

So there’s something that goes into photography that I don’t have.

And all the flopping around about AI “stealing” art… mostly by artists who are so by virtue of being called so by elites — what I call “unremarkable image or object, but really call description” “artists” — is nonsense. By that reckoning “first learned from what came before, copying the bits that we like” every artist is a plagiarist, all the way back to Lascaux (And only because we don’t have much from before.)

But is AI art disquieting? Threatening to those of us who spent a lifetime learning the best techniques and becoming damn good at the craft part of what we do? Hell yeah.

Interestingly, the artists I know who are compulsive — they HAVE to do art — and dedicated — practice, practice, practice — might be slightly discomfited and a little afraid — we’re all cracked like an unsound cup, okay? Again, it doesn’t take much — but they’re not lying down and dying. And they’re not stomping around throwing hissy fits that “If that’s AI, you might as well not bother.”

I don’t even know how much of the anti-AI mob sentiment is real, and how much is being stoked by global enemies terrified of America plus AI. I know a lot of it is just those enemies. And I wonder if it started that way and hit the soft heads of the wanna be artists and those who consider art a sort of grift.

I’m not a visual artist — again, I think I could have been, and the last art class I took — fourth year? — the teacher agreed and tried to convince me to pursue it professionally. Dad offered to pay for a third degree in art (He did NOT pay for the first two. One was paid for by my having very good grades, and one I paid for.) Because it was his first degree, and he always dreamed of one of his descendants picking it up. (Squints at the future. The Little Pickle does these amazing little symbolic paintings. Also not her main avocation, but you know? Maybe there will be kids who have dad’s ability and fire.) I still love to do portraiture, by hand, and am currently trying to figure out if there are life drawing/painting classes nearby. My favorite is doing those in conde crayons, all earth tones. BUT it’s not my professional thing. Not even close.

And yet, I dropped into AI art with both feet, because it served my actual need for my real professional artist avocation: writing. I needed covers. And before you flop again (what are you a fish?) and whine about taking money from an artist’s mouth, I WASN’T using professional artists before. The only one I’d have considered is Cedar Sanderson, and I suspect we’d have butted horns so hard — because we have different concepts of what makes a great cover and also because I knew enough to be dangerous — that it would have forever ruined our friendship. I like her, so I’m not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I also used Jack Wilder (See the amazing Dyce Dare covers) but guys…. getting Jack to do covers when I need them (I’m not good at planning. It’s always an emergency) was like nailing jello to the wall. He’s got to be one of the busiest men in sf/f.

So what was I using. Oooh, boy. I have some covers to redo. I started by trying to hire an artist for my first indie novel. It… didn’t work out, and I didn’t like the product. Which is not a big deal, because well, I couldn’t pay much (I still can’t, because I never know how a book is going to DO) though what I lost in that was more than I could afford at the time. (Remember, I had NO indie business, yet.)

So I started hunting down for stock images and altering them, and trying to make them fit. Honestly, sometimes I suspect I went beyond the license, and the covers still looked… well, like bad 70s covers when book publishers had first discovered cameras. (Not MOSTLY SF/F where seventies covers are sometimes great, but main stream or mystery 70s covers, at least in Europe. They were… odd. My favorite mystery series had silver covers with an inset of a picture of the human body. No, not A human body, which might have worked. Just a random portion of the human body, scaled up so far you couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked vaguely disquieting. (Have you ever looked at your nostrils? I mean, really looked?)

From that, after I spent weeks crying in front of the computer, and refusing to cook dinner because I couldn’t even, my husband dropped DAZ 3-D in front of me. Oh, I continued crying and screaming for six months (Most of this is not literal) while I rendered naked people with no hair. And then something clicked.

Were those covers good. Eh. Some were USABLE after extensive processing, but honestly it’s hard to get rid of a certain uncanny valley feel for those and anyway, I was still working through filters and lighting and… when AI hit. And the game changed.

Even in its early incarnation, where I sometimes used pieces of 10 AI paintings for a cover, it blew DAZ 3-D out of the water (Though I’ve found I can get Daz 3-D to do the base picture, then take it to AI and alter it, on rare circumstances when I’m asking for something AI simply doesn’t do well or at all. Would you believe classic pulp robots is one of those? Sure. I knew you would.)

So I jumped in, both feet, because mama has books and needs covers. And redid them when AI got better, and I have probably 10 covers crying out to be redone now, when I have (AH!) time. Which brings us to…

I know the artists who use AI for covers. I use AI myself. The amazing thing is how different our covers are, and how you CAN too tell style. Maybe it is our favorite AIs. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve TRAINED them. At one time, before we were even doing covers, our friend group all put the same prompt in, and even then, at the dawn of AI, what we got was completely different, because even then we’d trained AI to our vision.

So, is it art. I don’t know because I don’t know what art is — which is what is emerging from the big argument on X. That there are as many opinions as there are people. And we’ll go into that tomorrow under “the war on fun.” — and no one seems to know, though each person has mad-serious opinions.

BUT I know that even with AI use, the product is highly individual and tracks to the human doing it. More, honestly, than to the AI used (I have friends who’ve changed AI engine, for price or ease of use.)

Ah, but AI art lacks the divine spark.

Maybe it does. AI writing tends to lack bodies. (I’ve spent a lot of time reading AI novels, in Jane Austen Fanfic, and it only hit me why they’re so tiresome after about 100 of them. There is no stage business. No one fiddles with their bracelets, or adjusts her shoe, or even plays with a stray lock of hair. Or sips too-hot tea. Only bits of stage business are in STRICT service of the narration. “She looked at him when he spoke.” Not “While he spoke, she played with her embroidery thread.”) Now, once you figure that out — and btw, most writers also forget bodies. At least at first. And in my case when I’m exhausted. Which is why I have that — it’s probably easy to incorporate that into your prompts.

And I’m sure that a lot of AI art lacks something, even if it’s gotten better at hands.

BUT obviously not all, since I can tell whose AI art I’m looking at, and when a house changes cover artists even though both use AI. There is definitely a spark between artist and art. Which will probably get better now that we’re past the phase of screaming at the AI “I said a woman in a dress and a bird. Not a feathered woman and a bird in a dress.” (Don’t ask. Trust me. Once seen it can’t be unseen.)

I think yes, it’s uncomfortable and it’s going to demand that we change, and it’s sparked a scream and shout on X. Which is why we’re going to cover that tomorrow. Yes, I know there’s a war on people having fun. BUT must it be bipartisan?

But is it any more of a disruptive technology for artists than the camera?

I’m not convinced. I think it’s exactly the same. And artists who are compelled, are going to learn to use AI and to make their art better. And others won’t use AI but will learn to make their stuff so distinctive and amazing that AI can’t take their mojo.

And yes, in this case “artists” include writers, who are going a little crazier than even visual artists, partly because this technology has come for us too. (Note we had a minor disruption for wordprocessing and for dictation, but not as hard and fast as the camera for visual artists.)

I can’t tell you what other writers are doing. I can tell you what I’m doing: NOT laying down and dying. My stuff tends to be weird enough it’s hard to imitate, anyway. (Except to younger son, who can do a dead-imitation, the little SOB.)

And other writers are using AI agents for publicity, to remind themselves of various tasks (I need to figure out my substack. No really.) To convert books to epub format. Etc. etc. etc. Things that cut down on the other tasks and allow them to write more.

Me? I found it’s dangerous to talk about my universe to an AI, because I’m tired and slightly depressed. Because it gives me IDEAS. But then again, everything gives me ideas. I do have an idea for a youtube feature, though. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. But I’m holding onto the idea until I am done unpacking. Probably new years. If this works it might sell me a lot of books. Even more than the music did. (And I need to resume that with other series.) Now this type of brainstorming used to work great when Dan and I were both young and childless and used to drive nowhere in particular at night. Same effect. (Of course, mathematicians and AIs…. what am I saying?) BUT then the kids came and we got very busy, so I hadn’t had a rubber ducky with no time limits and very busy for a long time. Which, I’ll be honest, was kind of nice.

So, AI art is still human. But is it art? I don’t know. The divine spark or lack thereof is literally above my pay grade.

BUT I’m an artist, or at least a sad compulsive who expresses herself in stories. In my (it’s getting to be longish, no?) life, I’ve tended to grind everything in my writing mill and use every technology, every even, every friendship (people, we’re despicable, we writers!) as fodder to the thing I couldn’t stop doing.

AI is just more grist to the mill. It will get used in the service of creation. And what come out the other side will stand or fall on how well it’s used.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM CHRISTOPHER DIGRAZIA: Ten Thousand Midnights: A Theda Bara Mystery

Hollywood, 1922. Paramount Pictures director William Desmond Taylor lies dead in his apartment, a bullet in his back. Baffled by multiple suspects and blind alleys, the LAPD turn to silent star Theda Bara for help. With her loyal friend, makeup artist Toby Swanson, she delves into the dark corners of Tinseltown to uncover Taylor’s killer. Fellow stars Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle hold pieces of the puzzle, but Paramount chief Adolph Zukor is determined to hide the secret of Taylor’s murder at any cost. . .even if it means silencing Bara forever.

From the author of The Director’s Cut and The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of comes the third entry in the mystery series that Emmy-Award winning screenwriter Robert J. Avrech praised as making Theda Bara ‘a living, breathing woman.’

FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I

In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.

Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right

FROM HYEOK LIM: The Posterity War

At 8:09 a.m., every serving politician dies. Governments survive, but the people authorized to act are gone—and Social Security actuary Claire Harlan discovers the catastrophe came from the future.

Claire falsified a federal model recertification to preserve her father’s secret treatment priority. After the attack, withdrawing that lie could stop the present’s retaliation—but it would expose what she did and freeze the funding keeping his private advantage alive. Her renewed concealment keeps the counterstrike review alive while a future coalition invokes 486,107,392 affected people—neither combatants nor a single constituency—as its warrant for war.

With fifty days before the temporal channel closes, Claire, acting president Jonah Ward, and future commander Iris Kade must create a peace neither era can counterfeit: a constitutional settlement, a chain of evidence no one controls alone, and physical disarmament on both sides. Confession will not be enough. Neither will victory.

The Posterity War is a standalone near-future political science-fiction thriller about power, custody, and what each generation owes the next.

FROM DALE COZORT: Devouring Wind (Exchange Book 2)

“They’re coming for us, from the sky and emptiness.” Ten months ago, technology guru Sharon Mack and her autistic and strangely prescient daughter Bethany were trapped in the wild alternate version of Earth called Bear Country. They took refuge at Fort Eegan, an outpost built by a peculiar cult with mysterious ties to the US government. Now a new Exchange brings terrifying new consequences.

The new Exchange blocks Fort Eegan’s water supply, threatening deprivation now and catastrophic floods in the future. It also pits Fort Eegan against beings with superior technology, inhuman ruthlessness and a weapon capable of devouring everything in its path, including Fort Eegan.

In spite of the danger from the new Exchange, the humans of Bear Country are nearing a war with one another. Ruthless escaped convicts hold hundreds of women hostage. With supplies dwindling, they eye Fort Eegan’s already limited resources. Inside and outside the fort, conflicts fester among the isolated humans, including a deadly love triangle. Fort Eegan’s only hope is to unite before it is blown away by the devouring winds.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: The Bard’s Kings: The Bard’s Song Book Two (Bard’s Song 2)

What price honor?

Tuathal mab Bria map Aiden gave much to break the curse he brought to the land. Echos of that curse send him across the sea, to the Western Isle from which came his father’s people, the Dunalaid. Only the High King can settle a question of inheritance, one that has already seen blood shed. Half of that conflict, Fyon the Black, demands land and lordship, blood price for his son, and perhaps even Tuathal’s life.

Tuathal travels as law seeker and speaker for his half-brother, Low King Fiachta. He seeks nothing but a decision in his king’s favor. Trouble lurks, what sort he does not know, but the sense he knows too well. The same darkness that led to the curse, and his naming as “Twice Given” waits inside the High King’s court at Tara.

A third king also has a claim to Tuathal, a shadowy majesty of the mounds and hollow hills. Only a master bard and law speaker, an allav, Tuathal struggles to do his duty.

When duty brings danger and the High King’s life hangs by a thread of song, what can a bard do, even a bard of three kings?

More than Tuathal believes possible.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: Starlight Revelation: Expansion, Book 1

What would you risk to publish a finding that no one wants to believe?

Jack Merrill is doing exactly what he’s supposed to — running sanctioned pipelines, processing telescope data, keeping his head down — when a side project neural net he’s been quietly testing flags something in the noise. Four faint smears of ancient light, carrying anomalous signatures that should not exist. He wasn’t looking for a paradigm shift. He found one anyway.

Starlight Revelation asks what the search for truth actually costs — not in the abstract, but in jobs, safety, relationships, and the slow pressure of institutions that benefit from comfortable certainties. Set in a near-future space observatory processing center thick with rivalries and beliefs, the novel follows a chain of people who refuse to let a finding die just because it’s inconvenient: a stubborn analyst, a fierce colleague, a principled administrator, and an outcast physicist who has been right about the wrong things for decades.

The universe holds its oldest secrets in the faintest light. Jack Merrill just found one.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Xochicuzmal Enigma: Book One of The Plata Worlds

When a mysterious spacecraft crashes far from the settled regions of the Plata Worlds, Captain Mateo Valdés expects to find an accident.

Instead, he finds a survivor wearing an unfamiliar golden protective suit, speaking an archaic form of a Plata language, and carrying technology centuries beyond anything known in the region.

Before he loses consciousness, the stranger says only one word:

Xochicuzmal.

An eccentric historian recognizes the name—and immediately becomes frightened.

What begins as an investigation into a mysterious visitor soon leads Mateo, the historian Dr. Tomás Arriaga, and their companions across ancient ruins, forgotten archives, and a buried structure that predates Plata civilization by thousands of years.

The old legends speak of a lost city called Xochicuzmal. But there is no city where the ancient maps say it should be.

There is something else.

A door.

And behind it lies a technology capable of connecting distant human worlds.

As Colonel Rafael Borda and his forces close in, Mateo discovers that the legendary Long Fires—the disasters that isolated the Plata Worlds generations ago—may not have been natural catastrophes at all.

They may have been the consequences of an ancient transportation network gone catastrophically wrong.

Now the network is waking up.

And someone, somewhere beyond the Plata Worlds, already knows it exists.

The Xochicuzmal Enigma is a classic science-fiction mystery of forgotten civilizations, ancient technology, political intrigue, and exploration, and the first novel in The Plata Worlds series.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That

MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.

No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.

ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.

Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Day the War Struck Home

Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She’s to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts — but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF’s. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.

It’s the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it’s the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

However, the intelligence proves incomplete — the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.

It’s a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)

Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.

And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.

This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . . .

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1)

When Lilly Gilden discovers a cyborg in her airlock, she should turn him in for immediate destruction—harboring any cyborg means death, no exceptions. These abominations are born from violent, illegal brain extraction, forbidden across all human colonies. But this tortured soul believes he’s Nick Rhodes, a legendary detective from the 20th century, and his fractured mind may hold the key to finding her missing husband.

The penalty for harboring him is execution, but Lilly is desperate. Her husband vanished while investigating a case that leads straight into the galaxy’s most dangerous criminal networks. With time running out and nowhere else to turn, she makes a fateful choice: trust the half-mad detective trapped in synthetic flesh.

Joined by a mysterious journalist with secrets of his own, Lilly plunges into the shadow world of interstellar crime syndicates, corrupt officials, and deadly conspiracies. As the cyborg’s detective instincts clash with his deteriorating programming, Lilly must navigate a web of lies and violence where one wrong move could cost her everything.

In a universe where love is the ultimate liability, how far will she go to bring him home?

A pulse-pounding sci-fi thriller that blends classic detective with high-stakes space adventure—perfect for fans of cyberpunk mysteries, noir whodunits and interstellar romance.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: STRAIGHT.

By Holly the Assistant

By dint of a rather unusual past for my time and place, I am perhaps a bit of an expert on the lack of comprehension between the sexes.

I am the only child of an only child. My father was a Silent, as is my mother, and I am a fairly late in life child. As a child, I knew exactly one other almost-only child: she had had an older brother, who perished in a plane crash.

My mother had three siblings and numerous cousins. My father had a couple cousins he knew as a child, given family propensity to alcoholism and poor choices. One of those lived long enough and sane enough for me to meet. My father was an introvert’s introvert: other than professional colleagues and family he had no social group. None. Not one person. No clubs, no church, nothing.

And then I was home schooled.

Then I went away to college-my parents were both professors and there was no way I was staying home and going to their college-and met an international student, married him, and we had a normal size family of six, and I got to figure out how guys communicate, quite a lot from bringing up boys who had friends who were boys. I had a pretty good start on how girls communicate, being one, being in girls’ clubs, having a mother who is an extrovert. And my husband is also an extrovert, so marriage brought an instant social group of fifty-odd, prone to dropping in randomly.

Back then, there were some rules, still. Boys were weird in the first place, but they knew they had to actually ask girls out and girls could say no or yes. But there were also those who opened with sexual harassment and were shocked that didn’t work. The jerks you shall always have with you, I suppose.

My general rule was to go out with a guy who asked nicely once. To a public event, taking ourselves separately. No alcohol, ever, on dates, but then I met the man I married just before I turned twenty-one and married him not long after, so that wasn’t an issue. Not because I was irredeemably law abiding, but because I wasn’t stupid and had plans that involved keeping my security clearance. Turns out that pays off in personal safety.

I did some dumb things that could have ended very badly, but for the most part, most guys are just fine, and I was fine. (One boyfriend had a plane! He let me fly it!)

But I also grew up and live in possibly the highest per capita concealed and open carry state: the estimate before Constitutional Carry came into place was 10%. No one actually knows now. It is guaranteed that someone in any group of people is armed. That makes it a lot safer to make most dumb choices. (Maaaybe not flying the plane, though.)

Back to communication. Boys are weird. They don’t get hints well. “Wow, the trash is really full” gets a “Yep, sure is” instead of taking it out. They don’t like it when girls cry and want to fix it. I trained the girls early on that if they just wanted to have a good cry they should retreat to their room because the boys want to fix it, and if it doesn’t need fixing don’t upset the boys. Told the boys the girls have a right to cry when they want to and they can’t go in their room to find out why they’re crying. Worked out pretty well when they hit teens.

If someone does the girls wrong, they have their own brute squad. Conversely, the girls protect their brothers: No, that girl wants to get with you. Stop helping her if you don’t want to get dragged into her shit. She’s creating problems with other guys to get you. This is apparently fairly incomprehensible to the male mind. But it’s a female tactic. (Not all women, not all men. But quite enough of them.)

Men prefer direct. Women tend towards being subtle. Plausible deniability, yes, but also . . . when you look at a group of men you can tell who is in charge at a glance. He’s giving directions to accomplish the task. Women, it’s often more egalitarian looking on the surface, with the boss’ buddies passing on instructions. (Like Sarah, I tend towards male style interaction more than female, but I’m better at female than she is–I also didn’t switch cultures as an adult, so I have an advantage there.) You have to discover who is in charge, in a new group of women, because she’s not setting up for a direct challenge, so she’s not obvious. In many cultures it’s obvious: it’s the senior family female, but in ours it isn’t. Don’t challenge the boss if you don’t mean to, which means figuring out the pecking order, and who’s actually in charge.

We used to have a taboo on talking to men about women’s stuff. You didn’t admit you had a period, let alone cramps, in front of men. Remember that? That went away at some point, probably before I was born. Women wouldn’t’ve had to reject drugs of unknown provenance because they never would have expressed a problem to men. In a lot of ways it’s a good thing that it’s not shameful to bring up a problem, but . . . we don’t have a structure set up around it. The old structure worked.

Ideally, a woman could say “No, thanks,” and not have to worry about the man getting upset. Or the woman. But that’s not the world we’re in. Because, did you know, women also get upset about the rejection? Because it says “I don’t trust you,” straight out, and we aren’t supposed to say that. So the deflection response, that says “I don’t trust you” in a plausibly deniable form, so that the response isn’t anger.

So I suspect the needed adjustment for women is going to be going back to do not talk about intimate matters, such as cramps, around people you will not accept drugs from. There’s a downside, of course, in that men will be trying to figure out why women aren’t pulling their weight today. We’re stuck in a species with sexual dimorphism.

Gentlemen and ladies, don’t take a deflection response as something to argue with. Because also, it could be a really annoying allergy–not even TO the medicine itself, but to the coating, that one doesn’t want to risk–and every single person with an allergy or with a child with an allergy has had to deal with the “Oh, that’s not real” response, a lot of us from medical doctors. Take “Oh, that won’t work,” as being a rejection, a polite rejection, and carry on as you would have if you didn’t have the medicine to offer. And know that if one accepts food, drink, medicines, from you, that you are in the high trust zone. Not the date zone, the high trust zone. These are two very different things. And maybe now it makes sense why the coffee shop is a safer first date offer?

Furthermore, it’s not a cultural unity. It’s a lot safer to not deflect in the rural west, as far as I can tell, than anywhere else on the planet. That might be because heavily armed. Might be because no one stands close to anyone else anyway. Maybe you don’t have to reduce friction in social interactions in areas where there are few social interactions.

Assuming good intentions will get you quite far. There’s a line from the DeMolay organization my boys all participated in that goes something like “When a Brother has acted foolishly, I must assume he was motivated by good intentions which I know not, and had I his motivations, I might have acted more foolishly than I judge him to have.” It’s pretty good advice, really, in dealing with honest folk, and I hope you are all trying to avoid dealing with dishonest folk.