According To Hoyt

It’s Labor Day, or as we call it around the house (okay, okay, as I call it around the house) “That frigging Commie Holiday.” I don’t think my kids (or Dan whose birthday it often is) ever fully understood my hatred of the holiday, which is — in the rest of world — celebrated on May 1st.

Hurray on the US for having it on a different day, which in Soviet days obviated the (paid) agitators and their shenanigans. (There were always shenanigans for May Day.) But it is still a commie holiday, and the unspoken part of Labor was always “organized labor” which has been a creature of international communism for my entire (feel very long) life.

Not that there is anything despicable about labor, labors and laboring for a living. Nor is there anything particularly heroic, either. Labor is simply the way humans make a living. No, seriously. Any human, even solitary marauders has to make to make a living, and killing and robbing is labor, if that’s what you do for a living. I imagine Bad Guy #2 groans at the prospect of mugging yet another passerby, but when he’s out of money to buy his next meal, he most surely must. As must we all, at our less nefarious pursuits, me pouring out vivid hallucinations into electrons so people might experience them and pay me, and you at your various occupations.

Even animals, and insects and worms, when described in biology books, have a section about how this creature “makes a living”. How it labors, so to put it.

And on this fresh and bright commie holiday Labor Day I have various probably disjointed thoughts. Bear with me. And forgive me for being so late with this. We slept till eleven and then someone who shall remain Dan told me I wasn’t having cheerios for breakfast, not after the last week, and dragged me out for a breakfast of eggs and bacon. Which took place in a very busy diner, which explains how late I am. Sorry. I’ll be posting this next week, but hours will be erratic.

First, we finally found the amount of labor necessary for me to actually lose weight. Not a great deal of weight but the scales dial bends towards mercy down slowly. Apparently, despite my senescent years, I’m supposed to do heavy labor and weight lifting 18 hours a day, till I can’t sit down without falling asleep.

I’ve long suspected this, since the side of the family I take after tends to fatten to the size of planetoids on a diet of fish and vegetables, because we are built as though we were supposed to labor from can till can’t in heavy physical work conditions, and most of us have the overgrown brain that disposes us to thinking work. Back as we go, there are lawyers, engineers, doctors. The engineers are a little more trim because they tend to be hands on and super-involved on the factory floor. My own profession (I’m the black (ink stained) sheep of the family) is no more heavy-labor oriented, though heaven knows I tend to find heavy labor on my own, from carpentry to farming. Until a novel high jacks me again.

Which is as may be, but I’m very tired of being tired. We do have (at least) one more week of this. Maybe 2. I’ll try to make it one, because Orphans is loud.

The other thoughts are more complex.

I saw Trump float the thing about paying people to stay home and raise kids. And I’m sure it seems like a good idea to him. It is a way — I’m sure he thinks — to make people able to have kids or more kids. And he’s not totally wrong. A lot of the zers and zellenials who are now in prime child bearing age are slammed under student debts, in a market that is profoundly hostile to young people, and saddled with an education to which we should always append “mal” that hampers their ability to function in the real world. All three of them make it hard for them to engage in the most important labor of any generation: bringing about the next generation. So paying them/giving them money to have more kids and stay home must seem like a good idea.

Why do I think it’s not? Well, first because I am astringently and stridently against money from government. Government doesn’t MAKE money, you see. It can only re-distribute the product of theft. As a moral person I oppose theft and parting in the product of theft (even if this particular law of course wouldn’t affect me.)

But beyond that? Because it won’t do what’s intended. I saw Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries do this dance as far back as the eighties, giving people more and more “benes” from the government if they JUST would for the love of heaven have some kids.

It didn’t work.

When a culture decides reproducing isn’t a thing anymore, the problem is never money. Oh, it is money as well, and there’s a much more logical solution to the money problem, but it is never ONLY money. Or lack of maternal/paternal leave or any of the things government can do.

When a culture stops reproducing it’s sick in the mind and soul.

In this case it is the crazy propaganda work by feminists, for decades now, both casting men as the villain and women as the victims in everything AND making women feel as if “settling” for being a wife and mother is a failure. This is what is driving the neuroticism of trying to be a perfect trad wife. (Look, chilluns, for most of my life I did my own sewing, baked my own bread. I also cleaned, cooked, rebuilt two Victorians, painted walls, installed cabinets, and just about everything else, while raising two oversized/over brained goons and writing at least 2 novels and 50 short stories a year. And I won’t say I didn’t make myself crazy about it. I was born neurotic. But I was certainly no obsessing over being perfect.) That men are now answering the propaganda with their own and echoing Islamic nonsense (in fact most of it originates in foreign shit posters) about keeping women in the house and with no right to anything doesn’t make things better.

Again, I reiterate that the answer is equality under the law. Men and women aren’t the same. They’ll never be equal. In fact, I incline to Heinlein’s insight that we’re not so much the same species as symbiots. We’re that different. But we can be equal under the law. What that means after the raving insanity of the 20th century is to stop the paternalistic protection of women that is either written into law or executed as though it were law.

No, don’t believe all women. They can — and do — lie as much as men. No, don’t treat female murderers as if they were merely damaged, sweet children who just need to be coddled a little further. Don’t give women the advantage in child custody and divorce. Don’t hire women preferentially. Don’t promote women preferentially. Stop distorting schooling to cater to female ways of learning. And conversely, do allow women to have sports leagues of their own, because the biological difference is that great. And for the love of Bob let men (and women) have single sex schooling and clubs and associations. Don’t assume men are getting some benefit simply because they can have some time without a female looking over their shoulder. And let women have their own associations and structures. They scare the living daylights out of me because I don’t get female power-pecking, but you know what? Sewing circles might be needed in our next war. Even if they’re actually book clubs or charitable organizations.

Also stop telling women that they must excel in the more socially acceptable male pursuits (No woman fights for her right to be trash collector) and stop telling them that wanting to have children or raise their own children is a failure. Biological imperatives are biological imperatives. Thwarting them gives us the current insanity.

I’d be far less worried about the spectacle of support for the Clancy harpy if there weren’t a huge potential for copy-cats, due to other women who feel they failed because they’re mothers and wives and therefore everyone else must pay for their unhappiness.

As a woman who raised small kids, listen to me, it is very important that women understand that they’re not valueless or failures because they’re mothers. It’s very important to change that part of the culture.

No, I don’t think that child murder is either justified or justifiable. They should not have given the Clancy woman a three year respite or investigation or trial. Look, I know they had to give it due to laws. But to satisfy my inner sense of justice, they should have taken her out back and given her the same treatment she gave her innocent children, then buried her at a cross roads and erased her from every record, as though she’d never been.

BUT I do think that we’re making women crazy (NOT legally crazy. Just crazy-crazy.) with the messaging that they must be super-duper influential and successful in a way that doesn’t include what their every instinct clamors for. And in that environment, this botch of a trial and (largely or greatly) memorex support is going to cause more murders of innocents who have done nothing to deserve it. Women who are unstable, or simply feel guilty for giving in and having kids, are going to think she did a great thing and they can do it too without consequence. May G-d have mercy on their souls, and on the souls of the idiot feminists who encouraged this aberration of a culture.

I don’t think money from government for raising children will change that perception either. It’s more like you fell down all the social ladder rungs to welfare recipient.

What is needed is real social and cultural labor, rebuilding the thought that yes, men and women are different, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with their biological imperatives, though there can be with the way those imperatives are brought to fruition. There is nothing shameful in birthing children or in wanting to raise your own children. In fact it is right and good. And there’s nothing inherently wrong in wanting to sire children and provide for your mate and children. It is right and just. It’s the way men were built.

As for the financial point, forgiving student loans would go a long way towards doing what the subsidy for stay at home parents won’t do. No. Hear me out, the “working class” would not pay for it. They’ve already paid for it. In a fiat currency situation, those loans came from inflating away the money in your pocket so the government could send pallets of cash to the Universities to support Beardo The Weirdo in the comfort he wanted to attain. That money is gone. Inflation can’t be fixed. (Well, deflation happens, but trust me, you don’t want that.) It already happened. The pay back is just swelling the coffers of the Obamacare insanity. It’s time to drop that, and let those who want have the large families they crave. There is any number of them. The others, no money can tempt.

Moving on, there was also Bernie Sanders introducing a law to forbid AI programming and wanting jail for 20 years for those engaging in it.

Give the man credit. The damn commie is still serving his masters in the (defunct?) USSR and China, as slavishly as he can. So, he’s loyal at least.

But also, one reason commies are damned is that they continuously try to take us back to their ideal state of “labor” which is circa the 1930s. AI (Which Russia and China might be able to snuff out here, but will never develop to its full potential, because the rats in their heads eat innovation.) is a threat to that, as much as computers, working from home, and everything else but the state of shoulder-to-shoulder foundry work seems to be.

Commies misunderstand labor as much as they misunderstand everything else. (Except distribution. They don’t so much misunderstand distribution as deny it, and try to make it non existent by penalizing taking money for transport and resale. Because like Marx they think things should just automagically appear where needed, or something.)

And though I hope no one else is crazy enough to sign onto comrade Sanders’ nonsense, let me reiterate that it would be utterly suicidal. The type of society the communists crave, industrial, compact, mass-organized, cannot support our current population. In fact it could never support any population. Communism is a parasitical system where countries infected must invade and despoil other countries MERELY to survive.

There is no country in the world that can support the US at our current lifestyle. Hell, I’m not sure invading the rest of the world and taking everything they own would do it.

So we’ll have to labor (eh) to keep communism at bay (yet again. The damn thing won’t die. It needs a stake through the heart, but it doesn’t have a heart and therein lies the rub.)

And we must labor to solve our problems without falling into communist solutions of having the government pay for everything we want.

The hour is late. The light is failing. We have much to do.

Go and build under, build over, build around. Build sanely and fruitfully.

And may your labor be blessed.

*Sorry for being unholy late, but we have a functional kitchen now! – SAH*

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 N.A. SMITH: Into the Chaos: Terra Confracta Volume 1

The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended with a flash of light, and Corporal Nick O’Leary was standing right underneath it.

One second he’s grinding through a training exercise outside Camp Lejeune. The next, every circuit on the planet is dead, the sky is on fire, and an enemy that shouldn’t exist is overrunning his position. By the time the smoke clears, O’Leary and the handful of Marines who made it out aren’t in North Carolina anymore.

They’re not even on Earth.

The new world is a shattered place, a collision of realities fused into something that has no name and no rules. Dire wolves hunt the treeline. Samurai hold fortified ridgelines. Nazi remnants march under a sun that never set on their version of history. Every faction still breathing is fighting for territory, resources, and survival. O’Leary’s Marines are the newest faction. And this world has already started changing them; rewiring what they’re capable of, pushing them past every limit they thought they had, one firefight at a time.

No extraction. No support. No going home.Just a hardened NCO, a scattered squad of jarheads, and a multiverse that has never met anything quite like the United States Marine Corps.

INTO THE CHAOS is the first book in a gritty military progression fantasy series, for readers who want their power earned the hard way.

FROM KEVIN TRAINOR, JR: The Misfit

War hero John Benton recovers from his near-fatal injuries to find that his ultra-wealthy, ultra-influential mother has arranged for him to be assigned to the monitor Terror, an obsolete hulk preserved as a refuge for the incompetent, inept, and well-connected. But you can’t keep a good man down, and with a little help from his godfather the Sky Marshal and the blue-shirt Mafia, Benton decides there’s going to be some changes aboard the worst ship in the Aerospace Force.

FROM M. M. COLT: Hex & Hearth: A Paranormal Anthology

From sweet to steamy, Hex & Hearth is a multi-author paranormal romance anthology featuring M/F and M/M stories across a range of heat levels, with each standing alone and delivering a guaranteed HEA.

Driftwood Pointe has been weaving its magic for centuries—and love remains its greatest enchantment.

Along the Massachusetts coast, tucked between sea and stone, lies a town where the impossible feels ordinary and whispers are carried on the tide. At its heart stands the Hex & Hearth, where the fire is warm and fate often pulls up a chair.

For three hundred fifty years, Rowan has poured the drink you need, not the one you ordered, and Elara has listened, because she already knows your secrets—and keeps them safe.

Within these winding streets and salt-kissed shores, love takes many forms. Witches and shifters, ghosts and ancient powers, first loves and second chances all collide in ten interconnected stories where destiny refuses to be ignored and happily-ever-afters are hard-won.

Because in Driftwood Pointe, love is the one force old enough—and stubborn enough—to break what time couldn’t.

FROM WILLIAM M. LEHMAN: Harvest of Evil: The John Fisher Chronicles, Book 1

For John Fisher, it’s just another day at the office. But his “office” is a black Dodge Durango, rolling through the wild heart of the nation’s federal lands. Legends aren’t myths here; they’re reality. Creatures of shadow and blood, granted their place in the world after the Civil Rights Movement.

The law’s clear: magic is legal…until it’s used against the land, the people, or the rules of the natural order. Then, it’s his job to bring them in.

John’s not just any cop. He’s got the skills of a SEAL, the instincts of a predator, and a network deep inside the supernatural world. Werewolf, vampire, sorcerer—it doesn’t matter. No matter what you are, when you break the rules, he’s coming for you.

FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: The Universe Requires A Form: Stories of Bureaucracy, Blood Pacts, and Clay Men

What happens when the supernatural collides with bureaucracy?
Usually paperwork.
In The Universe Requires a Form, gods, monsters, dragons, golems, radioactive crustaceans, ancient evils, corporate weapons, supernatural spies, and one remarkably useful llama discover that humanity’s greatest defense against the impossible may not be courage, magic, or superior firepower.
It may be forms.
Across thirteen wildly inventive stories, ordinary people find themselves confronting situations no training manual was designed to cover. An intern accidentally signs his office into Hell. An insurance salesman discovers that even Cthulhu represents an underwriting opportunity. A Soviet golem arrives in Washington asking whether he is a weapon or a person. A customer-service center tries to route a monster attack through the proper phone tree. Roman officials discover that perhaps taxing a volcano was a poor administrative decision.
Funny, strange, satirical, and occasionally unexpectedly moving, these stories explore confidence, competence, ambition, ownership, and the underrated virtue of admitting you have absolutely no idea what you are doing.
The apocalypse is approaching.
Your call is very important to us.
Please remain on the line.

FROM S. M. CARLSON: America Hijacked – Second Edition: How Deep State actors from LBJ to Obama killed for money and power, and why they hate Trump so much

Second Edition: Updated to include Trump re-election, Biden Administration, 2022 War in Ukraine, Green New Deal, and more!

Delve into “America Hijacked,” a critical and expansive exploration spanning the past 80 years of US political history. This compelling narrative embarks on a journey from the conflicts of Vietnam and Korea, traversing through the tumultuous wars in the Middle East, unearthing the layers of deception and criminal corruption interwoven within the legacies of the Bush, Clinton, and Biden families.

“America Hijacked” illuminates the insidious destruction of the American Dream, as it outlines the substantial gains and profiteering of political dynasties amid national despair and global conflict. The text is composed in a clear and concise style, making it an accessible and engaging read for all, shedding light on the obscured truths of political maneuvers and the profound impact on the American narrative.

Make a foray into this significant exploration and unravel the intricate web that has ensnared the American political landscape. “America Hijacked” is available in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and Audible audio formats. It offers a seamless reading experience for all who seek to understand the depths of political corruption and its enduring implications for the United States.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Dragon’s Sister (Timelines Universe Book 7)

Two Sisters, Separated By A Timeline

When most people find out they have a long-lost twin sibling they never dreamed existed, reactions can range from happiness to anger.

In the case of US Space Force Marines Brigadier General Mei-Lin Lai, her “twin” is her timeline analog she was told did not exist. And because of that reassurance, the expatriate Chinese taikonaut migrated to Timeline Zero from Timeline One Right, to take command of United States Space Force Base Terra Meridiani, on Mars.

But her analog did exist. And was pulled out of a cold-stasis chamber in Chicago eighty years after she’d been recruited into a failed plot to disrupt an American presidential election.

Twenty years later, Mei-Lin must grapple with a woman who is her genetic twin and wishes to join the Space Force Marines as a medic — and will go through Basic Training on the planet where Mei-Lin is the boss Marine.

Will the two women, identical but different, be able to form a sisterly bond? And will Mei-Lin finally come to grips with the very existence of her other-timeline twin?

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: BEYOND THE EDGE: A Science Fiction Novel

Astrogator Dernal Barrackfive wants to be, more than anything, the pilot of a starship. That ambition comes to and end when Dernal makes a mistake he refuses to take responsibility for and he is dismissed from the Astrogator’s Guild. An embittered Dernal then then joins a group of outlaws who plan to hijack a collection of fabulously valuable alien artifacts, little dreaming that the decision will catapult him into the most incredible adventure of his life, for one of the artifacts contains a star map that only Dernal can interpret: a map that shows the location of an unexplored planet that might be a treasure trove – or a death trap. On this planet he will find, love, death, and truths about himself he never suspected…

FROM DIANA FEDORAK: Children of Alpheios

From award-winning author Diana Fedorak, an epic tale withsuperb world-building that stands with the best of science fiction and fantasy for an unforgettable read!

A genetically engineered new world colony.
A baby born like no other.
A mother who will stop at nothing to save him.

From the moment of his birth, Alina knew her son was special. Born with a remarkable DNA anomaly, Mandin must be protected at all costs. In the biotech-controlled city of Alpheios, Mandin’s uniqueness marks him as a target for corporate explotiation. Luckily, Alina has been trained by the Expeditionary Academy and knows how to survive the harsh environment and terrain around them.

Trusting her skills to guide them, Alina escapes with her infant in a desperate attempt to keep him safe. Out of options, she has no choice but to rely on a gruff pilot to help navigate her new surroundings.

As a rebel uprising brews, Alina must discover who she can trust … if anyone. Can she find safety for her son? Or will he be claimed by the colony’s most powerful institution?

Winner of the Firebird Award for Speculative Fiction, Dystopian, and Science Fiction, this harrowing adventure is perfect for fans of Nancy Kress and Veronica Roth.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: John Stark’s Gauntlet: A Novel of the New Hampshire Frontier (Historical Fiction).

In the wilderness of eighteenth-century New Hampshire, courage can mean more than winning a fight.

In 1752, young frontier hunter John Stark ventures deep into the New England wilderness with his brother William and several companions. What begins as an expedition for game turns into a desperate struggle for survival when they are ambushed and captured.

One companion is killed. Another escapes. The survivors are marched north through an unforgiving wilderness, hungry, exhausted, and uncertain of their fate.

Among their captors are people Stark has been taught to fear. But captivity forces him to see the frontier—and his enemies—in a different way. As the prisoners learn to survive among the Abenaki, they encounter a world of families, traditions, hunting, storytelling, diplomacy, and warfare far more complicated than the simple stories they had known.

Then comes the gauntlet.

Forced to run between lines of warriors, Stark faces the moment that will define his captivity. Rather than surrender to fear, he does the unthinkable: he seizes a warrior’s club and fights back.

What follows is not simply an act of defiance. It is the beginning of a grudging respect that may determine whether Stark lives long enough to see home again.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Heisenberg’s Point of Observation

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past.
Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?

FROM DALE COZORT: Snapshot42-Book2:Through The Texas Gate (Snapshot-42 Book 2)

Snapshot42: Through the Texas Gate is an alternate history novel. In early November 1942, with World War II hanging in the balance, an invisible wall cuts Europe, along with parts of the Middle East and North Africa, off from the rest of the world. With the Allies running out of vital raw materials from the rest of the world, they look for ways through the wall. They find two gates to other realities. One leads to a still-independent Republic of Texas that still uses black powder weapons and is barely holding off fierce nomad raiders, while another leads to a strange land without people but overrun by still-living dinosaurs.

Jim Bridger and Colonel Tillman need to buy oil and food to keep the allies in the war, but first they have to survive fierce new enemies in these new-found realities.

FROM KAREN MYERS: To Carry the Horn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 1)

AN ENTIRE KINGDOM BUILT AROUND A SUPERNATURAL NEED FOR JUSTICE, ENFORCED BY THE WILD HUNT AND THE HOUNDS OF HELL.

What would you do if you blundered into a strange world, where all around you was the familiar landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but the inhabitants were the long-lived fae, and you the only human?

George Talbot Traherne stumbles across the murdered huntsman of the Wild Hunt, and is drafted into finding out who did it. Oh, and assigned the task of taking the huntsman’s place with the Hounds of Hell, whether he wants the job or not.

The antlered god Cernunnos is the sponsor of this kingdom, and he requires its king to conduct the annual hunt for justice in pursuit of an evil criminal, or else lose his right to the kingship, and possibly end up hunted himself.

Success is far from guaranteed, and no human has held the post. George discovers his own blood links to the fae king, and he’s determined to try. But Cernunnos himself has a personal role to play, and George will have to sort out just why he’s the one who’s been chosen for the task.

And whether he has any chance of surviving the job.

Find out what it’s like to live in a world where you can help the Right to prevail, even if it might cost you everything.

To Carry the Horn is the first book of The Hounds of Annwn.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Gift of Koi

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?

Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.

But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

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.

The prompt this week is: perpetual

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: Perpetual.

Sorry to have been absent so long, but there was cleaning, and moving and setting up and …. we’re ALMOST moved now.

From reading comments the other day: this IS five years. Though we wouldn’t have moved except for major family incentive to move, plus the fact the new place will allow us to walk (our almost-old place had a lovely walking path, which got taken over by an invasion of homeless which I suspect followed us from Colorado. (Do you have a better hypothesis?) and use the pool. (Not OUR pool. We’re not made of money, but there’s a pool.)

There might have been a knife in an account and again, it wouldn’t have happened except for family … well, I wouldn’t call it needs precisely, but it makes things better for everyone concerned.

More importantly, since last year I realized I could make a go of fiction writing after all. This job comes with a weird glitch. I disappear into the made up world, and…. forget reality exists. Reality like, say, a garden path that gets so overgrown with weeds that packages get delivered outside the gate. Or I forget to weed the vegetable beds and raise a fresh crop of weeds and noxious saplings. Or–

The house wasn’t proving too much work for us because of age, but because my tendency to disappear into imaginary worlds became a liability.

So. This works better. Though Dan still needs to train the electric sheep.

So we’re now here, with the cats, though I’m still spending a lot of days at the other place, packing, cleaning and such. Not as bad as last time (not nearly) and we should be done in 2 to 3 weeks.

The cats seem to like the new place. Circe talks to herself walking around, making comments on the new place. “Wow, did you see? They brought in the old cat tree.” (We did because we want them to have familiar smells, but We’ll buy them a new one for Christmas.)

Anyway, it’s been busy and crazy and I was talking about something that happened yesterday and thinking it was a week ago.

I will resume normal posting on Monday, and should even be able to write.

I will keep you apprized, so you know I’m alive. Or dead but still writing. Whichever.

Love you guys.`

It is apparently that sort of day. Sarah is well, the cats are well through no fault of their own, Dan is not allowed to lift that, my husband very kindly bought me a new smartphone which has occasioned significant maledictions at programmers and is now mostly beaten into shutting up, but at least the weather is fine.

So, for your entertainment, here are a few pictures of interest. If you should feel so inclined, drop a few words about what is happening, perhaps a flash fiction or a scene, in the comments.

By Holly the Assistant

Fairly late last night, Sarah dropped me a note asking if I could put something, anything, up today.

This is anything.

The various cat anecdotes include “You’re playing with knives.” addressed to Circe, Muse, and Indy. To which I pointed out that they come pre-equiped with knives, so this is hardly an unusual thing. These, however, were box cutters, and we prefer the cats to stick to smaller blades. (Like the ten on their front paws.)

Then The Wolf tried to steal peaches, and I told him he was taking after his big sister, and he was very affronted.

Between packing and cats, the House of Hoyt’s internal appearance is currently best described as “Possibly en route to Oz”, and between de-cluttering, cats, and dogs, the House of Assistant’s internal appearance is “Accompanying the Hoyts to Oz”, so I shall leave you with a photo of a fine fellow who fails to feline, and who has discovered that de-cluttering is not a cat friendly activity.

(A Blast from the Past from September 2024: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/09/30/down-with-technocracy/)

In the 2000 election my brother told me he didn’t understand why I was so worked up. Both the candidates were basically technocrats and their program was very similar.

As we’ve come to find out, he was right. Wrong also, of course, but ultimately right.

Of course there were differences between Bush and Gore, beyond the question of which noses would be on the through. The left in the US seem to be the only true believers in communism left in the world. Even those at the top seem vaguely shocked when they try to implement extreme left measures and not having the success they’ve been assured should come. One must blame the universities. The rest of the world, by and large, those on top are aware that communism doesn’t work, it’s just a racket to keep the masses down. The intellectuals still believe, but that’s because by and large they need something to put their faith on, and religious faith is considered uncool.

Anyway, for one, Gore was industrial strength stupid, and wholly sold on using the climate cult to stomp on us, completely unaware of repercussions.

But other than that, and as far as we can deduce, they believed largely the same things and were largely “technocrats.” I.e. they believed in rule by the “educated class” and the “experts” who could “solve all the big problems.” And they shared — as we can tell from Bush’s post-presidency friendship with Clinton, of all people — a certainty that the little people should be ruled and not listened to.

The problem of course is that Obama was brought in by the same people. Who are the faces behind the Junta now. As well as those controlling most of the world. Badly.

Part of the hatred for Trump — particularly among the University educated class — is a sort of back-of-the brain certainty that he’s ruining the program. It’s the only reason I can find for the frothing mouth and glazed eyes, the screaming of how terrible he is and how he’s going to burn down the world, when he’s been president once, and all he did was stop the waves of illegals, stop the wars, and make us energy independent. This is terrible?

Yeah. For the international would be technocrats it is. You see, they need to dislocate people, make them rootless and disconnected. They need to herd masses of people here and there like sheep — a technique for breaking up nationalities that has worked since the ancient world (except, by and large, on the Jewish people) — broken from traditions/beliefs/ customs and social bonds. Only then will the masses be utterly dependent on their wisdom and able to be indoctrinated in the new beliefs of the….

Well, they don’t call it that, but of Homus Sovieticus in a new suit and tie, with a bit of computer savvy.

It is essential to them to make as many people as possible dependent on pay offs that are wholly divorced from labor or production. They need you to have nothing to live for. To, as they put it, own nothing and (pretend to) be happy. Only then can they direct every minute instance of your daily life.

Why? Well, they’ll give you all sorts of reasons. By and large the same reasons as communists: it’s a more efficient way to allocate resources, so we don’t all starve when the (non existent) population bomb goes off. It’s best for us to be kept in hygienic surroundings. It’s best to not let us get racist/sexist/homophobic ideas. Etc. etc. etc.

In other words, you’re a sheep they want to feed what they want, shear when they want, and eat when they want.

A curious thing happened on the way to the technocracy, though.

Humans don’t herd well. You can break humans and give them Stockholm syndrome, but you have to be offering something pretty strong for them to attach onto. Which “own nothing and be happy” ain’t.

Humans are in fact refractory apes, and have been breaking out in rebellion all over.

And the technology never worked as the technocrats thought. You see, they’re not in themselves technical. They just thought they knew how to control humans through tech.

They’ve already failed. Oh, they’re fighting a rearguard action, composed of vote fraud, violence, lawfare, spying, etc. etc.

Their problem is that it’s already out in the open, because they are fairly desperate. And the more it’s out in the open, the more horrified people become at the smile on the face of the tiger.

In a way the covidiocy was their high water mark, the complete coup of the technocracy. It worked, but not uniformly, only briefly, and the actual compliance outside big cities was — as I found out — notional. Their attempt to roll it into a “climate emergency” lockdown was shrugged off. Their attempts to spook us into locking up again have been… laughable.

As almost always, but now faster, the humans failed to comply.

Plus they burned their “expert rule” by revealing most “experts” are no such thing.

The insurgence — the real one, not the one they tried to gin up as an excuse in 2020 — is alive and well, composed of set faces, clenched fists and feet planted in the ground, refusing to be moved.

I don’t know if they’ll manage to fraud themselves into power in November. They might. But it will do them a whole heap of no good, you know?

In China rulers lose the mandate of heaven. Throughout the west… you can piss off people enough that they don’t put up with your bullsh*t anymore. So it’s been throughout history.

The only remarkable thing about our would be expertocracy is how fast they burned a clout that took them a hundred years to create.

We are not sheep. We are not in the mood to be herded. We are not going into their profoundly stupid future.

We are chaos. We are liberty. We are — us here — Americans.

And intend to stay that way.

It’s been a year since my mother died.

How am I doing? Well, I’m dealing. I’m dealing blind against an unseen opponent in a game I don’t understand, but everyone smiles a lot and life goes on.

Look, I don’t want you to imagine me prostrated by grief. That’s not how this works. We all know our parents will, ideally, die before us. And mom and I… Chalk and cheese, you know? No, not like that. Or in some things exactly like that.

The thing is, a daughter like me is a terrible thing to happen to a mother who spent most of her life carefully filing down the sharp angles so she could fit in the round slot for the proper pegs.

No, she wasn’t repressed. Mom gave people repression. She was not meek and mild. People were meek and mild around her.

But all the same, she knew how to play the game, how to impress people the way she should, how to get across what she wanted to get across. She commanded groups, made parties wonderful, and could fill a room, just by herself, if she was in that sort of mood.

And then there’s me… I’m…. me. I probably could impress people, if I remembered and didn’t have three or four novels competing for my attention inside my head, at any given time. I was reasonably good looking and even enjoyed clothes and makeup… sometimes. And sometimes I forgot and went to the store in my painting jeans and with my hair pulled back. I’m actually (I didn’t know it) and introvert and some of our biggest fights were about her wanting to drag me to parties, because of course she wanted to, and I wanted to stay in my room with a book.

And then there were the things I was enthusiastic about. They baffled her. She knew what they were, she just couldn’t for the life of her figure out why I liked them. She tried. For my 19th birthday she went to the one bookstore in town that carried books in English and ordered the complete works of Villiam Shogspierre in English. And when they told her she might prefer them in Portuguese she said “I don’t prefer them at all. My daughter does, and she prefers them in English, thank you.” (Yes, she knew how it was pronounced. It was part of distancing herself from it.) I have better ones which aren’t tiny print printed in Yugoslavia (No, I don’t know why that was what they had) but I keep that one.

Sometimes she got upset about the things that fascinated me, as though by paying attention to them I was denying her and shutting her out. She once threw every book she could grab in my room out the window and into the farmer’s field out the back wall. It was a fit of fury at these books I carried everywhere. It’s been fifty years since she did that, and I still don’t understand it.

She used to get very upset when she caught me reading. (That’s what brought the fit on.) So I trained myself to fling the book under the nearest piece of furniture and sit very still as if I’d just been staring at the walls when I heard someone approach. Baffled my husband for a year until he figured out what was going on.

My brother and I used to talk in book quotes. Despite an almost ten year age difference, we had a tendency to be reading the same book, at the same time. In fact, until his eyes went bad, we’d often get there for a visit and he’d have the same book on his bedside table that I’d left on mine at home. (Only in Portuguese.) And we both had eidetic or near eidetic memory (in my case marred by being so ADD that…. well, you can’t remember what you never paid attention to.) So, when one of us would quote something we found significant in the latest book, the other would answer with a quote from the same book. It was like mad libs for autists, I guess, but we enjoyed ourselves greatly.

… At one point, after half an hour of this, Mom just yelled at the ceiling “I wanted normal children!” Followed by “I met my old classmate at the fair last week, and her daughter is a hairdresser, and her son has a garage, and they’re successful and happy and NORMAL. I wanted normal children.”

… Someone played a horrible prank on the poor woman, and gave her two changelings, even if my brother masks better than I do, or perhaps was never crazy enough to do truly outre things like marry a foreigner, move across the ocean, write books for a living.

I’d like to say she supported that the whole way…. but…. well, dad says she did. Dad says she was proud of me.

Maybe she was. She had a picture of me receiving the Prometheus on her living room table. I suspect it was because I was in an evening dress, wearing pearls and for once in my life had my hair done. “Look, my daughter. She’s not a bum ALL THE TIME, okay?” (I know, it baffled the presenters, too. BUT I’d promised my fans if I won I’d dress up.) On the other hand, when someone over there asked what I did for a living, mom would break herself crossing the room to scream “She’s a housewife” before I could say anything. (I might or might not have mumbled “the world’s worst housewife, maybe.”) And I won’t deny it hurt a little when I saw my colleagues mothers’ making a big deal of their books. I never gave mom copies after the first three — okay, in English, she wasn’t going to read them, but I thought she might put them in the front room bookcase? — because she hid them in the closet under the stairs, with the old shoes. And I — baffled! — have no idea WHY. Which to be fair, she probably had no idea why I was doing it either.

She was, however, a woman on the run. She was always doing something, cleaning something, designing something, whether a dress, a room, a table, a party. Her normal mode was at full throttle.

I find it somewhere between funny and ironic she fell running down the stairs, carrying a vacuum cleaner the cleaning lady had forgotten in the unused guest room. It could have waited another week. But it bothered her. So… she was running down the stairs, and lost count of the steps. She couldn’t see where she was because of the vacuum. They told us she’d broken her hip, and she did that too, but not that she’d hit her head because apparently concussions are irrelevant, but she’d hit her head on the umbrella cabinet hard enough to break the door, and I suspect had a closed-cranium concussion. I had one of those at 40. It’s different at 91.

I find that funny, because it’s the most mom thing ever. And if given the choice of that or going quietly in her bed ten years from now, she’d probably have picked going at 91, still on the run and doing things.

She used to call every Saturday. Usually when I was in the middle of my cleaning time, the phone would ring, and it was mom, which meant the next two hours were toast. I didn’t realize all the news from the entire family over there came through her.

I now can clean uninterrupted, but my Saturdays are… kind of lonely.

How am I doing?

I’m dealing. We never got along well as it were, but her presence and her personality, in approval and disapproval, and in the spaces between, shaped a lot of what I did and do, and how I did it.

For instance, I stole her smile. Perfectly aware I was not a beauty like she was, and I certainly didn’t have her way with people, I fixated on the one thing I could copy. My own smile was awkward and odd. So I sat in front of the mirror and practiced her smile until it became my smile. And I learned her trick of memorizing funny things people do, and then replaying them for the family, like a skit. Oh, and my house is 100% cleaner than those of my peers all the time, because …. what would mom say? (Nothing good, is what she’d say. We’re in the middle of a move and both houses are filthy.)

When she vanished, it was like driving along a Colorado road, and suddenly the mountains vanish. Look, you live on the foothills, you don’t do anything with the mountains. but suddenly they’re not there, and your world is curiously flat and colorless and why did they vanish? Where did they go? Can you even orient without them?

… I’m managing. Most of the time I’m fine, really, except suddenly, out of nowhere I hit something: a word, a phrase, a memory. A way to cook a dish I still do routinely. Her never fulfilled (often repeated) promise to teach me how to put in a zipper. (I can’t put in zippers in clothing. It’s like a disability.) Something. Sometimes just a quality of the light. And suddenly I’m crying. I’m not even sad, and I don’t know why I am crying, but there it is.

She always ended our phone calls with orders, “Go get your family in gear. You know they can’t figure their way without you.”

…. She has no idea. The boys are in gear enough. So is Dan. But mom meant that I should do what I can, I think. And was afraid I’d disappear into book and neglect the important things.

Do I do that? Sometimes. But then again, I love the boys. All three of them, even though Dan is a little superannuated for a boy. And sometimes they need me.

I try to be there for them, because I know mom expects it of me, so here I am, grinding through the speed changes the best I can.

I’m dealing. No one said this stuff was easy: mothers and daughters, the way we can’t help disappointing each other, the big love that has no need of shared interests to echo it, the persistent sense that you disappointed someone and you’re not sure who or how, the memories of shopping for shoes together, the ridiculously large ice creams she bought me and watched me consume, because she couldn’t… This weird feeling when someone who is so much a part of you is now a part of eternity.

I’m dealing. I’m getting the family in gear (I think the gear is turbo reverse parking, but hey) and I’m doing the best I can with all of this.

I can’t believe it’s been a year. And the horizon still retains the outline of the mountains that just vanished one day.

It used to be illegal, at various times and in various places throughout Europe, to cast the king’s horoscope.

I’m surprised polls aren’t similarly illegal.

Look, I’m not saying polls should be illegal, but I wonder why governments haven’t made them so. And I think they’ll ultimately be defeated by the same mechanism that made casting anyone’s horoscope completely legal. Because in a way at this point they’re sort of the same thing.

Stop staring at me like I’m nuts. To explain:

It is a point of popular “people are so stupid” lore that “People read the horoscope” but in fact most people don’t believe horoscopes. We know that, because no country on Earth (okay, I don’t know about Asian countries) makes it illegal to cast its leader’s horoscope.

When it was illegal, it was because the horoscopes were believed. (BTW I arrived at this rabbit hole by — while flossing this morning — wandering down the path of Heinlein’s story Life Line and would I like to know my date of death (actually super-handy for planning, and since I don’t think it’s the end, probably yes) and how in most societies someone who could tell to the minute how long you’ll live will be run out of town/country or killed.)

Oh, I’m not saying all of the horoscopes were believed. As with any highly skilled professional, some were better than others, and some would be believed over others, but–

EVEN IF THE LEADERS DIDN’T BELIEVE IN FORETELLING, they had to take it seriously, because the vast majority of people did.

Take the situation with Elizabeth I. She had no descendants of her body. This meant there were (there always are) more than one pretenders.

If you cast her horoscope saying she’ll die in a year, and the vast majority of people believe in foretelling, the pretenders will start marshaling for the due date, and once they do … it’s easy to start a war. Or easier.

So casting the leader’s horoscope was forbidden.

These days enough people think the horoscopes are poppycock that no one cares. No, literally, no one cares. I have a bad habit of hitting really weird conspiracy sites, (look, it’s mostly a fun “I’m tapped out” type of habit. Like looking up asteroids that might kill us. That sort of thing. Or videos of a guy walking through cemeteries and reading inscriptions) and in January of every year they’re full of how every leader will die this year. Or how every nation’s leader is the antichrist. Yes, including King Charles (As if the man who can’t tie his shoes without help and is not popular with anyone were the guy who is so charming he starts a new religion with himself as a divinity.)

No one cares.

Then there are polls. Yeah, Trump’s approval is supposedly the lowest evah. But I remember when Obama’s was really high, supposedly, and no one wanted him to campaign with/for them, and his merchandise went straight to the discount bin. While almost all of Trump’s endorsements for the primary sailed through.

And you start wondering. Really, really start wondering. Like “Is this like the horoscopes that were incitement to rebellion” ways to get people to do the inadvisable? The answer is: almost certainly.

We know that the left uses polls to hide its massive fraud and attempts at fraud. We all know that the left uses polls to try to encourage/discourage voting.

It also uses it to enforce what remains of its social clout. I’m absolutely sure that Jelly Roll wouldn’t have made an ass of himself while guest hosting for Kimmel, if not for the polls telling him that, yes, of course, everyone hates Trump. And his attempts to roll back his commentary are ridiculous, saying he’s in the middle, and that he likes to hunt and he’s a Christian, but…. But not rowing back the comments about Trump being racist and all the rest. Because the polls tell him this is safe.

In fact, the only reason that the left keeps hold of the Mass Media and all the people who are highly visible, is that they can report these polls that give them an illusion of inevitability.

Of course, the downside is that it reinforces the echo chamber, so that, you know, they’re convinced all the people scream for socialism and such, and causes misfires like their attempts to ignite real rebellion with astroturf, like Occupy Wall Street or Antifa.

But ultimately? It’s a dying effort. Just like laws about the king’s horoscope are probably still on the books in Europe but no one bothers because people don’t believe in horoscopes, the polls are losing their effectiveness as propaganda and opinion molding tools.

Their few spectacular failures, which seem to be increasing, plus the fact that we know who answers those things, and that one in ten people know who to crawl into the poll’s innards to figure out what is going on, all of it accumulates and helps them lose credibility. This might or might not be helped by the fact all authorities including mass media lost a lot of authority during the Covidiocy, and they were already trending down.

In the end, at some point, like king’s astrologers, the polls will scream into a vacuum.

While life goes on and ignores them.

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 KEN LIZZI: Long Gambit: Book Two of The Twilight Galaxy Series

The Long Gambit is the second book in Ken Lizzi’s Twilight Galaxy — the ongoing saga of the free trader Long Gambit and the crew who keep her flying through a slowly collapsing galaxy.

Captain Pyater Welloons is one missed payment from losing everything. His ship is clamped to the pad for unpaid moorage fees, his accounts are nearly dry, and the only job on the board is a humanitarian rush run: twelve million doses of medicine for a plague-stricken backwater called Owming.

The catch is that Welloons has to source the drug himself — on Ixtpa, a planet where nearly everyone is chemically modified and the automated factories run themselves while the population drifts pleasantly toward oblivion. The one compound he needs has been bought up to the last ampule to treat a cattle plague on another world. So Welloons does the only thing a man in his position can do: he plans a heist.

What follows is a working-crew space adventure with teeth — a midnight break-in through an automated underground, a street ambush, a slow-motion brush with suffocation when a part nobody replaced finally fails, and an ambush by two pirate ships that knew exactly where the Long Gambit would be. The crew’s best hope turns out to be a piece of bargain-bin junk the captain told them to throw out.

And when the ship finally reaches Owming, Welloons discovers that delivering the medicine and getting it to the dying are two very different problems — and that the people who ordered it may be the last ones who want it to arrive.

For readers of working-ship, declining-empire space adventure in the tradition of C.J. Cherryh’s merchanters, Andre Norton’s Solar Queen, and Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper. Dry humor, a crew worth riding with, and a captain who keeps his word even when it costs him. The story is the point.

FROM K. ANDERS: Resurgence of Light

Twelve years ago the sky over Marseille tore open and the Dyn Lords took Europe in a season. The armies are gone. The gods who answered humanity’s summons are burning through their Chosen faster than they can replace them. What’s left of the Resistance hides in wet cellars and calls them cottages, because a dry room means a desiccator has found you.

Micah Jones didn’t sign up to save the world. He crossed an ocean because Amy Allgood said yes to a goddess, and somebody had to keep her breathing. That was a whole team ago. What’s left is three people, a hunted road through occupied England, and a goddess who takes a little more of Amy every time the Resistance needs her.

They pick up allies on that road: a paladin who talks like a field manual, a cleric who has buried every hero he ever healed, and a hooded creature with human eyes who fights beside them and won’t say why. Something is hunting all of them through the tunnels, and it is not what any of them think.

Resurgence of Light is told in three braided strands: a desperate present-day flight through occupied England, the fall of a legend in France, and the two years that took one team apart one funeral at a time. Every chapter opens with a dated page from a twelve-year war journal.

It is a novel about what the gods take back, and about a man who can serve the Voice or save his friend but no longer both.

Fast, brutal, and unashamedly heroic. The good guys don’t win because the odds are fair. They win because they refuse to stop.

FROM EDDIE FERGUSON: The Horn of Caninia: A Boy, His Talking Dog, and a Kingdom of Hounds

Some new kids get a new school. Ian Richards gets a new world.

When his family moves to a rambling old house in the Texas bayou country, twelve-year-old Ian Richards expects nothing but mosquitoes, boredom, and a summer without his friends. What he finds instead is a symbol carved into an old oak, a matching mark deep inside a drainage culvert, and a shimmering gate that swallows his Afghan hound, Penelope—whole.

Ian goes in after her. On the other side is Caninia: a world of two moons and talking dogs, ruled by the noble Queen Coraline and threatened by an alligator warlord named Snaptooth who is swallowing villages one by one. The canines fight with teeth and claws. It isn’t enough. But Ian has something no dog in Caninia has ever had—a human’s knack for building, scheming, and turning a weakness into a trap.

He can’t out-bite an alligator. He might just out-think one. With a nervous whippet, a rambling pug scholar, a Doberman hiding a dangerous secret, and a talking dog who has waited her whole life to finally speak her mind, Ian sets out to find the legendary Harrier’s Horn—an artifact that answers only to a human hand, a canine paw, and a small silver cross from home.

The Horn of Caninia is the first adventure in The Adventures of Ian Richards—a fast, funny, heart-first middle grade fantasy about courage, loyalty, second chances, and a boy and his dog against an empire. Perfect for readers who love talking-animal kingdoms, portal adventures, and good guys who win the hard way.

FROM MALORY: The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island: A Felix Jones Adventure

Book Two of the Felix Jones Adventures. New to the series? Start with The Weird Map in Mr. Glimm’s Skull.

Felix Jones is the kind of kid who builds a frequency scanner from broken library barcode
readers and uses them to forge permission slips. He is not exactly the student teachers dream
of sending on school trips.

But when his Year 7 class arrives at the Museum of Time and Tides on fog-locked Blackglass
Island, something is immediately wrong. The curator doesn’t blink. Ever. The classmates who
were throwing scotch eggs twenty minutes ago are now breathing in perfect synchronization.
And beneath the volcanic rock, something is ticking — a deep pulse that keeps trying
to sand away all of Felix’s best ideas.

Archibald Rook has been planning this visit for a very long time. Blackglass Island isn’t
a museum. It’s a machine — a lighthouse built around a shard of alien crystal that broadcasts
a frequency capable of rewriting human thought into clockwork obedience. All he needs is
enough brains to run it at full power. Thirty-two Year 7 students will do nicely.

Felix and his best friend William are the only ones the signal can’t reach. So it’s just
two twelve-year-olds, a Victorian signal cannon, a swarm of clockwork crabs, and one very
loud brain against a man who wants to silence the entire world.

The Clockwork Terror of Blackglass Island is the second adventure in the Felix Jones
series — smart, fast, and funny enough to get the book-hater in your life to read past
page one.

FROM TC ROSS: Bloodstone: The God’s Ransom: Boons and Banes, Book 2

The curse on Magnolia Manor is broken. The beast is gone. Verity Magnolia is human again.

And the god who put that curse on her just escaped from prison.

The Binding Death — Zeus’s parting gift, branded into her wrist — draws her life force to his with every passing hour. September Zamfir made a promise when he rode into her enchanted forest: he would walk the world for her. He’s about to discover how literally he meant it.

The only way to break the Binding Death lies with Hades himself, who hasn’t been seen in decades. To reach him, Sept and Verity will have to cross the Appalachian mountains, navigate the territory of rogue shifters, visit a goddess who holds ancient grudges, and eventually cross an ocean now patrolled by Poseidon’s dragons — all before Zeus heals enough to come looking for what he’s owed.

Their small company grows into something none of them planned: a werelion Warden from the Blue Ridge mountains, Artemis and her arrows, a mysterious little girl who may be the missing daughter of Hades and Persephone, a half-brother Cryptik with a rebel’s heart, and a flying air schooner that won’t survive its maiden voyage quite as long as they’d hoped.

Meanwhile, at the Gehrig Workshop, Sept’s youngest brother Sunny is learning to be a Tinker with one arm and a clockwork replacement — one near-disaster at a time.

Bloodstone: The God’s Ransom is the second book in the Boons and Banes series — a gaslamp historical fantasy set in 1887 America, where magical bloodlines run old and deep, the gods are not myths, and the debt between them and the people they’ve wronged keeps coming due.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: THE WATSON PROGRAM: A Science Fiction Mystery

Fifteen-year-old Mallen de la Pena lives aboard a cityship, a star-faring vessel with a crew of thousands. Since his parents were killed on an exploratory mission Mal has led an isolated existence that is almost completely divorced from the rest of the crew; his only real companion is the cityship’s computer, Zhang. The lonely Mal is happy to have the chance to aid eminent archeologist Jonathan Archer catalog a collection of alien artifacts, but his excitement turns to horror when the ship’s teleportation device suffers a catastrophic malfunction and Archer is killed. Then, only a few hours later, Mal himself almost dies – in a million-to-one accident. Only then does he begin to understand: Jonathan Archer did not die by chance – he was murdered. When the authorities refuse to believe him, Mal must become a Sherlock Holmes to find the killer, with Zhang as his Doctor Watson…

FROM HARDING MCFADDEN: Beyond 175

RETURN TO THE LOST CONTINENT

In 1915, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the master of adventure fiction, wrote Beyond 30, a prophetic vision about our world locked onto a course certain to lead us to a horrendous World War. That global nightmare became a reality in ways the brilliant Burroughs couldn’t imagine, and so he never returned to the apocalyptic setting he’d created. This was a rarity for a writer who loved to pen series, ala Tarzan, Barsoom, Pellucidar, and many, many others. Now, after a hundred and ten years, writer Harding McFadden, himself a devoted Burroughs fan, has picked up the thread of Beyond 30 and offered up a powerful sequel that would have made the Master proud. Filled with bizarre creatures, barren wastelands, and insane villains, Beyond 175 explores the frigid, barren landscape of the once mighty Russian Empire. Here is a novel filled with excitement, thrills, and adventure that pays homage to the great Edgar Rice Burroughs.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Family Law

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Dragon in the Foie Gras (Timelines Universe Book 3)

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She’s just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra’ (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name “Sanddoom”), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug “kitchen” that’s been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant “mules”. That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the “kitchen” and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .

. . . but it’s not to be. A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it’s up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got

A Dragon In The Foie Gras

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Chained Adept: A Lost Wizard’s Tale

MEET A POWERFUL WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS–AND AN UNBREAKABLE CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.

Have you ever wondered how you might rise to a dangerous situation and become the hero that was needed?

The wizard Penrys has barely gained her footing in the country where she was found three years ago, chained around the neck and wiped of all knowledge. And now, an ill-planned experiment has sent her a quarter of the way around her world.

One magic working has called to another and landed Penrys in the middle of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away.

No one has any reason to trust her amid rumors of wizards where they don’t belong. And she fears to let them know just what she can do — especially since she can’t explain herself to them and she doesn’t know everything about herself either.

Penrys has her own problems, and she doesn’t have any place in this conflict. But they need her, whether they realize it or not. And so she’s determined to try and lend a hand, if she can. Whatever it takes.

And once she discovers there’s another chained adept, even stronger than she is, she’s hooked. Friend or foe, she has questions for him — oh, yes, she does.

All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.

The Chained Adept is the first book of the series.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Five from Nouvelle Bruges (The Occupations of Nouvelle Bruges and New Lyon Book 3)

In an occupied city where every movement is documented and every document is monitored, a hotel concierge discovers five names in an overnight manifest bearing a designation that appears in no official vocabulary. The designation means one thing: these men are to be made to vanish.

Élise Marceau has spent eleven months reading every document that crosses her desk. She has mapped the occupation’s administrative systems with the same thoroughness she brings to managing the Hôtel Aurore. She knows how the apparatus works — and, more usefully, she knows where it doesn’t.

The five men she sets out to save are a railway freight scheduler, a former detective, a structural engineer, a linguist, and a shipping logistics administrator — professionals whose expertise the occupation has decided constitutes a threat. What follows is not a rescue. It is an argument in document form: a demonstration that systems can be defeated from within, using their own logic, by people who understand them.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Draw One In The Dark (The Shifter Series Book 1)

Deep in the Colorado Rockies, Kyrie Smith has mastered the art of keeping secrets: like how she turns into a panther at will, or how she’s trying to solve a string of shifter murders while serving up the daily special. But she’s not the only one with something to hide.

Take her coworker Tom Ormson—your typical guy next door, if your typical guy could transform into a dragon and might have accidentally killed someone. Then there’s the lion-shifting cop investigating the murders, a guilt-ridden father, and a trio of dragon shifters hunting for something called the Pearl of Heaven.

As if navigating a world of supernatural intrigue wasn’t complicated enough, Tom’s falling for Kyrie, discovering powers that shouldn’t exist, and learning that trust is a two-way street paved with decades of secrets. In Goldport, Colorado, where the coffee’s always hot and the shifters are always watching, solving a murder might be the easiest part of Kyrie’s day.

Welcome to small-town life where everyone has something to hide—and some of those secrets have scales, claws, and a tendency to roar.

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: place