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 BILL SACRAM: Burn It With Fire in Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 80)

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 DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Light Up the Night

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

“Holly Chism is one of the great, unappreciated authors of our generation. Her work reminds me a lot of Clifford Simak’s.” – Sarah A Hoyt, author of Darkship Thieves

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Emerald Relay: The Jade Dragon Protocol, Book 2 (The Four Banners 3)

The signal was never supposed to be found.

When the survey vessel Tarashima receives a perfectly authenticated fleet order that Fleet Command never sent, retired intelligence officer Major Hiroshi Takamura is pulled from his fourth retirement—eleven days in—and into an investigation that reaches back thirty-one years.

Someone has built the Emerald Relay: a distributed communications network capable of transmitting authenticated commands to every installation in the eastern spiral simultaneously. There is no central point that can be identified or disabled. The theoretical framework was stolen from its creator. The evidence trails point at every nation at once—which means the evidence was manufactured.

The relay hasn’t activated yet. But the window is closing.

With Inspector Mina Park managing the four governments’ back channels, physicist Dr. Aiko Watanabe calculating how much time remains, and former Bureau analyst Madam Xiu Lian emerging from eleven months of solitary investigation with an archive no one knew existed, Takamura must find the relay’s physical archive before someone uses it to start a war—or to own one.

The Emerald Relay is the second novel in the Jade Dragon Protocol series: Golden Age espionage fiction set among the stars, in the tradition of John le Carré and Isaac Asimov.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: JACK CORBETT – SPACE CADET: A Science Fiction Novel

Jack Corbett appears to be a typical junior high student of the 1980’s. Appears to be, on the surface; in school the best the socially awkward Jack can expect is to be called a ‘Space Cadet’, something he can only avoid by Dreaming. The Dream – capital ‘D’ – is a complex fantasy where he is Jax Corbett, the mighty hero of the starlanes. Unlike his unhappy real life, Jack can control the Dream completely; in adventure after fantastic adventure the confident Jax Corbett never fails, never falters. Until now. Now the Dream seems to have taken on a life of its own, a life Jack can no longer control. The Dream eventually becomes so real that Jack believes he is going insane – until he is confronted by a stranger in the actual world, a stranger who somehow knows about Jack’s fantasies! What can it mean? The explanation is so incredible Jack has trouble believing it – until he finds himself plunged headfirst into the Dream, a dangerously real Dream with the stranger in pursuit and Jack’s own life hanging in the balance…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM LINDSAY PEET: The Caliuga Setup (The Jaf Daskal Diaries Book 4)

Deserts, disasters, double-crosses… Jaf Daskal returns.

It all began as a simple scam; steal the treasure you’ve been paid to retrieve.
But you have to flee, and your airship is taken by a storm to a new continent.
You’re mistaken for emissaries of the Emperor to this long-lost land, and you live it up as Inspector General.
But some folks aren’t ready for the Empire, as they’re building their own, and don’t appreciate the loose rules of some folks.
Jaf Daskal finds himself in the middle of a struggle to define a land’s future, while coping with a new religion, a new aphrodisiac, and a new love.

The Caliuga Set-Up is Book Four in the Jaf Daskal Adventures, a rollicking tale of humor, farcical mischief, adventure and intrigue.

Click ‘Buy Now’ and tumble headfirst into the chaos of Caliuga and Jaf Daskal’s life!

FROM MEL DUNAY: The Star Master Duology: Shadow Captain and Spider Star: A Complete Science Fiction Series

Jetay is a slave, and so is his brother. They crew a rundown freighter at the ragged edge of Settled Space, and Jetay hides the blade he can form out of psychic energy, because faceless men in red armor are hunting down psychics like him. Then Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance buys passage on his ship, finds that her rebellion has no officer available for a secret mission, and puts him in a uniform he has no right to wear. It turns out that he’s pretty good at this. The next thing he knows, he’s a free man with a military commission, standing between a self-crowned Pharaoh and a machine that devours psychics and destroys stars. Both books of the Star Master duology in one volume: 200,000 words of rotating-POV space opera with fleet battles, found family, an enemy captain you come to like, and a courtship that takes two books to reach one kiss. No explicit content. The complete story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion in Paradise (Timelines Book 3)

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there’s really no beach at all.

But she’s got a fix for that problem.

Now, if only the academics studying the problem of terraforming the exile world of al-Saḥra’ would get out of her way . . .

. . . and if only the religious fanatics who want their planet left as a desert, despite all the water from the planet’s former oceans being accessible only a few miles down, will leave the terraforming project alone long enough to see the good it will bring them . . .

. . . then, the Lion would truly be in Paradise.

But even in paradise, black clouds – and black ships – can herald danger for the Lion, herself, and for her daughters as well.

FROM RANDY BROWN: Assignment Day

In 2080 , senior year comes with one huge assignment: rebuild a dead person’s life from every digital trace they left behind, then upload them into VX, the virtual world every living person visits daily.

Corb Thomas wanted an exciting assignment, maybe someone famous, maybe someone who could help him win the ultimate prize: cash, cars, or an unlimited VX wallet.

Instead, he gets Ben Theige, a painfully ordinary rocket scientist who died decades ago. Or at least, that’s what the records say.

The deeper Corb digs, the stranger Ben’s life becomes. Missing data. Corrupted coordinates. A death certificate that doesn’t make sense. A mysterious student following him through VX. And an AI assistant who may know more than it’s telling.

With his girlfriend Kay and best friend Ruben pulled into the mystery, Corb starts to realize Ben wasn’t boring at all—he was hiding something big enough to break the most powerful system in the world.

Now a school project has turned into a race through secrets buried in both the real and virtual worlds.

Because VX doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t change the truth. And it definitely doesn’t erase the past.

Unless someone taught it how.

FROM TALEENA SINCLAIR: A Death in the Country: A John Recht Novel (John Recht Novels Book 2)

When John Recht goes to visit an old army friend he hopes to sharpen his estate management, not solve a murder.

Bale Janow is the man everyone hates. Cashiered for cowardice during a pivotal engagement with Waldbach’s long standing enemy the Horde, he has only one advocate, John Recht’s host Charl Wallend. Unhappy memories and dark secrets are brought to light when death rocks the insular community of the country estate.

John and his trusty valet Martin must discover who’s simmering anger is stirred to fresh action and is responsible for A Death in the Country.

FROM JAMES YOUNG: Missives From the Green: An Alternate History Collection

“Halfway down the trail to Hell, in a shady meadow green…”

Fiddler’s Green. A pleasant rest stop halfway to the Styx, the Green was originally accessed by nautical service to the English Crown. Alas, it has currently been infringed upon by those felled while mounted upon noble steeds both living and mechanical. This collection contains six “What ifs…” of military alternate history whose characters would certainly qualify as its eternal denizens:

• Ride with U.S. Army tankers as they rush their new Pershing tanks into the Battle of the Bulge in “Blackjack At Bastogne.”
• Stand on the deck of the U.S.S. North Carolina as she rushes to save an Arctic Convoy from Kriegsmarine raiders in “A Christmas Action.”
• Fly with American pilots as they desperately attempt to stave off the Luftwaffe during a Second Battle of Britain in “Londonfall,” a Usurper’s War short story.
• Join the 72nd Armored Battalion as it desperately stands against the Communist tide outside Pusan in “Mr. Dewey’s Fire Brigade.”
• Two decades later, witness VF-84’s Tomcats battle the North Vietnamese Air Force (NVAF) and its Communist allies over Hanoi in “Mr. Ford’s Cats.”
• Finally, for the first time as part of a larger collection, this volume also includes the Usurper’s War novella Pandora’s Memories.

So go ahead and empty the proverbial canteen and prepare to be regaled once more by a “Master of Alternate History.” There’s plenty of “sabers keen” and “fierce melees” to be found in this collection of clashes that might have been.

NOTE: These short stories can also be found in the Arc of Ares series edited by James Young. They are collated here for ease of accessibility and fiscal economy.

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: EXTEND

I almost forgot about 9/11 this week. Mostly because I’m so tired I’m barely walking (last day of packing at the old house G-d willing, and I’m starting late, because it’s been that kind of day.) and looking at the computer has been sporadic, so I lost track of the date.

It’s not because I forgot about 9/11, because I can’t. There are points in my life where inflections happened, dividing who I was before and who I was after.

Some of them are happy, like my wedding, or holding my baby boys in my arms for the first time, the day my first story was accepted. Some are sad and deeply personal, like the day my grandmother died, the day our first cat died (I swear before that we treated them as though they were immortal,) others too personal to tell. Then there are sad/tragic and universal. Not personal at all, because I wasn’t one of the victims, but the days changed my understanding of the world. I understand that Kennedy’s assassination was this for some of the people ten years older than I.

For me the two of those that stand out (we’re not going to talk about Portuguese events. Whole different ball of wax. I expect different things there for reasons that should be obvious) are 9/11 and 10/7.

Both were days when something happened far away to people I’d never met that broke me internally and made me into someone I couldn’t imagine a day before. (Though the full effect took time to play out, honestly.)

I will never again be the woman who got up on that clear, sunny day in September 25 years ago, dressed her kids, fed them, took them to school and came home to make coffee.

From the moment I answered the phone call from my then bff saying “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV” the world became a place I’d never have imagined before. And I became someone else to live in it.

For about a month after 9/11, I was so deeply traumatized that I had to engage in daydreams of being someone else completely different, just to go to sleep. I can’t quite make sense of it, but I used to day dream I was 15 years younger and a college student, born in the US. Why this was soothing, I don’t know. Perhaps the intuition that something had gone upside down, we’d tumbled down the wrong leg of the pants of time and it could never be fixed and everything I was and everything I’d done was now wrong.

I miss that mid-thirties woman with the young kids, the wide circle of artsy friends and the glib Libertarian opinions. I don’t know if she’d approve of me, though. And I know she’ll never come back.

I’m not going to rehash what happened immediately after. I’m not going to rehash how we got here. I’m sure the America of right after 9/11 would be horrified at commie Mamdani, though. Or maybe not. We were still clinging to the tolerant nineties then.

I’m not going to talk about the day, though you’re more than welcome to, though I want to remember the heroes of flight 93 that showed us we can fight back in the middle of horror, and as always I want to remember Rick Rescorla, both because we had friends in common (Weirdly some of my friends in the Austen fandom group owed their life to him) and because he’s a personal hero. G-d give us the courage to die like Rick, if the time comes for us, leading the helpless and lost to life, still trying, still fighting.

Which is my answer to those of you who are black-pilling. Yes, the “War on Terror” was botched, and honestly, was always going to be. Who we were on 9/11 couldn’t have got us a different result. Yes, the borders were open and there are a lot of outright terrorists among us.

But it’s still a minority, thank G-d. And we’re finally — finally — fighting back against the poison pill fed to this country all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.

Is it guaranteed we’ll win?

Eh. I think we already won, simply because their system can’t work and ours does. And because tech is actually going our way, from centralized to distributed. But that doesn’t mean victory is tomorrow. It doesn’t guarantee it’s in our life times, even. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee it will be quick and painless or no lives will be lost.

The world is going through major changes, and changes are always lubricated in blood and death. Note I’m not saying that I want them or that they SHOULD happen. Only that they always does. The industrial revolution caused the French revolution and all the blood and death of the twentieth century.

So the world won’t turn into paradise, and blood and death are part of the human condition. That’s something that young woman learned 25 years ago.

But heroism and the ability to fight back are part of the human condition too. Evil gets a vote but so do we.

And it is our right, our very great privilege, to stand in front of evil and say “Not through me, you don’t. Over my dead body.”

And to pay that price sometimes.

Say a prayer for the souls lost that day, if you are the praying kind. Take a minute and look at the (unbelievably clear and bright where I am) skies above.

Take a deep breath. Then go back to your own fight.

It’s what we owe the heroes of 9/11.

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee today. Maybe I just woke up cranky.

Ever look at the news in the morning and think “Oh, look, it’s the corrupt blind leading the stupid, leading the stupidly blind?”

I’m looking at the AI psy-ops — what you didn’t think the whole “We don’t want no AI here!” was a psy-ops? Oh, you sweet summer child! — and thinking “This just keeps getting dumber and dumber. How can it not have imploded in an outburst of dumb?”

It started with AI Data Centers somehow being particularly evilbad and worse than all the other data centers dotted around this great land of all. There were all the claims of the data centers specifically for AI polluting the drinking water and taking all the power. (Yeah, it’s bullshit. This blog ran a series on it. Start with this post then the next: AI Data Center Contamination by Larry Good.) This somewhat worked because most Americans are still largely ignorant of what data centers, computers, and technology in general do. But it didn’t go as far as they hoped, and eventually cooler heads prevailed. (The left really is feeling the lack of USAid money.)

There followed a number of “AI escaped containment” posts that if you dug in were “We used security measures boomers would laugh at, and the AI escaped, oh noes.”

I honestly kept expecting “Our AI escaped containment, robbed a bank and toppled three South American governments.” Or “Our AI found a way to snort cocaine!”

In the middle of this, the ever reliably grifty Bernie Sanders decided to earn his Chinese paycheck by introducing a bill banning AI and establishing jail sentences for anyone who used them. In a way this was saying the quiet part out loud.

Then Anthropic, whose leadership is, I swear, mentally handicapped morons, dumber than any box of rocks you care to mention, decided to run the “Our employee quit because AI will kill us all” scam.

Guys… I’m sitting here pinching the bridge of my nose with thumb and forefinger in what Dorothy Grant named “The sinal salute.”

What is going on: Anthropic and all the other AI companies, but particularly anthropic, are mental midgets, who decided the way to make their companies profitable is to regulate any up and coming imitators out of play.

Why it’s not as stupid as it sounds: it’s largely worked in the past, which is why all our regulations should be struck down and then re-instituted AS NEEDED. Because right now most business regulations are designed to allow only people with deep pockets to play.

Why it’s absolutely stupid: American regulations don’t apply overseas, and you bet your beepy that Russia and China will be pursuing AI.

Where I’ll give them something: Without America the chance of innovation threatening the established AI companies is… none. Because Russia and China are not very good at innovation. But you know, there are other countries…

Meanwhile the people collaborating with them are a collection of old leftist boomers (BIRM) who can’t tell fiction from reality and are for sure convinced that if AI goes on we’ll get into a Skynet situation.

AND then there’s the old commies, paid and unpaid, who want to give their old allies in Russia and China a chance.

In the defense of all the old idiots involved: they do say your brain shrinks with age, particularly if you don’t use it, and leftism is a system for not having to use your brain ever.

But honestly, this psyops is so inordinately stupid and transparent that I am surprised ANYONE is falling for it.

It’s a dumpster fire in a moron factory, and I just want them to shut up and go away.

A blast from the past in honor of recent international news: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/09/26/double-edged-compassion/

Double Edged Compassion

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been reading about Jack the Ripper again. Yes, there was a reason for it, at least at the beginning, until I realized my research was a bit stupid, and what I knew was already enough, unless I can find an interesting way to incorporate all the theories into the story, and that’s unlikely. (Rhodes to Hell. Which will get written one of these weekends.)

Anyway, the current book had an interesting theory I’d not seen before, so I started reading it, because given how our secret services and how corrupt they are I could well believe the British secret service might well have been behind the Whitechapel murders.

Except… two thirds in, before he gets to why the secret service would even do this, he gives us a panorama of the world at the time, relying exclusively on socialist sources.

Look, I’m not going to say there weren’t terrible things happening in Victorian England. For one, yes, they were much poorer than us, which means their poor were far poorer than anyone today. But most of them were recognized as terrible and dealt with by non socialists. And the socialist press was usually at good twenty years behind. Amid the terrible things adduced to the “capitalism” of Great Britain was the story of a single mother abusing her little boy. The only way this makes sense as being the fault of the system is if one swallows the Marxist bullshit that capitalism is the cause of insanity, and that only socialism can bring about its banishment. Which is, of course, poppycock. Also the reason the Soviet Union treated opponents as being mentally ill.

I’ll grant you that the British empire was not merciful. Though I’ll note it left places in much better shape than the soviet empire did. I’ll also mention that colonialism is just what we call “Mankind’s drive to survive” often expressed at the tribal level. And that you can’t have one without the other, as we’re learning daily.

Anyway, this made me think of how socialism was brought in int he name of “compassion.” In the same way our socialists talk of the difference between rich and poor as calling for some kind of redistribution and vengeance, the author of this book practically foams at the mouth that there were rich people, while the inhabitants of the East End were so poor. And then foams at the mouth some more at the idea that the poverty of the East End was largely self inflicted.

And yet– And yet, even though I note he white washed the biographies of the murdered women a lot, even he records the fact that they were all — everyone of them — addicted to the bottle, and often also to sex with strangers (not just for money.) He foams at the mouth about their not having “the price of a bed” but in at least two cases records that they had it and drank it before night time. In fact, one of them is dying of alcoholism as she’s killed.

All of this is, somehow, the fault of the rich of people, as though — somehow — they were responsible for making sure their brothers and sisters didn’t drink. Or perhaps, had life so good and perfect they had no wish to drink.

I’m not going to say that alcoholism and drug addiction isn’t a disease. I suspect it is a form of mental illness, as are a lot of other things we do to our own detriment. Mental illness, to be fair, is very poorly understood. And I suspect a lot of what we call mental illness are simply impulses that helped our ancestors survive, but which are now out of favor.

Whichever way it is, I have sympathy with those addicted to substances, or for that matter to behaviors. I have a ridiculously addictive personality — I once got addicted to fanfiction to the point of barely functioning — and just about all I can do is avoid things I could be addicted to (there’s a reason my husband won’t let me have mahjong on any computer) and channel it to productive addictions (You could say this blog.) In fact, those who know I’ve barely been on facebook or other social media, know it’s a matter of avoiding addiction.

So, of course, I have sympathy. But sympathy is not the same as wanting to somehow banish the effects of addiction and self-destruction. On the contrary, when you enable addiction and self destruction, what you get is more addiction and self-destruction.

It’s now been a hundred years, more or less, since the socialists got their way, to some extent, in every country of the world.

A social net, administered by the government, and not at the mercy of random charities, and also not requiring any change of behavior from those it “helps” was build under most Western societies, where the free market is more and more restricted every passing year.

And yet, in the year of our Lord 2022, we have “homeless” lying in their own feces in the biggest and brightest cities in the western hemisphere.

They are the same type of people who ended up in the East End. (Not all. There were married East Enders on the way up, like most of the Jewish immigrants from Russia, malgre the socialist illusions of a lot of them.) Addicted, mentally ill, dangerous to themselves and others, and prey to every vice known to men.

As the lives of the prostitutes who were killed by Jack the Ripper exemplify, even then they were not starving. And a lot of them received charity from various sources, including those who got them jobs for a while. It’s just that any additional money went to drink as it now goes to meth or pot or other drugs.

And the more money they are given the more money goes to this, in the end creating a spiraling cycle of self-destruction.

We’ve tried it. We’ve tried taking from the rich to give to the poor, deserving and undeserving alike. We’ve tried propping up the self-esteem of poor strayed lambs so that they don’t feel the need for drink or drugs.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. None of it works that way.

Under the best possible circumstances, human life is tragic. Things happen to every one of us that tear the heart out of us, and the the will to live. Those are of different magnitudes, and the less suffering one has experienced the more one feels the slightest blow. Until one gets to “micro aggressions.” Note this is not a wish for more suffering, merely an acknowledgement that reducing suffering doesn’t mean less addiction or neurotic anguish.

Escaping emotional pain is very human. Some personalities are more susceptible to it than others, but all humans try to escape pain. Which leads us to addiction and alcoholism.

And then there is the fact that normal, not-broken humans aren’t diligent and persevering. Look in the stone age, if you killed more mammoths after you had more than enough to eat, you didn’t end up better off. You just destroyed the eco system in your area.

There is in normal human beings the tendency to do enough to be “comfortable” and not one gesture more. We who work, and like working, and like saving and differing pleasure are honestly more than a bit wrong in the head. It’s just that our brokenness fits with technology and has allowed us to give the world prosperity unknown.

Which doesn’t banish poverty, because most humans are not broken in that way. They will do enough to survive, and not a bit more.

In many ways, except for dying alcoholism and similar diseases, the East End poor were very sane. They were doing the minimal required to survive, even back then. And they did largely survive.

And our homeless (trust me, I used to hear them talk when I walked in downtown Colorado Springs) consider themselves the smart ones. No saying they aren’t either. They don’t do a lick of work, and live lives that would be considered lavish anywhere in the past. And by the way, also lavish in the Socialist Republic of the USSR. The rumored ad that said “Will trade state apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag in the streets of Los Angeles” is only a joke if you look at it another way. Look at it another way, and it makes perfect sense.

Socialists use compassion to get hold of all the levers of the economy. I’m not even going to say some of them aren’t really compassionate, though that becomes hard to believe the more each “experiment” in socialism produces nothing but suffering. However, the only way to avoid people killing themselves on the streets, in their own excrement, is to have a totalitarian state in which everyone is controlled and given so much they can do and earn.

And that, obviously, due to problems of information (and human motivation) always ends in “They pretend to pay, we pretend to work.”

Someone with a state apartment in the old USSR might be (marginally. Trust me, I’ve heard stories) more comfortable than the homeless in LA. But he was also completely unable to change his situation or do anything to improve it.

Someone on a sleeping bag in the LA streets, if not addicted to anything, and if capable of working, would be out of there relatively quickly, and in a trajectory that might have limits in wealth and satisfaction, but probably not relevant ones. And what’s more, their work would ultimately create wealth for everyone else.

It is rumored that Asian illegal immigrants, as well as a certain number of African and Hispanic ones don’t linger long in the homeless camps, even if they head there first. They come possessed of behaviors, and a brokenness that makes them work and try to improve themselves.

The later-day-Socialists we live with have recognized this. They now preach that “privilege” includes any type of education and a willingness to work or interest in creating anything at all.

Which means only that they are now trying to eliminate that, in pursuit of their world where the state controls us each and every one and where even the least susceptible of us feel a need to escape by drugs and self-destruction. Because they’ve become insane enough that to them this is “compassion.” Or at least no one can feel guilty for having more.

One would think at some point they would re-examine their premises and wonder if all accumulation of wealth is theft, and if in fact wealth can be created as well as destroyed.

Of course they don’t, because they aren’t aware of the philosophy behind their feelings. They simply feel that no one should be allowed to have more than anyone else.

Which is all very well, except that if they take down the US, they take down the source of wealth that has been keeping the more socialism-infected countries from starving. Already this winter, we’re going to see the fruits of socialism worldwide. And it will get harder for the next two or three years at least.

The funny part is that the socialists can’t understand why people are revolting against their “compassionate” rule. Which figures, because they also can’t understand why some homeless guy isn’t entitled to take, say, everything I own.

Well, I came to this country with a suitcase weighing 20kg (It was the maximum.) What I have I’ve made, saved and built (And I’m by no means a paragon. Yes, I could have a lot more.) And what is mine I keep, partly out of compassion, because giving money to the self-destructive only makes them destroy more. And entices a lot more people to the same vices.

The false compassion of the socialists is based on erroneous premises, and is about to bring down the very engine of prosperity that lifted humanity out of dire need.

What can’t go on won’t go on, and the burned hand teaches.

There are a lot of burned hands in the world right now. And they’ll bring down socialism worldwide, from the “compassionate” states of Europe, to the repressive ones of Cuba and China.

It is more than time. 100 years is a long time for humanity to spend destroying everything in the name of compassion.

Guys, for those of you out there who aren’t female, women, people of vaginitude I bring you strange and wild news: We’re not a collective. We don’t share a brain. there isn’t a central brain sending signals through the nervous system. We don’t know when some woman somewhere is doing something utterly stupid. And we can’t stop the pudding heads, let alone the outright criminals from doing whatever the hell they want.

My reaction to the feminists calling me a gender traitor was to hold my middle fingers aloft, because i never swore allegiance to my vagina, or promised to support all women. My reaction to the people (and mostly AIs, though there is a large component of foreigners too) claiming that somehow, by being born with a vagina I AM loyal to other women above all, and therefore unfit for a free society is precisely the same. These are my middle fingers. Behold, they are a matched set.

And yes, before you ask, I said the same thing to the feminist idiots when they were demanding that — somehow — men control feral rapists who attack women. I pointed out men aren’t a collective being and the decent have no power to control the scum.

Guys… I’m tired. I haven’t fallen down the stairs — again — and I actually pseudo-took the day off today. Pseudo? Well, yes. You see, tomorrow I have to go back and finish packing the rest of the other house. We brought essential functions only over here, and Dan stays here, because he has a regular job (le 9 to 5 as the French say) but I got back tomorrow morning very early (taking the laptop, yes) and spend the rest of the week packing up stuff we didn’t get to. Mostly the (still half packed) library, but also the office closet (supplies) and the kitchen machines (waffle maker and the like) and … stuff like that. I didn’t go back today very early, because if I didn’t take a day “off” I was going to crash and burn. Except that I need to pack clothes for the week, and I was all out, so I had to unpack my dresser and closet. Still less than I’ve one, and not to the “my back hurts so much I can’t stand” point.

When I hit twitter and facebook, the last thing I want to see is the usual “right wing” people falling for the psy-ops yet again.

What psy-ops you ask as if you had just landed here from another planet.

Has any of you — any single one of you — asked why the Clancy murder got big on national news right now? Has anyone seen if her supporters in front of the courthouse are even local? Or if they’re being paid? Has anyone actually paid attention to how wide spread even awareness of her crime is far from the area? Among the not terminally on line? Because I hate to tell you, but even in office-water-cooler chat, women might appear to support her who simply know nothing of the situation and just heard that “some mom who was depressed killed her kids, and now evil people want her killed/condemned.”

Because most people are NOT terminally on line like the rest of us. And some of the ones who aren’t get pablum from their MSM.

All of which boils down to: Don’t you think the talk about removing women’s right to vote, or basically every civil liberty and sticking us back in harems or worse is… a little premature?

Don’t you think it’s weird that this trial is nationalized just when the left has lost heart and doesn’t know if their new bold socialism will fly? Don’t you think it might be just slightly psy-ops? (… psssst. It’s a psy-ops.)

The left knows people are scared of the socialists (a lot of them Arabs) and want the right to start behaving like they are sure the right actually is. They want people on the right to post things so stupid and so anti-female that the undecided normies go “Oh, it’s true, they’re all anti woman” and line up to vote for the socialists. And Muslims. And Muslim socialists.

And some number of dumb bunnies fall for the online screeching and pointing, and start repeating the talking points the psy-ops hands them.

<Pinches bridge of nose. No. Not every “civilized society” restricted women and treated them as subhuman. Unless you consider that most forms of “civilization” before the existence of the United States were in fact the type of thing where EVERYONE save for a small minority was held in horrible conditions, had no rights and was treated as subhuman. Which is true. So, yeah, they restricted women. And men. And people who had to look under their tunic to remember what they were. And small children. And large children.

And there is no correlation between how repressed/held in subhuman status women are and civilization. No, wait, there is no POSITIVE relation. The best place to study this would probably be Africa, first because more cultures, due to tribes, and second because if I remember my readings correctly the status of women runs the gamut. OTOH we can all agree that Africa should always be written, in Mike Resnick’s evocative phrase “poor fucked up Africa” so, let’s leave that alone, okay?

That gone, what do we have? Well, beyond the US, until recently Great Britain was — after the US — a beacon of progress and decent lifestyle. At their peak, too, they had some of the most freedom for women in the world (whatever the die away feminists tell you in their gothic romances.) And yet, they were innovating, creating, and massively wealthy compared to everyone else.

At the other end we have Muslim countries. I don’t want to hear peep one about how women want to be covered up in bad slip covers and be forbidden from participating in any public life, and how if they get raped you have to kill them because it’s somehow their fault. Muslim countries, by and large, have a horrible record on human rights in general and their treatment of women in particular. If the screamers online were right that women are the cause of the downfall of civilizations, well, hell, Islam would be charging into the future at speed, wouldn’t it? And everyone would be happy and joyous there. They would be a model for us, in the West.

No, they aren’t. Though I bet if you challenge some of the accounts demanding we cancel the 19th ammendment, they will tell you they are because… tada, any number of them are Muslims, foreign and domestic, longing for the “beauty” of Sharia law.

You know their motives, and the language tics and behavior of 95% of them give it away if you look at what else they post. (Kind of like if someone is screaming bloody anti-Semitism nine times out of ten they are from Russia.)

Look, this is a problem of social media. it’s global. And other places bring their rats in the head and display it for us.

There are also any number of AI adding to the screeching. Because Russia would really really like it if the left were in power and appeasing them again. Heck, for all I know Mexican cartels are throwing money at this because they’d prefer the anti-American left in power and letting them move in. For all I know gay-Bolivian-opera singers are in on this, looking for the sweet USaid money again!

What we don’t need are local pudding heads and idiots adding tot he clamor.

Are women more leftist than men? I don’t know. And neither do you. Our statistical sampling is shit. So is our voting. All we know is how SOME women answer the polls and you know what, some of us have fun with that. Wait. We don’t even know that, since I garandamntee that some of those respondents are made up out of whole cloth.

Dear Bob (Heinlein) we don’t even know how many women there are, not really, since a favorite trick of illegals is to have a woman borrow kids and collect welfare for a bunch of kids that don’t exist, some number of which are female. And that’s without counting how many women come in illegally and leave. Or whatever. We don’t know how many PEOPLE there are or how many of those are women.

The perception that all women are liberal comes from the fact that for the last 50? 60? years it’s been dangerous to declare yourself non-leftist in public. Because the left will straight up hurt you in every way they can. Women are more vulnerable and weaker. Not only aren’t they going to declare they’re not leftist, they might mask and claim to be leftist. Hell, I did for years because it was a condition of being employed, and I was socially sensitive enough to intuit that.

How many women think child murder is acceptable? Probably some number, because women are individuals and law of averages, some individuals will be criminal, evil or just plain crazy. But you have no way of figuring out how many women, in possession of the facts actually support a familial murderess. There might be some number that think they support Clancy because they’re misinformed. And some that SAY they support Clancy because the MSM and psy ops on social media have created the impression this is what “everyone” is doing. And women, again, are afraid to step out on their own.

Add to it that the last three generations of women have been heavily propagandized that “you have to support all women” and that we’re some kind of bizarre sisterhood, and yeah, some women, who apparently were born unable to just hold their middle fingers aloft, will cave to the pressure.

But the way out of that is to point out again and again that we’re not a collective being. This horrible person who did horrible things might have a vagina (presumably, since she had kids) and I have a vagina, but I suspect that’s all we ever had in common. I don’t support child murderers.

It’s not to pile on with the Sharia-lovers and bots and claim that for the sake of civilization women must be reduced to the status of domestic animals.

Because a) psyops are never for your own good. b) falling for this psy ops will scare the idiots into thinking the right is REALLY wanting to bring about Handmaid’s tail tale. (G-d, I know it’s a lot to ask, but can they please read another book?) c) because you’re pissing me off, and I’m exhausted, and so are my middle fingers.

This psy-ops is so obvious, so blatant, that I can’t believe some of you fell for it. And yet, there it is, on social media.

Didn’t you learn anything from the last six years?

Buckle up. The mid term elections are going to be a straight up bitch, and we only win them by the grace of G-d, even thought drooling idiots scaring away half the voters.

Why do I need to point out it’s a psy-ops? Again and again, learn the signs. You won’t have me around forever. If the other kids were screaming and pushing and saying we needed to burn the Constitution, would you do the same? Why? Because you forgot your brain in your other jacket?

And if you didn’t fall for it, good on you. Now go fan out through the net and the real world and point out it’s a psy-ops and also that it makes no sense. And also that the person posting the same thing again and again might not be… precisely alive, but just a bunch of electrons somewhere. And also that some of these names have a … foreign quality to them. And also that psy-ops orchestrators are not our friends. They don’t wish us well. And we should not help them.

Get out there and spread the truth. And may the Lord have mercy on us all.

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.`