According To Hoyt

*Because I’ve promised to give warning, since weird things seem to happen as soon as I clean, I’m going to be doing a quick clean after this, because the litter boxes are disgusting and the stairs are CRUNCHY. (With Litter.) So, you’ve been warned. – 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 PAM UPHOFF: Filling in the Blank (Chronicles of the Fall Book 24)

A short story thirty years before the main events of the Fall of the Alliance.

Amnesia? Drugs? Magic?
Ilari Mikhailov has just lost nineteen years of his life . . . and apparently he’s been busy.
Now does he confess that? Or try to slide unnoticed into a life he doesn’t remember?
Not helped by the realization that he wasn’t a very nice person . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: The Bard’s Curse: Bard’s Song Book One

In a world where words are power, a bard’s curse weighs heavy on those who draw his wrath.

Tuathal, master bard and prince of two realms, journeys north to his half-brother’s court. When Pyder of the Ford breaks the laws of hospitality, Tuathal’s satire brings ruin in its wake. But more than just righteous anger moves over field and forest. What began as an insult reveals far darker things moving in the realm Fiachta NoDomnail, low king of the Dunalaid.

A wandering bard and prince, Tuathal faces a war that will burn down all that his kindred have built. To stop it and lift a bard’s curse may cost more than he is willing to pay.

Words have power, but darker powers than those of man also have a say.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: KOSMOPOLIS: A Novel of Berlin

It is the summer of 1927, the peak of Berlin’s ‘Golden Twenties’, an age that is soon to come crashing down – although no one knows it yet. One citizen of golden-age Berlin is Erich Zeller, shell-shocked veteran of the Great War and a ‘confidential agent’, the European version of a private detective, who is seriously down on his luck. That is why, when new client Kathe Eichhorn asks him to locate her cousin Rosa Losch, Zeller takes the case – even though he instinctively knows Kathe is lying to him. Asking no questions, he searches the heights and the depths of the great German kosmopolis, never suspecting where the case will lead him or what it will ultimately mean to him – for not only will Kathe Eichhorn prove to be much more than just a client, Rosa Losch will prove to be much more than just an innocent missing person. She is, in fact, a key part of an international conspiracy that involves the governments of two nations – both of which are willing to kill to keep the conspiracy a secret…

FROM D. A. BROCK: The Lone Star, The Red Banner, and the Rising Sun: Republic of Texas Navy Book 4

December, 1941.

With the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and across the Far East, the war is now a true World War. The Axis nations appear to be at the height of their power, while the Allies are scrambling to recover from disaster after disaster.

In the middle of all this is the Republic of Texas. After nearly two years of war, the Texas Navy and Marine Corps have grown far beyond what the pre-war world could have imagined. Do they have what it takes to stay relevant in an alliance dominated by America, Britain, and the Soviet Union?

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Cataclysm

The end is coming.

Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Fox in the Henhouse (Timelines Universe Book 2)

Delaney Wolff Fox is a spy. A cute spy. A deadly spy.

A spy you want at your back when stuff gets real.

From a palatial office in Johannesburg, to a fancy whisky bar in Sydney, Australia, to a beautiful private beach in southwest Florida, to the great and wild city of New Orleans, Captain Delaney Fox, United States Space Force Marines (Intelligence Division) finds herself beset by assassins at every turn, while first saving an alien government’s valuable artifact from the South African cartel that’s stolen it, and then being assigned to guard said artifact while it completes a world tour, on loan from that same alien government.

But like the proverbial fox in the proverbial henhouse, you can count on Delaney to complete the mission and come out with the prize, intact and in hand – even if the “farmer” isn’t all that keen about her doing so.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Witch’s Daughter (Empires of Magic Book 2)

Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.

Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..

Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.

Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.

Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Grandmaster’s Gambit

The disastrous war of 1913 is over, and young journalist Isaak Babel has used his fame as a war correspondent to win a peacetime job covering an international chess tournament in New York City. However, trouble is aboard the airship Grossdeuschland, in the form of the notorious Bolshevik terrorist Koba and his henchmen. Men with a dark plan, and New York City will not welcome their visit

FROM CELIA HAYES: Return to Alder Grove

Love in all the wrong places – Caro Robertson was a professional researcher, employee and occasional on-air reporter for a national public radio outlet; the perfect job, the perfect condo, the perfect fiancée. She had the college education, the job, the social position, the perfect life … and then in one fell swoop, everything went sour. Wrong. Disastrously wrong. In the space of a single week, she lost her beloved pet, the perfect fiancée and then her job. What was left for her, but to return to Alder Grove, the little town in Texas where she lived as a child and try to rebuild that life and a new career?
Mark Bascomb – owner of a small fabrication business, small-town handyman, veteran and high-school drop-out; everything in life that Caro Robertson wasn’t. Could they find common ground with each other, a common interest, even love, when they are so different?
Find out when the sparks fly in Alder Grove, in this short romance novel by the author of the Chronicles of Luna City, and the Adelsverein Trilogy.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Three Worlds (The Aurigan Conflict)

The Kingdom of New Norway is dying.

When the Aurigan Empire launches a devastating offensive, defeat becomes inevitable. There will be no relief fleet. No miracle weapons. No last-minute rescue.

Instead, the king authorizes Operation Long Winter—an extraordinary evacuation that sends scientists, engineers, military leaders, and thousands of civilians into exile while one forgotten fortress remains behind to buy them time.

At Fort Harald, Colonel Halvorsen and a handful of instructors prepare the least likely defenders imaginable: cadets who have never fought a real battle.

Their sacrifice becomes the first link in an extraordinary chain.

Across three occupied worlds, refugees become resistance fighters. Small victories become organized rebellion. Secret networks spread from colony to colony, carrying hope farther than any fleet can travel.

Years later, when liberation finally comes, history remembers the great victory.

Only a few remember the people who made that victory possible.

The Three Worlds is an epic tale of courage, duty, and ordinary men and women who refuse to surrender their future. Perfect for readers who enjoy David Weber, Jack Campbell, and classic military science fiction rooted in honor, strategy, and the resilience of free people.

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: Language

I’ll do the promo post AND a regular post tomorrow. I found myself unavoidably detained away from home for most of the day. Nothing bad, just one small thing after another. If it makes you feel better, Miss Muse is most seriously displeased with me. She was waiting at the door from the garage with the look of “Hooman? How long have you been out? And did I sign permission for this?” And is now punishing me by not being on my lap.

To you and to her: I’m sorry. I’ll try to give warning next time.

Goodbye Havelock Vetinary Hoyt, aka Fuzzy Pooka, aka Squeaks, aka Fuzz Butt, Last of the cats the boys grew up with, Last of Colorado cats.

Look, I know, I’m not stupid. I know he was weedling on himself — pretty much all the time — and he couldn’t see or smell very well, He still called for his buddy, Greebo, his closest cat-friend, gone six years now. And just this week, he seemed to be expending all his effort into making his back legs work.

But I still hoped he’d go quietly, in his sleep, in one of the places he loved, like the extensively battered too small little bed.

It wasn’t to be. He was now in pain all the time, and we couldn’t let it go on. For humans it might have the advantage of expiating sins, but cats can’t sin. They have no moral judgement. And for our pets, the only rule they know is “keep my human happy.”

He did that. He was a good cat. The best cat possible. And we’re going to miss him every day of the rest of our lives.

Havey, when we brought him home from the mini-golf course. Well, after 3 baths, one of them professional. We got him from a mini golf course. People were hitting him with sticks for playing with balls. My younger son plopped down on the floor, called “kitten, kitten, kitten” and Havelock ran into his arms. he’s been ours ever since. When we got him he looked yellow. We think he was living from the dumpster of the Vietnamese restaurant next door. He was covered in CAKED grease. After three baths, he was white but still greasy. From this point on, the boys and I rubbed corn starch on him and brushed him out till he was clean and magnificent. One of the most beautiful cats ever.

He was the cat that people who didn’t even like cats loved. One minute they were reluctant and the next they were petting him and threatening to “num num num” his fuzzy ears.

And he loved people. All people. All the time. This cat never met a stranger. Being hit with golf clubs didn’t sour him on humans. I doubt anything could.

He wasn’t our brightest cat (that’s Indy.) It took him ten years to learn to go down stairs. Before that he’d throw himself down head first, go ass over teakettle, then squeak (until he got ill, his voice sounded like an 8 week old kitten) indignantly at us for keeping such a feature in our house, that forced him to hurt himself.

He never understood my body was also me, so he had to be as close as possible to my head, preferably ON my face. And when I got up to go to the bathroom in the night, he’d shadow the feet closely to make sure they didn’t run away with me. (Yes, this resulted in many clunks as I accidentally kicked his little, hollow head.)

In the house before this one, where we had one of those balcony things, overlooking the living room, he tried to jump twenty feet from the railing to Dan’s lap down a floor and a bit. I plucked him out of the air, I still don’t know how. This scared him so much he fortunately never did it again.

He used to bring me his mechanical toys when they were broken and make the “fix it, mom” sound. One day he brought me a beetle. I had to explain. He was disappointed in my lack of ability to raise the beetle from the dead.

He answered to his name. Wherever he was hiding in the house, however badly he was feeling, he’d come when I called “Havey! Havey Bavvy!”

He mostly delighted in being petted. He’d do anything for pets.

He went with younger son and I on either side, petting him. I hope Greebo was on the other side, waiting for him. Look, I’m not even sure if there’s an other side for cats, but I hope there is, and that Greebo was there, waiting for him. They were the best of friends, Greebo’s intelligence and protective instincts looking after Havey’s boundless affection and love. And I hope little Helena, his foster daughter the little time we got to have her with us, is there too, to let him cuddle and groom her.

In that time, where there’s no time, it will be only a little while till Dan and I are along. If we deserve it. If we’re good enough to meet again the gallant and innocent little souls that went before us.

By Holly the Assistant

(Say a prayer for Sarah and Dan, as today they perform the final duty of any pet owner to their Havey.)

(Photo by Jeff Henry, National Park Service)

Once upon a time, not so very many years ago, the summer skies were mostly blue and clear . . . not in 1988*, but before that, and after that.

But that isn’t far enough back. I’m lucky to live in a place that still has living memory of when was far enough back, at that.

An elderly friend told me that when she helped her daddy pull cattle off the range for the winter, they always fired the range, because the Indians had told her daddy to do that when he first came out and settled. The transition of the land from nomadic to ranching/farming is just outside of living memory, today: the oldest generation here are the first settled children born here.

The experts decided at some point that fire was very bad, and banned the regular fall burning.

And here we sit, under an orange sky, with a red sun, in June, July, August, September . . .

Somehow, we need to get back to the ranchers firing the range when they pull the cattle, and burning all the stuff that needs to burn, when the fall rains and snows will put fire out, and the burns will be light and skippy like they were back before the experts got involved because they happen so often they burn the tinder fast and don’t get into the larger plants.

It seems increasingly clear that absolutely everything has had the same problem of incorrect experts infesting the system. People who didn’t have the entire picture, only parts, and wanted to fix the problems, and did fix the problems, they could identify, but in so doing broke the entire system and left us with a world prone to conflagration.

Medicine. Education. Research. Publishing. Government. Food. Transportation. Culture.

All it takes is a spark, and there are so many sparks blowing around right now. Who knows how things actually work? When did they actually work? In what ways did they not work that left openings for improvements that were actually the seeds of destruction?

Much of it was a multi-generation process of breaking working systems to improve them, in the name of progress, in the name of scientific advancement, in the name of modernity, equality, charity, environmentalism . . . and some fields have definitely improved immensely at the same time as they have created the conditions for destruction. It doesn’t seem to have been pure malice, but misguided and/or ignorant do-gooderism, with a touch of malice slipping in here and there.

Like Sarah always says, Build over, build around, build under. Keep building, and try to rediscover what used to work in the areas you can see starting to smolder that you can touch your own self, and build from that.

*Yellowstone Fires. The Yellowstone Fires were a direct result of the long time policy of suppression of fires being lifted. There was too much to burn, and did it ever burn.

Why go to war with Iran now? When we have so many problems to solve — still — at home, and with the midterms looming?

If you just said “Because Israel” go and sit down. No, sit ALL THE WAY DOWN. And stay there, quietly, while the adults talk. You’ve been sold a fable by people who would love to split up that alliance in order to destroy both countries piecemeal. And yes, a lot of the people in this country you trust are in the pay of those people or alternately truly vulnerable to manipulation.

Yes, Israel is at war and has been at war. Not out of some desire of being a local hegemon — after all, they gave back a lot of territory in the early 2000s in the hope of buying peace for their people for all the good it did them — but because they would like to survive. And even then, they were soft-handed to the point of insanity until they got the wake up call of 10/7. Not responding to that wake up call would have been suicidal. Apparently they are not that. This makes them neither an evil scheming nation nor manipulators of US politics. Go sit all the way down, and think shame you allowed the likes of China and Russia and dissatisfied Arab elements (now their leadership is becoming marginally saner) to manipulate you.

However, our war with Iran has nothing to do with Israel except insofar as Israel has provided able support in it, taking down the “Hamas fighters” Iran would have sent against us when we moved against Iran.

And if you think that Trump just up one morning and decided to go to war with Iran because he’s just that crazy, you have the president completely wrong. He had a public persona that is a little unpredictable. This I think is intentional just as I think Reagan’s “the bombing will now begin” was “accidentally open mike.” If you believe that, I have some bridges to sell you. They might be underwater, but great property.

Trump’s philosophy of government is “Make money, not war.” And I don’t mean making money for himself, though setting the US as the leader of the economic world definitely will end up in his children and grandchildren being richer. And ours too, think on. What I mean is that he uses money the way other presidents used war. He makes it profitable to be on good terms with the US, rather than beating people into not hurting us. By and large, it works.

Until you come to something like Iran. An “Islamic Republic” established with heavy propping by the USSR and still used as a proxy by Russia (and China. And every bad actor who wanted to use them.)

None of which would be an immediate problem, necessitating war. The world is full of crazy little countries, armed to the teeth and with evil intentions towards everyone starting with their own people.

Except for three things: 1- Iran’s evil intent is real and proactive. They declared war on us (And yes, Israel, but remember Israel is “little Satan” to our “Big Satan.”) They’re not just squatting on their territory, murdering their own people and muttering “touch me and you’ll die.” They actively want to eliminate us. (And Israel, but honestly, mostly us.) They believe a final, massive war, will bring about their end times and paradise for the faithful. And they are, yes, sincerely religious. At least the leadership. 2-They either had a nuke, or were very close to having one, and as we have learned through their bombing every one and their cousins, they actually and for real had delivery means. To the US? who knows? And anyway, with a nuke and open borders, there are many means of delivery. 3- Pallets of cash given to them by Obama, which greatly accelerated the nuclear program. Which we supposedly have maybe thoroughly degraded. Maybe. Apparently the terrain and capacity of the Iranians…. it’s difficult to ascertain that, or to be sure they won’t be up to their games next week absent thorough regime change.

In other words, our war with Iran right now is very simple: Because the enemy gets a vote. And so do others who would love to be the enemy if we give them an opening and who are now at BEST “adversaries”.

Because if we give in to the “peace at all costs” people we’ll likely go back in a year or two. And if two who knows who’ll be in charge or what they’ll use “war time emergency” to do. Remember the covidiocy?

Now imagine that we have Kamala, or G-d forbid AOC in charge when Iran hits NYC or Chicago, or Denver, or any of our big cities. Or three or four of them.

Imagine millions dead, and the US suddenly on a war footing. Imagine what a “Democratic socialist” would do in an environment 10 times what the post 9/11 fervor was, when speaking out against war is political and perhaps physical suicide. Or, you know, you don’t have to imagine. Go and study the unvarnished presidencies of Woodrow Wilson or FDR and you’ll KNOW.

Beyond the fact that China is running out of time to make with aggression. Their demographics don’t support a long wait to go to war with us. They must do it soon. But to do it now would be suicide. To do it after Iran hits us with a nuke and we’re in disarray (particularly, if G-d forbid we have a Democrat in charge.) … golden opportunity. (And don’t tell me there’s no chance of a democrat in 2028. The right is riven by discord being sown by enemies domestic and foreign, and a lot of duckies on the right fall for it every single time.)

THAT is why we are at war with Iran now. And why Trump is doing it (he said he couldn’t risk a president he couldn’t be sure of facing this, remember?) right now, regardless of political price. Because undoing the damage that Obama wrought is essential if we are to thrive or even — just — to survive as a nation.

Is it ideal? Well, no. Do I like it? Well, no. Is it possible the president is misinformed on Iran’s capabilities? Sure is. Heinlein, who is my guide for US politics before I was born, said that the US had the worst intelligence services possible, and I’ve seen nothing since I’ve been an American to doubt it. It’s entirely possible they are either lying or think that Iran has more capacity than it does. The thing is… It’s also possible they think it has less.

Can you be sure? No? Neither can Trump. So to be on the safe side and avoid the end game scenario for our enemies, he HAS to make sure Iran is put down and put down for good.

Yes, I do hear some of you bleating “no more wars”. Stop bleating. “No more wars” is a hope for the future, when the world is redeemed, by whatever means you believe (religiously) that the world will be redeemed. (And if you are not religious, you know better. The only way to have “no more wars” is to allow the kind of social engineering that always ends in communism and mass graves.) It is neither a strategy nor a political philosophy.

“No more wars” can’t be a political philosophy BECAUSE THE ENEMY GETS A VOTE. And a lot of places become enemies when you lay down your weapons and announce your intention to never fight again. Announcing “No more wars” is the same as announcing “I’m ready to be assisted into dying.” And there’s no dignity in that, whatever Canada says. (MAID is a lie. There is no dignity in letting yourself be killed.)

No more wars in which we have no interest involved? Sure. I’m glad we didn’t directly involve ourselves between Russia and the Ukraine for instance. It is a big problem for Europe potentially, so Europe should deal with it. I was deeply opposed to the Balkan war under Clinton for that reason. And the war in Somalia.

The wars I oppose are those in which the democrats use our army for things we have no interest in, or sometimes against our interests. I don’t want to use the r word, but yes, it’s retarded. DEEPLY retarded. And that’s an insult to every mentally handicapped person or living organism ever.

But Iran isn’t one of those cases. They mean us ill and MIGHT have the means to make it so. (Why Obama isn’t being tried for treason… yes, I know why. Bad precedent, but still.) They declared war on us and caused the deaths of countless Americans already. And want to cause more. That’s casus belli if there’s ever been one.

Now, I oppose turning this into an endless war, with our troops stationed there forever. I say we hit them hard, we hit them terminally, and we get heck out of dodge. And use economic and other means to control what comes after, rather than our people in harm’s way.

In that, my philosophy is pretty congruent with Trump’s, I think.

But it not “No war.”

You can imagine Whirled Peas all you want. The rest of the world has no obligation to play along. And if they imagine a nuke in our cities and have the means to do it, we’ll go to war under much worse conditions.

Now, Mr. President, can we make it quick and decisive? And get the heck out of dodge fast?

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

This week I had an interesting… I’d like to call it discussion, but it wasn’t. I kept telling him how I’d come to the conclusions I’d come to about Covid (totally vindicated by Fauci’s exposure) and he kept autistically holding on to the government numbers of Covid deaths like a particularly shitty teddy-bear.

Let’s put it this way, if it were on the blog instead of email, you guys would have told me that it was a boring troll and I should block him, because he had no flavor. Except he’s a well-known commenter. I suspect it was an attempt to brow beat me, which reveals a lack of understanding of me that is almost staggering considering how many decades I’ve been me in public. In fact if he continues (he’s trying) and given that I’m in the middle of the world’s most protracted furniture refinishing project (I haven’t tried to redo most of a house’s furnishings since I was 32. So much material for Dyce) and my give a damn is extensively broken, I’m just going to allow the natural Sarah to come through. And nobody likes that. (Right now I’m ignoring him, on the principle that he’s not paying me for my time and energy and he’s certainly not engaging with my arguments.)

Anyway, to an extent I feel sorry for him. I think he’s older than I am. And if he’s not, he’s certainly MENTALLY older.

It’s very hard to let go of the mind set we grew up with, in which the government might have been — was — viewed as the enemy by many of us, but we trusted it to do some things right, at least in the first world. And the things we trusted it to do included collecting numbers on everything, from population to GDP to mortality rates with this or that, to–

Was it bullshit from the beginning? Was that carefully all-knowing facade always bullshit? I have begun to suspect so, since I found out that FDR set the price of gold according to his lucky numbers.

I think at times, in the machinery of government, well-meaning men and women did the best they could. But the task was ultimately always impossible, since it necessitated both a public who would answer truthfully to government busy bodies and supervisors who didn’t have a preconceived idea of what the answer would be.

Honorable men and women who knew the task was impossible just made up a number that made it convenient and easy and appeased their supervisor. They understood the task as “Make up the numbers that will work for us now and that aren’t glaringly crazy. Then roll with it.” I know some of you were even involved in this type of thing. Every time I mention it I get an email from someone going “Oh, yeah, in the seventies I guessitmated the population for x city and they’ve just been adding to it or guesstimating from that number ever since.”

I mean, sure, we have a census, but the census itself is now blatantly adjusted, randomly, to account for “people who don’t want to be counted” and was frankly notoriously flaky even before that. Adjustments were just applied quietly and with less fanfare.

Yeah, they admitted after that the numbers were plumped, but seriously, I LOLed so hard I shot coffee out of my nose when I read that Colorado population had increased in the last census. When I left in 2021, sure, we were getting a mort of Californians and New Yorkers and also bizarrely left-leaning Texans. BUT– But the exodus was so huge that the press of people remodeling their houses meant sometimes the most basic supplies disappeared from the refinishing stores. Like… paint rollers. (Which led to the infamous Sarah crying in Home Despot episode that we don’t talk about if we want to live.) More telling, NONE OF THE THRIFT STORES WERE TAKING FURNITURE. So many people were abandoning what they had to move lighter, that we had to take good cherry cabinets to the dump (And we moved with more than we should because I couldn’t stand the idea of destroying some of it. We’re getting rid of some of it now.) The stores were stuffed to the gills. Getting a u-haul out of Colorado was unobtanium. When older son and his wife moved out, he had to drive to Gunnison from Denver to find a u-haul close to the size he wanted. (And even then, we had to rent a cargo van to supplement it, and the whole family had to drive down to his out of state destination, in various SUVs and vans with the overflow.) As it was he might have found the only u-haul available in the state that weekend. When we moved we kept a u-haul for a week and made several hundred mile trips back and forth. (Because what else could we do?)

But according to the census, all these people were moving in. Sure. Why not?

So starting with the basics, like population, government numbers were always a crapshoot. And that was before the incentive of major government money was added.

Population? States and cities get per capita subsidies of more kinds than I want to think about. Health? Ditto. Business? Oh, baby, don’t get me started.

Which brings us back to the Covidiocy (Yeah, I know they don’t like it when I use that word. Would they prefer the Covidcrime?) and the guesstimate of how many people died of Covid. This person is hung up on “they can’t have made up that much.” This shows a bizarre smallness of mind and also not knowing enough people in the health professions.

They can. They did. In fact, the numbers had no relation to anything in the real word, beyond “Does this hospital need money?” (Pretty much always yes. By the bucketfull.) Look, the federal government was paying per covid death. The early tests were so “reliable” you could do better by flipping a coin. If you tested positive, covid went on the death certificate. If you didn’t test positive, but the symptoms were upper respiratory, “covid” went on the death certificate. I know — because we spent hours over it on email– one of you almost lost her job for fighting a finding of “covid” for the death of a patient who had long been treated for and died of lung cancer. You fought it because it mattered — the family would not get the payout from the insurance for cancer treatment right to the end, which would bankrupt them — but that you had to fight at all tells you how bad the problem was.

As for the death rate, it wasn’t that much higher, and what there was is completely explainable by cancer screening and treatments not being considered essential, by the deaths of suicide and despair, by people abandoned in nursing homes. One of you who works in hospice told me it really was an “old people killer” and I believe it, but I don’t even know if it was Covid or just the heartbreak of being unable to see your family (I understood the decline in my parents, even over the phone.) Or of course the fact that old age homes are staffed mostly by third worlders where uh doing your job is an imposition, and when relatives couldn’t check… I have some horror stories I’d rather not rehash. I like to sleep at night.

So how many people died of actual covid? I think your answer is somewhere between fuckedifiknow and whothehellcantell.

So, given that how am I so sure that the death toll was not worse than (at most) bad flu? The Diamond Princess. We’re not often given perfect microcosms studies, but we were fortunate in Covid. It was the perfect study. Almost all very old people, in an environment that routinely gets overwhelmed by various infections to the point boats have to be taken out of commission, and no medical care for a while. And… the result is bad flu, if that.

Which is why I was screaming in the desert since that study. To make the lie more blatant, no country that wasn’t invested in the lockdown had covid be a thing. AT ALL. In fact, the fact that it had no appreciable increased mortality among our homeless population is a reproach and a slap in the face of those who still buy the government numbers.

Ultimately, that is the thing we have to learn: to look beyond government numbers, because most of them don’t have anything to do with reality. And even those that should be trackable have weird adjustments and begs that you don’t know about but which make the whole thing stupid.

Like recently I found our economy the last quarter was supposedly “Carter slump bad” until of course you deep dive and find out that they count negative net exports as a negative against economic growth (!) which means higher consumer confidence will always translate to “no growth” that is, until we re-industrialize a lot. (We will, G-d willing.)

But everything, from the GDP to the inflation number is … nonsense. The way they calculate things make them useless, and they’re buried deep where we can’t mentally adjust the nonsense. (And don’t get me started on the fed. Just don’t.)

This is why I continuously find test cases (unfortunately few are as perfect as the Diamond Princess. Reality can be very disappointing.) Also why I gather information all the time, from eavesdropping perfect strangers to looking at what’s available to buy, the prices, etc.

Because yeah, the truth is out there, but you have to look under layers and layers of bullshit to even get an inkling. And you’ll never have all the numbers (Barring a Diamond Princess situation.)

In fact, in a discussion with one of you this morning we circled back to “no one knows how much medical care actually costs.” No, the hospitals don’t. It’s all obscured by government meddling, overregulation AND insurance dealing.

But it goes deeper than that. No one knows what ANYTHING costs. Because there’s too much government interference and meddling in anything.

To all the idiots who want socialism: we already have too much of it. We have a massive information problem, because of government meddling in every level of the economy and the next level taking the cooked levels as truthful.

Kindly take your Mixed Economy, roll it all in corners and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Mixing lies with the truth makes it all lies. And mixing government meddling with the economy makes it all wobbly and stupid, and makes daily life harder at every level.

We need the federal government to restrict its meddling to the constitutional powers. Defend the borders, negotiate with foreign powers, arbitrate disputes between states and leave us the fuck alone.

And we need state governments continuously afraid of a mob descending on the capital with pitchforks and a nasty disposition.

The truth will set us free.

A Blast from the Past originally at: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/08/26/why-dont-you-come-back-to-the-war/

Yesterday I stumbled on this post by Devon Eriksen on Twittex.

For those who don’t wish to follow through, he claims there were no real fat people in the fifties/sixties, when mothers cooked for their families, etc. It’s one of the those things of “he’s right and wrong” because he’s much younger than I and I can assure him the having home cooked meals was not universal, or even close to it, food was already processed by the time people bought it to use as ingredients, and there were indeed fat people (though very rarely as abnormally fat as now, but you do see those throughout history too. And I can go into that if anyone wishes me to write on fat, and why our society is exceptionally “fat”. It’s a number of circumstances, including that we’re as a rule older (the very fat people of the past were usually very wealthy, meaning they could live longer with serious physical issues. Like Henry VIII with a debilitating, never-healed leg wound) and that … well, the pictures that Devon uses to illustrate the “there were no fat people” are part of the problem. Because those pictures of the sixties and seventies show people who were by and large on extreme diets due to the worship of “thin.” We do know there are serious metabolic consequences to whip-saw dieting — trust me, I’m a case study — and to early-life anorexia, as well as to extreme dieting while pregnant, which screws up the baby.)

The post is still worth reading, and I’m very glad it can be said. It’s just his being younger than I, I think, and also falling into the writer trap of “there was a master plan.” This is usually true in novels, never true in reality.

Sure, there was a short of prospiracy of cult devotees of the communist manifesto in places of power in entertainment and mass communication which led to the poison of “Marxist feminism” inserting itself into the dynamic and making everything objectively worse.

Note henceforth I can refer to it as simply “feminism” because “feminism” in modern society is Marxist. But there was, before that nonsense, a sort of sensible feminism. It curbed the greatest excesses of societal oppression of women (which happened because women are the most precious resource of any society. Do I need to unpack? You don’t let the people who can literally give your tribe a future wander off on their own and be captured by the enemy, for ex. This leads to curtailing the movements of women, historically) and advocated for stuff like a widow’s ability to manage her own household and money, without needing to return to her parents’ home or be subordinate to her inlaws. My grandmother was a feminist in that sense and at points it was opposite what is considered feminist nowadays. How opposite? Well, you see Victorian feminism was for women and children. So, it actually encouraged a woman to have children, treat her children well, stay home with the children and have no other employment, if the husband could at all manage to support her.

This was most often not possible, btw. The mid 20th century ideal of the housewife who stayed home and did nothing but watch her kids, cook for the family, decorate and maybe garden is the ideal of a very wealthy society. As such it was probably transitory and illusory, both. It was also, and Devon is absolutely right on this, aspirational and amazing. Because if you can afford to do it — and are temperamentally suited to it — what is better than to spend your life making the life of your family and community better?

It is particularly suited — center mass — to most female personalities. Women tend to be more social than males and like to perform acts of service for the community. It’s not that we’re saintly, it’s just what evolution selected for in females probably from the time we climbed down from the trees, if not before.

While women’s work tends to be indoors and non-dangerous, most women throughout history worked. And I’m going to lay down a marker here that I’m not even sure most women watched over their own children, in the sense we tend to think of it, the sense of the mid century housewife doing everything for her own kids. (And here, as with my thinking those very thin people of the sixties and seventies — I have my own pictures and honestly it looks odd, because people a generation before and after were if not “fat” more “normal”. I think that thinness and all the dieting are reflection of “listening to experts” who indulged their own fancy — being the seed of weight problems later, that housewife having nothing to do but mind her kids seeded the boomers neuroticism.)

While people tended to raise their own kids, and certainly (as I’ve said many times) the societies (upper class Victorian, Roman) that outsourced the raising of kids to hirelings did NOT fare well long term, child raising was more… flexible in the past.

I still caught the edge of this, to an extent. I mean, my mother, like my grandmothers, worked from home in her own business, and minded me in the sense that mom — and grandma — were there and provided meals at set times. But to be honest, from the time I was four or five, I played with other kids in the neighborhood for entire days. They played at my house too, sure, but that meant mom watched us all maybe one day out of six (Sunday was for extended family.)

More importantly, going back to former times, the children were expected to help with household work at about four, and often were apprenticed/had jobs/were in serious school (how serious? Well, people often entered university in their pre-teens. And don’t tell me they didn’t learn as much. They didn’t learn the same, but the amount was maybe more than we do as preparation) all day, etc.

It is a mistake to look at the middle years of the 20th century as “the way things ought to be.” To an extent we were already seriously off course.

To the point of fat and there not being a fat gene, etc. True. But at the same time there are things that break the system and predispose people to accumulate fat.

I’m not going to defend pre-packaged food, which is a thing regulated by the government and therefore by “experts.” Like, the ones who decided in the eighties that fat was bad for you but sugar just “got used up” which is a metabolic misunderstanding of epic proportions. For me and my family I always preferred to cook from scratch, because it’s healthier and often cheaper. But let’s face it, the diet of our ancestors wasn’t particularly wonderful, between lack of refrigeration and often being limited to what grew locally. Sure, they got limited amounts of protein, which might be good in a way, but which we’ve also find stunts growth and perhaps brain development.

Go ahead and cook from scratch and local if you can, but the fat epidemic is probably more related to see saw dieting in an attempt to reach the standards of thinness the experts said we should have, and the fact our health care has gotten good enough people survive with serious illnesses. My metabolism has never been the same, for ex, since I was put on strict bed rest for six months with first son. It is likely at a less wealthy time I, myself, and my son would both have died of eclampsia.

However, there is one contributing factor that absolutely can be blamed on feminism and that Devon hit on, though glancingly: the fact that all of us work, and work ridiculous hours.

Someone else mentioned that Americans define themselves by their job, as if that justified our existence. They’re not wrong. I figured that out in the aftermath of 2018 and being let go by the two main purchasers of my work. I realized I was suffering from middle aged unemployed man syndrome, as I’d defined myself by my jobs, even though they were in many ways crappy and stress filled.

And it’s interesting that Devon pointed out corporations jumped all in on “Women should have jobs” because it expanded the workforce and therefore lowered wages for everyone, because my friend Bill Reader had tentatively told me the same a few weeks ago. As in “Was it all a ploy like importing a lot of third worlders? A way to depress wages?”

I don’t think it was a “ploy” as I don’t think it was calculated. I think it was partly, sure, the communist manifesto at the back of a lot of influential brains, but also the fact life had got so good. Women not only could stay home, but were under-utilized. Look at recipes from the fifties and these people weren’t really cooking from scratch, but buying a series of canned things and combining them, with the result that a meal that would normally take half the day to prepare (Still does to me, if I’m doing something big from scratch, which is why nowadays it’s so hard, because we don’t eat that much, and it seems a waste of time.) And cleaning the house had gotten exponentially easier with machines (Seriously. I washed clothes by hand. You don’t have any idea how much time it took.) Women found themselves seriously under-employed, and therefore started casting their minds to what else they could do.

Now, if that prosperity had hit fifty years later, when there was an internet, there would have been a flourishing of work-at-home jobs, and I still think that’s where we’ll end up. But in the sixties, seventies and eighties, what it caused instead was bored women to start ENVYING their husband who got to go out and have jobs. (The fact most men’s jobs were no longer difficult and arduous helped with this. Women are still not hankering to be construction workers, truck drivers or trash pickup workers.)

Did corporations step on the accelerator and aid and abet this ethos? Yes. But corporations are served by university graduates, and the universities had already come up with the narrative of the oppressed woman freed by work.

And this in turn depressed wages, which in turn made it absolutely necessary for everyone, male and female to be “married to the job.” Because there’s always someone who is willing to work harder/make more sacrifices than you.

Recently we found ourselves explaining to both sons that yeah, though in very different jobs, we too worked 18 hour days in our late twenties and up through our late thirties. It’s what you have to do to establish yourself. And to be honest, because of increased longevity “establishing yourself.” and gaining credibility in your field, no matter what it is, takes longer and longer and longer. I mean, Dan is still working way more hours than he should be, and he might still (I haven’t checked) be considered “the kid” in his office. (Even if he works from home.) I know I suddenly crossed from “Raw beginner” to “Old woman of science fiction” somewhere in my mid fifties, and I’m still working raw beginner hours.

As I tried to tell my parents at one time — with marked lack of success — that Americans aren’t overweight because we’re lazy but because we work too much. It’s just most of our jobs are so all-absorbing.

So, in the essentials — aside from quibbles on the “fat” thing — I’m in accord with Devon that feminism has caused a break in American life, and by extension destroyed the family in our health.

It’s more that feminism was not so much an intended thing as a trend that picked up after World War Two.

Part of the problem is that all reproduction is a war between men and women — or in the animal kingdom males and females — in that each sex tries to have the most babies with the least expenditure of energy and effort, so at the expense of the other.

If you study evolution, this is how some species ended up with things like…. well, eating your mate right after copulation, or completely atrophying and becoming a pimple on your spouse’s side, but a pimple that can still impregnate her.

That kind of war is all very well, but the point of it is that it leads to more children.

This broken situation where each man and woman is an independent and competing economic unit is not leading to more children, or even a healthy and connected life.

Instead, it’s led to a life of anomie where humans have value only as economic production units, and can be discarded when no longer (or not yet) functional. Where it’s a shame to not be “employed” and “producing.”

This type of life is obviously completely compatible with communism/Marxism, in which the individual only matters so long as he produces, and where he’s a widget who is the same as everyone else.

And like all forms of Marxism, it leads to death and unhappiness. (Not necessarily in that order.)

The bitterly funny part of it (more bitter than funny) is that the entire left blames this on “capitalism” and doesn’t realize their version of feminism does nothing but feed all humanity into the maw of faceless corporations.

It would be funny if we weren’t living it and at risk of dying laughing.

(Note from Holly the Assistant: last night, Sarah lamented “I’m tired and I want to write Vic,” and I replied “Let me run a Blast from the Past tomorrow and go write Vic.” Vic being Skip’s mom, and a very interesting character.” So, in favor of getting a few words of the next book written, the blog gets a rerun today.)

Is it just normal life? Is it “Now we know better?” Or is it … the times we live in?

Can every other generation, every other person catalogue loss of innocence, loss of trust in the world in general — all of the world — through major events?

Something said this week reminded me of the nineties. I’m not going to sell you a fairytale and tell you I was deliriously happy. I wasn’t. I was writing my heart out, sending out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript and getting back standard rejections. And Dan was working at a job he loved that was slowly becoming a job he hated as the organization changed. We were always short on money, overworked, and raising toddlers.

Happy? Yes. I mean, I’ve always been happy since Dan was foolish enough to marry me. How could I not be? What were the odds? (And 41 years last week, thank you so much.) But deliriously, fairytale happy? Well… You know? I was nervous, wrecked, always short on money and extremely tired. I went to bed with a list of tasks I hadn’t accomplished that day in my head, and then added more to them every morning.

And somehow — the things you do when you’re young — I was pounding out a short story a week, writing two or three novels a year, keeping the house spotless and… well, I was always tired.

In many ways, though, in the normal things of life, I’m happier now. Okay, not right now, because I’m throwing all my energy into packing and unpacking and trying to keep the writing (including this) going is hard, because my body gets very tired. BUT in normal life.

I mean I miss the remote-away kid, and heck, I miss the nearby kid when he doesn’t come by every other day. BUT Dan and I are finally getting over the “what do you do with an empty nest” as we pivot to our respective work, which fortunately both of us have always been interested in/liked. And of course tech gave me indie and is giving him the opportunity to do the work of a small coding shop just by himself. Once the move is complete, we’ll be in a place where we can walk every day (the area we used to walk here is public and turned… dicey by two years ago.) and where the physical house-plant is easier for us. (It’s still two floors, it’s just arranged so the rooms we use the most are near each other. Oh, and the church is so close even I can’t be afraid to drive to it (or walk, depending on the time and weather.) Yes, me 10 years ago is giving me the stink eye, but things have changed and right now that’s a great comfort to me.

Which brings us to how things have changed….

It is weird, given the relative positions we were in/are in now for me to get misty eyed at the thought of the nineties. I mean we had friends who are now dead or… not friends, sure. Our life became far more restricted, socially in the oughts, partly because the kids grew up and made up a lot of our social interaction. Why have a writers’ group when you have one every evening around the diner table? But also…

If I look back, the first blow to that misty-eyed golden glow is 9/11. Half of our group went… weird. Weird is a good term for it. (Did you go crazy or did you report, on that day they wounded New York — Leonard Cohen) From truffer illusions to the certainty we’d brought it on ourselves because colonialism (like any human breed ever, and frankly the US less than most, but never mind.

And once the fracture set in, it widened. Ten years later we were polite strangers, keeping up polite chatter when we accidentally met somewhere.

Okay, these things happen. Yeahbut. That was also the first blow to my world view. I’d lost friends before. I mean, you move across the ocean and acculturate, the people back where you came from will find you AT BEST weird, and at worse resent you as a traitor. But this was different–

We all like to think we pick decent, reasonable, smart people to be our friends, right? I mean we might know some of them aren’t too bright, or not as bright as us, but they’re still in every day parlance smart, and definitely decent and reasonable or what’s the point?

What broke me around that time, I now realize, was not losing friends, which happens. It was the first instance of what I would later call “I remember him/her when he/she was sane” which has now grown to hundreds. I.e. it was the way my friends embraced the craziest sh*t rather than simply revise the airy-fairy ideas we had in the early nineties. (Mostly that individual cultures could be overcome and the world could become one large happy, free family. We didn’t put it that way, but that’s what we thought.) they embraced weird, impossible conspiracy theories that involved the west being extra-special evil and therefore needing to be destroyed. Heck, most of publishing did, but that didn’t upset me, as I already knew most of them were at best unreconstructed Leninists and at worse fundamentalist Stalinists. My friends, though? We’d raised our toddlers together. I thought they were…. reasonable people.

Which brings us to all the shocks since, because doing a deep dive into why 9/11 had happened, I arrived at my current perception of culture as an almost living entity that will not be ignored or superseded by wishful thinking and good will. What we drink with mother’s milk, absent a great effort at acculturation (and even so, see for instance how I’m dealing with the concept of being “old”) surfaces in all sorts of ways, good and not, ways that are hard to counter as most people aren’t even fully aware of them.

Then there was schooling. Seeing my kids go through school, arguably as boys of tanitude but still boys (I understand unless you’re outright black, and even then, unless you’re an aggressive black male, all these problems are the same.) Seeing how they were treated and the efforts made by a culture (Micro culture, in this case, the education culture) that had decided driving boys down was the way to make females rise (never was, never will be. That’s not how any of this works. Two halves of a whole) and was willing to destroy any number of innocents for the crime of being born with a penis broke me. Deeply.

I almost prefer the honest cultural stupidity of Latin machismo. At least they’re not doing it on purpose to destroy one of the sexes. It is just what they believe, probably because of deep cultural legacy from the Muslim invasions. At least when I pushed back the reaction wasn’t “must pound harder.” (Or else it was and I didn’t notice, because G-d bless the ’tisms. And since mom and grandma were the same, no problem. by my late teens I’d realized the culture I was raised in was not exactly standard Portuguese. The way my schoolmates interacted with their families would probably have driven me to homicide. Never mind.)

I was particularly disturbed because I can read tea leaves for the future passibly well from cultural trends, and THAT one… Nothing good comes from this path, as we’re seeing in decreasing marriages, fewer children, and pervasive all penetrating patina of loneliness and anomie.

There were other shocks. Poll watching in 2012 was one of those. The absolutely staggering scale of fraud. The fact this goes on and we tolerate it…

Then there was… well, 2020. Electoral shenanigans, color revolution, DC surrounded by razor wire. The evil treatment of the people who took a guided tour of the capitol on Jan 6, the arrest of harmless pro-life demonstrators, the fear of being demonetized just for speaking my mind, the bizarre certainty that if this went on I’d end up shot at the back of the head and in a mass grave. (At least I’d have company, amIright?)

And then the amazing 2024 and since. Which you’d think is great.

To an extent it is. I’m no longer afraid of being demonetized. We can buy eggs — EGGS — without breaking the bank (I won’t lie, it left me broken a bit. Right now we have 3 dozen eggs in the fridge, which is loony. I need to make a few souffles.) We decided to put a knife deep into one of our saving accounts so we could provide the younger set of kids with a safe place to live and so we could move to a place where we don’t have to pay a small fortune for (one acre) yard care, since we found out I’m allergic to everything outside. (Not even kidding, yo. There isn’t a plant or tree I’m not allergic to. Well, maybe grapevines? I seem to be okay with those. But even Colorado wasn’t safe because of pine trees. I’m deathly allergic to EVEN PINE in woodworking form (as I found out recently, while making a “lady’s work table” to keep my crochet and cross stitch safe from the cats.) This new yard (not in that house yet, but–) Dan claims he can handle, but he’s still going to train the electric sheep to do most of it. These are good things. As is finding out I was celiac my whole life. There is less pain and I have more energy. Fortunately. Otherwise I’d already have died, last week and would certainly die these next three (after which we should be okay.)

On the other hand…

All the fraud, everything Data Republican unearths is so floridly evil it shocks even me. And then there’s the conspiracy theories on our side which we thought were crazy cakes, and…. behold their being proven right. At this point I wouldn’t even be shocked if Big Mike proved to be true. Okay, I would be shocked, but not the shock something like that deserves. Because, holy moley people! Crazier more involved things have proven true.

Including… yeah, the Fauci testimony which is in the process of breaking me yet further. Oh, not because he is a vain little shitweasel. Somewhere in the mountain of posts in this blog, from around that time, (I probably in addition to the acculturation essays which my assistant is editing should make a collection of the Big Break of 2020) are posts saying he was a little nerd dazzled with his own celebrity. BUT I am shocked that what I suspected and was afraid to believe seems to be true. Yes, it was just a flu. Not even a particularly bad flue. All the extra deaths including the abandoned in old age homes in Spain are the result of the panic this evil gnome induced.

And at this point not fully in the open, but I’m absolutely sure of it, I am certain — sure certain — that the entire thing was a ploy to drive the economy down and make the color revolution of 2020 plausible in people’s eyes. Because I remember various writers (and therefore lefty) groups I lurk in, forgotten, ringing their hands about how popular Trump was early 2020 and wishing there was something they could do to tank the economy.

Knowing what I know of electoral fraud, I know they still didn’t win that election fair and square. BUT the ability to pretend they did was enough.

And for that, they locked down the world, traumatized a generation, terrorized older people and the unstable, destroyed the economy and for good measure terrorized everyone in the US (which the rest of the world tried to ape) with memorex race riots, so that the courts would be afraid to reverse their electoral fraud.

ALL OF THIS, all of it, because they wanted power. With no thought of consequences. (I’m half sure the rest of the world locked down because they ape us and are stupidly dependent on their press which makes ours seem honorable. The other half is suspecting this panic was encouraged by our shitweasels for verisimilitude. Note that it only happened in the west. In Africa, India, etc. the Covidiocy wasn’t even a thing.)

I think this last break is the worst. I don’t want to become cynical about the world and people in general.

Listen, you, I never thought that most people were fundamentally good. My husband does because he is. I’m not. I’ve got a broad streak of darkness I fight all the time. BUT–

But… I didn’t know that so called civilized humans could be so… indifferent to the welfare of others and so willing to kill other humans in batch lots, by psy-ops means, to make old people die alone, to interdict funerals even to those people for whom funeral is the final consolation.

And I might never forgive the churches in the west for locking down, obediently. THEIR RELIGIOUS ANCESTORS RISKED DEATH IN THE CIRCUS TO CELEBRATE THEIR RITES. But they locked down to avoid…. a flu. Or being scolded. Whichever. I mean parking lot masses were judged too risky by the church in Colorado. (They remained locked down for a year after we moved. And when we moved the church here was NORMAL.)

This break, this feeling of never being able to trust anything again, of being on unstable ground, and having to be ready to revise every assumption at a minute’s notice? It makes daily life…. fraught.

I wonder if that’s how we become old. Not the aches and pains or the diminished energy (for me that picture is mixed, since I was desperately auto-immune always, and anyway, the energy is better since I cut out wheat) not the occasional forgetfulness… I wonder if what makes you old is all these breaks, all these sheddings of illusions.

And if our generation (broadly all of us who are adults and alive now) is worse than those in the past, because there was such a big lie maintained in the 20th century, affecting every aspect of life, and it’s breaking now, so in a way it’s like all of us moved to a different country and culture. At once. And that’s tough for acculturation. Tough for sanity.

I don’t know. what I know is this: of everything I lost I miss my illusions the most.

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 PAM UPHOFF: Profit & Freedom (Chronicles of the Fall Book 23)

The disruption of the attack on the 300, and then the invasion has left twin sisters unsupervised . . .

Noeme and Juna Jaeger, at the age of fifteen, might have put a toe over the line of strict legality to make sure they stayed safe . . . then they helped a couple of their friends . . .

And then . . . why not? Why not turn it into a business? Save some other kids, and make money doing it! What could possibly go wrong?

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Fen Dead (The Groundskeeper Book 6)

In the misty fen on the edge of town, a murdered man refuses to stay buried.

Chloe Brandt, groundskeeper of Belleview cemetery and reluctant apprentice mediator to the dead, has been called in to help. The deeper she digs into the strange killing, the more she realizes some bindings run deeper than any grave.

Armed with a glowing jar of restless oil, a crew of sectretive gnomes, and more confidence than caution, Chloe must navigate deceptions and dangerous liminal spaces before the fen claims another soul. In a world where even the dead keep secrets, the only way forward is to get your hands dirty.

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.

EDITED BY DAVID BADURINA: Pet Monsters: Ten Tales of Monsters and the Kids Who Befriend Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 78)

You were a weird kid once. So were they — right up until the monster showed up.A boy brings a rotten sandwich back to life and discovers the truest
friend he has ever had. A lonely girl pulls a crashed alien out of a cornfield. A grieving kid hides a fire-breathing salamander in his dead
father’s office. And out past the porch light, something with too many tentacles is looking up at the same stars — and quietly noticing the
marriage coming apart inside the house.Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures
that crash into ordinary lives, and the children brave enough to love them back. They are funny, they are frightening, and underneath every
one of them runs the same current: what it costs to be an outcast, what it means to finally be understood, and how much it hurts to let go.For readers raised on E.T., The Iron Giant, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and for anyone who still, on the right kind of night, half-hopes to find something waiting at the edge of the yard. In the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill: ten tales where childhood wonder shades, story by story, into the uncanny and the unforgettable.Ten
authors. Ten monsters. One anthology about the friends we lose, the people we become, and the small impossible miracle of being seen.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: King of the Zombie Moonmen

Craig Holdren is a typical young slacker, until, thanks to an inheritance from his mysterious Uncle Jack, he finds his way into another world. It is a world much like his own, except for flying saucers, atomic-powered cars, rocket ships, unearthly zombies, renegade robots, giant spiders, ferocious rock creatures and an imminent invasion from outer space. Here Craig finds his true destiny when he takes Uncle Jack’s place as the legendary Flying Commando – the only man who can stop Retik, King of the Zombie Moonmen, from conquering the entire Universe!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Huntress on the Rocks (Timelines Universe Book 4)

A young military intelligence agent. Hunting a murderous drug dealer across a floating city on a water world light-years from Earth – with only his name, and a vague description of what he might look like. Will she finally find her quarry and bring him to justice, or will cases of mistaken identity mean she’ll simply end up

A Huntress on the Rocks

(A Delaney Wolff Fox story)

FROM MARY CATELLI: Even After

Mirror, mirror on the wall — can I be safe when I am tall?

Rumpelstiltskin got the baby.

Rapunzel and her prince never again met.

Snow White still sleeps in the forest.

Biancabella, Snow White’s half-sister, knows that if she is more beautiful than her mother, trouble will follow again. Her appeal to the magic mirror only gains her stories of how hard it is to fight the evil sorceresses and wizards and witches who have banded together to bring unhappy endings.

But with her mother seeking to constrain her, Biancabella knows she may have no choice to use that knowledge to attempt to escape.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Evening Performance: A Novel of Theatrical Discipline and International Espionage (The Aurigan Conflict)

A retired accountant notices that the actors aren’t saying their lines correctly.

Four intelligence services notice something else entirely.

At the Grand Imperial Theatre, The Kingdom at the Edge of the World appears to be an ordinary theatrical production. But beneath the costumes, stage directions, and carefully rehearsed dialogue lies an international communications network—one that has operated undetected for years.

British Intelligence is watching. The Aurigans are watching. The mysterious Grey Office is watching. Several other intelligence services are watching.

And then there is Cedric Pritchard.

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: structure.