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, by clicking through and buying (anything, 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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
FROM AMANDA S. GREEN: Fire Striker (Tearing the Veil Book 1)
Some say monsters aren’t real. Others say the only monsters are those people who aren’t fully human: the witches and shapeshifters, elves and dwarves, and all the others who one day stepped out of the realm of fairy tales and into “real life”. Morgan Walsh knows the truth. Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and some of the worst are human.
She didn’t start out life as Morgan Walsh. Once upon a time, her name was Adriana Grace Hensen. Everything, including her name, changed the day she turned thirteen. That day she learned several lessons she’d never forget. The first was that monsters were real. The second was that her parents were two of the worst “monsters” alive. The third was that those you trust the most can and will turn on you.
Morgan’s parents betrayed her because she wasn’t “human”. Now she’s back with one goal in mind: vengeance.
Never, ever conspire against a Fire Elemental, especially one with other “talents” as well. When you do, you’d best be prepared to get burned.
FROM TIM WUEBKER: The Forbidden Book: A novel
Mark and Rose are typical high school seniors: afraid to speak, aware of the cameras watching them in every room and on every street, and smart enough to walk away if anyone dares discuss the place known only as “The Island.”
They know how to stay invisible. But on his way to school, Mark gets caught in the crossfire between two revolutionary gangs, and later that day, Rose’s friend…just…disappears.
When violence happens, Mark—who is destined for the NBA—knows the unspoken rule: don’t talk about it. You weren’t there. It didn’t happen. And when someone vanishes, Rose–who gets away with things she shouldn’t—knows denial is the only ways to survive.
But each has reached a breaking point. Mark decides to smuggle his family out of the country. And Rose will risk everything to get her friend back.
“The Forbidden Novel” is the story of two people who live in a nation hell-bent on domination and control. Will they be crushed beneath the wheel?
Or will freedom strike back?
FROM J. L. CURTIS: Rimworld – Diplomatic Immunity.
Fargo’s latest attempt at quiet retirement is going haywire quickly.
Hiding the officially missing Dragoon heir at his cabin is about to get interesting.
A GalPat change of command brings new attention to his militia and their capabilities, just as he’s falsely accused of murder. Facing a stacked prosecution, he finds that friends have hidden abilities when they come to his aid, including hiding the heir.
When he comes back out, he’s got an agenda and an heir to get home in one piece… A young man thought lost, whose homecoming will shake an entire empire. And hopefully Fargo will survive the experience.
FROM PETER GRANT: Wood, Iron, and Blood: A Classic Western Story Of The California Trail (Annals of Ash Book 1)
Sometimes wanderlust skips a generation… but when it strikes, it strikes gold.
In 1852, fourteen-year-old Jeremy Ash rises to his grandfather’s challenge and sets out on the adventure of a lifetime – the California Trail.
It’s four deadly months and 1,600 merciless miles from the Missouri River to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada. There’s alkali water that’ll poison you; desert heat that’ll fry your brains; mountain passes that’ll crush you; swarms of biting insects that’ll drive you mad; deadly diseases that’ll plague you; and warrior tribes that may make it lethally clear they don’t want you there.
Will the California Trail kill Jeremy, like so many others before him? Or will it make a man out of him?
FROM CHRISTIAN TOTO: Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul
Inside Hollywood’s Descent into Dreary, Dull Leftist Groupthink
Hollywood’s Dream Factory is now a nightmare of woke restrictions, Identity Politics run amok, and freedom-snuffing rules and regulations. The Oscars are unwatchable, as are many films and television shows thanks to the woke revolution. Virtue Bombs breaks down where Hollywood went so wrong, illustrates the slow-motion disaster infiltrating the industry, and offers a glimmer of hope for a woke-free tomorrow. Award-winning film critic Christian Toto has all the receipts, showcasing Hollywood’s virtue-signaling follies and how it could get much, much worse before it gets better.
FROM DAVE FREER: CLOUD-CASTLES. – NOW ALSO IN PAPERBACK!
Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.
FROM KATRINA LEGG: The Case of the Rollerskating Armadillo.
Spacestation: Arcadia is a vacation destination for the rich and connected.
When a midnight call from one of the guests includes assault from an unfriendly lawn decoration, Deputy Corbin knows something isn’t quite right.
It’s not just the grumpy old man who needs his help but it’s going to take all his wits to uncover the other victims in the mess he’s stumbled upon.
FROM DALE COZORT: Raphaela, Princess of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novel (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 2)
Nearly a hundred years ago, in an alternate reality Africa dotted with lost cities, Raphaela of Zan was eleven years old and dying of a rapid aging disease. A mysterious gray-eyed man gave her a drink he claimed would cure her. Instead, it stopped her from aging at all, trapping her in an eleven-year-old body, on the verge of life, but never able to truly live. Now, the rapid aging disease is back, threatening to turn her into a withered crone before she has a chance to live. Can she survive man-apes, Romans and Mad Puritans to find the gray-eyed man and convince him to save her?
FROM DANIEL L. NADEN: Parting Shot.
“A brutally smart gorefest, and uproariously funny to boot!”
James H Longmore
Brian has survived for ten years beyond the end of the world, but he’s not sure why. He’s not even sure if he cares anymore.
When the dead began strolling around and eating people, society was certain to collapse. Brian never realized how lonely a guy could be in a world with six billion hungry zombies hanging around. Or how empty a life of just surviving could be.
Meeting survivors in Brian’s world is dangerous. Living with survivors is almost suicidal. Zombies like large groups of people: the more, the merrier. Caring about people in Brian’s world is insane. How often can someone lose every person they’ve ever known or loved before they just quit trying?
When he hooks up with a new group of survivors, they all find a way to…well…survive together. After so many years, surviving is easy part. The real challenge: can they find a reason to live? To love? Can they find a reason to hope? Can they remember how to laugh when so much of the world is dark and despairing?
FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: Army of One.
Collection of my best essays and one-liners, thoughts on history, the War on Terror, current events, pop culture and lots of humor. Get yourself a cup of Rococo Coffee and read this book. Or just buy Rococo Coffee and ignore this book. Wait, what?
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.
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.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: wretched
According To Hoyt 
Finished reading Cloud Castles early this morning. The first couple of chapters had me rolling my eyes at the naivete of the main character, but the book quickly drew me in and I really couldn’t stop reading until it was finished. Characters that I cared about, interesting world building, and an engaging plot that made the book hard to put down.
Mary Wright writes (Her last name changed to protect the continent.). Mostly fantastically but occasional sigh fie. She finds vignettes satisfanticsifying, and is quick to encourage others to do too. She does allow, however, in spite of the joy of doing, the monetary return is quite wretched.
Forty nine, fifty.
Wretched indeed!
The Bartender watched as the 10 foot tall monster came in and sat down at the bar.
The monster growled “Give me a beer in your largest mug”.
As the Bartender gave him the beer, he asked “Bad day”?
“A wretched day. First a witch turned me into a monster, and then my wife left with all my money and the kids. Don’t know how it could get worse.”
Then an older woman stormed into the bar shouting “Wilber! Why has my daughter returned home?”
The monster growled, “Oh shit, that’s my mother-in-law”.
She climbed out herself, and Julian drew the boat entirely onto the shore.
“You’ll see a lot of this shore,” she said. “Look at the sand carefully, and you will see how much of it is fused together. No one wants you to practice near them, and make them wretched.”
Reader’s Block, h/t AoSHQ:
A continuation of the one I started last week.
“Father!” The barkeep hurried over to him, hands held before him for a blessing. “I run a clean establishment. Is there anything I can do for you, or the church –”
“I am looking for someone, good sir.” Father Harold told the man. “Have you seen a young man, about fifteen, with rust red hair? Medium build. Green eyes?”
The barkeep began to sweat. “Except for the hair, there’s someone at the back tables who matches that description. He could have coal dust in his hair, though.”
“I will look, then.” The priest strode to the back door. It was not his worst fear. The boy was merely playing cards with three other men, and, by the piles of money, winning. “Gregory. Heinrich. August. Graf. Duttinholf. What, in the name of God are you DOING HERE!?” Harold grabbed the prince by the collar and dragged him from the table. The prince was drunk, again. “Pratzev vwyeta” the priest muttered, holding his right hand over Gregory’s head and blessing it.
Gregory staggered, as the alcohol in his system began breaking down. “God damn it, Harold! At least add a painkiller spell.”
The priest slapped the prince across the face. “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, you wretched little boy. You worked for that headache, you can have it. You are only fifteen, but you have neither the wisdom, or temperament to even begin to rule and no matter what the law says, you are still a child.”
“Well?” said Eleanor, adjusting her rags. “Do I look sufficiently wretched to fool a Beggar-Lord?”
“*I* wouldn’t know you for a princess,” said Melissa candidly.
“I would,” Cameron murmured.
Eleanor’s cheeks burned beneath their mud-stains. “Well, Arsenius won’t be seeing me with *your* eyes,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”
The preacher’s words and the chosen Scripture burned Michael as he re-read them. His son from a former marriage was in rehab again and his ex was asking him to write the boy. Boy? He was nearly 24, and had rejected efforts from Michael and his parents to reconnect many times. Now, as he was recovering from a second cancer, Michael was wanting to try again; but how?
The years of fighting cancer and multiple periods of unemployment over the years since the divorce had drained Michael’s savings and obliterated his retirement accounts. At one point he got a job just in time to avoid missing the mortgage payment. His “new” car was over 14 years old. Every previous contact with the boy had resulted in a request for money that didn’t exist, without a glimmer of hope for anything else.
The post-divorce rancor was worse than the cancer. Most of his family and his former in-laws had died without any chance to reconcile. And they were the ones who raised the boy while his ex was at work or taking college classes. So he really had nothing in common except a name.
Maybe a more serious meditation on that Bible passage is the way, thought Michael. It’s almost the only thing I haven’t tried…
“Hm. Wonder if they share a root.” Isaac said with a distracted expression, looking over the refugee documents. Well, papers– they were hand written on what the big shipper had informed Jon was called ‘parchment,’ with the added comment that it was really a form of paper. Since Jon had thought parchment was paper, just with a fancy name for games, he was hesitant to ask the difference. When Isaac didn’t explain, things were usually unpleasant.
“If what shares a root?” Jon finished copying the next list in and set it to one side. Only twenty to go.
“Words.” Isaac explained badly. At Jon’s flat look, he elaborated. Some. “You know how you get space-sick?”
“Only when you’re being ridiculous, but yes. What about it?”
“That’s retching. The refugees we’re lifting out are listed as wretches.” Isaac finished his list and stood, stretching. He folded under the table fairly well, not that you could tell from the chorus of pops that went off from his joints. “With a dubba-U. Sometimes that means same original word.”
That was a good idea, stretching before things hurt. Jon leaned back and tried to loosen his arms.
“But retch doesn’t have a double-U. It’s just a form of wretched, or it would be spelled differently.”
“Only if the word entered after they started standardizing spelling, and even some of those are homographs, or false friends.”
“…. Isaac, writing is almost five thousand of years old, at least. There’s no– Oh. What’s that word you keep using. ‘Oh, hell’.” And yet another blind spot in what he’d been taught and always just known. If writing meant that words didn’t change, then how could language have developed? And that was before some of the subject changes Isaac kept pulling, about book files Jon couldn’t send back to Earth, was considered. “Oh, hell.”
“Really shouldn’t curse by something you haven’t actually heard about, runt.” Isaac said, not without sympathy, reaching over to pat the shorter man’s head.
Did she just love to make people wretched, and she did not care who? Ciara swallowed. She had found killing everyone in her family mirthful, and she had missed Ciara, not spared her.
The corridor turned into stairs ahead, and Ciara slowed. No point in doing her work for her.
“Father!” The barkeep hurried over to him, hands held before him for a blessing. “I run a clean establishment. Is there anything I can do for you, or the church –”
“I am looking for someone, good sir.” Father Harold told the man. “Have you seen a young man, about fifteen, with rust red hair? Medium build. Green eyes.?”
The barkeep began to sweat. “Except for the hair, there’s someone at the back tables who matches that description. He could have coal dust in his hair, though.”
“I will look, then.” The priest strode to the back door. It was not his worst fear. The boy was merely playing cards with three other men, and, by the piles of money, winning. “Gregory. Heinrich. August. Graf. Duttinholf. What, in the name of God are you DOING HERE!?” Harold grabbed the prince by the collar and dragged him from the table. The prince was drunk, again. “Pratzev vwyeta” the priest muttered, holding his right hand over Gregory’s head and blessing it.
Gregory staggered, as the alcohol in his system began breaking down. “God damn it, Harold! At least add a painkiller spell.”
The priest slapped the prince across the face. “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, you wretched little boy. You worked for that headache, you can have it. You may be fifteen, but you are still under my care, living in your father’s house. You have neither the wisdom, or temperament to even begin to rule and no matter what the law says, you are still a child.
“We are truly wretched people,” she said grimly, her hands so far up her thighs that her thumbs were able to hide fully under her panties.
Izanagi, I thought, start…
Running the gestalt software now, and have psychiatric services on contact, Izanagi interrupted me and I could feel my blood chemistry change. Izanagi was convinced that there was going to be a fight.
That picture of Raphaela is supposed to be an 11-year-old girl? She looks twice that age.
I think that’s after “Now, the rapid aging disease is back”.
yes
“Utterly wretched I see,” said the wizard, glancing them up and down. “Skin and bones, dressed in the remnants of rags, badly injured.”
Rosine looked at her intact clothes.
“Having,” said Florio, “little hope of escaping any of those things, being utterly friendless and with a powerful foe in pursuit.”
“Daddy, why did you call the pool hall a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’?”
Rafe smiled to his son. “It’s an old joke. One of these days we’re going to have to watch some classic movies together. One’s a musical about a con artist who sends a whole town in a moral panic over a pool table, and the other’s an adventure story about what we used to think an interstellar civilization would look like, before the Tiwari showed up and sold us their stardrive.”
The wretched little hovel stood, barely, in the middle of the clearing. There was a huge hole in the roof and one wall was leaning precariously. Ivy worked its way up two of the walls and wrapped itself into the hole in the roof and through an opening that Davan supposed had once been a door.
Galina switched the display’s feed back to the status update from her millshop — the display didn’t have any hardware to ‘read’ its input other than as image data, so no security wormhole there — and leaned back in her seat with a drawn-out sigh. And tried to herd her stampeding thoughts back into something resembling order. There were various ‘official’ news feeds going blank all over the planet; but the contents of the overall commnet made it clear enough (outside of thousands of people going Orson Welles all at once, or something equally Crazy Years) that declaring a Planetary Emergency Level 0 Type 737, Alien Invasion, had been nothing at all like a joke.
Armored, suited Fed-troopers in the streets of the cities. Landing craft falling from orbit to ‘invade’ most of the major population concentrations on the planet. Witless-sounding broadcasts hacked into the Net, with wooly-mouthed presumptions by Fedsters who obviously had no least clue how utterly damn-foolish they sounded to regular people, how they might just as well have had a neon-red-flashing sign going on and off over their heads, DUMB-ASS, DUMB-ASS, DUMB-ASS.
All those years after Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater of the Air (unintentional) Mars Hoax, this time it was just totally real. Except now, of course, it was Commie-fied ‘One World’ Earth invading Mars.
She looked over to the curved section of borehole liner wall, where hung one of the several versions of the old 19th-century quotation she’d cross-stitched on the long, long way Out Here, months in the Big Wheel before they’d airbraked into the atmosphere and it continued on its long, two-year loop back to Earth and (presumptive) re-use as hotel for another flock of colonists. (Not exactly “your tired and wretched masses yearning to breathe free” or “steerage to the stars” or whatever else the wry originals had truly said; but not a first-class luxury passage exactly either — that would be the gas-core reactor “torchships” on their fully-hyperbolic orbits, not their own inter-ballistic craft shot off on trajectory by very old-school, return-to-Earth-orbit solid-core nuclear rockets right out of the 1960s.)
«Планета есть колыбель разума, но нельзя вечно жить в колыбели.»
The Earth is the cradle of the mind; but one must not live in the cradle forever.
It had never failed to inspire her, in all the years since she’d read the words of a Russian schoolteacher and, really, technological prophet named Tsiolkovsky; it was only that now, suddenly, it also quietly enraged her.
The inmates of the nursery have revolted, the squalling babes of the cradle have run out to try to tell all of us grownups in the rest of the house what we will do. Forever.
Mais non, but simply no, she said in her husband’s French. And some other old words came to her, a few at a time, in the same tongue from that old song of almost three centuries ago. Which the new world government had (of course) banned. Like l’étandard sanglant elevé… raise the bloody flag on high, more or less. (Red as blood, red as Mars, red as war.)
And she permitted herself a very slight, very warm smile. Beneath all the love and comfort that being (for so long) “Galina Ostrovska” had brought her, all these long years for most of her life now, all of that and so much joy and satisfaction too, there was a deep-buried geological stratum of something else, someone else, from a time before “Galina” had ever been.
And Natalya could, perhaps, do what so many others could not, or ought not. For their own sakes. Though in her case, experience had taught her so long ago, it risked mostly… satisfaction, of another kind and perhaps of a kind far too tempting, at that.
But for now Galina, once a colonist, then a stoop-labor tunnel farmhand, then a precision machine operator on extrusion machines making graphite fuel cores for NERVA-style nuke-rockets, then a chemist helping to turn the monazite-salted dusts of Acidalia Planitia into thorium for the reactors that made Mars run, then a precision shop owner/operator/foreman… turned back to her millroom.
Because firearms had been some of the most precise machinery in existence, for most of their own.
One must not live in the cradle forever.
And Galina Ostrovska smiled Natalya’s old smile, so little and so large, as she opened files on guns.
[Based on some pre-existing setting and events.]
Wretched, that’s the word that came to Phillip’s mind as he sipped the “coffee” from the Bus Station canteen. He didn’t even waste his time on the other offerings which looked either stale or well past their best sell-by date. The girl listening to Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell had been interesting, and he made a note to pick up a copy of the album when he reached Albuquerque. She’d gotten off in Houston while he had pressed onward (sigh). Now he was waiting in the San Antonio Greyhound station for the connection to Albuquerque. Three days on the dog, but it would be worth it, eventually.
“Geez, Hartley, you look awful! Parapsychological research not going well?”
“On the contrary. I’ve achieved a breakthrough: I can hear what others are thinking.”
“Wow! That’s great!”
“Is it? Did you know that ninety-five percent of humans have earworms? Frère Jacques by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir… The second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh on kazoos… Vincent Price singing ‘Over the Rainbow…’ I tell you, Smithers, I shall have to move to the Sahara Desert to escape this wretched cacophony.”
My cashbox now has only fifteen denarii in it, not even enough for stock.
I bought a comical sign in the marketplace and tacked it on underneath the lock.
“My other cashbox is a wagon train”.
Silly, I know, but I laughed like a drain.
I love acting the goat.
Thanks for boosting the signal!
“Thought control is too dire a temptation. Anybody willing to use such power can’t be trusted with it.”
“But for mass murderers, and terrorists…”
“Oh, sure, they’d start with the most wretched examples, and then crow about how successful it was, how humane, how life was so much better when certain people could be prevented from committing any more heinous crimes…but it would never end. They would inevitably turn from correcting actual criminals to averting potential criminals — and they’d see everybody as potential criminals.”
“You can’t know that would happen—“
“Can’t I? Look at how they vilify all gun owners.” He looked a challenge at her, and she had no answer.
He let the silence hang, then proffered, “Of course, anyone who would oppose their benevolent rule is obviously a potential criminal…”
“You think people would do that?”
“What have you ever seen that would lead you to doubt it?”
Again, she had no answer.
“Using this technology against their political opponents would come as naturally to them as any other form of tyranny. Look at the lengths they go to in suppressing dissent today! Thought control is just a more effective version of ‘cancel culture’. Anyone daring to speak out against them would be taken in for…conditioning.”
“Imagine a world in which people are programmed to obey the ruling elites without question or doubt. I assure you, they are imagining it right now.”
Got around to reading Cloud-Castles this weekend- perfect read for a blizzard. Took a few chapters to warm up to the world & characters, but once I did I pretty much binge- read it. Hopefully we will see more of this world going forward (Charlie & Lindsey’s adventures on Azure, perhaps?)