Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

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. ;)*

*Some of these books are getting pushed two weeks in a row because now (crosses fingers) they have images. Apparently it makes a huge difference. Who knew? – SAH*

From Sarah A. Hoyt: Odd Magics: Tales for the Lost

This is a very strange collection of fairytales, recast for modern life. In it the prize isn’t always to the fairest, the
magic is rarely to the strongest.
But lonely introverts do find love, women who never gave it a thought find themselves at the center of romance.
Doing what’s right will see you to the happily ever after.
And sometimes you have to kiss an accountant to find your prince.

This one is the fault of all of you little maniacs. I wrote a few short short fairy tales set in modern day, frankly on days I was too depressed to write about the real world. And then y’all clamored for it in book format. Well, having read them over, they’re really ridiculously cheering-up. So I edited them and slapped them up for sale. Yes, there will be a paper version when it comes out (I need to figure out how to put it for preorder, first.) This amuses me greatly because fracture fairytales are the domain of ultra-woke. Cover by Caitlin Walsh, who was terrified of making a cover, but I bullied her anyway. Because I do that. There you go – SAH

From Frank J. Fleming: Superego ON SALE

Rico is a psychopath.

That’s why his job as an intergalactic hitman for a massive criminal syndicate suits him so well. He gets to do what he does best: go planet to planet and wreak destruction. He enjoys his work.

But Rico’s latest assignment isn’t what it seems, and after inadvertently thwarting a terror attack, he finds himself playing the good guy. Stuck pretending he’s a cop, he gets paired with some lady detective who is more than a little suspicious of him. To make matters worse, he starts to have new feelings toward her, feelings he’s never felt before. Love, maybe? That’s stupid. What is he supposed to do with that?

And this job isn’t fun, as it soon spirals into secrets, betrayal, and a whole planet out to kill him. Well, it’s a little fun. Still, Rico may have finally found himself in a situation he can’t shoot his way out of.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

From Frank J. Fleming: Superego: Betrayal

Terrorists. A ruthless criminal syndicate. A warmongering dictatorship. And those are just Rico’s allies.

With the civilized universe conquered, it’s up to the uncivilized to fight back. Rico prefers working alone, but this time he’s leading an army against his two greatest enemies, who both have one thing in common: Rico’s own DNA.

Fighting a personal battle on a galactic scale, Rico enlists thieves, murderers, and malcontents (plus one space princess) to help him save the universe from tyranny.

And considering Rico’s new associates, it’s not a question of whether he’ll be betrayed, but when, and by whom.

From Amanda S. Green: Foil of the Gods

Evil has taken root in the Adrean Imperium. Soon it will rise up, destroying everything in its wake. If Balaar wins, the world will fall to a darkness the like of which it has never before seen.

Aimsir, to the west of the Imperium, is the birthplace of the Order of Arelion, enemy of Balaar. Cait Falconer—Knight-Cleric and heir to Queen Maeve Porgisl, ruler of Aimsir—knows danger draws near. Aimsir’s borders have been safeguarded but at a great cost. Now Cait and the Order work with the Queen and her military to make sure Aimsir never falls to the coming evil.

Then the unthinkable happens. Allies fall. Others become enemies. The followers of Balaar march inexplicably toward Aimsir. If it falls, all will be lost.

From Roy M. Griffis: The Thing from HR: A Cthulhu, Amalgamated novel

What’s a nice Shoggoth like him doing in a dump like this?

Narg was content working as a Damnation Services-10 in HR. Sure, he was related to one of the Elder Gods, but a little nepotism never hurt any Thing. His life was just wailing and gibbering, right up until his Uncle needed a small favor from his nephew.

All Narg had to do was go down among the humans…and pretend to be one of them.

From Dale Cozort: Snapshot-42 Book One-Stalingrad Run

At the height of World War II, an apparent time anomaly cuts Europe and part of the Middle East off from the rest of the world. Trapped in Northern Iran, with no way to contact the world he knew, United States Army Engineer Jim Edwards is forced to flee from both the Germans and the Soviets. His only companions are a mysterious Russian woman who may be trying to assassinate Stalin, and a man who calls himself “Loki”. Is he any more trustworthy than the Norse trickster god he’s named after?

In a desperate bid to get to Great Britain, Jim finds himself in a treacherous race across Nazi-occupied Europe. His mission? To prevent the Nazis from overrunning Europe, then sending their war machines against an alternate United States that’s still armed with black powder muskets. The freedom of mankind’s future may depend on his success.

Pam Uphoff: Home World

Roland house Jaeger is in desperate straits after being brutally used to distract his father while his enemies move.

Lord Seigbert Fey needs help to gain custody of his orphaned grandchildren, and desperate enough to take a chance on a battered angry teenaged boy.

Together, they start to pull their lives together. But their Transdimensional Empire of thousands of Worlds, the Drei Mächte Bündnis, the Three Part Alliance, is heading into rough waters, and about to hit the rocks that will shatter it.

Can a small family survive the fall of the Alliance?

From Anna Ferreira: The Flight of Miss Stanhope: A short and Sweet Regency Romance

Marianne Stanhope is in trouble. Her family is urging her to accept the attentions of a most odious suitor, so she turns to a gentleman of her acquaintance for aid. But Mr. Firth has his own reasons for assisting Miss Stanhope, and it falls to her childhood friend Mr. Killingham to convince her that she’s made a dreadful mistake.

By Malcolm Jameson, With Afterword by D. Jason Fleming: Too Young To Live!

After suffering a catastrophic failure that almost destroys their ship, the crew of the Thuban manage to gain some control inside of a dark nebula, and land on the mysterious Athanata — a planet where age is immortality, and youth is a death sentence!

First published under the editor-mandated title Quicksands of Youthwardness, iktaPOP Media is pleased to bring this long out-of-print Malcolm Jameson tale back to readers everywhere.

From Peter Rabe, with Foreword by Jason D. Fleming: A House in Naples

After World War 2, Charley and Joe made a good living on the black market in Italy. They didn’t like each other. Didn’t even trust each other. But they worked well together.

Now it’s been ten years, though, and after Martha shows up, things are starting to come apart.

From Leigh Kimmel: Once a Chekist

Katya Burinskaya carries a deadly secret. So when she is summoned to the Lubyanka for a personal meeting with the head of Imperial Security, she fears the worst.

However, this meeting does not concern her, but her daughter. Tasha has become entangled with a troublesome genomic prince of the Imperial House, and both mother and daughter may suffer if Katya does not assist Security Minister Chalkov in investigating a family affair of his own, which also involves Prince Yevgenny Yakovlevich.

Politics makes strange bedfellows in the new Russian Empire born of human cloning and Cold War genetic experiments. Chalkov was once an officer of the old Soviet KGB. And as Katya’s husband often warns, once a Chekist, always a Chekist.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Originally published in the anthology Mortis Operandi.

From T. L. Knighton: Bad Moon On The Rise

Sheriff Jason Calvin and the people of New Eden have managed to move on from a brutal war with a neighboring town. In the aftermath, a new government rose from the ashes to bring peace to the Tennessee Valley.

Unfortunately, there always seems to be people who have no interest in peace as a group of ruthless thugs with a personal axe to grind kills one of Jason’s closest friends. Now, the sheriff has to deal with meddlesome bureaucrats, a conniving rival, and old enemies in an effort to find the men responsible, plus the small army protecting them, and bring them to justice.

Bad Moon on the Rise continues the story first told in After the Blast and continued in Bloody Eden.

By Max Brand, with Foreword by D. Jason Fleming: Train’s Trust (Annotated): The classic pulp western adventure

Steve Train, gambler, adventurer, clever rogue, didn’t care much for work. But then he was offered a job with no work, but plenty of danger. The job: track down outlaw Jim Nair — and hand him a pile of money!

From Sarah A. Hoyt: Barbarella #9
(There will be five more with a new plot line after #10!)

The penultimate issue for this current installment! Beauty meets beautiful (and highly defended) beast as Barbarella takes the fight right to The Lady’s doorstep. Doing so means tracking down The Lady’s hidden home world and doing that means fighting through the masses determined to keep it hidden! If it’s that hard to make planetfall, what the heck awaits our hero? And what is the incredible, tragic connection between The Lady and Taln?! All this, and cringy one-liners, too!

Edited by Hank Davis, and featuring a story Co-Authored by Sarah A. Hoyt and Robert A. Hoyt:Cosmic Corsairs!

NEW FICTION AND CLASSICS OF THE GENRE COLLECTED BY THE EDITORIAL TEAM BEHIND SPACE PIONEERS AND OVERRULED!

SPACE PIRATES!

Words that conjure up rousing tales of adventure, derring-do, brave heroes battling the scurvy vermin of the galaxy. Those vermin have taken to pillaging cargo ships and, even worse, space liners, relieving the helpless passengers of their valuables, and worse with the comely women passengers, then spacing the lot—unless one or more of the aforementioned brave heroes arrive in the nick of time, and turn the tables, making the spaceways safe again for the innocent and helpless. On the other hand, perhaps the pirate captain is a woman, and it’s the comely male passengers who need rescuing. And on the third hand (we’re talking space pirates here, possibly aliens with four or more arms), perhaps those ships traversing the interstellar void are not so innocent, and the pirates, fighting an evil despotic star empire and defending the freedom of the space lanes, are the good guys and gals. The possibilities are many, and the daring exploits set the blood racing in the veins of any reader with even a trace of buccaneering spirit in their hidden self.

So board a battered but spaceworthy fighting starship with such star-spanning and award-winning crewmates as Robert Silverberg, Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, Larry Niven, Fritz Leiber, and Sarah A. Hoyt, plus James H. Schmitz, James Blish, Gregory Benford, and more, and set sail—er, thrusters—for a universe of freebooting adventure!

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: SPOTTED

*Yes, yes, this time it worked. Well spotted! Granted it worked in a slightly different format, but I think I like it.
Anyway, didn’t quite finish the book yesterday, despite a valiant effort, so going back to head down. If you need me, some of you have my # (you just have to play find the person.) If you can’t find someone who has my number, and you don’t have my number, you don’t need me. Keep the dragon out of my office. He’s liable to get his nose bitten off. And try not to wake Havey, who is sleeping instead of bothering me. Thanks – SAH*

72 thoughts on “Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike”

  1. Now where is it?

    Oh, I’ve spotted it.

    Now I can have some coffee. 😉

  2. Well Spotted!
    Pinictures and all! I sorta like the format in the regular page too. In Reader, it looks like any other Promo.
    Had to jump to the home page to comment because I liked it in Reader and that was its cue to not let me post for a few reloads.
    Oh, and now I am logged into this page all the time too.

      1. Regardless, I think this format looks better and is easier to read (and to associate text with cover). At least on my screen. Your screen and eyeballs may vary, void where prohibited, some assembly required..

        1. Known to cause cancer in Californians. Operator assumes all risk when switching on the equipment. Unattended children will be given sugar and kazoos. Do not taunt happy fun ball with DeWalt, Milwaukee, or Makita products.

  3. “I can’t wait to tell my kids about this.”
    “Are you serious? We are working on leopard DNA and you just identified the sequence that turns the spots on and off. And you just took it out, then put it back in.”
    “Yes.”
    “Why would you tell your kids?”
    “Well, how much fun is it if I can’t tell them, ‘I spotted a leopard at work today’?”
    “You did all this for a dad joke?!!!”
    “A pun. And yes. I did.”

        1. Keep going, Mr. Taurus. Keep going. You just became the head of the bovine clan in this book. And at risk of assassination. (Laughs madly, then subdues into giggles.)

              1. Wow. And here I’d expected a walk-on sort of thing. I don’t know if I should be grateful or terrified. Or yes. But I plan on buying the books, yes I do. Possibly multiple copies to inflict upon amuse family and friends.

  4. Nice set of books today! Thanks! And Padre, I spotted that one coming from all the way over here! 🙂

  5. The prostrate ewe paused to gulp some air; then she gave one last heave, and her lamb wriggled free. Squirming eagerly out of his placenta, he staggered to his hooves, his spotted fleece gleaming unmistakably in the sunlight.

    Laban’s sons exchanged uneasy glances. Four in a row. This wasn’t good…

  6. Something new to read here!

    As opposed to the latest story I’ve spotted about the current White House occupant trying to start World War 3…

    1. Given the current White House occupant’s level of competence, having him try to start World War 3 might be the safest thing that could happen.

  8. The water heated sufficiently, Andriy added the contents of the packet and stirred. He leaned back among the ruins of what had been an apartment building, sipped and sighed. He was tired. A few moments for a bit of coffee, even instant was a welcome rest.

    “Andriy!” It was young Pavlo. “Sergeant says the enemy was spotted two kilometers north. We must go!”

    Andriy swallowed the last of his coffee, placing the metal cup back in his small pack, shouldering it. He picked up his rifle and started with Pavlo to the sound of the guns.

    “Let’s make them pay.”

  11. “March has been a terrible month, The Author needs to work on his pacing.

    Look at the Russia-Ukraine dispute. If you aren’t up for full time collection and analysis yourself, after you filter for information warfare it is like nothing is happening.

    Should have just segued into above ground testing on targets that are realistic, because real.”

    “You are insane.”

    “Well spotted. However, is there an actual problem with the argument that I have made?”

      1. Problems with the argument include that “bored now, carry out murders for my entertainment” is both evil and insane, and that European cities are probably not instrumented properly for testing.

        1. Definitely not. And given the current state of Europe, the reliability of said instruments even had they been emplaced properly would invite question. I am of course assuming that the instruments would be the responsibility of governmental entities. With very few exceptions I have not been impressed with the ability of governments of late, especially European ones, to do practical things properly at all.

  13. “They called me mad! That it couldn’t be done!” The wild eyed Professor turned to his diminutive sidekick; cowering behind a tesla coil.
    A calico cat sat beside him, industriously cleaning its paws.
    “But I did it! Finally, the world will behold my genius! For I have created the SPOTTED ZEBRA!”
    Pulling on a rope, the shroud fell from a cage, revealing an equine, placidly chewing on oats in a trough.
    “That’s called an Appaloosa,” the cat commented from the flagstones, “Idiot.”

      2. Amazon delivered a bit early – but, did you know, when it sends email, Amazon does not tell me WHAT it has delivered?

        Anyway, about halfway through. Seems like a bit of premature nostalgia for Colorado in places. Very nice so far; you have successfully competed for my beer money.

  15. “Well spotted,” said Julian. He offered her his arm and ushered her on.
    Grass spread before them.
    “All this lawn,” said Ava. “They can’t use it all for picnics.”
    “I believe it is for practice,” said Julian. “So we do not blast down the house, or tear up the roses.”

  16. No one moved in the house. Perhaps she had arrived without being spotted.
    She should not roam about the house searching for all the doors. Not now. It would be noticed. But tomorrow she would search, without a care for consequences. Perhaps she could say she heard stories about fires.

  17. “Ho, what’s going on at the castle?” said one man. He looked up, and all sorts of gazes followed him. Rosaleen frowned in puzzlement. They milled around like people who heard news.
    One lady started to wring her hands, and turned away. Rosaleen flinched. Like bad news.
    Someone started up.

  18. “Which was enough to make us not appear quite so strange, but it was the next day when we showed our skills. We shrank down, and appeared in the middle of a company, knowing they needed someone who could work with great stealth to succeed. Which is how we first joined Marian.”

  19. Dr. Michelson looked over the kid, “Do you know there were any tick bites in, oh, the couple weeks?” he asked.

    The concerned mother answered, “Yes, more than one. The things seem to be everywhere.”

    The doctor quickly scribbled out a prescription on his notepad, “Alright, ma’am, I want to run a test or two to be sure, but in the meantime, I am prescribing doxycycline. Make sure no doses are skipped, and even if everything looks and feels better, use it all up. Let’s not chance letting this nasty bug getting resistant.”

    “What is it?”

    “Looks like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.”

  20. (Another bit from the same story as last week)

    A motion at the entrance to the dining hall caught Shelly’s attention. She looked up just in time to see the four men coming in. That’s the Ares II crew

    Was Admiral Chaffee coming over here? Shelly’s heart beat faster with excitement.

    It would’ve been easier if she’d been a technical specialist, forbidden by astronaut custom to initiate contact with pilot-astronauts. You will not fangirl all over him. You are a professional test pilot and astronaut, so act like it.

    As the admiral walked up to their table, he made eye contact with Lucius. “Captain Belfontaine? If we can talk…”

    And then the two of them walked away, leaving Shelly watching their retreating backs in silent frustration. No, she was not going to look like the protagonist in a shoujo anime, moaning oh, senpai, please notice me. She was a professional, a pilot-astronaut, and she had work to do, so best to be about it.

  21. After shrugging into her parka and stuffing her wool-socked feet into shoes, she called down to her son, “I’m going out to get the mail. Will you come upstairs and spot me?”

    “Sure” was the laconic reply. She waited till he came into the room, then pulled open the front door, pushed open the storm door, and went carefully down the uneven steps to the driveway.

    It was only 50 feet down the slightly sloping drive to the mailbox at the curb, but with her bad knees the six inches of new snow on top of a half-inch of sleet made the going treacherous. Not to mention she knew at least a couple dozen sweetgum pods lurked under the white to turn an unwary ankle.

    So she walked gingerly down to the mailbox, wrestled with the door which was half-frozen shut, pulled out two envelopes, then carefully retraced her own footsteps. Once up on the safety of the dry porch, she stamped her shoes free of snow, pulled open the storm door and stepped into the living room, to find her son ensconced on the sofa wrapped in an afghan and reading on his phone.

    “That’s your idea of spotting me?” she asked in disbelief. “You weren’t even watching out the window.”

    “Not a problem,” he replied, not looking up from his book. “The inside door was open. If you had fallen, I would have heard the Thunk.”

  22. I love the cover Caitlin Walsh did for Odd Magics! Please let her know she should do more. I am looking forward to getting the Kindle version on April 2nd. I pre-ordered it as soon as I got your newsletter announcing same.

  23. “So your message said you wanted to see me, which usually ends up saying there’s something unpleasant enough you don’t want to tell me about it remotely.” Franklin Zumwalt’s voice was neutral, curious, easygoing as his almost-invariable disposition went (which really helped, when you were in overall on-site operational charge of at least the present incarnation of a decades-long terraforming project). “So, have your wildly clever people in Biological Testing and Calibration spotted another near-catastrophe we need to manage and avert, swiftest?”

    “No. Nothing that immediate, Zee, though this is probably worse in the long run than any of those ‘uh-oh’ scenarios. We’ve found pretty clear evidence of topogenic life, on Gemini Alpha.” Walter Collins’ voice was level, too, but a bit strained and even vaguely… funereal.

    Zumwalt — quite firmly “Zee” to anyone familiar enough he talked to them more than about once a standard year — furrowed his brow. “‘Topogenic’ is, what, natively-evolved life, not what we’ve been bringing in? How clear is ‘pretty’ clear, exactly, that it’s From Around Here? Because I’ve actually not yet read the detailed writeups on any world that wasn’t strictly abiotic from the start since I was taking planetforming classes back in graduate school.”

    Collins grimaced, just enough to see in-person. “Enough that one of its four DNA bases isn’t quite the same as ours, though it seems able to interoperate well enough. But so far, this is only a couple of species of extremophile bacteria from hot springs, about the only above-freezing spots on the whole planet before we cranked on the Global Warming.”

    “What you’re worried about, and let me simply skip ahead and guess, is that this might be about to blow up into a Snail Darter or Spotted Owl scenario on us. Right?” His soft gaze had got notably more intense.

    “Zee, it’s not quite as bad as all that… but it’s still a huge jump. What you’re used to, in this one corner of things, is simply Snodgrassing the whole planet — ‘No environment, no impact’ from that old 20th-century book. Well, now suddenly we’re into ‘unique biological heritage’ and all that sticky stuff. A whole new world, as the old saying goes, and not a better one at all. And of course Edensdawn being a private company hiring out as contract services, instead of some nonprofit single-purpose org building and launching their own single-shot dedicated arkology ship…”

    Zumwalt leaned back in his chair and blew a decent smoke ring meditatively at the ceiling inlet vent. (Ships might well frown on such a thing; but a miles-long modular arkology station, even ‘bolted together’ from smaller elements Jumped in piecemeal by dedicated transporter-carriers — could afford to be a bit laxer with ‘environmental cycling’ standards.)

    “Geographically, how widespread are these aboriginal bacteria? I know you said hot springs, but how many distinct detection sites so far?”

    “Three or four, likely five when we catch up to the testing. You have to develop biomarker tests before you can process mass lots of samples.” The sudden ‘thousand-yard stare’ in Collins’ eyes said something of how daunting that ramp-up really was becoming.

    And the ghost of a smile lit up Zumwalt’s face. “Way, way back, at the start of every planetology class, they used to give us the run-down of what things looked like pre-experimentally. You know, back when there was just as much speculation and mad guesswork to an ‘exoplanet’ as there was to a ‘unicorn’ or a ‘jackalope’ — and one of the things they mentioned from old intra-system primitive exobiology was how those shergottites and all the rest of the other-planet meteorites could easily have swapped around any life from Mars, Venus, and Earth that happened to be there to swap.” And his smile grew clearer, signal overcoming noise.

    “So, even though this is gonna up the load on BTC branch one more notch, I’m officially asking you to assess how likely it is that Gemini Alpha and Gemini Beta — our near-twin worlds tide-locked in a 31-hour orbit, as it says in all the prospectuses — have done that same thing with their own native life, assuming (as seems now about proven) that Alpha has ever had its own native life to swap? We know both have been hammered by impacts, we know they’re in a pretty deep mutual gravity well, we can calculate some Monte Carlo wizardry about the relative, ah, transmissibility of life between our Geminis vs., say, Mars and Earth back home. Right?”

    Collins actually smiled. “You mean, Arrhenius’ panspermia and all, but in the Gemini sub-system… so if Alpha has it, then Beta, sitting idle for the next couple of centuries according to the plan, likely will too? And that means… ‘two environments, much less impact’ if we can prove all that?”

    And “Zee” returned, seen and raised, a relatively rare full-out grin. “If we can show Alpha’s extremophiles are interchangeable with Beta’s, then we can just keep on with terraforming Alpha… while we get lots of non-Edensdawn science interest in Beta, lots of extra resources in-system too; and they get to figure out if heat-loving bacteria would love to get a little, ah, love and attention in trans-terraforming Beta for them — not our circus, not our monkeys, not our problem.”

    “Wow. Yes. Not much on the Spotted Owl after all, that would be. But Oh My Dear Lord, Zee, it’s like a whole new sub-effort within the Alpha project itself.” He looked at once energized and ready to play with his shiny new toy, and also quite precociously and pre-emptively exhausted. Christmas morning, after staying up all night to try and bag Santa.

    Frank Zumwalt smiled the smile that had launched a dozen workships. “And that, my dear Mr. Collins, is why we get the big bucks and the dazzling office views.” He waved to the 8K screen on the opposite bulkhead, eternally staring down at the mostly-snowy sweep of Epsilon Eridani IV-alpha far below them.

    (That “No environment, no impact” really appears at the beginning of one of Melinda Snodgrass’ “Circuit” trilogy books, as the final Environmental Impact Statement of the “Mars/Eden Project” — which series of books does indeed prove that legal, as in lawyerly, SF actually does exist, and does work…)

  24. Mother was unhappy. She had spotted chimney smoke in the distance. This was a sure sign the settlers were arriving in greater numbers. Soon her little bit of wilderness would be a boomtown. She started packing immediately. Within a week the wagon was packed and we were headed for Kentucky.

  25. So, on another topic…

    I haven’t noticed Fox posting here for a few days, which is unusual for her. RES has been MIA for many a week now. And as I had another girl named Sara on my mind just recently, it occurs to me that I can’t even remember the last time I saw a comment from SaraTheRed.

    Might be time for a roll call and a few wellness checks?

    1. Whoops, meant to post this under “In Vain I’ve Struggled.” Sorry to interrupt the stories with that.

    2. Fox has had, last I heard elsewhere, something develop that makes her busy and okay.

      Will pass on to that venue.

        1. Why would she be mad at you?

          Don’t worry too much. She and I had a nasty argument last year and if she’s held any kind of grudge, she’s done a damn good job of hiding it. I can’t imagine you doing anything that would make her STAY angry.

    3. RES was having eyes issue, so he doesn’t post as much, or read here as much, but I hear from him almost every day. I think he and his beloved spouse are taking a vacation from politics. Don’t blame them.
      Fox um….. added one to her tribe. He’s very cute.
      I have no clue what happened to Sarah the Red, and we should definitely find her.

      1. “RES was having eyes issue, so he doesn’t post as much, or read here as much”

        Yeah, I knew that, but he was still showing up every third or fourth post as I recall. But if he’s just taking a break, good for him.

        “Fox um….. added one to her tribe. He’s very cute.”

        Holy crap. I don’t even remember her mentioning that she was pregnant.

        I DO remember her saying she wanted to be Molly Weasley when she grows up, and I think she’s now tied for number of children. Tell her I said congratulations on catching up. 😉

        “I have no clue what happened to Sarah the Red, and we should definitely find her.”

        Hmm… do we know of any other places online she hangs out?

        2. I noticed the mention of pregnant here, but I can’t recall when or where.

          Anyway, I’ve been told that I can pass on that delivery occurred, and infer that I can pass on that mother and child are well.

    4. Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen Shadowdancer in a coon’s age. I recently saw an old, old comment over at Monster Hunter Nation, but nothing current.

      1. Last I heard Shadowdancer hangs out on the AtH Discord these days, though I don’t so I can’t confirm she’s still there. But I just checked her Twitter feed and saw that she retweeted something yesterday, so at least she’s still alive.

        1. She occasionally posts art on MeWe. She was doing a lot of commissioned work, the last time we chatted, and was busy.

    5. Sara is okay also.

      Had a lot of busy with family.

      She is mostly lurking, ATM.

      She appreciated the check in. Was thoughtful, and made her day.

  27. I’ve been wondering, is there a difference to the author between pre-order and order? Is it just getting people excited, or is there a difference in pay or anything? Patience is not one of my strong suits….

    1. I admit ignorance, but suspect even if zero difference directly to author, pre-order volume is an Indicator to publisher, even if (perhaps esp. if) not TradPub and is really “here are the tools, go for it.”

  28. Casper the Cat had an adventure this morning. We all know the definition of Adventure — somebody else going through hell in some distant place. Casper certainly didn’t enjoy his adventure. He’s an off-white cat with medium-long hair and gray shading on his head, ears and feet, similar to Siamese coloring. He’d be a Birman cat if he was purebred, but that’s unlikely.

    The first indication was the uproar of a cat-fight in the back yard. I went out to check, found Casper sitting on a pile of rocks looking rather out of sorts, and wondered what was going on. Then I spotted the palm frond. Somehow, Casper had gotten his tail snagged on the stalk of a large fan palm frond and dragged it across the yard, under protest.

    I tried to untangle his tail but, already in a foul mood, he ran off a short distance, turned on the palm frond and attacked it, hissing and growling. This set off Velsper, the chunky black cat, and they got into a squabble, along with the palm frond.

    Finally, his tail pulled free and he raced around the house to the front yard, and away. Velsper stood glaring after him with his fur all puffed up. Settling him down took a couple of minutes.

    Casper returned about fifteen minutes later, wanting back in the house. He curled up on a cat bed at once, clearly having decided that was enough excitement for one day.

  30. Pingback: Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike – According To Hoyt

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