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

1. “Young man, when people talk about having a hot time in town, they don’t mean literally setting the town ablaze”.

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2. “My mind is ablaze with the possibilities” Chuck said.
   “No, it’s your hat” Marcus informed him.
   “Dude you are such a downer man, can’t you see a genius is working here?” Chuck angrily replied.
   I grabbed the fire extinguisher, and liberally dosed the genius’s burning hat.

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3. Jodie’s eyes were ablaze with anger. “Father did what he usually does, didn’t he? Figured out exactly what strings he had to pull to get someone to dance for him. And make them grateful that he did it to them.”

   I’m glaring at her, and I hold up my left arm. “Remember this? You probably don’t, because when your car exploded, it took this arm off. And most of the left side of my face and left eye. Most of my jaw. Most of my legs. Six months to a year, floating on morphine at best. So, yes, I am grateful that he fixed me up! The secondary issues I could have done without, but I’m here because he asked and you said yes.”

   Jodie looked away, ashamed. “I did, but I didn’t know what was going to happen to you. Wong is one of his pet mad scientists and I know that the process…well, it wasn’t made to create sane people, but broodmares.”

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4. This one calls for action from one group or another! Why not let this group run wild?

   “That’s right! Run, you vermin!”

   Lysandra Hasapis’ mad laughter echoed through the battlefield as her mech Yurena extended its left hand, a mass of flames forming before streaking forward. The fiery sphere exploded, scattering the Baldrazian mechs and setting the battlefield ablaze. Lord Protector Edmund was by her side but he saw no need to quench the fire. Quite the contrary, he was channeling his own fire magic through Alpheratz’s arcana mechanisms, slowing the advance of another wave of enemy mechs.

   Yet Edmund wasn’t caught up in the reverie of destruction the way his empress was. He spotted a stray Falke that had gotten through the inferno and moved to intercept, shifting his focus from searing flames to protective light. The high-speed mech bounced off the barrier Edmund had conjured up and the Diamond Paladin moved in for the kill. The stunned pilot had no chance to react before Alpheratz drove his sword through the cockpit, ending his life.

   “Fool,” the Lord Protector sniffed before turning his attention to his charge. “Are you all right, My Lady? That was close.”

   “Hm? Oh yes, yes, yes I’m fine!” the Mad Empress replied, extending Yurena’s built-in whip from its right wrist to lash an approaching Jaeger. “I knew you’d dispose of any strays, Edmund dear!”

   “I could never do anything less, My Lady.” Edmund responded, taking a position next to the empress. He then enchanted Alpheratz’s sword with fire, its blade becoming less like the sword rapier he usually fought with and more like the curved kilij that he trained with in Odrysia all those years ago. It was a shame Vincent Austin was up north dealing with Carys Adair at the moment. His skills would be dulled by this pathetic fodder, as would those of his savior, Empress Lysandra Hasapis.

   “Long may you reign, My Lady,” Edmund said to himself quietly. “And may it soon encompass the entire continent.”

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5. He watched her warily, and she abruptly realized that he did not know her, any more than she knew who the other woman was. Still, he did not look as if he feared she would set him ablaze. She reached out and touched his arm.
   The glow spread, and the wounds knit up at its touch. He stared with wonder, and the moment the glow faded, he stood on his own, testing his arms.
   “Ah, good,” said the other woman. And vanished without a trace.
   They gawked. Ciara closed her eyes and remembered they could be attacked from any door.

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6. The night sky was ablaze with shimmering curtains of blue and green, ornamented here and there with reds and oranges. Had he been in St. Petersburg, Gil would’ve been unsurprised, but here in Tbilisi the Northern Lights were at most a dim glow above the the northern peaks.

   He twirled the radio dial, finding only noise. Not just the crackling and hissing of ordinary static, but also piercing shrieks. Even frequency-modulated transmissions, which were supposed to be immune to static, were being flooded, almost as if they were being jammed.

   He glanced over to the computer monitor. Internet connectivity was spotty, although it did appear that fiber-optic lines were suffering less than copper. Pings were getting completely unpredictable results — a node that was up a minute ago might be down now, and respond again in another minute.

   What was happening over in the US? Gil didn’t think about the land of his birth often. Almost two decades since the Expulsions, he’d found his place here in the Russian Empire — but with a crisis at hand, his mind went back to long-forgotten friends and their well-being.

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   1. A Super Carrington Event? Imagine intense auroras in the daytime at the equator.

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7. Molly, Amy, and Ellen were all hard at work at sewing. The plain work, but they were stitching so hard that Rosaleen did not think they would hear any words by the hearth, which was ablaze.
   Liam leaned forward as if he could spy out dragons in the ruby-red coals.

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8. “We’ll be lost!” Jiro wailed.
   Yoshino replied, “Nope. It’s not a problem.”
   “But you don’t have a compass, or a map, or even a GPS. How can we find our way back through this forest.”
   Yoshino smiled as he sliced a bit of bark from a tree. “With a blaze.”

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9. “The peasants must have loved that,” said Katherine. “Unable to go into the forest for their firewood. They had rights to it. I would have thought they would set the woods ablaze.”
   “They did not,” said Grace. “Tales agree that he let them into Goldengrove, to gather firewood and things.”

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10. “And do you know why many scorn that distinction?” said Master Stephanos mildly.
    Lenore drew a deep breath. “Because some spells are inherently evil in their operation, because of the evil used in them or that they directly cause, but there are no spells that are inherently good. A fire-lighting spell can warm the cold, or set a house ablaze. Even were I to heal someone, if I did so in order that he might do evil, it would be evil on my part.”
    “Peasants can’t learn that,” said Mistress Jane. “They could learn to call it bright and dark.”

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11. “The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed at times with the Blood of Patriots and Tyrants”
    Thomas Jefferson.
    This once again set the country ablaze!

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12. June’s nose wrinkled at the smell of charcoal lighter as she stepped onto the patio. The briquettes were ablaze and Susan, looking pleased with her creativity, had weighted down the tablecloth with a bottle of soda at one end and her baby brother at the other.

    “Watch him, Susan! Don’t let Todd crawl anywhere. I’m going to get the plates and the coleslaw.” June darted back inside as her husband poked at the coals in the hope that they would burn to ash faster.

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13. “Drop your gun belt, Lefty, before I have to drop you!”

    “What are you about, stranger?”

    “You’re riding my horse, and I’m taking him back. I want to make sure there are no – misunderstandings.”

    “How do you know this is your horse?”

    ‘Windy has a blaze that is very distinct.”

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14. Apropos of not much, I’ve run into a nonfiction book of letters that ends up sounding very much like the beginning of a Gothic novel.

    https://www.google.com/books/edition/Memorials_of_the_life_and_character_of_l/L0kBAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

    Memorials of the Life and Character of Catherine Osborne is the title of the book. It’s about a lady who was widowed young, and who came from England to live in an overly big mansion between Counties Tipperary and Waterford, in 1816.

    “…those great rooms where no sound is to be heard but the cawing of rooks and the sound of my own footsteps…

    “Johnstone… and I occupy my dressing-room a great deal. I make her sit there that I may sometimes see a human face — hear a human voice. I never saw a house so still and solitary as this.

    “It is so very much apart from the servants; no door of communication upstairs with their apartments. My maid and I walk along the long corridor, from room to room, without more fear of interruption from a single being than if we were in the deserts of Arabia.”

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    1. The letters really have a lot of interest. And this young Anglo-Irish matron goes swimming!

       “The bathing place is a favorite spot with me; the river is overhung with trees, and a little moss hermitage to undress in. I am become as fond of the water as an otter; and it is much pleasanter to bathe in a river, than in a closed bath, because you have the advantage of sun.”

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       1. Her husband was very weird. When some of her hyacinths were cut down, to prevent the gardener from winning at the local flower show, he decided that the show was the problem, and forbade the gardener from showing any flowers or even his prize cucumbers.

          Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

          He was a lot older than she was (he fell in love with her at first sight, when he saw her looking over books in a subscription library in England), and he is destined to kick the bucket pretty soon. (Hence the early widowhood, although not before she had something like five kids.)

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          1. She confesses to having fainted several times, while enjoying being read to, from the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

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             1. There is a lot of mention of the difficulties of figuring out what to do with all the farms owned by her husband, for the benefit of her son, and having to deal with a lot of lawsuits because the executors didn’t feel like doing their jobs.

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                1. Apparently her family used to send letters to Lord Donoughmore to get franked, and it turned out many of the letters never got sent, both because he was disorganized and because he had so much correspondence he was asked to frank. This included bills being paid… oops….

                   So she concludes that she will start sending letters to a Miss Hutchinson to get franked.

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                   1. OTOH, some of her schemes for the improvement of her tenants’ lives were… um… more enthusiastic than wise, or even desired.

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                      1. When her daughter Catherine was sick, she had her “literally enveloped in flannel; flannel jacket and trousers and stockings…”

                         So there’s a picture — early Victorian winter pajamas!

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                         1. They did that to me when I had smallpox. RED flannel. Also the lamp was wrapped in red paper, to shield my eyes.
                            I later found out that was a thing done in Elizabethan England. Go figure.

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                            1. Red treatment for smallpox was a real thing, under the aegis of the Elizabethan equivalent of the CDC.
                               https://alphahistory.com/pastpeculiar/1307-treat-smallpox-colour-red/

                               And was just as effective as the current nostrums for the Pox Du Jour.

                               However, there is a modern medical treatment using red light that may indicate the older medicos were sort of on to something but couldn’t quite figure out why.
                               (google-fu ” red light therapy” for links)

                               My speculation is that people learned early on that red lighting enhanced night vision, and made the usual leaps of intuition sans investigation common before science was invented (not to be confused with The Science).

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15. The old-gold-bead crescent of the hurrying little moon had passed overhead a few minutes ago; now dwindled in the east opposite paired and lowering suns. Newly also a tiniest fiery dot was visible, along the track it took, though you must shade your eyes well to mark that out.

    By her quick smile, he saw her raptor-sharp eyes had caught it too.

    Odd, at least somewhat, for it to be a Gold Moon up there instead of a Brick Moon, thought Asaph Connery idly (formerly Colonel Connery, CSA, still called so by some). Even if I’m the one of all us once-Americans on this unco far-off globe who’s read Hale’s story, to know what a Brick Moon is.

    His arm tightened a little on the woman, his wife Sorcha, by his side. Not born within a thousand light-years (as they reckoned it) of Earth, on Tea-and-Tephi; not able, on their memorable first meeting, to speak any but the most broken bits of English; now inescapably central to his life.

    “Tell me again, just a bit, of these Tinkers. Who they are and how it is they’ve ended up as the first off-world contact we’ve had here, since we were, as you say, Dropped.” His eyes held to that incoming bright bit of flying — marvel — visibly well up by now, out of the suns-dazzle.

    “Traders, purveyors of curiosities and necessities, not so much the heavy and commercial and industrial — though that too, at times. If you imagine a caravan parade of wagons rolling into some backwoods little town in your ancestors’ Ireland or Scotland, some fair market day… a lot like that. Not Travellers per se, ethnically or linguistically; but maybe a bit like ’em too.” Her accent wandered wildly, from almost-Southern to bookish to deep-dyed Irish, like so many from (Earth’s) Irish Gaeltacht.

    Her Tea-and-Tephi had been settled by people rescued, or Shanghai’d, from old-Irish places before Patrick and later the English conquerors had come.

    Two planets in one orbit; a persistent pre-existent Gate (quite amazingly) bridging the sixty degrees of orbital longitude between them.

    “And it’s quite common for the Miinarii to leave their new-planted, umm, colonies to themselves for half a century or so. Perhaps simply to see if they thrive, or survive at all.” (Asaph shuddered, inwardly; it was a bit disconcerting to reflect you might well be, to the ones who’d whisked him and a few of his men from that hellish rout, and Sorcha and a few of her travel-companions from that boiler explosion, no more than a hill of corn or beans was to a farmer; and as easily re-plantable at need.)

    “But sometimes you ‘hear’ first from others, not the Miinarii themselves or their human ‘agents and intermediaries’ in person. May be our Tinkers have a message to give us. Sure and near-certain it is they’ll never have gotten here, them or their miles-wide little gold moon, without the Gates the Miinarii can Weave.” (That was what their old, immemorial name said, the only ‘native’ word they’d ever gifted to anyone: Weaver-folk.)

    That tiny bright dot had now the aspect of a streaking meteor — ablaze in truth, not merely shining in reflected sunslight, trailing flame behind in a tail. For at least a moment, he feared for those inside. Then raised an eyebrow, slowly, at Sorcha.

    Who, as always these later days, caught his question perfectly. “Fear not for them, dear Asa. Tinkers love to, as you say, ‘show off’ — especially their impressive-things. Think of an immaterial silvery balloon that can appear around you, and divert all the hot gases and reflect all the heat and light. Though, of course, that means all the heat they had and make meantime is trapped with them, too, all the while it’s there around them.” If she sounded like a scientist, or more like a ‘natural philospher’ of an older style, it was what she’d been, before; often, still managed to be.

    “There are ways to make a semblance of gravity, like Newton’s universal gravitation but different, and shorter-ranged, and quite artificial.” (She might’ve compared it to Cavorite-based antigravity in First Men in the Moon, awful physics and all; only Wells hadn’t written his book yet.) “And even cast it out differently in different directions, so it pushes to the east but pulls to the west; that’s another way to slow down, coming in to land. You can even store up your energy of motion to use later, though it’s not as, hm, dramatic, as coming in with heels kicking and hair ablaze through the lower, thicker air.

    “Or so I, and we, have heard. Remember, such things are phoenikeia even to mine, who leash the lightning and bid it carry our words like a pigeon.”

    Again, Asaph shuddered. She’d said earlier, almost offhand, orbital speed was four or five miles a second, down as ‘low’ as the Golden Moon circled. It wasn’t only faster than a bullet or artillery shell, it was nearly fast as a meteor. Briefly, he mused on how such surpassing swiftness made near anything a most deadly weapon.

    And tried to imagine flying blind in and through a fiery trail of ravening meteoric flame, of your own making. When you didn’t need to, had calmer and safer-seeming ways to go instead…

    Asaph Connery had come through some of the nasiest fighting of the entire War Between the States; he’d faced down some of his own men more than once when they wanted to… go feral, as when they came upon Sorcha and some of her co-Dropped bathing naked in a pool here, after leaving Earth behind. (Though her friend Aine shooting an arrow right through a six-inch oak limb, in the middle of that standoff, had not hurt his efforts.)

    He was nothing of a coward and had nought left to prove. But riding inside such an insane ball of flame, as came ever closer and grew ever brighter?

    No, thank you, ma’am. Thank you so much, but none of that dish for me.

    Closer, it dimmed and dropped its dazzling fiery mantle; made a brown dot, cloaked now and again in an odd sort of fog. Well west of the zenith, so it lowered in altitude as it neared in distance.

    By now, it seemed, at the limits of vision, to take on definite form and figure — like a shop-wagon of the “medicine show” sort, crossbred with a “prairie schooner” on the Conestoga pattern. Flying yet, of course; which made his hair stand on end some, despite an ongoing parade of marvels he’d seen since waking up with his left boot still brim-full of blood, but the bullet-broken artery inside most mysteriously whole again.

    “But to really answer your question, Asaph, they like above all to deal in wonders, novelties, impressive things. Phoenikeia as we call ’em so often, out among the Daughter Worlds you of Earth never see or hear about, always the last to know. ‘Phoenician things’ as the old Greeks named ’em; first the alphabets, back when those were a big new thing, later anything else wondrous, be it Miinarii or not.”

    Almost like a train pulling into a station, if nearly too fast to see, it braked to a near-stop in mid-air maybe a furlong or so up. Drifted slowly downward and nearer to where she and he and the curious and brave stood by their cross-mark of rolled-out white cloth stark against the green field.

    Came swiftly down in a graceful swoop toward it, hovered a breath or two maybe ten feet above it, fell decisively and kissed the ground gently on chest-high wheels.

    A shortish man in white shirt and dark pants and bowler hat — who’d not be out of place in a general store or haberdashery in Roanoke or Atlanta of Asaph’s time on Earth — hopped smartly out and all but ran up to meet them.

    Offered him a neat-printed card in old-fashioned style, on an open palm. Asaph couldn’t help but smile as he took it and read:

    Aloysius T. McCarron

    The Family McCarron:

    Traders and Curiosity-Dealers Extraordinary.

    “We Aim to Amaze.”

    The man’s smile, as he doffed his hat and bowed, was… brilliant.

    Asaph Connery’s was, too. Just that swift and easy, we’re no longer an island in the sky. Part of their great Synagogue of Worlds. Us!

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16. A scientific rationale for the efficacy of red light therapy for small pox, 1905.
    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/464827

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