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

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

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.*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.– SAH

FROM CAEL AMARI: Oathbound: An Age of Shadows Story

Life is short in Signe’s village. Monsters and undead infest the unforgiving mountains, and a brutal winter is prowling at the door. But when her closest friend is murdered in secret, Signe must undergo a dangerous journey in order to find the truth — and exact justice for the dead.

Sword’s justice, if need be.

Yet sometimes justice is not what one finds at the end of an oath of vengeance, and sometimes, it takes more than a blade to ensure the dead are truly at rest.

Rooted in a Dark Age inspired world, with nods to Old https://amzn.to/3EZFyJuNorse, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian legend, OATHBOUND is a standalone dark fantasy novel.

FROM RACOUNTER PRESS, FEATURING STORIES BY ALMA BOYKIN DANIEL G. ZEIDLER AND MORE: Space Cowboys 3: Return of the Bookaroo

When there are no frontiers left on Earth, humanity will head to the stars.
And the cowboys will be there, riding herd on rockets, asteroids and whatever animals make it to space with us.
Join these 10 authors as they tell the stories of life, death, justice and the struggle to survive on humanities next frontier.

BY Z. M. REMNICK: The Wedding of Light and Shadow (The Seelie Court Book 5)

Emma Greer is a Champion of the Mortal Realm against the forces of the Fae—and her life is now a mess. She sees things that no one else sees, hears voices coming from the shadows, and senses danger in things everyone else considers ordinary. She feels like she’s going insane as she tries to go about her every day life with the forces of the Fae swirling around her.

In the midst of all this, Emma receives an offer to run security for a wedding in Estes Park. The pay is good, and it includes a free week at the Stanley Hotel. It seems like a no-brainer to Emma. Then she finds out that the wedding is between two fairies of different courts—and if it doesn’t go off without a hitch, it could start a cascade of destruction that will shatter the Fae Realm and send ripples into the mortal world that will bring everything into chaos.

Keeping a couple dozen fairies out of trouble in a Colorado tourist town is difficult enough, especially when aided by a security team of questionable loyalty. But then a critical member of the wedding party disappears, and foul play is suspected. Can Emma find the missing Fae, keep the wedding from turning into a battle, and make sure that the bride and groom get to “I do”? To do so, she must master her own powers and take the next steps to understanding her destiny.

FROM DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

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

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Chained Adept: A Lost Wizard’s Tale

MEET A POWERFUL WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS–AND AN UNBREAKABLE CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.

Have you ever wondered how you might rise to a dangerous situation and become the hero that was needed?

The wizard Penrys has barely gained her footing in the country where she was found three years ago, chained around the neck and wiped of all knowledge. And now, an ill-planned experiment has sent her a quarter of the way around her world.

One magic working has called to another and landed Penrys in the middle of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away.

No one has any reason to trust her amid rumors of wizards where they don’t belong. And she fears to let them know just what she can do — especially since she can’t explain herself to them and she doesn’t know everything about herself either.

Penrys has her own problems, and she doesn’t have any place in this conflict. But they need her, whether they realize it or not. And so she’s determined to try and lend a hand, if she can. Whatever it takes.

And once she discovers there’s another chained adept, even stronger than she is, she’s hooked. Friend or foe, she has questions for him — oh, yes, she does.

All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Deep Pinkhttps://amzn.to/45iCJOq

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

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 ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: sticks

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

  1. Fred said “Sticks and stone will break my bones but words will never hurt me”.

    The Wizard replied “Drop dead” and Fred did so.

    [Very Big Crazy Grin]

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  4. “Their rich uncle George bussed them out to fuck shit up on the Hicks-in-the-Sticks. Then they were shocked when they were shot.”

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  5. ‘Come Sail Away’ blaring from his bluetooth speaker, Charon smiled as he cruised through the rural scene.

    Styx on the Styx in the sticks – what could be better?

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  6. After the explosion, Martha found herself standing by a river.

    “Who’s that guy?” she asked the soul next to her.

    “He’ll ferry you across the river for a copper coin.”

    “That’s good?”

    “You can stand here forever or cross and stand in a field forever.”

    Martha sighed. “Worst. Afterlife. Ever.”

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  7. “What is this?” Renee asked, looking at the long, stick-like white vegetable strip, with a thin brown coat on one side.

    “Koda with a tempura batter coating,” Sola replied. “You dip the end in the sauce and eat just the part with the sauce on it.”

    Renee dipped the koda in the small dish with the brownish sauce, nibbled on it, and considered. “The koda is a little sour, but the sauce…very sweet. And you’re distracting me from our mutual problems.”

    “I am,” Sola agreed with a sigh. “But our only two options are suicide or Grandmother. And I almost prefer suicide at this point. There will be a lot less ‘I told you so’ from Grandmother.”

    “It’s can’t be that bad…,” Renee asked after taking another dip of sauce with her koda and looking at Sola’s expression. “It’s that bad.”

    “Worse. Just crashing on Earth meant we landed on a proscribed world. Minimum interaction would have probably kept us out of trouble, but we landed close to the natives. That is something the Precursor Council doesn’t take lightly. Then, we harmed a native-you-after our crash, while you were trying to help us. Harming a good Samaritan makes the Council even angrier…,” Sola’s expression was morose, but she kept eating.

    “Your ship had an explosion, not your fault…,” Renee tried to help, but Sola shook her head.

    “Won’t matter. If we hadn’t crashed and we hadn’t crashed near a city, you wouldn’t have been killed. Our fault by the law. And to save you, we had to upload your mind into one of two blanks forms we had-and both of them were Throne bodies. The bodies of the Triple Crown Monarchy itself, which we stole to keep them away from the coup planners.

    “So even if we can restore the Emperors to the Thrones, you’re wearing a body that it is an act of treason to even possess blank outside of the Families. Which we can’t get you out of because of the security protocols. The only way to do that is the Thrones. We’re sitting in a starship, and the bounties on our heads, that is worth more than the GDP of your entire sector for five hundred Earth years. Any of those crimes would have us shot. All of them, if put together on the same bill of charges, will see us killed by torture if we’re lucky.

    “And the only person I can think who can keep us safe for a week, let alone help us, is Grandmother,” Sola lamented, popping the last bit of koda in her mouth. “And…I know she loves me, but we left on bad terms the last time I talked with her, a year ago.”

    “How bad?” Renee sighed. “‘Turn us over to the coup planners’ bad or some other kind of bad?”

    “‘Point out my mistakes by not pointing out my mistakes’ bad,” Sola cleaned up her tray and started to pick up Renee’s.

    “Ah, Jewish grandmother’s guilt,” Renee nodded.

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  8. “Do you know why fascist governments almost always go up in flames?” Guido asked with a glint in his eyes.
    I knew I was being set up up as the straight guy .
    “No Guido, why?”
    “Because they’re like a fascio, nothing more than a bunch of flammable sticks, kindling.”

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  11. Figured I was well past due to focus on him and introduce his mechanical partner…

    “Your weapons are complete, Sir Alphonse,” Professor Gireaux sniffed before turning to his subordinates. “Mount them on Sadalmelik!”

    “Clawed gauntlets, eh?” the Lapis Maelstrom said before chuckling. “Gettin’ a little old to be flippin’ around the battlefield with them, aren’t you Alf?”

    “Best to stick with what you know.” the knight stated coolly as he waited for the crew to begin their work.

    “Wish Phil the Prick’d let you into the hangar before,” the mech grumbled. “We’d have probably overrun Freddy and his army by now!”

    “Watch your tongue, Seigneur Sadalmelik!” the professor hissed, giving the blue giant a reproachful glare. “How many years were you asleep?! And to have awakened for him of all people! Dieux! If you weren’t a national treasure of the utmost importance I’d have had His Majesty -”

    “Eh, lighten up, Prof. Ol’ Phil’s dead and not even our new king misses his old man,” Sadalmelik retorted. If his mechanical visage wasn’t set in an unknown alloy one could almost imagine him grinning. “Alf was always more interesting than the inbreds and meatheads Phil, his daddy, and his granddaddy all sent down here! Not my fault the late royal prick wanted Alf to be some silent killer instead of Loire’s Hero of the Battlefield!”

    Professor Gireaux’s response was cut off by one of his subordinates, who reported “The outfitting is complete! Sir Alphonse, Seigneur Sadalmelik, tell us how they feel.”

    The engineer and his crew stepped back as Alphonse urged the Lapis Maelstrom forward. It had been a while since he’d piloted even a Rapace, his preferred model when he participated in Loire’s standard military operations, but controlling a mech was coming back to him more easily than he had thought it would. Perhaps there was something to the ancient magics powering Sadalmelik that was making the process easier.

    “So far so good,” the knight responded. “I trust you’ve prepared a proper test for them outside?”

    “Don’t insult my professionalism, assassin!” Gireaux spat. “There are plenty of scrap mechs for you to butcher!”

    “That’s another reason I wanted to sleep for a little longer,” Sadalmelik grumbled as Alphonse took him outside. “I heard every last bit of that casse couille’s pissing, moaning, whining, and demanding ever since Phil the Prick hired him!”

    “It could be worse,” Alphonse shrugged. “The stories I’ve heard about Professor Blomgren in Baldraz are horrific even for one who’s seen the things I have.”

    “Yeah, heard all that too,” the Lapis Maelstrom noted. “If even half of ’em are true Freddy’s not just playing with fire by keeping him and Dunst around. He’s playing with full on Hellfire!”

    “Shall we get to work?” the knight asked when they arrived at the training field.

    “You bet! Show me what you’ve got, Alf!”

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  12. The light flickered like a fire, and not like one burning up a few sticks, so that it would burn out in moments.
    She turned to the others, put a finger to her mouth, and pointed. Ciara nodded, and gestured them back, around a corner.
    “Assume we must fight there.”

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  13. Lisa Fox looked out at the redwoods beyond Sparta Point. “When I was an undergraduate, the other girls in my dorm gave me a hard time about living out in the sticks. But the Tarrant Winery is right off the main highway, a quick drive into town. This place is so isolated that if I couldn’t see satellites orbiting overhead, I’d wonder if we were the last human beings on Earth.”

    Connor Westin cracked one of his rare smiles. “Gives you a new perspective on things, doesn’t it?”

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  14. The snow melted easily and quickly. Within a week, the garden was a morass of mud and sticks and dead flowers. The streets outside had rivulets in them.
    “I think,” said Rosaleen, with grave majesty, to the dwarves and the captain of her guard, “that it would be as bad to fare forth in that mud as in the snow.”
    The captain bowed and said, “There is much reason to think that it will snow again, and soon. These mountains has never known a winter where snow storm did not follow snow storm.”
    Dark gray clouds billowed on the horizon.

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  15. “After the thumping they got, who would be such fools? They reigned only as long as their king lived. As soon as any knights could face them, they were hollow reeds and dry sticks. Who would wish to emulate them and end so?”
    Something dark moved in the forest ahead.

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  16. Today I saw a mini-van with a BIDEN HARRIS sticker on the back window.

    I wanted to stop them and ask: “How is it you’re not embarrassed enough to scrape that shit off yet?”

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    1. The other day I saw a mini van with a much better bumper sticker: a picture of an obviously confused Biden with the slogan “Clean Up on Aisle 46 – Joe’s Got to Go!”

      Liked by 1 person

  17. How can you appoint someone to the Senate for Cali, if they don’t live in Cali.? If that is true than someone can appoint Trump to a seat outside of Florida.

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    1. States? Who gives a rat’s patootie about states? The Party is all!

      Gruesom just went as far afield as necessary to find a good little Demokrat that will parrot the Party line and not think about anything too much.

      Liked by 1 person

  18. “Of course, your people have their great and wise practical and strategic philosphers too. Your American President Teddy Roosevelt said ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick’ for instance, didn’t he?”

    The voice was low-toned, resonant, warmly-inflected — and as natural as a bolt of nylon cloth. It came (for similar reason) in periods of a sentence or two, interleaved with what the supreme line-lord (major clan lord, too) had actually said, himself.

    Alexander Fothergill was used to hearing both, one then another, either way — he could manage the verbal lyric of the Noble Speech well enough, especially in a pinch or a rare intimate moment; but was far more used to the translator’s talking, which (he could tell) did quite an impressive tin-box job of it almost-all the time.

    “For one thing,” the speaker continued, “it makes obvious the benefits of stealth, as a tool of state rather than simply a way of life.” The Speech didn’t sound, quite, like a bucketful of cats fighting, as some wags had said and assorted SF writers had foretold; but the X consonant that led off the species-name Xsshindala, for instance, did sound much like a cat sneeze crossed with a human cough crossed with, maybe, a ks-sound.

    “Ah, but with regret, Your Virility, it seems you’ve been… slightly led astray.” (The word ‘misled’ in Xsshindann carried dire connotations of treachery and treason — as in, “Humans are not prey! We were… misled!”) “So many of our own people have been taken in by the same corruption of what he said… the word was and should be not ‘walk’ but ‘talk’ instead. The simple matter of a single written letter, a single spoken phoneme.”

    Line-Lord Brrunnissh smiled — not as a human might, but with mouth very clearly closed, and a double-blink of the eyelids to underline the subtle play of facial muscles. Xsshindali were not housecats writ large, weren’t lions or leopards or cougars or bobcats modified by evolution for tool use and sentience, they were their own kind, created (best anyone now could be sure so many millennia after the fact) by the fusion of three sub-species in a time of great… survival stress. But they were far more feline than anything else Earthly-esque; which was a fine starting point to begin to build an understanding.

    “Sometimes humans — and Xsshindali alike — take too little care with the treasured gift of words from our noble predecessors. But still, if it is just as you say, the wisdom of ‘Talk softly and carry a big stick’ is hard to miss for anyone diligent and attentive. Far better to do such, than to jump up and down screaming in display.” Another smile, this one far more pointed — doubly so to most Xsshindala listeners, who could not fail to recognize one of the local monkey-ish stereotypes. A polite jest, defused in-advance by its context in Roosevelt’s words of any real provocative or pejorative… explosive yield.

    (Ambassador Fothergill always tended to interview new recruits with the same gambit, sometime in a first meeting. “So then you do realize, don’t you, that this face-to-face converse is the sort of thing that could get you killed, almost certainly, with almost no warning, if you mess up bad enough? That these are the same ‘killer space kitties’ you’ll be talking with, that gave us a run for our survival money and then joined with us to… quasi-exterminate the Diamond Gnat Swarm for a thousand light-years around? They say ‘fear of imminent death concentrates the mind wonderfully’ and sure-enough it does — every moment you’re in talks, it is always and ever there. So are you, truly now, quite ready for that?”)

    There was a certain amount of mirth. Not only among the feline fraction of the assembled company at this dinner, either.

    “It’s always better to be clear; and sometimes, a monkey jumping up and down howling in front of you is better than… misunderstanding. Or far cheaper and less destructive in the long run; or even both.” He paused long enough to trigger the machine to clear its buffer, in catspeak.

    “But dignity is a thing, a noble and a valuable thing; and sometimes a point can only be rightly made by showing, not telling. Human history is littered with the debris of those who forgot either, and to their cost.”

    And the words spooled out again in the Noble Tongue, almost exactly as if he’d rendered them in it himself. But of course, his English did tend to mirror the Noble Speech, as it had during the war with the Xsshindala, as it had during the war against the Xsshindala before it and during the pale and fragile peace that followed it. Even as an officer and a gentleman in the old Victorian Imperial mode, he’d found the habit natural.

    Alexander Arthur Fothergill had never, even in childhood, been anything of a ‘loose cannon’ — surely a vast saving grace for him, because what he really was all-underneath was a hand grenade with the pin gone, for all his time in human society. Two or three, maybe even four standard deviations out from whatever ‘the norm’ truly was — but tactically useful in war because of it, strategically useful here and now all the more.

    Not a Xsshindal in monkey-clothes, no, really not. But also not utterly or irreconcilably different from it. Enough to make many more perceptive but more conventional humans obscurely uneasy around him, or maybe even a bit afraid of him, if only unconsciously (which was far worse for them than consciously, of course).

    And as he listened to Brrunnissh’s reply direct, a familiar old thought padded softly through his mind.

    Speaker to Cats, speaking as a human who never fit in and always had to be translating between ‘my culture’ I was born with, and ‘their culture’ that was comprehensible and familiar and often even logical, but seldom really mine. How wonderfully Fate brings us along, from where we began to where we must be and become to serve for the good of all who deserve it and the greater glory of the One Who made us all.

    (All — human, Xsshindala, and others yet-besides.)

    “But still it’s too bad your Roosevelt did not say ‘Walk softly and carry a big stick.’ If not instead, at least in addition. After all, stealth in stalking is one of the cornerstones of relationship with the world as it manifests around us.” (Again, kudos to the machine.)

    Lexa Fothergill, young troublemaker, early military volunteer, seasoned diplomat in the highest of high-stakes posts, smiled. Let his mouth move but not open, triple-blinked his eyes, tilted his head just-so a moment.

    “All true, Your Virility. And yet, in the defense of my co-human Mister Roosevelt: isn’t it the very heart and art of stealth itself, to steal up upon your prey fully visible, in broad daylight, coming with a smile on your face and in your eyes, nothing but a piece of wood in your hands? Isn’t accomplishing that one of the subtlest arts and the undoubted work of a true and cunning master?”

    And as he said it, ten thousand generations of ever-more-lethal killer monkeys looked curiously but hungrily out of his eyes; but through soft eyes and with deep affection for even more generations of our good friends the sand-cats, who’d chosen us as much as we’d chosen them, and perhaps by it had saved us all from losing our lives and species and future to either the hunting Xsshindala or others who’d have exterminated us both alike.

    Line-lord Brrunnissh said nothing; did incline his head in the particular manner and mode that meant Respect for Wisdom Offered. And picked up his glass (of a blood-warm meat soup, more or less) to offer a silent toast, to the Honored human Predecessor Roosevelt.

    The Ambassador followed, of course. Lexa adding a silent drop.

    Such a wonderful wide world You’ve made for us, that has such as these most noble and beastly people in it. To keep us together from drowning in ourselves, in all our human faults and vanities; but rather offer us a way to rise above them together with our good friends, if only we will do.

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