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 JERRY BOYD: Baby Ruth (Bob and Nikki Book 43)
The Gene makes it back to Charlie’s in time for the birth of Jim and Hannah’s baby. You didn’t really expect Murphy to take a day off, even for such a blessed event, did you? Come along and see what Bob and the crew get up to.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love
Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?
FROM GABRIELLE MARIE: Friend of the Pack: fated mates, slow-burn, paranormal, wolf shifter romance (The Mawu Shifters Book 1)
Friend of the Pack is the first standalone book in The Mawu Shifters Series featuring strong female characters, fated mates, dual POV, and slow-burn romance.
Tucked away on the other side of the sleepy human town of Evergreen Falls lies the largest Pack of Wolf Shifters known as the Moon Pack.
As the daughter of the Alpha, Eva has known her whole life that someday it will be up to her to keep the peace and protect her packmates from threats . . . including the threat of discovery.
The problem, though, is her best friend Sky is the human son of Evergreen Falls’ Mayor.
These star-crossed childhood friends fight to stay together in a divided world that threatens to tear them apart.
When rival Packs, hidden enemies, and long-held secrets come to light, it will take everything they have to keep those they love from getting hurt.
And their world will never be the same again.
If you enjoyed the dual perspective, lyrical prose from Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals, or the supernatural characters from television drama Teen Wolf then you’ll love Friend of the Pack which mixes the two together with an extra dash of spice.
FROM J. L. CURTIS: Ice
Revenge is a dish best served cold… but vengeance isn’t the only thing that comes to he who waits.
Colin Graham and Lisbet Sarnov were kids when they witnessed their mining colony habitat’s destruction and his father’s murder while checking for survivors. Eighteen years later, his little payback list is almost finished when his command catches wind of unsanctioned justice, and sends him to a backwater a hundred light seconds from command HQ.
If only they’d known the coldest reaches of space held not only the last ‘prize’ he was looking for, but also a long-lost treasure he’d almost forgotten…
FROM I.M.LERNER AND CATHERINE L. OSORNIO: The Door in the Hedges (Under the Staircase – An Economic Adventure Series for Kids)
The man stood up and extended his hand.
“Welcome. Come in. I’m Professor Walter Williams.”
Mandating a minimum wage for each job sounds good, but is it really? Former officials from the city of Strait have made some good arguments to the citizens of Kirkcaldy Point, but Maggie, Maya, and Nate are not so sure. Something seems…off. The Society is nowhere to be found, and the kids don’t know who to trust. Just when all hope seems lost, an unlikely ally shows them the way.
Under the Staircase® BooksA mystery and adventure series that teaches treasured values: personal responsibility, individual liberty, and economic freedom.Psst! Parents & Teachers: The third book in the series introduces a variety of Walter Williams’ concepts, including Self-Ownership and a Minimum Wage. Books include All It Takes Is Guts, Up from the Projects: An Autobiography, Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism, and much more. Under the Staircase books include examples from kids’ day-to-day lives in school, with friends, and in familiar situations.
FROM RALPH BARTHOLDT: Tank Creek: Short Essays from the Panhandle
Tank Creek is a timeless account of North Idaho’s outdoor lifestyle. With humor and passion former journalist Ralph Bartholdt captures the spirit of the Idaho Panhandle’s wild places from the Snake and Salmon rivers to the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe mountains of the Bitterroot Range. Tank Creek chronicles with erudition and insight the experiences, memories and lore of rural inhabitants as they hunt, fish and embrace the sanctity of their surroundings.
“This is how it works and why people say fly fishing is just another of life’s mirrors: You breathe. You forget about the broken things. You let your heartbeat mark time and focus on future endeavors, count cadence, let distance and past fall away,” Bartholdt writes in “The Whole Day.”.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania
A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.
These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.
FROM VAN LEDYARD: CEMENTOPOLIS
The inside joke was that they were hatchlings, genomic trash, chicks from the Pentagon henhouses. The black humor masked the hard reality that the super soldiers created at the Eau Claire Project and other black sites were now unexpectedly timing out. They faced certain — and a grisly — disintegration.
Trevelyan Moss, an Eau Claire “graduate” and a veteran of the serial wars in the western Pacific, is sent to the Navy’s Cyberwarfare outfit in Souda Bay where he meets Nepheli, the math whiz and Cretan beauty.
Moss takes an express discharge from the Navy. He will go undercover in New Racine, the half finished smart city on the shores of Lake Michigan, to take down a renegade oligarch terrorizing much of the Midwest with a fleet of driverless bomb cars called Weevils. Moss talks Nepheli into joining him along with Marcus, her teenaged son. Desperate for a new start, she agrees to go. But she’s frustrated and mystified at how little she knows about Moss’ background and his reluctance to talk about his family.
The undercover work gets Moss close to Eau Claire. And maybe – how exactly he doesn’t know — he can begin to find some answers, make some connections, find some genomic clue that will make him whole.
Nothing seems to stop Moss. Not Bad Axe Security, the oligarch’s brutal private police. Not the warring gangs in New Racine’s no-go zones. Not even double-crossing Col. Mac McKelvey, the man who had mentored Moss — controlled really — since Eau Claire days.
And it all goes horribly wrong.
Ah the smell of electric vehicle fires in the morning! In New Racine, the future ain’t what it used to be.
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: BEDS
According To Hoyt 
Well, I’m going to put this computer to bed. My new Amazon Fire will be here in a few and I’ll have to get it set up. :wink:
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The room revealed behind the locked door was long, narrow and dimly lit by filthy windows. It contained two broken chairs and three unmade beds, covered in dirty bedding. A young woman huddling a blanket over her shoulders stared at them.
“Who are you?”
“Officers of the law,” Fixx responded. He and Passepartout exchanged a disgusted look; it was clear that they had stumbled upon a brothel.
“Mademoiselle, how long have you been here?” Passepartout questioned.
She stared at him blankly. “I don’t know… they locked us in here, give us food. The men come, mostly at night.” She shuddered. “I have not been outside since I came here.”
“We are here to take you out. We can find you shelter,” Passepartout said firmly as she backed away. “Let us help you.”
“Why would you?” she said despairingly. “I had nowhere to go, no food. No one would hire me. Girls like me come to London every day looking for work.”
“I know,” Fixx answered. “I have seen enough of it in my job. But if you can answer some questions for us, we can get you back to your village if you wish -”
“No! That would be even worse.” Leveling a hard gaze at the two men, she said, “Pay me first. Then I’ll see if I can answer your questions.”
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She scooped up Snowfall, who purred in the crook of her elbow, and slipped out the back door, passing through apple trees past blooming but without even green apples yet, into sunlight and flower beds where early irises bloomed among the late tulips.
Snowfall meowed and leapt to the ground.
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Lisa was surprised at how well the children had taken to working in the vegetable beds. She’d expected they’d need some guidance, but she hadn’t expected Nicky or her own Andrusha to grab trowels and start digging as if they’d been born to it.
“It’s easier when there isn’t anything in there they could damage.” Elaine kept a tight hold on the leash which restrained her younger son. An impetuous redhead, Basil had a tendency to want to run after anything that caught his interest — and up here in lion country, they couldn’t risk him getting out into the redwood forest that surrounded Sparta Point.
“True.” Lisa recalled her own childhood on the family winery, her father taking her by the hand and leading her out to walk the vineyards with him, learning the tasks that would in time become her regular chores, even if it was just looking for damage to the all-important grapevines and their supports. “Once we get the seeds in and start weeding, we’ll need to supervise them a lot more closely. But it’s still good to establish the idea of having chores when they’re little. How old were you when your folks started having you do chores?”
Elaine shrugged. “I can remember Dad taking me out with him to feed the animals before I even started school. I was too big to pick up the big feed bags or carry buckets, but he’d have me help scoop concentrates out for the steer and the hogs they raised for our own meat. By the time I was in grade school, Mom was teaching me how to gather eggs. Getting them out of the nesting boxes wasn’t that hard, but some of the hens liked to wait to lay until we’d let them out for the day, so I had to learn all the places to look for a stray egg or two. The corn and beans were our bread and butter, but we had some regulars around the community who’d buy a dozen or two eggs every week. Said they tasted better than the ones at the store.”
Yet again another reminder that, although both of them came from families with a strong agricultural tradition, the experience of it was worlds apart. Her parents hadn’t even done much in the way of gardening, other than the ornamentals that helped make the place picture-perfect for the photo shoots that helped publicize their vintages.
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“So, how often do you, you know, have Companions sleep?” asked the prospective client.
“Howland Technologies Companions are capable of operating for as many as 120 continuous hours, in a pinch,” replied Nigel Slim-Howland. “However, we advise putting them to bed every sixty hours or so, if not more frequently.”
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“Bed?” asked the client. “Can’t you just plug your Companions in or something?”
“Yes,” replied Nigel, “but for home use, we recommend either a charging chair or bed. Wireless charging, and perfectly functional furniture!” Nigel pointed to his butler Jenkins, who was recharging in an easy chair, and snoring softly.
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It was a melancholy recollection: Twenty-five years ago, playing hide-and-seek with Lily, only to have the game cut short by nap time. Lily idling on the charging bed, clutching a toy dinosaur, eyes closed, smiling serenely. Young Nigel waiting, praying her power consumption wouldn’t make the engineers take her away.
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“I say, MidnightOilDiary, don’t you work tomorrow?” said Nigel. “Shouldn’t you be going to bed or something? This Superbowl match isn’t even all that good.”
“One suspects he feels obligated to see it through,” observed Jenkins. “That, or he’s counting the number of times the camera pans to Taylor Swift.”
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Now that it’s gone into overtime, Nigel retracts his previous judgment.
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At the dock, in the evening, Karl was waiting with boys, and she greeted little Simon and Edward’s enthusiasm. Not until they had put the boys to their beds did she quietly raise the matter of the gossip.
“And after we found him in the necromancers’ wood,” said Karl, grimly.
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None of the others spoke. Perhaps they slept in the wagon as snugly as they would in their own beds. She fought down a yawn and wondered what it would do to her mask if she shifted her head like that.
The horses placidly clopped out into a sun-lit field.
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“Lisabet? Bedsy? Beds?
Dagnabbid, I’b godda code in da head – where are you hidig, and where did you pud da deco, deecos, phooey! code pills?
You know I’b allergic to dose new dæmons. Ba’ish dem, Beds!”
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“Well, the garden beds are finally done.”
“Great! So what’s going in?”
“Tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots here… it’s the salad plot.” She grinned at me.
“Oh, you’re so funny. Herbs here?”
“Yes, and squash. I’d like to get to where we can mostly feed ourselves with only a small gap.”
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Thanks for the boost and I’m in good company!
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Ally looked up from the multicolor engineering displays, stretched a bit, then felt a little sheepish. As if rising from rather deep in the water…
“Sorry,” she said to Erzulie.
“Nothing to be sorry about, feel free to go up and ‘bug’ our brave and dashing pilot for awhile. Remember, you’re just the observer and intern here on this run for now.” With a quietly-dazzling sort of bright smile.
And Ally Higginson did her best to shrug off a half-hour of being quite thoroughly immersed in the details of the jet engines, gave the flight engineer her sincere thanks, and stood up quite carefully in the gravity she still wasn’t really used to yet.
There were railings on the aisle, of course, and she used them. But once again she marvelled, subtly and softly, at the smoothness of supersonic flight… which she’d now experienced far more here on Mars than Earth.
“Duncan? Permission to come aboard the flight deck?”
“Granted, Miss Higginson. Though for heaven’s sakes, this is a magjet not some blazing-bright interplanet GCR torchship. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.” And he briefly fiddled with some of what Ally was almost sure were the radio controls. “Do sit down if you’re coming in for a spell, though; it may be smooth up here much of the time, but the rest is not so friendly.” And he waved at the (vacant) co-pilot’s seat.
“Are you sure it’s okay?”
“It’s not like your side of the board is live, but don’t play with it and you’ll not get a surprise.” And Ally simply sat down and belted in as if she’d been doing that half her life.
And the view out, even through the deeply-inclined windshield… wow. All the way up to this dark-violet upper sky, shading down through a dim but almost Earthly cerulean-blue toward the more familiar butterscotch-yellow.
“So, what do you think of Wandering Albatross now that you’ve had a chance to stare deep into her engines for a while?” His voice was quite interested, but ever and always with that quantum of reserved attention…
“It’s… amazing. Getting real in-flight data is quite something. And at a totally other level, part of me is still completely flabbergasted that any of this actually works. Jet engines that burn gaseous magnesium in CO2, so you don’t need any oxidizer like a rocket, just free Martian air… it’s a true wonder to me.”
“And you being the up-and-coming young expert in combustion dynamics and jet systems design.”
Ally found she’d actually thrown up her hands. “But, I only study them, I didn’t come up with them! Or ever have to convince anyone to do experiments.”
“Not so pathbreaking now, of course. Less then a century and a half past Wilbur and Orville and their Wright Flyer, here we are. What a dream that would’ve been, to them, if you could go back and show ’em this, though!”
And Ally shook her head. “Or if you could drop some vision of a gas-core reactor drive ship crossing from Earth to Mars in 90 days, like I did, somehow into Robert Goddard’s sleep… So this is Chryse Planitia going on over into Acidalia Planitia?” (By now she didn’t stumble over the formal Latin names, much… even A-kid-a-li-a Pla-nish-i-a wasn’t too very odd.) “The, hm, nuclear breadbasket of Mars? The main thorium-ore beds?”
It wasn’t all a question, there was a nav display. But, hoping for more.
Duncan Stokes smiled broadly, as if at a shared secret. “And that’s our secondary mission, as I believe you’ll already know: taking radiosurvey data as we fly. Like those old turn-of-the-millennium probes, but from much closer in and with rather bigger detectors. Even cosmic rays, thorns in the bum as they are, can have their uses. Kicking off gammas we can detect here, mapping what’s below. And of course the thorium and potash most obligingly radiate for us all by themselves.” The Ozzie strains in his voice got a bit stronger, almost always, whenever he relaxed more.
She still hadn’t ever dared ask him about the Crazy Years, Down Under. Bad and scary as some of that had been in the U.S. in her parents’ time, she knew it’d been rather evilly worse in Canada and Oz and Ennzed.
But that was over and done and the Beanstalk was up and running, and the world of the future opening up wide again. The worlds, even…
“But it’s not truly like there are ore beds, not here and not the way the mines actually work. Thorium is basically monazite, like on Earth it’s in sand form, beaches and sandbars, here it’s usually sand in dunes. And you can get a lot of concentration here and there, the heaviest sand with the nuke metals settles down by itself some, for one thing.” And he paused, a sudden slight secret Loki-esque sort of smirk playing up around his lips. “‘The worm is the spice, the spice is the worm’, and all.”
And Ally’s mind hosted an odd sort of collision, as the reality of Mars met three or four ‘Dune’ movies and even some of the books… “Suddenly I understand a few obscure references, now a bit more, Duncan.” You couldn’t really see the dune fields, as such, from this far up. Mostly, the plains looked like the low ancient-seabeds they probably had been, so long ago.
“Though I really can’t see Mars ever getting together and conquering the whole galaxy or whatever, like — I think, it’s been awhile — the Dune people, the, ah, Fremen? Did in the stories.” Ally was a little surprised at the turn she was following, and now a bit leading, in the conversation. It wasn’t like she was a native or even adopted Martian, at all…
“No, getting us Redmen together on anything that’s not bloody-obvious is more than somewhat like herding cats. Or getting them to put on a circus act like a gaggle of trained poodles. The old joke here is that Martians are like Americans, only squared. Chaos incarnate for sure, Nemesis to every possible New World Order.” It was a bit amazing to Ally, still, how quiet this supersonic flight was, so that she could hear Duncan’s voice very easily even as soft as it’d gone.
“But if anyone ever thought to fight us, all together, why that’d be a right something. Come over to the Planet of War here, itself, then try to lord it over on all of us lot? Hm, there’s not an easy road to run.”
And something somewhere in Ally felt a need to shift the subject. As if she was not yet “Mars-y” enough, yet or maybe ever, to talk further on this.
Or as if, perhaps instead, she herself wasn’t ready to hear something her own mind, her own heart, her own inutition was whispering soft already.
“So, you ever worry about the extra radiation you get, on all your runs like these? I mean, even on Earth airline travel means more cosmic rays than on the ground, and here, with no magnetosphere to speak of…”
Duncan smiled. “But that’s why we always think of it, Miss Higginson. It really is always there for us, so we work so hard to keep it down when it is a practical thing, so we don’t worry so much when we can’t. Here, if there was a solar flare or something, we could land and get under fast.”
And his voice and expression got that more-remote sound and look, again. “Ever hear of a mining town in old Australia, named Coober Pedy? Little opal town, way far in the deep desert Outback?”
“Yes, I think so, where they dug out the ground looking for opals in the shape of rooms and, well, whole houses? So they could live right there, down away from the summer heat and all that?” Comfortable ground, again.
“Yes. You can think of Coober Pedy as a prototype of sorts, in a rough and incomplete way, for the sort of doing and thinking we’ve done here. Bedded into the deep ground, under the shielding rock, warm and covered and snug. Snug as a bug in a rug, as Benjamin Franklin, wasn’t it, used to say?
“Don’t worry on any of that, Ally. We’re blazing through the high blue at a touch over a verst, that’s our Martian nautical mile, every pair of seconds. Couple of hours from now, we’ll be done and down in the cozy bright sheltering deep again, all home and dry just fine.”
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