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
https://amzn.to/49EUhHIFROM HOLLY CHISM: Bar Tabs: A Modern Gods Story
Brief back stories on the characters from the Modern Gods universe.
FROM SCOTT MCCRAE: Finding Bradigan’s Mountain
A brand new Mountain Man adventure from Scott McCrea!
Mountain man Richard Bradigan goes on a deadly cross-country trek to save the girl he loves from his old nemesis, the sadistic Colonel Sauvage. With him are the outrageous Bon Chance Legrand, dime novelist Fred Stryker, and disgraced soldier Captain Burr. But time starts running out for the searchers when they are pursued by some of the most dangerous badmen to ever come out of the West.
One thing is guaranteed – it will all end in blood. But who will live and who will die?
A Mountain Man’s Revenge is the pulse-pounding conclusion to the exciting Finding Bradigan’s Mountain trilogy.
https://amzn.to/3wLpAShFROM CARL MICHAEL CURTIS: Stigmata Invicta
On a backwater planet in an otherwise barren solar system, an underground church thrives. For generations, the tyrannical world government has tried to stomp it out. But now, an elderly nun has brought hope to her suffering people when she begins experiencing a genuine stigmata. Her bishop requests her be rescued and taken far away. The Knights 15 13 send a spec ops team to do just that.
But these missions never go easily.
Discovered and assaulted from the land to the atmosphere, the Knights 15 13 rush to save the nun from the clutches of their enemy. An enemy who has much more sinister plans in mind. They don’t want to just kill her. They want to force her to help them kill everyone.
https://amzn.to/48CSmCaFROM BECKY JONES: Academic Magic
Karen Myers: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 4)
Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.
DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.
George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.
He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.
How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Baying of the Hounds
In the world we know, Nikola Tesla’s Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.
FROM MARY CATELLI: The Other Princess
This time, they invited the last fairy to the christening.
Elise, uncursed at her christening, received strange gifts about castles and roses. With such good fortune, what more does she need? She grows up forever in the shadow of her lovely, cursed, tragic cousin.
Even when the curse falls, and Princess Isabelle lies in enchanted sleep, life must go on for Princess Elise. Despite the curse, the kingdom can not sleep itself, and neither can she.
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: HELP
According To Hoyt 
“Help me George!”
“Sorry buster, you got your wife mad at you so you suffer the consequences of that.”
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Forgot the “click”
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Nice group of promos today!
Simon looked up as Michelle walked slowly into the office. “What’s up, dear?”
“I hate stakeouts! They’re…f’ing boring as hell, and I’m not built to pee in a cup!” She threw up her hands in frustration.
Simon wisely didn’t comment, quietly asking, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
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“So is Van your real name?” June asked, fumbling for a way to put the boy at ease. The teenager confronting her was clutching a transistor radio emitting the tinny sounds of “Help Me, Rhonda.” Why do they keep repeating the lyrics? June thought, irritated. More importantly, she noticed that the boy was shabbily dressed and rather skinny, as though he had not been eating regularly.
“Who cares? And how did you get my name, anyway?” The boy was poised to run.
“Well, there’s a musician named Van. Van Cliburn. He plays the piano – he competed in Moscow a while ago, won an award. But now I think about it, that could be a nickname. As for how I got your name, a friend of mine has kids about your age. I think they know you.” After a moment June added, “You look like you’re hungry. Have you eaten today?”
“I was going to have cereal, but the milk’s gone bad. Had to throw it out.” The unspoken context, that there wasn’t anything else to eat in the house, was clear.
June hunted in her purse and handed him three quarters. “You can get something at McDonald’s then.” Van’s eyes lit up.
“Thanks,” he said awkwardly. “Why did you want to talk to me?”
“You heard about what happened here, right? In the parking lot, a couple days ago?”
The boy immediately backed away. “I didn’t have anything to do with that! And if anybody thinks I did…”
“I’m not here to get you into trouble. I don’t think you did anything wrong. But this is the second time in a week that someone’s been killed. I heard kids hang out near the supermarket to catch a ride to the beach, maybe to buy cigarettes or pot. I don’t think this is such a safe place to be.” The concern in her voice caught Van’s attention.
“I can ask, I guess. Will you be here… Thursday?”
“Thursday afternoon, yes, I’ll be here.” June added a five-dollar bill to the money she had already given him. “Why don’t you go into the store, get some milk and groceries. Something you can make sandwiches with.”
Van looked down. “All right. I will. And they call me Van because of my shoes. Vans, you know? I wear them all the time. My real name is Jeremy, but I hate it.”
“Okay, Van,” June smiled. “See you Thursday. You take care now.”
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Ciara watched with narrowed eyes as Felix served up the food. She was the paladin and needed to lead them. It was not as if they had to wonder what the evil was, or she, whether they were meant to help her. Not with the swords.
“What to do now?”
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The e-mail was from University Admin. It read: “Need focus? Need direction? We can help!”
The last phrase was hyperlinked, but Nathan thought a phrase suggesting “help” from University Admin was essentially meaningless, like “quick trip to IKEA,” or “sung beautifully in German.”
But Nathan was bored enough to click.
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Within moments, Nathan heard a knock. “The hell?” he thought. “It’s Sunday night. The dorm’s basically dead!”
He opened the door to a small, balding man wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. “Can I help you?” Nathan asked.
“Backwards!” the man said.
“Excuse me?”
“You clicked, right? I’m here to help!”
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Yep, fiction. Flat State U’s IT people needed at least 15 hours to respond on a weekend, unless it was a computer flambé in the big computer lab in [redacted] Hall. IT only needed three hours, then.
(Apparently the first scream wasn’t “Fire!” but “My data run! Nooooo!” Or so a witness told me before class later that week.)
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Yeah, I remember years ago, click-clacking away at a dumb terminal, sending things to a mainframe, waiting for them to compile, trying to find the fatal error in my code. And this was only “Basic Computer Programming for Dumbass Engineers.”
I close my eyes and look back on those days of my youth, when I could spend all night hammering away at a problem, and you know what? I don’t miss it a bit!
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Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22757404-april-2024
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The March book is Citizen of the Galaxy
Spoiler free here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22757425-march-2024—-citizen-of-the-galaxy—-spoiler-free
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Spoilers allowed:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22757476-march-2024—-citizen-of-the-galaxy—-spoilers-allowed
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“Four new pups?”
“Yep, she whelped last night.
Good thing, too – nearly ran out of carp to feed her.”
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It took me a minute…
Incidentally, that was how I referred to my eldest daughter’s first boyfriend: “The Whelp.”
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A family. How convenient. Berenike hummed under her breath as she approached. The parents could tell the girl she had go where she was sent, so there would be less fuss on the child’s part. And these shady paths were so much more pleasant than the city streets. It had almost not been worth it for those two children.
The house came into view. A pleasant and bustling place. The sort that would not miss a child, and would be glad to see her so well placed. She paused. It would take some persuasion on her part, to be sure.
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You’re the one who told Elaine to go help Tamara in the kitchen and assumed she’d understand she was supposed to stay in the kitchen, out of sight. Yet again Leonid was struck by those little cultural gaps that could bite a person on the butt — except this wasn’t just a matter for embarrassed grins.
There’d been no time to take her aside and explain the situation, not when some of those outside fighters had already taken notice of her, in a way that clearly showed they viewed her as a baba available for a casual tumble. Under the circumstances, the only way to mark her as Off Limits had been to mark her as his own woman.
Now she would have to play that role convincingly whenever he had outside fighters up here. Which meant needing to explain to her the obligations it would involve.
As if she weren’t already having enough trouble adjusting to the isolation up here, after over a year of the bright lights and endless diversions of Silicon Valley.
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Kelly whispered, “These time travel rules are a bit weird.”
Thea turned. “They mystify us as well. We don’t always understand until something goes haywire. But we have to disappear to save Daniel. And the only place I can get to is my 19th century world. My ties to it are strong enough to overcome both my weakness, and the spatial move required. Daniel can go forward a few minutes in time, even without help from an artifact, or backwards for hundreds of years, but he can’t go back just a few minutes because it will overlap his life and cause insanity.”
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Imps surrounded her wagon – a entire war band! – dragging the draft-bird out of the traces and away into the forest and trying to climb up the sides, and she could only target so many with a single spell before it would be too weak to put them down.
Dimly she heard the sound of a riding-bird’s feet thudding on the road toward the melee. Imps didn’t ride, maybe…! But then another group rushed forward and she had no more attention to spare.
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When he yawned for the first time, Rosaleen went to pick him up.
Liam helpfully diverted people as she left, and she reached their private chambers with Ewan before he started to wail in sleepiness. Which would not be becoming.
“And no use in scolding you.”
Ewan rubbed his eyes.
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“That will help,” said the man, his tone measured. “But not suffice.”
“Well, then, Gregor,” said Adelaide, sounding patient, “I’ve never known you to say such a thing without having a plan up your sleeve to deal with matter. Spit it out.”
“We need to watch the mercenaries,” said Gregor. “See what they do.”
“They’re watching you,” said Sylvie. “They always do. It’s more important that they not see anything out of common.”
Hendrick said, “They don’t know much of what is common about here.”
“She’s right, though,” said Gregor. “There is only so much we can do, but to keep to the common customs will help some. And they have the castle’s servants to tell them.”
“Or lie to them,” said Otto. “Though the lies might be more dangerous than if they tell the truth.”
Sylvie yawned and felt ashamed.
“Let us talk under the stars, then,” said Otto.
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“Five minutes of fuel, ten if we’re crazy lucky.” Her voice, still almost level as ever, held an undeniable, near-unbearable tension.
He had nothing to say; still nothing on the radio or the direction finder. They should’ve overflown the island several times now, ‘plowing a furrow’ north and south. But below was only what kept proving to be shadows from low broken clouds in the morning sun… on a wide and endless sea.
“Perhaps I can be of some assistance,” came a new voice from back in the cabin. Which was, of course, impossible.
“I’m not going to ask you how you got here, only going to wonder what you think you could do.” The pilot’s voice was, almost, annoyed. “Given how all good sense says you must be a hallucination.”
“You’ve got around six minutes of gasoline in all your tanks together. You are almost on top of Howland Island north-to-south, but over forty miles off on an east-west axis. Your radio and RDF systems are, to be unkind but accurate, all fouled up; and the Itasca’s shipboard radio direction finding isn’t up to doing what you need. You are, as the idiom has it, up Schitz Creek with no paddle. And as I said, we could help.”
By now the — stranger — had come to the cockpit. Dark hair, violet-gray eyes, slim of build and graceful in motion. Dressed plain in a white linen or cotton shirt, dark pants of wool or the like, he still seemed somehow exotic; with a trace of an accent in his voice, and a quasi-aristocratic bearing, of a noblesse oblige kind not a vastly superior to all you lowly peasants sort…
“And who the hell are you?” The navigator’s voice wasn’t nearly as tightly restrained as the pilot’s.
“My name is Arvannion. There are titles and positions to go with that, of no moment now. I can give you a place to land, if you want it. But there are costs and conditions, and not ones I’m after horse-trading you into.
“You’ll have to climb to about eight thousand feet, bullseye a target in mid-air about twice as wide as this Electra’s wingspan. But if you can do it, you’ll have a wide, long runway to land us on.
“Then you’ll basically be stuck where I come from, awhile. But even though it’ll be months or years for you, you’ll likely not return here within the century, as time runs here. Still better than ditching dead-stick in the ocean and taking your chances with… everything.”
“You sound like you’re recruiting for the Good People from Under the Hill or something.” Fred’s voice was — a touch distracted.
“Hold that thought, Mister Noonan. And, Mrs. Earhart, I can provide you with a dozen or two gallons of fuel… more than enough to finish a full climb-out to level flight at the — designated altitude. Or I can go home myself and leave you two and your Lockheed to the mercies of Fate and the providence of your ingenuity. But I cannot, we cannot, do both. As it is, this little humanitarian improvisation of ours is burning decades’ worth of resources of a rare and precious kind.
“It’s been said that magic is only a technology you don’t yet understand, or the utilization of laws of nature still unclear. But what we are about in this, my people, the mechanist-cooperativist faction of the Lovers of Order not the Lovers of Chaos, is helping you and ourselves at once.
“We’d love to have a cutting-edge metal-body airplane. We’d love to have a famous American to, hopefully, act as our ambassador to your world as we work towards our long-term goal… which will sound entirely mad. And we are not without compassion for you two in your current, ah, predicament. But we’re not profligate bloody philanthropists, either.”
“Why eight thousand feet?” Her voice was… pensive, calculating.
“The pressures on either side of this — call it a ‘gate’ — must be in balance. Higher on this side, air is blown through the gate and you have a blast to ride through on, massive turbulence included. Lower on this side, you’d have to fight what might be a near-sonic headwind; your aeronautics isn’t up to that either.
“And on the other side of your, what, hole in the air?” Madness.
“A Lost Horizon, one might say. To be blunt, a whole world that, like your Earth, won the planetesimal crapshoot and ended up big enough to hold its air for the long term and so forth. In our alternate-history Solar System the fourth planet did that… Eirr Tangarre is three-quarters the size of your Earth, while the third planet came up the runt of its litter.
“Venus is an oven-hot, sulfurous hellhole in both Systems.
“But live worlds are impressive creatures, and call to each other and know their sistern and brethren; and so we’ve been exchanging people and things for quite a long while… ‘our’ life may even have started on Earth.”
“Give me the aviation gas and we’ll see.” Matter-of-fact.
He smiled. “Start your climb and we will.” With a merry, flinty surety.
“Fred?”
“Amelia, you’re mad to even consider it. But I’ve had a bad and ever more horrible feeling about this flight, all this past hour or two… and I’ll leave it up to you, A.E.”
And she pushed the throttles forward, twiddled the mixture a bit.
As they started to pitch up and climb.
And there was something of a thump from the cabin. Followed by what was to a near-certainty swearing, if in no language either crewmember knew.
“Allionara, surely the drama is surplus.” In English.
“You try carrying six stones of inanimate cargo across… oh, most sorry, manners. Lady Amelia, Lord Frederick, honored.” She nodded to them.
Held up, with effort, four full jerrycans, brow furrowed. Which seemed to get a whole awful-lot lighter, all of them, all a-sudden…
“Um, Arvannion? The gauge just jumped by about… eighteen gallons.”
“Yes. No need to be able to fill the tanks from inside… conventionally.”
“Still nothing on the radio, any way. If it still matters.” His voice was somewhere… over the rainbow, between near-despair and… detachment.
“So, three thousand feet and climbing. Still at zero degrees.”
“Bear east to maybe 5 degrees. And keep climbing. We can only… open the gate aperture certain places. And you’ll have only the one pass at getting through, likely; and the edges of that will cut through this plane and anything on it like a cheese-slicer through cheese, so don’t miss.”
“What do I look for? Hard to hit what you can’t see. Theme of the day for us all, I guess.” Her voice was only… intent, not fatalistic.
“We can make the edges glow… perhaps pure green, for good visibility?”
“Four thousand feet. There are much better planes than this, at climbing.”
“Just keep going, we’re watching everything; think of remote detection, a passive-reflection radio system, an echo-locator. Yes, done from a hundred million miles away, only… just say, magic.” He went quiet a few seconds, as if listening. “Come right to 7 degrees on your magnetic compass.”
“We’re goin’ to Mars, like John stinkin’ Carter.” The navigator still had that sound, of a man in way over his head.
“Neither Mars nor Burroughs’ Barsoom, I assure you. Although, much as your own Mars is a thin-aired desert, it does have water and ice. Yes, we’ve gone over a few times, without quite killing ourselves. And in the longer run, if your Industrial Revolution keeps, ah, revolving, maybe we can all colonize it together, one fine future day.” With a fond, soft smile.
For a while, there was only the sound of engines and wind.
“Seven thousand feet. And, oh my, is that it?” Above the broken low cloud cover now, and… a wedding-ring of intensely green light.
“Yes, that.” Arvannion’s voice sharpened. “Go through straight and level.”
As they approached, she could see through it… high forested hills.
“Eight thousand feet, level. And I can fly right through that.”
“Do.”
Ameila did. Landed them all quite nicely and neatly too.
“Welcome to the Seelie Courts of the Land of Promise, Lady and Lord.” As he said it, tears were gleaming soft in both his eyes, most un-Fae-like indeed.
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Took me a bit to come up with this. Set some time into the past.
“You look a bit frazzled, Sir Carlo.”
“Tell me about it!” the man sighed, wiping off his forehead dramatically. ”How do I keep landing Knights of Hell on my patrols?!”
“God always gives his toughest battles to his strongest warriors!” the receptionist chirped. ”Even if you seem to be missing proof of your claims!”
“That’s because it wasn’t me who killed the damn thing,” Carlo grumbled. ”It was – ah, there’s the thief right now!”
The man who walked in was slightly taller than Carlo. He lowered the hood of his black cloak decorated with Azuman patterns in teal to reveal a handsome face, short blonde hair, and dark green eyes. Fittingly the blade at his side was Azuman in origin as well. He carried the Order’s standard sack for carrying the severed heads of demons.
“If I was still on the old force I could arrest you for that, you know!” Carlo quipped. The man only acknowledged the jest with a slight smile before he went up to the reception desk.
“Sir Maximilian,” the receptionist greeted him coolly. ”You have the Devil’s own timing.”
“You can think of it that way if you’d like,” the man replied with a shrug, handing over the confirmation of his kill. ”Give half the reward money to Sir Carlo. It was a team effort.”
“Uh, you sure about that, Max?” the former patrolman asked. ”I wasn’t much help you know.”
“Yes,” Maximilian replied. ”You have a family to provide for. I don’t.”
“Well, I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth!” Carlo said, grinning.
“That’s quite generous of you, Sir Maximilian,” the receptionist cut in. ”I didn’t think you cared that much about your fellow knights.”
“You weren’t paying attention, were you?” the taciturn knight asked, giving the receptionist a cool look. ”A man with a family should get his just reward, not the least of which is a husband and father going home to them safely.”
Maximilian walked out of the reception area without further comment. The receptionist aimed a disgusted look at his back as she spat “Who does he think he is?!”
“Eh. He could stand to work on his people skills but I don’t think he’s a bad guy.” Carlo said with a shrug and a smile.
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