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 RORY SURTAIN: Psyker: A Dark, Dystopian Science Fantasy Novel
Dystopian science fantasy – “Where minds are weapons and hope is heresy.”
They call it dark energy or chaos or the Warp. It leaks into our universe at an unpredictable rate.
Those sensitive to it can wield its immense power in unimaginable ways. In the Imperium of Mankind, anyone born with such a gift is labeled a psyker and outlawed at every level of society.
Enter Paric Kilhaven, a scion of a noble House and a young man as clueless as he is clever. His future was set until a genetic aberration, a freak encounter, and a curse turned his life inside out. Reality set in. He wasn’t like anyone else. He wasn’t even considered human, but at the end of the day, he was merely a pawn.
Paric navigates the darkly alluring world of his city’s underhive, hoping to escape the fate of an outlawed psyker. Rival gangs and chaotic forces align against him in a fight for the planet’s survival.
Can Paric outlive the nightmare? Can you? Grab your copy today!
Part adventure, part mystery, this dystopian science fantasy novel is appropriate for Adult and Young Adult readers.
FROM ALLENE R. LOWREY: Einarr and the Shining Valkyrie: A Viking young adult action-adventure
A high-seas chase…
After wintering with the Runemaster alfs of the Shrouded Village, Einarr is finally deemed ‘safe’ to leave the village and rejoin the Vidofnir. But the alfen High Roads have become unstable, so he has to find another way back with his new friends. It seems as though they’ve hit a stroke of luck when an old friend of Einarr’s father makes port. At least, it seems like they’ve found a ride back to Kjell.
But, not long after they set sail, a ship of the Order of the Valkyrie appears on the horizon… and starts following them.
FROM SABRINA CHASE: Red Wolf: Scout Part 2
Despite injury, capture, and enemy pursuit, Nic and Feng Guo succeed in finding the camp of the mysterious northern general — a man who also seems to have a common enemy in the rebellious General Zeng. Other good news is sparse. Suspicious of strangers, the northern general Bai Yan does not welcome their presence. Will they have time to convince him to join their alliance before they must return to Shanmen Fortress?
As Nic and Feng Guo race to return before his absence is detected, Zeng’s nefarious plans for Shanmen are already in motion, trapping the soldiers behind the walls. Only a shunned monk and Nic’s cross-time special forces team remain to defend the people of the town …
FROM MICHAEL HOOTEN: Wizard’s Heir (A Bard Without a Star Book 1)
Gwydion ap Don is a talented harpist, and a known rogue. But his Uncle Math sees something more: a young man with the magical talent to succeed him as Lord Gwynedd. But to learn magic, Gwydion will also have to learn self-control, duty, honor, and the martial arts. He’s not sure which will be the hardest. And when his training in magic begins in earnest, his whole world will change, as well as how he sees himself.
Based on the ancient Welsh myths from the Mabinogion, but set in the world of Cricket’s Song, this new series looks at one of the three great bards of Glencairck, Gwydion. But long before he became a great bard, he had to learn how to be a good man. This is the story of how his uncle tries to temper him into a leader, and a suitable heir.
FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Golden Summer
Early ripe, early rotten, or so the proverbs claim.
Pjtor Adamson Swendborg defeated the Harriers and opened NovRodi to the lands across the White Sea. But his wife has not born another living child, and there are whispers that Godown has cursed her or him. He chafes at the old men and old ways that surround him. He may be emperor, but even he must bend to the will of the nobles and the church. As Pjtor wrestles with his past, he discovers that defeated enemies do not always stay defeated.
In his haste to save his world, Pjtor’s impatience may undo all that he has won so far.
FROM ILLENE KAYE: What’s Wrong with Being a Princess?: A short story
What happens when a Fae princess wakes up in a mortal’s bed? TROUBLE!
Eglantine – ‘Tina’ to her friends – just wanted to visit the mortal realm to help her forget her upcoming marriage to a minor demon lord. She didn’t expect him to follow her!
Boat Night is always crazy, but he never expected to be picked up by a Faerie princess!
Brad was just working his shift at the bar when he was suddenly compelled to take the pointy-eared girl home with him. Now he’s being chased by winged hellhounds and an annoyed demon lord.
It’s the morning after neither one of them expected. The question is: Can they survive the day?
FROM CELIA HAYES: Daughter of Texas
A woman’s life in Texas, before the cattle drives, and before the Alamo – before the legends were born… She was there, and she saw it all.
On the day that she was twelve years old, Margaret Becker came to Texas with her parents and her younger brothers. The witch-woman looked at her hands, and foretold her future; two husbands, a large house, many friends, joy, sorrow and love.
The witch woman would not say what she saw for Margaret’s younger brothers, Rudi and Carl – for Texas was a Mexican colony. Before the Becker children were full-grown, the war for Texas independence would come upon them all and show no mercy.
During her life, she would observe and participate in great events. She would meet and pass her own judgment on great men and lesser men as well; a loyal friend, able political hostess . . . and at the end, a survivor and witness. But in all of her life, there would be only one man who would ever hold – and break – her heart!
FROM TOM KNIGHTON: The Essence of Man: A Real Guide To Masculinity In The 21st Century
Popular culture argues that being a man is a simple matter. It’s all about what you think you are. If you think you’re a man, you’re a man. Nothing else matters so long as you feel better about yourself by saying, “I’m a man.”
Historically, that wasn’t the case. Being a man was something earned, something attained through a rite of passage, and those days are mostly gone. However, why should that change the concept of manhood?
Author Tom Knighton has been forced to watch in his role as a journalist and blogger, but that has given him an opportunity to formulate what it means to not just be a man, but to be a good man. This is the guide for taking masculinity into this century without betraying the core of what it has always meant to be a man.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox
To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past to change it. And in the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier
With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon’s Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William’s own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.
In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon’s Breath Organ.
However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon’s Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.
Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ’s windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life.
Or worse, her sanity.
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: Morning
According To Hoyt 
They could search all day, through the night, and into the morning and be no closer than when they started. Felix closed his eyes and wished their tutors had spent less time teaching them to hunt through the woods, and more on the books. They could not always consult librarians.
“Good Morning! How are you feeling today?”
“It’s morning? And what’s good about it? And how did you get into my Lair?”
George chuckled. ”You’re really out of it Sam. I got you home after your drinking spree and you let me in.”
Sam grumbled. ”What was I drinking?”
“Not sure but you bet one of the Elder Dwarves that you could out drink him.”
“If I don’t remember it, I’d say that he won.”
She woke, abruptly. In a cave, no light to tell the time of day; no light at all save the glow of luminous crystals, so not her cave, but also no sense of any threat. She stretched, neck and frills, and claws, all the way down to her tail-tip, and laughed.
It had worked. She was in her proper form, and free of the curse. It felt like the dawn of a new day.
Too bloody early, that’s when morning comes. Especially here. Especially now. “Come do gigs in Finland,” they said. “Finns love goth-rock,” they said. Yeah, the Finns do, but midsummer in Finland hates goths.
Especially photophobic night stalker goths. One of these days, I’m going to have a word with the Management. Sunrise at 0400? That’s just sick, Sir. Sick.
Visiting Calgary on the Summer Soltice, it didn’t get fully dark until after eleven, and it was already starting to lighten up shortly after four.
Scotland in mid-June was enough, thanks. Full dark around midnight, dawn at way-too-early-o’clock.
A fellow I knew in the Air Force was once assigned to Eielson AFB, near Fairbanks, Alaska. He said he remembered his wife yelling at him for mowing the lawn one summer. The problem? It was eleven o’clock at night!
When $HOUSEMATE first visited MN he was a bit taken aback at how late it was light (Summer… so still light at 9 PM in MN) and also how fast it got dark. We went into the restaurant in daylight or maybe very early twilight. We exited in full-on night.
Glacier Bay, Alaska in July. Sunset around 11:00 PM, sunrise around 2:00 AM. Standing midwatch in the daytime is something of a surreal experience. 😀
Lisa had always prided herself in her sense of direction. Even in her various trips to Russia, she’d never gotten turned around and taken by surprise when an environmental cue didn’t match her mental map. She could find her way through even the oldest and twistiest streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg, to the point some of her Russian friends would look to her as a navigator.
All that changed on her first morning at Sparta Point, when she woke to the sun pouring in through a window she thought sure was on the north side of the old ranger station Spartan’s Own called “the dacha.” For a moment she was stricken by a feeling not dissimilar to vertigo — and then she realized that somewhere along the back roads between here and the highway, she’d lost track of all the turns they’d made.
On reflection, it wasn’t that surprising, considering the circumstances of her ride up here. Better to focus on figuring out how to prove herself — and not revealing that she was aware of Spartan’s true identity. No, Leonid Gruzinsky would not hesitate to eliminate someone he considered a threat to his operation up here.
“Good morning, Passepartout,” said a voice the valet thought he recognized. His pounding headache made it difficult for him to respond, until he managed to prise his eyes open – at which point he shot to his feet.
“Monsieur! Mr. Fogg,” he managed before collapsing back onto his bed, unable to hold his balance. “I can explain…” Raising a hand to his head, he flinched. “Or perhaps not.”
“You’ve a swelling the size of a croquet ball,” his employer commented, handing him an ice pack. “Mr. Fixx sent me a message that you had been injured and we got you back here last night. Do you remember anything?”
Passepartout rolled his neck and applied the ice to his head. “We were in an alleyway when we were attacked. And later, someone shining light in my eyes, telling me to stay awake. A doctor, I suppose. Finally he told me I could lie down.”
“Mr. Fixx may have saved your life. He was somewhat the worse for wear, himself. He said there were two attackers and that you defended yourself well, until one of them got you on the head. At that point the noise attracted the night watchman and the men ran off.” Fogg considered for a moment. “You’d best take the day off, Passepartout. Mr. Fixx will come here at seven this evening and we will discuss developments further at that time.”
”That’s Morn?”
”That’s the guy.”
”So he really knows how to do this?”
”He’s been aboard this station since the Cardassians built it. Longer than anyone else here now, that’s for sure. I watched him get in there myself last week.”
”And I just watch what he does and do that on the control panel?”
”Right. And record the sequence for the Chief in case he ever needs to get in there. He was fine with showing you. He likes you.”
”Great. What do I call it?”
”Just call it what it is. Why the blank look? You can title it ‘MORN-ing sequence for access to spaces 374-D-82 through -97”. Okay, he’s ready, go, record it all.”
”I should have specialized in security…”
Follow up to an earlier one!
“OK, Ash. Spill it.” Brad grumbled as he opened up his toolbox.
“What do you wish to know, Bradley?” the draconic titan responded.
“You’re practically humming this morning and damned if I know what it is,” the engineer replied. ”I thought Aoi and I had patched that arcana cable leak already.”
“You did. Admirably.” she replied, the slightest hint of good cheer in her voice.
“Then what the hell…?”
“Brad! How much longer will it be?”
He looked down to find a sight that was both expected and not. Vincent and Carys together. Expected because they were finally working together after how long and always followed up with their mechs in a similar time frame. What was unexpected was how, well, comfortable they looked together. Now it all made sense. It had nothing to do with any mechanical problems and everything to do with a certain thing the Jade Tempest had been after.
“Finishing up now, Vince!” he called to his cousin before turning to the mech. ”I didn’t know you Immortals could practically sing with smug, Ash.”
“The least you can do is be happy that a significant wall has come down between them, Bradley,” Ash replied, her yellow eyes blinking with amusement. ”Getting you out of your magazine pages and into the real world is a task for another day, however.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Brad grumbled, putting the finishing touches on his work.
Morning.
Above is the shortest complete horror story ever written.
Has anyone copyrighted it yet?
“Meow” can be a pretty succinct horror story as well, particularly in the morning.
Three fewer letters, too, dang it.
Kenneth tossed and turned in his bunk. The next morning was his weekly appointment with the college’s Director of Community Integrity, who would expect a full report on the previous week. While the DCI insisted negative reports were acceptable, Kenneth knew better than to take the man at his word.
Kenneth was due at the DCI at 0730 sharp. Walking to the Admin Building, he racked his brain for something to report. Wastrels loitering in an alley? Hardly worth mentioning. That party last week? No law against beer and dancing. Come on, he thought, I gotta come up with something!
Outside the DCI’s door, Kenneth was even more agitated. If he didn’t have something to report, the DCI would wonder if Kenneth was worth his stipend (which about covered cigarette money), or if he was hiding something. Kenneth didn’t ask to be a Community Assistant, but he couldn’t resign, either.
Maybe I could bring up Enzo Troy, Kenneth thought. He’s a bastard anyway, and deserves whatever misery comes his way. But what can I say about him? Can I just make something up? Kenneth looked at his watch. 0730 exactly. It’s time. He stood, and knocked on the DCI’s door.
No, it would be wisest to wait until morning. To rest. And to bask in the starlight. He looked about the trees, dark against the sunset. And to stop being so afraid. He had slept in the rough before, and when he did not even know where the necromancer was.
Marlene looked about. “Were there servants that didn’t get up this early at the castle?” she said, in a low voice.
“Some,” said Sylvie. “When the courtiers danced until midnight, someone had to clean up after them. At least well enough to manage the next day. Others were up now.”
This morning, I woke up and decided that only one thing was going to keep me from murdering people was pancakes.
Which was why Viola had come in with pancakes. “Good morning, Adelaide,” she smiled, putting a breakfast tray in front of me. “How are you today?”
“No long contemplating massively parallel murders as long as I have breakfast,” I replied cheerfully as I started adding butter to my pancakes.
“That bad?” Viola looked at me carefully, right eyebrow raised.
“Not quite, but close enough for government work,” I sighed, and added just a little bit of maple syrup.
It all to seldom realized just how much massively parallel murder is prevented by the small sacrifices of maple trees. A Universe without maple trees is short-lived indeed.
Emma came very slowly and comfortably up toward wakefulness, from depths of dream she felt more as a brim-full recent eventfulness, than knew as a collection of stories properly and clearly remembered. Cracked open her eyes, to see much the same vagueness of orange-ish morning light as when she’d fallen asleep. Checked by sight and feel (and habit) that she wasn’t tied or strapped or chained to the bed or anything else; some of which had been true far too much of the time since her… abduction.
(Kidnapped! — minus all the neat Robert Louis Stevenson parts.)
Remembered she was supposed to be in the middle of three and a half full 24-hour days of “solitary meditation and self-actuation” (the Noble Ones of Midgard had called it)… and decided she could sleep a bit more.
The strange slow re-sunrise off to the east wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything fast. Like being on Mercury, with a lot more air and a lot less scorch, she’d told herself, when she’d finally understood the mad (mis)behavior of the sun these past several (Earth) days.
And it felt like only half an hour or so later, when she realized with not a little surprise and novelty that she really felt like getting up.
So, for now at least, she simply… could just-do that. “If and only if” she wanted. Novel and agreeable, almost — comforting.
But as she was done scrubbing her hands over her face, to begin finishing waking up (to a “new day” only by courtesy), her eyes lit on the platinum and gold ring on her left thumb. Large enough to not be uncomfortable, but most definitely too small to pull off… put on her by some “impossible” tricks of “hole in the air” wormhole-tech or, well, something like it. As she’d sat there helplessly watching, both dazzled and half-terrified. (If a discontinuity in space can cut metal like a cheese-slicer cuts… cheese, or water, then what couldn’t it do to the flesh and bone of your body?)
One of sixty similar rings, tying 58 of her fellow abductees(?) and one Midgard “instructor” to her, symbolically and… well, magically. Not only in the way they said it did, but in ways Emma simply… felt.
Aware as she was that her Celtic-pagan religion and practice, with its own custom recipe of “walking between the worlds” shamanism, was likely (or entirely) the reason she’d been “singled out” along with 300 or so of the likely-millions that Los Angeles’ techno-Viking raiders had taken as she’d watched — “special treatment” not “general population” in prison terms, rather than ones of servitude — it was still more than a bit creepy to be symbolically bound, that way, not “just” literally so.
Five-times-sixty women, five of those Norse teachers, all “in the circuit” together; that she knew of, that she’d met by fives and sixties and all, that she’d been housed with and trained with and punished with and…
But now, since last night, she was alone. Which was, for an introvert and “highly sensitive person” marooned on some exo-planet (or rather, two or three of ’em so far), a blessing almost beyond any price or ever saying.
No “sisters in learning and service” — no “instructors” or people simply and without any hint of permission asked or given, doing with and to her.
And suddenly it really hit Emma, that for the first time since that sudden power failure, and odd cloud layer, and… so forth, had hit her in her friend’s room in Los Angeles where Emma was visiting — for the very first time in all this sense-of-reality-twisting madness, she could get up and do as she pleased; only within narrow limits, yes, but still.
She threw back the sheets and blankets of the narrow cot-like bed, put her bare feet cautiously on the thin flat rug (she wasn’t yet used to the half gravity here, or had ever been used to the full and-then-some gravity on Midgard half a solar system away), stretched her arms right out on either side, turned and looked through the thick, narrow, high window at the sky.
At the incredible sunrise, golden above and ruddy below, of a world half the size of Earth with a star far cooler and yellower — a red-dwarf with maybe a hundredth the light output of the Sun, but bigger in this sky by a few times. And seeing it, directly, made Emma quite-sure she wanted more.
Biggest now, she thought as she pulled on “her” socks and shoes — very like the ones she’d been wearing on the other side of the Gate, but these had all come with the rooms and yard — walked through the T-shaped suite of concrete-cave rooms to the entrance, to face a dawn above the yard’s overhanging concrete and stone walls. Biggest and brightest in the sky now, as this planet’s lopsided, eccentric orbit brought it in closest to its star; as the eternal horse-race between steady rotation and now-fast revolution reined the sun to a near-standstill in the sky.
It must be just below the horizon — which you could see, desert-Southwest hills and brush, above the wall below where she stood, whose top rose far above the floor of the sloping yard by thirty feet or so, unjumpable even here — now, by the way the brightness gathers right above that one place, she thought further.
The sun here made a circle of the sky every two orbits, every three turns of the planet, in a 3:2 tidal lock. But it… paused, in its course twice in that double year, stopping, drifting slowly and slightly backward by a dozen degrees or so, then stopping again and moving forward again, slowly at first then going faster and faster around. Almost like a ‘retrograde loop’ by an outer sister planet of Earth, but different and far more eerie.
Here, near a ‘cold pole’ on the equator, or its twin half a world away, it did this up-close and bright but near the horizon; at the ‘hot poles’ on the equator a quarter-way around from both, it did this right overhead, a days-long super-noon that smashed down with three times the heat input of even a cloudless tropical day on Earth.
(Emma had felt the breath of that, yesterday; she’d been out in the sultry air of a crater-filling sea, so humid its water would condense on her skin at body temperature. Without the square-foot or so bag of freezing-cold water on her lower back, she’d surely have died of heatstroke; no way to dispel the fever. But the Midgarders weren’t so wasteful as to kill their property in training… except by stopping your heart electrically if you really misbehaved, then re-starting it once you’d got your briefly-fatal lesson. In public, where their firm point could be usefully appreciated by unwilling spectators and terrified revenant-Lazarus alike.)
But here, it rose, bright and big; stopped at maybe a half-hour height on Earth; dropped gradually down below the horizon again; then rose a second time, still moving so slowly even compared to its later fast but shrunken and warm passage straight overhead. Over days of time.
Or, at least, it was about to do that last.
She watched the re-dawn of this days-long double ‘year’ of this odd little planet, for a few more minutes. Savored its colors — twice as high up the sky as on Earth, stretched vertically sunrise and sunset alike — simply standing there, in borrowed/issued clothes she did not own, as she did not (so they said) own even herself.
Then went, with a fugitive smile, and opened a can of Bumble Bee tuna, and made her a big bowl of tuna-salad to eat. Because she could and she wanted to.
And when she’d come out of the little kitchen, glass bowl and stainless fork in hand, she’d already run through the numbers in her mind one more time, eccentricity and mean anomaly and equation of the center; and had looked at the GMT clock behind its Lexan window in passing.
So that as she looked again out over the too-near horizon, the very first fiery-reddish stripe of too-big sun was just barely peeking above.
“So, morning has come, again.”
And despite it all, all of it entire, Emma did indeed smile brighter yet.