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 JON LAFORCE: Hell’s Belles: Love and War Downrange
Two souls collide in the middle of a deadly war.
Sergeant Sylvie Lyons of Her Majesty’s Royal Engineers wishes she’d listened to her grandda’s advice and stayed away from the military.
USMC Sergeant Hondo Cassidy wants nothing more in life than being a Marine and fighting.
Hondo and Sylvie find themselves thrown together when his artillerymen are assigned to provide security for her engineers deep in the desert of Afghanistan.. Amidst death, destruction, cultural misunderstanding and the inevitable that happens when you mix an all male unit of Marines with an engineer unit that is mostly female, Sylvie and Hondo find in each other a reason to live.
That is, if they can survive.
FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion
Invasion from an alternate timeline?
It’s December 1937 in a world exactly like ours except that it is about to veer wildly into alternate history. It’s less than two years before World War II broke out historically in Europe. War has already come to much of Asia, with Japan invading China. An isolationist US fears it will be drawn into that conflict, especially after the Japanese sink the US gunboat Panay. Just when President Franklin Roosevelt thinks he has that crisis under control, he faces a bigger issue. High tech descendants of the Wokuo, Japanese pirates and smugglers who should have vanished over three hundred years ago, flood into the Pacific coast off California.
The Wokuo are both refugees and invaders, fleeing from war in an alternate reality where they survived and grew strong, while looking for new conquests to replace their lost empire. They set their sights on California. President Roosevelt sends disgraced former Colonel Martin to California to organize resistance to the invaders, but the Colonel has his own issues, buried deep in his brain and waiting to cause disaster.
FROM MARY CATELLI: Madeleine and the Mists
Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went. . . the Misty Hills were filled with marvels.
Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old.
But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband.
She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king — and the Misty Hills.
Some things are not so easily evaded.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Having a Pint (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 2
Even the dead have to make a living…
Meg Turner, vampire accountant and investments advisor, has plenty of living clients, but not many among her fellow undead. That’s about to change: she’s been invited to a regional business fair for her kind. She’ll get to meet and greet more bloodsuckers than she really wanted to (hopefully without having to suck up to any of them). than just the two Vampire cops she helped track down and stake her late, unlamented sire—and hopefully make some friends and answer some questions.
Unfortunately, she’s got a Line Progenitor who’s begun invading her dreams, and a serial killer stalking her future clients to distract her from growing her business. Throw in a sick roommate not long before the conference starts, a mafia messenger boy left on her front porch, and only one car to juggle all of her responsibilities toward her roommate and unexpected guest. And then on top of that, she has the business fair over an hour away that features vampire karaoke, nosy, pushy elder bloodsuckers, and one particular elder who’s friends with her unwelcome dream guest. Seriously, it’s enough to drive her to drink something other than coffee or blood.
Just why did she think this whole conference thing sounded like a good idea, again?
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf
The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.
Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.
Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?
FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact
Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .
As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!
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: credit
According To Hoyt 
“I hate to take all the credit for what me and my people did, but it’s better than taking the blame for something me and my people couldn’t do anything to prevent.”
Oh, thanks for the Promos Sarah! Take care!
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No, no! Too much white space! Apply the <CR>edit tool.
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The ravens cawed together, and Marcus realized he had let himself be seen.
Not to his credit. He would have to move more swiftly to stop this one, and that she was working necromancy made it all the more urgent. He flew down toward the hill. A raven flew in.
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DANGIT, I was hoping for a second there that it was a new Holly Chism book (I’ve already bought the whole series thus far–if any of y’all haven’t read it, it is really excellent!!!) :D
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Every time I see that Blake Smith cover my brain wants to correct it to “Harrington” and then I’m wondering why someone other than Weber is writing Honor . . .
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Kevin sighed, “To give him some credit, hiding the Codex on low-mana Earth wasn’t a bad idea.”
“You’re just saying that,” Amandine replied softly, “because he was your uncle.”
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“Against my better judgment,” said the professor, “I’ll give you extra credit if you can reverse the effects of your lab project.
“Thanks, Perfesser!” said Elmer the Aspiring Wizard. “I won’t let you down. Ya hear that, Roomie? I can make things right!”
From Elmer’s pocket came the reply: “Ribbit!”
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To look at Elmer, the professor thought, one might conclude that aspiring wizards didn’t need to be particularly bright. To his credit, however, Elmer never said he was. He was naive, gullible, and his clumsiness was legendary. But he was determined, and the professor thought that might be just enough.
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Moving money through a galaxy-spanning polity has its own complications. Your first big consideration is communication. Depending on how your comm systems work, you can get into all kinds of problems, from light-speed lag to quantum decoherence.
When you’re buying from the local grocery store, you don’t have to think too much about it. But when you’re a merchant buying from someone in a distant system, you want to make sure that the value of your money won’t be fluctuating wildly, whether because of local economic conditions or travel times between sysems.
Add in the question of extending credit between buyers and sellers, and you’ve got a whole new set of complications. For instance, how do you deal with payments when they need to travel between systems? Are they considered paid when the debtor remits them, or when the creditor receives them?
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“Forgiveness. No credit to … humans.” The loan officer didn’t actually say humans. It clicked its mandibles to form the slang kl’dak, an impolite word in ultra-polite Dzanda society. Everyone in antenna range turned to look. But you get used to it when you’re the occupying force on a defeated world.
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He had angered his majesty the Lord High Protector by his questions. He felt he not been given proper credit for the praise that he had heaped upon The Pretector himself, but rather unfairly targeted because he had criticized the official functionaries. Now, he found himself in room of the doors and his assignment was to pick one. He had some power over his punishment in that regard. The room of the doors was in effect a long hallway with doors interspersed every so often. It was long enough to that one couldn’t really see the end in either direction.
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