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 HOLLY CHISM: The Law of Magical Contagion

The capper to Siobhan Miller’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day was a dog, tied to the stop sign. She hates dogs. She’s terrified of dogs, and that was a big dog. Looking sad and lonely, tied to a stop sign. That was not okay. She was the only one around, so she took him home. Only to find that he wasn’t a dog, but one of the Good People, under a curse. And there were more of them.

And they were all after her. And all she had was the dog (who wasn’t a dog) to help keep her from being taken away from all she’s ever known. Because that dog? He and his twin sister are family that she didn’t know she had, and their appearance has upended everything she’s ever known about herself. Including that she was human to begin with. She has a lot of questions.

Starting with curses, and how and why they sometimes spread.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Empire of Japan (Chronicles of the Fall Book 13)

The Three Part Alliance is falling apart, with internal strife, and out-and-out war . . .

In the Japanese sector, everything is spiraling into a major crisis, but for two teenage boys, their personal problems seem more immediate. For Shato house Kujo the usual fate of a servant’s child looms, while his legitimate best friend and almost brother is powerless to help, while preparing for college.

But the murder of the Crown Prince is about to scramble everyone’s plans as Japan withdraws from the Alliance, and plans retribution.

FROM HOLLY LEROY: One Eight Seven – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller

Love J. A. Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels? Try Lt. Eve Sharpe.
Lt. Eve Sharpe’s mom doesn’t just enjoy guilt trips she buys your ticket, packs your bag, and stamps your passport. Now she has Eve reluctantly heading to San Francisco in an effort to solve the murder of a drag queen superstar.

Teamed up with a tough-as-nails local P.I., Jillian Varela, Eve figures it’ll be an easy case. But what her mom didn’t tell her was that she’d be helping a Mafia don with a long list of enemies.

As the bodies begin to stack up, it becomes obvious that her mom’s ‘simple job’ has turned into something both dangerous and deadly.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Another Word for Magic (Family Law Book 6)

Fleeing the Solar System after an attack by North America, the three Home habitats now have to seek their own fortunes. Heather, Sovereign of Central on the Moon saved them but now has to make certain the USNA can never threaten them again.
What was a tentative research partnership with the Red Tree Clan of Derfhome becomes a full alliance of equals. Lee finds she has to grasp authority and act for the Red Tree Mothers and herself to repossess the planet Providence she and Gordon discovered. The Claims Commission on Earth has collapsed without the leadership of North America. Explorers like her are cut off from their payments and the colonists on Providence are left in the lurch too. To do that she needs these powerful new allies.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)

Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn

TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?

It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.

Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.

Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Deep Pink (Magis Book 1)

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.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Rockin’ the USA

It’s not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.

Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne’s Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band’s committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.

Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.

A story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.

This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.

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: Periodic

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

  1. It’s a periodic problem. Reading book promos where I already have the books or I don’t want those books or when I can’t afford to buy the books. [Crazy Grin]

    Of course, it can be worse when I can’t think of a good vignette featuring the writing prompt. [Big Crazy Grin]

    Liked by 1 person

  2. We were just resigning ourselves to being slaughtered when there was a flash of unearthly light and an overwhelming sense of vertigo. As quickly as it came, it was gone, leaving us standing in bright sunlight with no sign of our captors.

    It took us a moment to realize we hadn’t just been blown to Kingdom Come. No harps, no halos, just a huge open green area surrounded by buildings. The proportions looked a little odd, as if those buildings had been built by someone with a slightly different aesthetic — but otherwise they looked a lot like the buildings around the Quadrangle back in the world we knew.

    Not exactly Dorothy getting blown to Oz by a tornado, but right now we were just happy to be still alive. The first order of business was to figure out where we were, which meant going into those buildings and seeing what kind of resources they had.

    It didn’t take us long to discover that we were on the campus of a university — but one with all the books in an unknown language. What an irony, to be surrounded by untold wealth of knowledge, but unable to put it to use, like a man with a warehouse of canned food and not a single can opener. For all we knew, we might have books right in front of us, telling how to recognize edible plants and raise them, how to put the equipment all around us to use for our survival and ability to prosper.

    The linguistics students were all saying it was hopeless, because there was no way to get a bilingual between any Earth language and the language of this unknown world. Why was that tugging at an old memory?

    About two hours of moping and doping later, I headed into another building just to get away from all the negativity. Looking through an open door, I saw a room full of long tables, with cabinets of glassware on either wall, along with the odd-colored chalkboards that we’d seen in so many other rooms. Of course any writing on them had long since eroded away, given that chalk adhered by friction rather than any binding agent.

    On the other hand — or paw or talon or whatever manipulatory organ the original builders might have used — the wall decorations had not. Intricate patterns, sometimes repeating, sometimes not…

    And then I realized that what we thought to be a decorative motif along the tops of walls in so many other rooms was nothing of the sort. The gaps in the repeating squares were not mistakes, but very deliberate and meaningful parts of the representation. They just looked odd because we’re used to having parts of two rows broken out and set at the bottom, whereas they’d represented them linearly with everything else.

    Yep, I was looking at the Periodic Table of the Elements — and the memory came pouring back, of a story from back in the days when it was still plausible to have Mars as the home of an ancient and dying or dead civilization. The astronaut protagoninsts were struggling to read the Martian language from the books they found in the ruins, and just about gave up when someone realized they were looking at a chemistry journal — and the key to translating everything.

    Now I just had to get both the linguistics people and the hard sciences people to listen to a music major who happened to be a huge sf fan.

    Like

    1. Something akin was one Univ showcase of senior projects. There was a Music major with a display of what she had worked on – along with a violin that she would play. Because the results of her project work could not be expressed in words.

      Like

  3. “Welp, tomorrow we move this to Joe’s house.”

    “And then in three months we move it to Rachel’s place. We do this every year. It’s such a pain.”

    “Grandma got just a bit batty toward the end. She left her priceless antique formal dining set to the whole family with the stipulation that we all share it on a regular schedule.”

    “You mean—?”

    “Yup, it’s a periodic table.”

    Like

  5. Folks who do not read ATH, but an adjacent set of sites, are not (or do not know they are) fully Odd, but are PeriOddic.

    While we’re here, folks building cathedrals but were carpenters or tile setters or glass window artisans were always solving mysteries – they were PeriMasons.

    Adult easy listening crooners of the 50s who never got their own TV show are PeriComos.

    People who can swallow upside down enjoy PeriStalsis.

    A good place to oppose Lewis’s Back Archon seems to be PereLandra.

    Like

  6. June sighed and massaged her forehead. The PTA’s Periodic Budget Meeting, as she had dubbed it, was into its second hour and she wanted nothing more than for it to end. At least she’d had the forethought to take the hamburger out to thaw, but after sitting through these meetings every three months she knew what to expect. The argument over the library budget had not only run well over the allotted time, but had almost resulted in the PTA President and one of the fifth-grade teachers challenging one another to a duel.

    She entertained herself for a moment, visualizing conflict with pistols or swords in the cafeteria.

    Like

  7. Diggory frowned. “What was that?”

    The others looked up, and Annike frowned. Rae’s tragic expression had not changed. The woman had not popped in to be certain they were all right, as she had done like clockwork.

    But as soon as he said it, he knew he had felt something in the earth. A shaking, as if something had struck it. Nearby or very strong.

    “Is that a fight?” said Hans, sharply.

    “How could it be?” said Cora. “Who would fight her?”

    “The land holds many foes,” said Jasper. “There is something in the air.”

    “Which way, Diggory?” said Annike.

    Like

    1. Folks of a “prep” mindset might want to top up the gas tank, etc.

      Vary your Monday schedule a bit, off your plan.

      If you are the sort to carry, do so. Maybe the “conforting” option, versus “confortable”.

      Don’t over think it, nor over worry. Just, be that relaxed aware person.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I was going to do the weekly market trip (weather for working outside is better tomorrow than today), but then $SPOUSE recalled that Monday is also MLK day. The mail drop has been closed on federal holidays (in the past, but–UPS and FedEx and the Wal/azon drivers might be working today), so I will stay home and a) work inside and b) check news periodically.

        Like

      1. Never mind. It happens.

        And I guess the Feds agree with you. Twitchy said there was going to be no parade, no outdoor seating, and very limited indoor seating. Apparently two happy little Terries tried to attack Carter lying in state, and one of them brought a car bomb and the other a machete. And all sorts of baddies are out and about, and then there’s the drones.

        So yeah, lots of inaugural balls, and this afternoon’s victory rally with Kid Rock and the Village People, but a very low-key inauguration.

        The people who came to DC to have fun are apparently okay with having fun in their hotels.

        The lefties are apparently delusional, as I saw someone complaining on Reddit about how all these old people in MAGA hats were “grinning and leering” at them.

        I guess smiling is violence. Or maybe vio-grince.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. “Why are our enemies not afraid of us? They must be afraid of us! “

          “If they are laughing, they are not obeying! They -must- fear us!!”

          Like

    3. Yeah, I’ve seen comments from a number of people who are ill at ease about tomorrow. And I’m feeling the same.

      Given my track record in such things, likely nothing will happen. But I won’t be comfortable until everyone’s gone home following an Inauguration Day that runs more or less according to schedule.

      Liked by 2 people

  9. Kevin noted that Marianne Stewart did not appear at school that morning. That always happened the week after Periodic Assessments. He and his classmates were evaluated thrice per year in three areas: technical competence, dedication, and citizenship. And after every evaluation, their class got smaller. Nobody wanted to ask why.

    Like

  10. The school’s weekly magazine contained a feature article: “Periodic Assessments – The Real Story.” The assessments, it said, were administered by the school, but to ensure objectivity, they were evaluated by a centralized board. Scores were released a month later. What that had to do with Marianne Stewart’s disappearance was unclear.

    Like

  11. And there he squatted, watching the horizon. To sit in this cold was to drain heat from his body, and to risk falling asleep. Mother had sounded worried about him, but she needed someone to tell her when the star rose, and she thought he was old enough.

    He yawned.

    Like

  12. “Describe the multiverse, Mister Gerringer.”

    Kip snapped upright, his daydreams quickly dispersing. “Um, individual ‘verses vary, but not randomly; it appears to be periodic. They occur in bundles, sharing composition, characteristics, and events.”

    “A kindergartner explanation,” the professor intoned dryly. “I expect more from a graduate student of dimensional mechanics.”

    Like

  13. The servants left so swiftly once they found a route that she could not even call it periodic.

    She reminded herself that the fewer people she had with her, the less magic needed to move them. The very way it was her strength would require her to use it often.

    Like

  14. ”Who are you building that ginourmous table for?”

    ”The zoo.”

    ”What? It must be six feet high! And you’re building it really stout. What do they need that for?”

    ”It’s for the Loxodonta Africana male enclosure. Apparently every once in a while they like to feed them up off the ground for mental stimulation, and the rocks in the enclosure aren’t large enough for them. So the keepers decided to put in a table.”

    ”Okay.”

    ”Yeah, so it’s kind of a Periodic Table for the Elephants. Hey, why are you running?”

    ”I don’t want to be around you when the carp arrive.”

    Like

    2. Finished yesterday. Well done! Review up on Amazon and everything – I’ll buy the sequel if it appears.

      Also bought OGH’s Deep Pink. About halfway through that one. I think it explains a lot.

      Contrast with Spinrad’s story The Big Flash.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Oh, and UPS says a Certain Leather Hat is due in Vegas tomorrow. Still no chocolate this time. The pointy things were shipped from TX on the 17th.

        Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.