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 LEIGH KIMMEL: Gnawing the Bones of the City.
Tikhon Grigoriev has a problem.
He’s a member of the civil police, but has come to the attention of the political police. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, that is a very dangerous situation. He’s hanging on by his fingernails in besieged Leningrad, and he has a family to think of.
Worse, he has reason to believe that something uncanny stalks the frozen ruin that is a besieged city in subarctic winter. But as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he is not supposed to believe in the supernatural.
How can he keep his head in this impossible situation?
A short story.
Note: includes intense scenes that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised.
FROM HOLLY LEROY: Remember the Dead – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller
Love J. A. Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels? Try Lt. Eve Sharpe.
In the world of serial killer hunters, Lieutenant Eve Sharpe is a legend and well known in every cop shop in America. But when one gruesomely posed body after another are discovered in the middle of Chicago, ambitious politicians and an aggressive press are threatening to derail Eve’s investigation.
And with her partner Walt on an extended second honeymoon in Mexico, it doesn’t look like help is on the horizon.
Then a friend from California, P.I. Jillian Varela, shows up on a job that parallels Eve’s case. Together they pursue the killer into a nightmare world of obsession, torture, and murder where no one may survive.
A dark follow up to the first Eve Sharpe/Jillian Varela mystery, ONE EIGHT SEVEN.
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Help! Nobody Taught Me to Cook
If you have never cooked and need to gather the tools and start TODAY this 26 page booklet will get you started without taking half a day to read. If you don’t have funds to eat carryout or go to a restaurant until your next paycheck it can be a life saver.
It assumes you live in civilization, have some funds, and aren’t homeless but not much more than that. More than feeding you it can give you the dignity and independence of not demanding charity of others. It suggests common well know dishes with easy to find ingredients. It should hold you for a week or two until you get tired of the limited selection or win the lotto.
FROM MARK D. TINDELL: The Giant Catfish Caper of 1943
Duke was a lanky young man, perfectly suited to the Army in that fateful year of 1943, but familial complications kept him at home, where he led a crew maintaining the shiny rails of the railroads.The men worked to keep transportation running smoothly in a time of war while the Texas heat worked to make them crazy.
The crew stopped for lunch on an old bridge over an almost dried up river, hoping in vain to find a breeze. They heard a strange noise from the small stagnant pool below, so they decided to go fishing. What they landed would lead to events crazy enough to make any sane person accuse them of telling tall tales.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Cataclysm
The end is coming.
Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…
FROM MARY CATELLI: Winter’s Curse
Who but a fool would linger after Zavrien laid his curse? Ill luck can kill — and all the more in Zavrien’s enchanted, endless winter, haunted with ice giants and frost fairies.
When the soldier Gareth is cursed, the young wizard Perriel learns how dangerous lingering can be.
But she can hold out a sliver of hope for breaking the curse — if it doesn’t break them first.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT (AND YES, THE SEQUEL IS ALMOST READY TO PUBLISH): Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1)
Lilly Gilden has a half-crazed cyborg in her airlock who thinks he’s Nick Rhodes,
a fictional 20th Century detective. If she doesn’t report him for destruction,
she’s guilty of a capital crime.
But with her husband missing, she’ll use every clue the cyborg holds,
and his detective abilities, to solve the crime her husband was investigating
when he disappeared.
With the help of a journalist who is more than he seems,
Lilly will risk everything to plunge into the interstellar underworld
and bring the love of her life home!
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: INTERRUPT
According To Hoyt 
c4c
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Squirrel!
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Nice set of promos today!
My first novel, Vignettes, was basically a series of short stories loosely tied together by the same characters and a timeline. While working on the second in the series, a friend interrupted me to tell me about a 1-star review, saying the book was nothing but short stories… True story!
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It helps to indicate in the blurb that it’s a short-story cycle, not a novel.
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Howie Waite was still puzzling over his homework when his father came in. “What’s wrong, son?”
“What’s an interrupter gear?”
Reggie Waite grinned. “That’s old-school technology. By the time I was flying in the Energy Wars, designers just had to position any kind of machine gun where spent brass couldn’t get sucked into the intakes. But back in the earliest days of military aviation, one of the biggest challenges of creating a functional fighter aircraft was being able to aim the weaponry. In two-seaters, they’d mount the machine guns on a swivel and the weapons officer would aim them manually, but with the powerplants available in those days, a two-seater was just too sluggish for the maneuverability a fighter needed. But with a single-seater, the pilot needed to aim while flying the plane, which meant needing to fire in the direction of flight — and because of limitations of the airframe, the guns had to be mounted on the fuselage, where they would fire right through the arc of the propeller. To solve that problem, they developed various mechanical linkages that would allow the guns to fire only when the blades of the propeller were clear. They weren’t perfect, but they made the great aces of World War I. By World War II, fighters were heavy enough that the larger machine guns to destroy bombers were placed on the wings, about where the hardpoints for missiles are located on modern fighters, putting the bullet trajectories clear of the propeller.”
Understanding clicked. “And by the Korean War, everyone had switched to jets, so no problem.”
“That’s my boy.” Reggie gave his son a cheery back-slapping.
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Queen Isabella smiled, thinly, and the courtiers merely turned attentive.
“It is not fine enough for her,” said King Juan. “She must have a finer gown for her wedding, and for that she needs a bridegroom.”
Some courtiers had murmured before. Aurora could tell by the silence now.
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we interrupt this program to announce that Columbia has decided to send its presidential plane to pick up their nationals being deported from the United States. previously the Colombian president had refused landing rights to USAF airplanes carrying these refugees but upon the imposition of an immediate 25% tariff, ramping up to 50%. In addition there would have been sanctions on all members of the Colombian government.
This is what we voted for. Huzzah.
An interesting thing is that these sanctions on individuals would make them Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) which is how the banks de banked conservatives. That’s how it’s done.
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YES!
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Then there’s the option of dropping them off *over* Colombia, parachutes optional . . .
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Venezuela
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yep.
There’s always helicopters.
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And of course someone liberal was complaining because we import a lot of flowers from Columbia. Strong, “Where will Ah get the flowers for Mah garden party?” vibes.
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Thinking of interrupts caused me to muse on an old computer program I maintained once. It used a ‘Trap 4’ instruction as a branching command – slick and very compact code, meant for a 4K-byte memory limit, well before micro circuits (but after tubes!) (PDP-11 Macro on an RT-11 system).
And I was making my bed, and my blanket says it is ‘microfleece’, and I wondered where that came from.
Ever looked inside an older desktop computer? Dusty and such. And many of the components are micro-cheeps, so the dust must be the micro-fleece.
So, that’s where your old computers have gone, truly recycled by being brigaded to the fabrics industry, so microfleece may be harvested.
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The TTL Appreciation Society* takes issue with your statement. A TTL is a microcircuit, though it’s very small scale integration.
((*)) If you believe one exists, I have a bridge (full-wave rectifier) I can sell you. :)
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As a required lab project for USAF electronics school, I built a Bi-stable Multivibrator from discrete components. (Keesler AFB, 1971!)
Most folks these days call that a ‘flip-flop’ – the basic ones and zeroes of computer hardware.
Electronics school was a better life interruption than visiting Beautiful South East Asia would have been.
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Hi Sarah,
I give my Dad’s money away this time of year. If you can give me a mailing address, I will send you money and you can share with Luke, Mary and Mike.
Pam Allsmiller
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Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
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“She should not have sent you,” said Father, cutting in. “A great big bear indeed. You must have been dreaming. You must have fallen asleep on the mountainside and you could have perished from the cold right there.”
“But, Father, I watched the stars.”
“You dreamed you watched the stars.”
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I feel the need to give a “shout out” to Mackey Chandler for his public service. (Good thing we’re on opposite sides of the country, though – otherwise, we’d have to duel over the use of stainless steel…)
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I concur. Basic cooking shouldn’t be an inaccessible skill. Director Robert Rodriguez even had a comment on that, where he said that people look at “how to cook” like an impossible mountain, when really you need to learn to cook 3-6 individual dishes, that’s it. (You can spiral out from there as you like, but if you learn to cook those things well, you’ll always have good food available.)
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Hamburgers, tacos, bean burros, grilled cheese were where I started. (I don’t count heating canned soup as cooking – and definitely not assembly of a bologna sandwich.)
Now, I’ve spiraled out lately into Japanese and north Mediterranean dishes.
I would be playing around more with other southeast Asian and south Mediterranean things – but I have two spice-adverse people in the house. Makes it difficult, except for a few things that are just as good whether made the “traditional” way or not.
(I would do more with Indian recipes, but younger $DAUGHTER$ has that as her concentration. Once a week is about as often as everyone else wants to have curry or some such.)
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Carolus cut in. “That will deal with the air. Is there anything else that we shall need for certain?”
“There’s any number of things we shall need for certain,” said Florio. “Unfortunately, what we need first of all is knowledge enough of the Conundrum to learn what they are.”
“True.”
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I was gonna tell y’all, but got …
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So… among other interesting facts coming out about Neil Gaiman… it turns out that not only were his mom and dad very high up in UK Scientology, and his siblings too, but that he was a Scientologist auditor at their UK HQ, as well as being Executive Director of their Birmingham branch in the Eighties and into the Nineties, while he was selling comics and novels galore. And his parents also had a big vitamin business that had tons of Scientologists as customers, so they had money. And his first wife was another high-up Scientologist, and his production business (that sells licenses to his IP) is tied to various Scientologists too.
And we all know that Scientologists do try to support Scientologist authors, so it’s very likely that Gaiman’s legitimately high sales numbers were also pumped a little by the built-in UK (and maybe US) audience, trying to please or help his parents and siblings, who were still high up. (Nobody seems sure whether Gaiman himself is in or out.)
Given how gossipy that sf/f fandom usually is, I’m fascinated that nobody seems to have talked much or at all about this. It’s the ex-Scientology folks who seem to have brought all this up.
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That’s because one thing Scientology is known for is its high-powered litigious nature. I know the Vulture article got edited after the lawsuit was threatened.
For fun, go look up Operation Clambake. It’s been up for decades and not only has good information about Scientology, it also has a lot about how cults operate, and my favorite comedic section, Operation Foot Bullet, where the CoS does things like anticipate the Streisand Effect.
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Agro Squirrel Narrates, the well-known HFY fanfic narrator, has emigrated from South Africa to Portugal. It’s a place in the country. His second YT channel is getting turned over to his dad to be a homesteading channel.
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“Child! Get away! There is danger! You do not know what you interrupt!”
Annike looked over. For a moment, she thought she saw Marcus, but no, that was the man who called her child. Her gaze went past him, and she saw Marcus flying in the air. He looked horrified.
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IO CONTOLLER: LEVEL 05 INTERRUPT
CPU: SOURCE INTERROGATIVE
IO CONTROLLER: SOURCE CODE UNRECOGNIZED
CPU: INTERRUPT TARGET INTERROGATIVE
IO CONTROLLER: PROTECTED MEMORY SECTION 0x5BA9
MEMORY CONTROLLER: SECTION 0x5BA9 ACCESS RESTRICTED TO VERIFIED INTERRUPTS
IO CONTROLLER: INTERRUPT VERIFIED – CODE INACTIVE BUT UNEXPIRED
CPU: CODE ACCEPTED – INTERRUPT APPROVED
MEMORY CONTROLLER: YOU GUYS SUCK
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