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 MACKEY CHANDLER: I Never Applied for This Job (Family Law Book 8)
Lee seems to be getting a handle on this sovereign business. Mostly it is making sure you have exceptional people and then stay out of their way. She’s learning moderation a little at a time and commissioned a self programming AI who may be a he instead of an it.
Friendship is also a difficult process to master when you are torn between the standards of several species, but she manages to satisfy Badgers ideals, and her Human allies turn out to be very good friends too. A little working vacation with Jeff and April solidifies that bond and gives then a couple of adventures too. They really needed to check on the Bunnies and the Jeff had to teach the squids to keep their filthy tentacles off Lee.
Now if the Earthies would just stop trying to kill her, and they figure out how to deal with the impending death of money, maybe she can do some stuff again just for fun.
FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: The Groundskeeper: Deadhead
The reward for a job well done…
Chloe loves her job as a groundskeeper in the big cemetery, and as a caretaker for its dead and undead inhabitants. In fact, she’s doing a little too well at it, and as a result, her Boss makes her an offer she can’t refuse.
Now she’s not only dealing with angry honeyscuckles growing in eldritch muck, but secret societies and a task that makes her wonder if she has a ghost of chance…
EDITED BY JAMES YOUNG WITH A STORY BY SARAH A. HOYT (ALSO STORIES BY OTHER PEOPLE YOU KNOW. LOTS OF PEOPLE YOU KNOW. TO MENTION TWO KEVIN J. ANDERSON AND PETER GRANT!): Thin Red Tales: Military Alternate History (Arc of Ares)
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes,” when the drums begin to roll…—Rudyard Kipling, “Tommy”
From the first time a group of savages looked at each other, gathered into a formation, and then said, “Hey, let’s go together to swipe that guy’s food…” Humanity has sought to settle its differences by force. Whether for possessions, deities, land, or the sheer love of violence, organized conflict has been the Fates’ playground. Chaos and chance provide fertile ground for multiple “What if?” paths, and Thin Red Tales brings you several expert portrayals of things that could have happened, had Ares’s whims been different.
Prefer your mayhem to be up close and personal, with foes’ thrusting blades under arrows’ shade? You’ll love Rob Howell’s “Here We Must Hold.” Want that with ancient Latin and legions? Dragon Award nominee Sarah Hoyt (“To Save the Republic”) [Hey now. While I was finalist on some things, like Colorado Book Award and Mythopoeic Award, I DID win a Dragon and a Prometheus! AND am USA Today bestseller!] and bestselling author William Webb (“Broken Oath and Shadowed Blades”) will scratch your Roman Empire itch.
If you’re more a fan of enemies being close enough to see but not in each other’s personal space? NYT Bestseller Kevin J. Anderson, Sidewise Award Nominee Lee Allred, Colorado Book Award finalist Kevin Ikenberry, and newcomer Daniel Kemp bring you short stories from the Napoleonic era through the Age of Iron.
“But what if I really enjoy imperial angst but I have an allergy to black powder?” Thin Red Tales also gives you stories by Sidewise, Dragon, and Prometheus Award Winner S.M. Stirling, Sidewise Award Nominee William Stroock, and bestselling author Joelle Presby that cover both World Wars. Small wars against the backdrop of nuclear holocaust also get their due, as bestselling authors Peter Grant, Justin Watson, and editor James Young all provide Cold War-era stories that round out this take on alternate conflicts.
Bottom line: whether you like your alternate warfare served by the edge of a blade or delivered from several kilometers, Thin Red Tales has fiction for you. With its mix of new stories and previously published favorites, this second Arc of Ares anthology reflects the war god’s capriciousness from the dawn of time. So, grab your pilum or your sidearm, as you’re about to be entertained.
FROM PERCY SINCLAIR: New Dawn.
Earth tried to colonize Mars. They failed. But now the colony ship has come home, crewed by unknown entities far more powerful than dystopian Earth. Frantic to survive the invasion, Earth puts aside its internal quarrels and forms a coalition to investigate. But when the truth is revealed, everyone must make desperate choices. Caught in the web of lies and confusion, two scientists, one intelligence operative, and one pilot must choose who they will believe and where their true loyalties lie. Making the wrong choice could be fatal, both for the individual and for Earth-bound civilization.
FROM DAN MELSON: The Monad Trap: Connected Realms Book Two
You’d think there’d be more for a god to do.
Alexan and Petra have become Eternals – minor gods, binding themselves together in their divinity. According to most stories, that’s where ‘happily ever after’ would start. However, there’s a divine ecosystem, as red in tooth and claw as any other part of nature, competing for power and worshippers and other divine benefits. There’s also the diligar deity Klikitit, who’s appointed Alexan his personal enemy for having dared defend himself against one of Klikitit’s Sons. Then there is the question of how do they achieve the next step on the divine ladder? All of this while dealing with divine curses which bind both of them – for all divinities are cursed.
The Connected Realms are certainly more complex than they appear at first glance!
FROM RACONTEUR PRESS, WITH STORIES BY J KENTON PIERCE, LEIGH KIMMEL AND MORE: Steam Rising: Tales of steampunk and wondrous inventions (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 35)
Steampunk. It’s not just a genre, it is science fiction in its purest form. In this collection, you will read of the ways that technology could both help and harm mankind. Steam power took a special kind of bravery to use and master, and the people who live in a steam-powered world adjust to that need: engineers, inventors, tinkerers and experimentalists of every kind and every manner imaginable.
Within, you will meet clockmakers and war-widows, steamship captains and airship pilots; you will see wailing engines race and clanking automata strut. Hurry on! The engineer is feeding the coal, and says she’s raring to go.
See that red lever over there? Grip ‘er tight, and heave forward the throttle…
FROM MARY CATELLI: Even After
Mirror, mirror on the wall — can I be safe when I am tall?
Rumpelstiltskin got the baby.
Rapunzel and her prince never again met.
Snow White still sleeps in the forest.
Biancabella, Snow White’s half-sister, knows that if she is more beautiful than her mother, trouble will follow again. Her appeal to the magic mirror only gains her stories of how hard it is to fight the evil sorceresses and wizards and witches who have banded together to bring unhappy endings.
But with her mother seeking to constrain her, Biancabella knows she may have no choice to use that knowledge to attempt to escape.
FROM CHARLI COX: The Fae Wars: Northwest Front
Fae Wars returns on a new front as war rages in the Pacific Northwest!
Corporal Erik Doherty isn’t some kind of special operations super soldier; he’s just an infantry grunt trying to get by in what was once the United States Army, now an enforcement arm of the Fae overlords. When orders come down from a chain of command more interested in boot licking their new masters than protecting American citizens, he has to make the choice. To serve and live, or run and die?
Ashleigh Greene is a teenage girl with a price on her head, the Fae looking for retribution for the killing of one of their nobles. As her hometown burns behind her, she flees into the mist shrouded forests of the Pacific Northwest, her family killed by dragon fire and her world destroyed.
On separate paths, each human comes face to face with a haunting legend that has lived for thousands of years. One that has been waiting, watching, and hating the old enemy that has finally returned. Together, they bring war to the Fae in a battle for honor and revenge.
Book seven in the best-selling Fae Wars series!
FROM JERRY STRATTON: The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Ice Cream Cookery: Twenty-three great recipes for ice cream from your home freezer.
Twenty-five great ice creams and other frozen desserts from vintage cookbooks 1927 and up. Lemon Sorbet, Candy Cane, Cherry-Almond, Chocolate, Coffee, Cranberry, Mango, Maple, Peach, Peanut, Saffron, Vanilla, and Walnut! Including Italian and Russian.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Normalcy Bias: Look closer…things aren’t always what they seem to be.
Look closer. The things that you’re assuming you’re seeing? May not be what you think. Is that really a mouse, or is it a Brownie? Is that really an owl? Is that polished gemstone a stone…or an egg?
We take so many things for granted. Some of them may be harmless, but many are a lot less so. I wonder how many people ignore red flags every day, because they only see what they expect to see?
This collection takes what’s “normal” and asks “What if it’s something more?”
FROM KAREN MYERS: Tales of Annwn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Story Collections Book 1)
A Collection of Five Short Stories from The Hounds of Annwn.
The Call – A very young Rhian discovers her beast-sense and, with it, the call of a lost hound.
It’s not safe in the woods where cries for help can attract unwelcome attention, but two youngsters discover their courage in the teeth of necessity.
Under the Bough – Angharad hasn’t lived with anyone for hundreds of years, but now she is ready to tie the knot with George Talbot Traherne, the human who has entered the fae otherworld to serve as huntsman for the Wild Hunt. As soon as she can make up her mind, anyway.
George has been swept away by his new job and the people he has met, and by none more so than Angharad. But how can she value the short life of a human? And what will happen to her after he’s gone?
Night Hunt – When George Talbot Traherne goes night hunting for fox in Virginia, he learns about unworthy men from the old-timers drinking moonshine around the fire and makes his own choices.
Who could have anticipated that the same impulse that won him his old bluetick coonhound would lead him to his new wife and the hounds of Annwn? Every choice has a cost, he realizes, but never a regret.
Cariad – Luhedoc is off with his adopted nephew Benitoe to fetch horses for the Golden Cockerel Inn. He’s been reunited with his beloved Maëlys at last, but how can he fit into her capable life as an innkeeper? What use is he to her now, after all these years?
Luhedoc needs to relearn an important lesson about confidence.
FROM SARAH D’ALMEIDA: Death of a Musketeer (The Musketeers Mysteries Book 1)
The musketeers never expected to stumble upon her body—a beautiful woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to Queen Anne of France herself, lying lifeless in the shadows of Paris.
D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis swear a solemn oath to uncover the truth behind this mysterious death. But their quest for justice quickly spirals into something far more treacherous than they imagined. What begins as a murder investigation soon reveals layers of intrigue and conspiracy reaching into the highest echelons of French society.
As the four friends follow a trail of clues through duels and deceptions, they find themselves squarely in the crosshairs of their old nemesis, Cardinal Richelieu, whose shadowy hand seems to guide events from behind the curtain. Each revelation brings them closer to King Louis XIII himself—and to dark secrets some would kill to protect.
With their loyalties tested and their faith in humanity shaken, the musketeers must decide how far they’re willing to go for truth when the price of discovery might be their very lives. Some mysteries, once unveiled, can never be forgotten.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Gods and Monsters (Modern Gods Book 4)
Here there be dragons…again, damn it.
Deshayna has her sanity back, and forces older than the gods have granted her a new purpose. Chronos, his freedom restored, fights for his sanity, and with it, a purpose in helping Deshayna—now called Shay—with hers. The gods are starting to pull together more…and it’s about time.
Millennia after the last dragons to threaten human existence have been hunted down, they’ve started to reappear, hinting to the surviving gods that something more sinister appeared first: Tiamat.
Instead of a confrontation, though, the gods—major, minor, and genus loci—are drawn into a frustrating hunt for a predator that flees rather than attempting to strike.
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: DAFFY.
According To Hoyt 
“He’s daffy”.
“Who’s daffy?”
“A rogue Ultra that calls himself Jester. He decided that he was going to be my Number-One-Enemy. The problem is that he’s not very good as a criminal so he’s easy to catch. Worse of all, he calls himself Jester but his jokes fall flat.”
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Do try out “Steam Rising” and let me know how much you liked “Flight of the Pisa”. If you are fascinated with World’s Fairs, this is an alternative tale about the St Louis Fair, also, seen in “Meet me in St. Louis”. I enjoyed writing this and putting in what I loved about the area.
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I’m fixing it, I’m fixing it!
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What’s crazy is I got it right, to include the year, in the back blurb for Violent Blue Yonder. Whoopsie!
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LOL. I wasn’t yelling. I was just mildly shocked.
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Then he stuck something like a dragon’s head at the end of it. The boy sulked, but he made more whimsical castles and birds and easily shaped things before he called off and took his wages to go eat.
He was drinking ale when he heard about the flood.
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And those of you who buy these works can add to Indie Revolution by rating and reviewing them. (Yes, longer reviews are better, but even a short one helps.)
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‘Da boss sez ya can’t cross lessn’ ya pay,’
‘Pay? Pay what?’
‘Da fee.’
====
4 more in the ‘to read’ pile today! Thank you, all those who contribute the skull-sweat.
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One from this list and 4 more. The TBR stack was getting a little thin…
I have and enjoyed James Young’s Leyte Gulf novel, so the stories were a must-buy.
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“Load the carpapult!”
“I say, load the carpapult!”
“Wot’s wrong, didn’t you hear me?”
“I’m trying, sir, but the damned ammo keeps flopping around!”
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Except that she had also swept off with her father to the capital city at the same time.
After working out mathematics for a spell.
It sounded silly put like that.
“I will go mad,” she said. “Is this real? Or rather, it is real, what real thing is it?”
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“Getting there is simple,” said Theo merrily. “Put your arm about my shoulder, I will put mine about your waist, and we will fly quite lightly back.”
He grinned. “It will seem quite sane and simple after the first few times.”
“Until then?” said Honor.
He shrugged.
“You would find staying out by night quite daffy,” said Marcella firmly. “We have excellent places to stay, out of their gratitude for us for what we do.” She smiled. “And years of experience in determine what it is that we can do to inspire gratitude.”
“Two years,” whispered Theo in her ear.
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“Get all your ducks in a row,” Mom told me.
Ok, so there’s Donald and Daffy and Howard and Jemima, and I’m starting to run out of ducks. Wasn’t there one in the Super Mario Brothers ‘verse, or was that another video game.
Sorry, but ducks were never all that much my thing.
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Donald and Daffy are just about certain to get in a row, at least– they’re always fighting.
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Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald’s nephews. Scrooge McDuck. Mallard Fillmore of eponymous comic strip fame. Lil’ Guard Duck from Pearls Before Swine.
Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (an alias for Daffy, of course).
Duck Tracy, another role for Daffy.
The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
Ludwig von Drake (had to look him up)
Wikipedia has a list of fictional ducks – some really obscure ones in the Disney universe.
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Never, ever pick a fight with a biologist turned exo-eco-engineer. Their field is as madly “interdisciplinary” as actual rocket science — all sorts of things from appallingly many different branches of knowledge lie smugly in ambush to trip you up — but also far younger, and less well regarded.
So if you’ve made it even this far in it, you’ve perforce learned to be sufficiently, ah, scrappy.
But especially if you’re facing someone like Aileen McCarron, hair the red of Mars from far off (neglecting the polar caps) and temper legendarily to match — and I mean more the “never suffer fools or foolishness gladly” of that trait, far more than the Dorsai-esque rages when truly provoked. It’s still fortunate people have to really work to do that last, with her.
The problem being, public PC-moronism is often an oblivious idiocy.
“So you see, meat isn’t just murderous, it’s madness. Seven pounds of feed to make a pound of pork, and ten pounds to make a pound of steak! When you could’ve just as well eaten a proper plant-based diet from the very start, skipping over all the crazy wasteful inefficiency of feeding your food to someone else first, then killing them to eat the scant leavings.” She was not quite strident, not as media-drunk as it likely sounds; but it was still enough to make her companion (boyfriend?) at the bar silently cringe a visible trifle. (And she was just getting up to operating speed, alas.)
You could see it clearly, even in the way he picked at his own… salad.
While Aileen studied her own medium-rare steak, then ate with a powerful obvious relish — only a little more blatantly so than before. And smiled a cat-like, knowing sort of smile to me, as she (so obviously) listened.
And I smiled back, sharing her merriment at her virtuous self-control.
“But the biggest point is, meat is doomed too. Because someday soon we’re going to Mars, and in a big way; if not Musk and his bunch, then someone. And there are whole new books about how that is going to revolutionize how we eat and raise our food here on Earth too. They’ll have to be efficient up there, growing crops in a dome or an underground farm, and no-one will ever mess with meat or milk or anything animal-based, except for sheerest luxury — and the one-percenters will not take half our whole for luxury!
“They call it the Mars food singularity and it’ll be the next big thing!”
Aileen snickered, softly and non-obnoxiously, and smiled. “No accounting for people who simply can’t do accounting,” she said, very softly, to me.
“And those Cro-Magnon cave-people types who couldn’t learn to live in the future if their lives depended on it — will learn better, or else.” Only, she’d made the mistake of looking at Aileen and her steak as she said it, then flicking her eyes sidewise to take in me and mine (medium-well-done and thank you so very much for finishing cooking my cow, O kitcheners).
Aileen is one of those who take more offense at slights aimed at others than ones that land on themselves. (I am too; but this wasn’t a matter of deep insult or metaphorical pistols at dawn, this was watching an uppity mouse lecture a playfully-mooded cat. Entertaining.)
“Funny thing about efficiency, it only adds up right if you do the math right.” Aileen spoke to the air, but as if she was standing in front of a crowd. “And when you bother to do the math, you realize a plant-based diet runs aground on the pis-, I mean, abysmal efficiencies of plants and their photosynthesis. Look up the yield of rice, then its calorie value, figure how many hours of sunlight on that rice paddy you get as biomass energy, from all those months of daylight. Look up the overall conversion with a very well-managed cane field — say, somewhere in Brazil — from sunlight to sugar energy, without even going on to ferment it to alcohol to fill up their cars; they brag that it’s up around one percent. Because a lot of the time, with other crops, it’s even worse!
“Now, take that same area on Mars, pave it with solar cells. Because there you don’t get farmland free for the price of burning down some jungle. At 15%, 20%, maybe 30-plus percent conversion to electricity if it’s a new multi-layer type; almost perfect conversion to hydrogen; very efficient Sabatier-process conversion of that to methane; 80-plus percent fixation of methane into biomass by bugs like Methylococcus capsulatus, that they already use to turn natural gas into animal feed — look up ‘Calysta’ if you dare.” She was still looking at her Mars-red bite of A1-ized steak, almost as if she were replying to it instead; then slowly eyes-closed ate it; then and only then glanced over at the veggie-an and her sidekick.
“Sunlight to feed is well over ten percent, ten times what ‘plant-based’ can do; so even if you feed that stuff to cows or pigs (and M. Capsulatus isn’t the best for people to eat, or the healthiest, something about the nucleic-acid levels being a bit high, and of course the rabbit starvation if you ate nothing else anyway) — you’re still a few times more efficient going from sunlight to meat than your greenhouse would be going to plants to eat. Now, I’m not saying Martians are all going to be on a ‘carnivore diet’ or anything… but there is a better way to go, and it’s not yours.”
The one at the bar looked as lost-affronted as any of the fervid believers do, when one dares to question their dogma with anything as inconvenient as facts, numbers, or logic. Then rallied, as they do, with an appeal to authority in the best authoritarian tradition. “I’ve got a whole book here and it says you’re wrong. Dinner on Mars. And there’s others, too. You’re just daffy. Or maybe you’re simply having me on. But I know you’re wrong.” And she actually hauled a paperback out of her booksack and started waving it at Aileen and me. Like some Wef-Lefty-Veggauthoritarian version of a Bible-thumper, minus the whole Actual Divine Inspiration angle, of course.
Aileen put down her fork. “Not a bad book, really; though it does go all the way to the end without telling you much of anything about how a real Mars food-cycle would actually, in-detail, work. But it’s all full to the brim of global-warming this and pandemical that; and worse, it never even considers the idea of using mechanical, industrial means to get around the whole photosynthesis bottleneck and all the massive land/energy use it involves. And it doesn’t run to much in the way of hard numbers, either.”
She produced a card, waved it at the bar-flies, laid it on our table.
“See my Web site for the papers.
“I do this for a living, or at least it’s getting to where it pays most of my bills. And there’s more and more understanding in the community of all the things I just said, and more; like space flight, when they finally got around to understanding on-site refuelling was a game-changer. After years of Zubrin and Pournelle and people, patiently telling them the obvious.
“I already live in our future, much of the time. I have already seen your future, too, and it just doesn’t work, or not nearly well enough to fly.
“Stop designing space Edsels, or pre-ordering them from ones who do. Get real, get informed, and maybe you can help build the future with the rest of us. Or, get left behind, at some dumb-ass loud 1960s Earth Day rally.
“This is the late 2020s. Start celebrating Mars Day, eco-retro-techno-boomer, and dump your fashionable eco-fantasies along with all your doom and gloom.”
She looked, the veggimiter did, all constipated and indignant, silent in an inhibited-fuming sort of way. Her companion looked… thoughtful, a bit or even a lot, and maybe very subtly and cautiously heartened.
Aileen picked up her glass of sherry, raised it to me. “To a future worth having, that tastes deliciously of pork barbecue and filet mignon, looking out over the ruggedness of the Mariner Valleys.” Her eyes were on me, as she said it; but also, truly, looking a hundred million miles beyond.
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And, assuming my just-posted macro-vignette gets out of Moderation Purgatory, I ought to mention that not only is “Dinner on Mars” a real book, but also the idea that power to hydrogen to industrial methane to “single cell” animal feed to meat is more efficient than “just” growing plants is… pretty sound by some hard-ish numbers, by now. (Of course I’d love to read all of Aileen’s fictional papers on that, if only. And aquaculture, if not quite squid farms on Mars, may yet win the efficiency race.)
So, Our Vegetarian Future In Space? Maybe not so much, despite beaucoup de trendy.
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The Martian smiled each time he looked out the forward viewport. He’d never been a fan of garishly decorating the primary hull, as many younger pilots did these days, but he had to concede: there could be no better figurehead on the bowsprit than the skull of that daffy duck.
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