Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

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

1. Hiking the gentle slopes at the start of the Appalachian Trail has been a summer pastime in my family for years. We never ventured far up the Trail. Gram was too old, and even after she passed we kept to the lower elevations that we had come to love so dearly.

   Those hikes were always peaceful, and the cool greens and dappled sunlight were a balm to the suburban soul. Oh, we had a few surprises over the years, occasionally startling the wildlife, and once got chased down the Trail by an angry badger. But in all those years we never encountered the horrors that we saw today.

   “Do you hear something?” My wife Darlene was a veteran of many summer hikes, and as a teenager had once hiked over half the Trail with her family. The woodland denizens did not startle her easily, yet her voice held a trepidation I had not heard in our dozen years together.

   I stopped walking and concentrated on the forest sounds. At first I could only hear two year-old Jake snoring softly in the carrier strapped to my back. After a moment, a faint tinny whine came floating across the Trail. Quietly, I pointed over the next rise to Darlene, signaling her for us to creep up on the noise. Her eyes were wide with a tightly constrained trepidation, but she nodded and we advanced on the source.

   At the top of the low hummock, the noise rose to a wailing cacophony. What ever was making this unholy racket was just on the other side of the thick brush. I found small, sturdy branch and hefted it like a baseball bat as Darlene snatched back the branches. What we saw was beyond comprehension, leaving us momentarily stunned.

   “Is … is that … Kenny G?” I stammered.

   Darlene turned and sprinted down the hill, shouting back to me, “Run, you fool! The hills are alive with the sound of Muzak!”

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2. “Coffee! I won’t be alive until I had my coffee!”

   “There’s no coffee here.”

   “It’s going to be hell without my coffee.”

   “Where do you think you are?”

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3. Thank you for the NSFW warning; much appreciated. I’ll have to modify my scrolling habits to scroll line-by-line rather than page-by-page, because the warning popped up on my screen at the same time as the image itself, but this time I was getting on AtH at home on Sunday night (my timezone) rather than work on Monday morning, so that wasn’t an issue. And if I scroll line-by-line, then the warning is perfectly adequate. Also appreciated having the NSFW cover at the bottom of the post, so that I can read the other blurbs, then go to the “#comments” link to jump to the comments and skip the cover if I need to.

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4. Snippet from upcoming book, featuring slave-turned-sorceress Illandri and pira…privateer captain Kett:

   The ship’s door creaked open. “Are you ever coming out?”

   “I have to know what he knew.” Illandri didn’t look up from her table full of notes. Some in her own clumsy handwriting, most in the elegant penmanship of the man who’d tried to replace her soul with his own. Those had changed gradually as she paged through them, spiky antiquated letters to polished calligraphy to flowing modern script. Centuries of knowledge both earned and stolen. She wasn’t about to let it go to waste.

   “Sure. Your kill, your loot, that’s the rule.” Kett examined her carefully. “But you’ve got time. He’s dead, you’re alive, you can take a minute to breathe.”

   “I survived. Now I want to win.”

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   1. ARGH WPDE, that should be under SheSellsSeashells. Sorry!

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5. Remember, you can be a FORCE MULTIPLIER!

   Rate, review, and recommend these works to spread the word!

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6. “It’s Alive, Bwahahahaha” the Corpsman said in a manic voice.
   “WTF” second Lieutenant Petersen said.
   “Don’t worry about it LT, they do shit like that all the time, Murphy’s only got a flesh wound” Lance Corporal Saunders said with a shrug.
   “Just blowing off steam sir, meant to lighten the mood” Gunny Roberts added.
   Just then an explosion rocked the shuttle.
   “Maybe I spoke too soon” the Corpsman worriedly replied.
   The shuttle started to lose altitude and sink back to the surface as Marines scrambled to get belted in.
   “Going to be a long night LT” Gunny Roberts sarcastically informed him.

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7. NOTE: Not mine. But I can’t believe I’m the first one to reference this.

   “This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.”

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   1. …there’s no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying ’til you run out of cake. And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun.

      For the people who are still alive…

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      1. … And believe me I am still alive,
         I’m doing science and I’m still alive,
         And when you’re dying I’ll be still alive,
         And when you’re dead I will be still alive,
         Still alive…
         Still alive.

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8. Thanks for the promos! I need more books for my TBR list!

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9. She glanced down the next pathway. Her heart hammered. That snake could not be alive if cold could not kill it, or slow it.

   Fire blazed, brightly enough to cast her shadow before her, and that of the hedges. The snake lunged, and she gasped.

   “There,” said Emalie, “it’s dead.”

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10. One thing bothers me about that last book cover: where would a tribe of cannibal savages get an iron cook-pot that big? I know in the stories they’ve always got one, but how?

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    1. From Dr. Livingston, one presumes.

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       1. The cat?

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          1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Livingstone#Stanley_meeting

             In some (more fanciful tellings), Stanley found Livingstone about to be cooked by natives and greeted him thusly, usually cartooned as Livingstone standing in an iron pot.

             And now, having been explained, the joke is no longer funny.

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    2. Amazon.

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       1. Sears catalog, or possibly the best known of the safari outfitters, Rowland Ward, who still exist.

          https://rowlandward.org/

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11. I heard a groan. In my voice, if my voice had swallowed a whole pineapple. Wow did my head hurt.

    I summoned the full power of The Force and managed to barely crack open one eyelid. “Sharon?”

    ”Okay, alive and can identify me by sight, at least on one eye. Here, drink all of this.”

    I really did not want to move, but Sharon has a fair sized ethereal bag of tricks, and not doing something she tells, rather than asks, one to do is contraindicated. I forced myself to sit up with much groaning, managed after a struggle to open the other eyelid, and took the glass from her hand. The contents were green and bubbly. I looked into it and then back up at Sharon, eyebrow raised. Which also hurt.

    “It’s Mountain Dew, with twelve or thirteen extra additions from me. Drink. It. All.”

    I hate Mountain Dew, but Sharon had about a grade 4 glare going. Dating a witch at her level puts some choices into stark perspective. I might be dumb but I am not an idiot. I drank.

    I felt better immediately.

    ”What a hangover. I don’t even remember drinking anything,” I said, swiping my hair back from my forehead.

    ”You didn’t get drunk, you got hexed,” said Sharon, taking the glass from my other hand. “And that is not something that The Rules allow against mundanes dating a witch.” Sharon was still glaring, though I was immensely relieved that said glare was not directed at me. I was thinking the glare was up to grade 5 now as she went to clean the glass at the sink.

    ”Someone is screwing around, and you and me and a few friends are going to figure it out and then we are going to kick some ass,” she said, scrubbing the glass quite vigorously.

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12. “Delbert!” called Clem. “How’s the coffee testing going? We wanna ee-valuate our new products real good.”

    “Well,” answered Delbert, “I let this lovely Portugues woman sample some of the Morning Alive blend, and –”

    “You done gave Sarah A. Hoyt a shot of the high octane stuff? Aw skit! RUUUUUUN!”

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13. “Just what is going on?” said Nigel Slim-Howland.

    “A certain Mrs. Hoyt has ingested some rather, uh, lively coffee,” said Nigel’s butler, Jenkins. “It appears she’s ravaging the local filling station.”

    “You mean she’s crossed universes? Oh, no! There goes Texaco!” cried Nigel.

    “The National Guard has been alerted, sir.”

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    1. They’re fleeing from Maine to Mexico,

       They are the terrorized of Texaco.

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    2. They’re fleeing from Maine to Mexico!

       They are the Terrorized of Texaco!

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14. The cloud of birds, like a living thing itself, shifted its path and darted over the crowd. Honor put on a burst of speed, only to confirm that the birds, indeed, came for her.

    Someone struck her from behind, knocking her to the earth, and lying, in armor, over her.

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15. With apologies to the BeeGees …

    Well, you can tell by the way I use my words

    I’m a sci-fi writer, a real big nerd.

    Explosions leap from the page;

    The doctors says it’s internal rage.

    But it’s alright, it’s okay,

    My imagination has to play.

    The great sandbox of outer space

    Is a writer’s perfect place.

    You can leave more than one star or avoid a comment too harsh,

    I’m starting to cry, starting to cry.

    Whether you’re a lover of the AI cover,

    I’m staying alive, staying alive.

    My agent try’s to screw my while everybody boos me,

    I’m barely alive, barely alive.

    Ah, ha, ha, ha, staying alive, staying alive.

    My bank account is running dry.

    Ah, residuals!

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16. The radio down in the robotics shop was blasting “Alive Again” by Chicago, just a little too loud, right when Reggie Waite had come down here to inspect Engineering. Had Sprue decided to play that song on his own, or had someone put him up to it — someone who knew the significance of this day.

    For a moment Reggie’s mind went back to that moment when he first pulled his MMU alongside the mystery spacecraft, when he noticed the odd size and spacing of the handholds that formed neat paths along its hull. If it hadn’t been for the words “United States” painted along the hull, along with the Stars and Stripes, he would’ve wondered if he could be looking at an actual honest-to-goodness alien — and then he saw the robot making its way across the hull toward him, its manipulator claws grasping the handholds.

    Below the two lenses on its camera mast, red LED’s began to flash, forming a ticker crawl that read “FREQUENCY CHECK.” At that moment Reggie realized he was so astonished he hadn’t said a word — and the robot wanted him to transmit in order to know what frequency to communicate on.

    And that whole incident is classified. The public was told that we had seen an experimental spacecraft that McHenery Aerospace was operating in cooperation with the Department of Defense. Apparently the big brass didn’t think the general public was ready for hard proof of the Multiple Interacting Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

    No, better not inquire down at the station offices. Sometimes the very act of asking a question could reveal that you knew things.

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17. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » ON SUNDAYS I DO A PROMO POST FOR (MOSTLY) INDY AUTHORS:  Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Cat

18. “By the way, Grampa. Are fairies real?”

    No, I told her. But I could tell it disappointed her. But I couldn’t tell her the truth.

    Too much history behind us, too much pain.

    Too much treachery.

    If the Fae were to survive, we had to hide.

    Or we would die.

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19. It’s like this every time. Every single bloody, accursed, blessed, heaven-bestowed time out of all the far-too-many ones I can never forget.

    My eyes opened wide as I took that choking, coughing, whooping out-breath like a baby yelling her way into our world — as I had indeed done, that one singular and unique time, so many moons and seasons ago — followed, as usual but not invariably, by that deep gasping first in-breath as soon as my instinct had found to its own imperious satisfaction I would indeed inhale usable air.

    (Try coming to yourself in a heap of dead bodies, mounded in a cart as the dogged plague-victim collectors made their stubborn rounds. Once, if you have any say on it, later; it was not my favorite awakening, to be sure.)

    It was cold there in the boggy mud, though my memory reminded me this was Florida in the springtime; a clear open night spends its heat freely, and the stars (so clear, here, far away from ‘civilization’) told me it would be sometime barely after midnight. That airplane had had its majestically complete ‘malfunction’ above this mid-Florida wilderness — in what I’d learn soon ehough was, most ironically, an ignition of ‘oxygen cans’ that made breathable air by burning solid fuel — here I was lying in what had to be the longish track of my own impact, now mostly filled with murkish water.

    They were so many and so lovely, those stars. As they’d been, familiarly almost anywhere you could go, before the streetlights and the spotlights. Never mind my usual habits and imperatives; for a long dozen seconds or so all I did was lie there and watch them. Wondered, at how long it’d be till we — well, I — could see them from closer at hand, genuinely and not by any mere sleight of telescopic magic. (One learns the long view, in time, just as one learns that humanity is both angelic and devilish, but almost invariably endlessly clever and inventive in its being one or both.)

    I wiggled assorted bits and pieces of my body (mostly naked, but that’s a hardly-novel thing for anyone such as me), testing if there were any much still of things broken or slashed or seeping or whatever-the-like. Then I listened; hearing, mostly, quiet, perhaps a faint sigh of a gentle breeze. That I did not hear a moaning, or hopeless screaming, or quiet sobbing, or even a level-headed call for help or offer of it… was disappointing but not much surprising. We’d hit hard, or at least come in surpassing swift; and though my duty to the living seems to be as inbred in me as my odd, well, call it resiliency for short and simple, it was a relief not to have duties and demands of my fellow-men. (I’d long ago decided I am human, after all, only with some deep major difference, or some ineradicable connection to a wildly bounteous fount of what earlier times would have called simply ‘vital force’.)

    Soon enough the helpers, the ‘rescuers’ and officials and functionaries of this last couple of centuries would be here, just as in an earlier time a clergyman or a clutch of villagers would have made their well-meaning way to some obvious scene of dramatic calamity. Well, I needed to be long and far gone by then, if I could manage it; also leaving few enough tracks or traces they’d not wonder at who’d gone away, or seek to chase her down.

    I pulled myself to a sitting position, then slowly and carefully and most mindfully rose, trying also to spare myself the indignity of splashing in the mud again (as I must have done, quite unconsciously, very lately). It showed as a dark boggy plain in this lowering half-moonlight, with bright patches of this and that, which must all but surely be man-made or human debris. I resolved to try to walk not just carefully, but respectfully, as I went. This place was now sanctified in a way no mere priest could ever quite manage, and that costly kind of sacring is a thing that abides long.

    I felt like I was a thousand years old. Ah, the faded glories of youth…

    Swift I oriented myself to the west, and started walking. Figuring that if this bog was only wide enough, they’d miss any footprints I did leave for its murky, clouded water. Hopefully it was far enough from habitation I’d not draw any close notice, until I could scrounge somewhat to cover myself.

    Perhaps I might borrow, from these raw new dead, what they could perforce no longer use.

    For a long time, longer than any normal human lifetime, I was called and known by Elizabeth Eilidh Maclachlan. So you might as well think of me as that mostly happy-go-lucky woman, young in body and at heart, content for most all of those long years to weave and waulk cloth in the west islands off of Scotland — all cinema-cliches to the contrary, I am not and have never been any kind of highlander, rather a lover of the gunmetal sky and gray sea in all its merriment and fury. (Oh yes, and its rain, Scotland.)

    And if any ‘predator’ — on four legs or on two — tried to accost me, in this strange flush of afterglow of whatever had lately poured through me? I gave the night and the stars a predator’s smile, pre-emptively as they like to say these so-called modern days. (‘Berserker strength’ has nothing at all to teach whatever this echoing afterglow of renascent life really is and does. And, it turns out, with true heart and humble need, one may call it later.)

    It’d been years since I’d had alligator meat; perhaps if they were madly foolish and I was lucky enough to find a way to make a wee fire, I could start this new awakening of mine by renewing that old acquaintance, too. (Surely it’d be too much to ask, for a bit of well-done mammoth. Unless, of course, those clever geneticists were to pull off another triumph…)

    “I am not come to bring peace, but a sword” — I quoted aloud, a favorite saying of an acquaintance of mine (and many others) from some while back. However much some people might have been well-pleased to act otherwise, as lovely and congenial peace and tranquility is (recall my decades wandering from island to island, as Eilidh, before the Sassenach blew all that up), it not only does not seem to be rightly my lot… it does not please best.

    I was not born as I am, it seems, to be a quiet villager, or indeed a wild and self-indulgent brigand, or any sort of ronin, but rather a samurai. In the cause of the Ordered Powers who made this world out of chaos, and keep it (often despite our best human efforts) mostly upright and in business.

    Or, to slightly misquote a late very learned and insightful but also often more than slightly foolish man — extraordinary gifts demand extraordinary service, in direct and straightforward proper return.

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    1. Oh, well done.

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       1. Thank you, although this was so much “gateway writing” I did little but edit and get out of the way for Ellie to tell her own story (sure enough it took me decades to learn how to do the last, due in no small part to these vignettes). A pre-existing idea, that’s suddenly turned into a concrete character and detailed setting.

          As far as “more..?” (see below), I’m already about 3 K words / 20 K chars deep into a next story, about how Ellie meets one of her associates (+~300 years on a planet called New Bedford Falls, told in 1st person from his perspective). Likely individual pieces of this overall story would never be longer than novella-length, each; but whole ‘novels’ have been written exactly thus (see Poul Anderson’s stories of the Time Patrol, for instance).

          A bit dizzying, to realize I’ve “created” (cough!) a character who can legitimately show up at any (though of course not nearly every) point in human history, as someone who’s essentially herself, without being a time traveller in any ordinary sense…

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          1. Yeah. The most difficult part is to let the character write.

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    2. I would like to read that story, if and when you ever make it into a complete book.

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