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

TODAY THERE WILL BE NO EXTRAORDINARY BOOK PROMO, BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED A BOOK PROMO WITH YOUR BOOK PROMO SO YOU CAN PROMO WHILE YOU PROMO. THERE WILL, HOWEVER, BE SHAMELESS WRITER SELF-PROMO.

*First of all, a blessed Easter to those celebrating, and for those who celebrated Passover this week, I hope you passed dry shod from slavery to freedom. And now, the promo!- SAH.*

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM SARAH A. HOYT, ON PRE-ORDER COMING OUT APRIL 23: Witch’s Daughter

Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.

Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..

Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.

Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.

Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Vesuvius Incident

A scientist has vanished beneath the ice of Europa.

Officially, it was an accident.

Unofficially, she discovered something impossible.

Josef Kellerman is asked to find out which is true.

Posing as a documentary photographer, Josef travels to a remote research station on Jupiter’s frozen moon. His assignment is simple: observe, ask questions, and report back quietly.

But nothing about Europa is quiet.

The missing scientist was studying anomalies in the subsurface ocean—patterns that shouldn’t exist. Structures that shouldn’t be there. Evidence of technology no human has ever built.

Now she’s gone.

And Josef isn’t the only one searching.

As rival factions close in—each with their own plans for the discovery—accidents turn deadly and alliances begin to fracture. The deeper Josef digs, the clearer it becomes:

This was never just a disappearance.

It was a cover-up.

And whatever lies beneath Europa’s ice is too valuable—and too dangerous—to be revealed.

If Josef can’t uncover the truth in time, the discovery could reshape humanity…
or destroy it before it ever reaches the surface.

FROM ROBERT MILLER: Up the Down Beanstalk: Parodies based on the fairytale, Jack and the Beanstalk

UP THE DOWN BEANSTALK

There has to be MORE to the story …
Did you read the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and come away with questions?
How young was he, to believe the beans were magic?
Was he bullied into accepting beans in exchange for the cow?
Was he really that gullible? Was he desperate? Or was magic real in his world?
Why did he think it was smart to climb that beanstalk? How far did he climb?
Why didn’t he run when he saw the giants?
What was the giants’ side of the story? Were they bullies, or were they the victims of burglars and swindlers?
What about the golden harp and the goose?

On and on, with every answer generating MORE questions..

We invite you into these pages to explore the MORE our authors found. You’ll be delighted, enchanted, intrigued, and we hope you’ll cheer for our heroes in all their shapes and sizes and motivations.

Brilliant inventors and identity theft. Brutal usurpers and imprisoned princes. Mischievous boys and missing eggs. Curmudgeonly neighbors and rivals. Heroic sheriffs and computer programmers. Liars and thieves and desperate girls risking all for their families.

And MORE.

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Hidden World (Annotated): The science fiction classic

Sudden, brilliant towers of light emanate from the Earth at three different points on the Equator, at specific intervals in time! Dr. Kelsall has a theory, that they come from a world inside our own world, and he takes his three comrades to the South American jungle where he predicts the fourth light will appear. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared the men for the alien menace they were about to face!

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book cultural and genre context.

FROM KEN LIZZI: Dekason (Twilight Galaxy Book 1)

On the feudal world of Kvasir, lowly armsman Carkston Monitor steals an ancient glider and launches a one-man raid to shatter two enemy armies—hoping to win a baron’s daughter and a seat among the Peerage. His audacious strike succeeds… and utterly ruins a secret plan of the nobility. Banished in disgrace, he’s dumped on the decaying planet Dekason, where stagnant syndicates duel with dueling swords and forbidden electromag pistols.

Now Carkston is done playing by anyone’s rules.

He forges a deadly alliance with an Unsanctioned House, turns rival nobles’ own vendettas against them, and unleashes a whirlwind of sabotage, estate raids, and blazing gunfights that threaten to topple the rotten aristocracy of a dying world.

One outcast. One stolen glider. One chance to seize the stars—or burn both planets down trying.

BY ROBERT J. HORTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Man of the Desert (Annotated)

It starts with a stampede, and never lets up from there!

• This iktaPOP Media ebook has an introduction by indie author and editor D. Jason Fleming putting the novel into historical and genre context.

FROM DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Tale of the Crane Princess (Timelines Universe Book 6)

Ordinary, everyday shopkeeper Horiuchi Tsurue is running a little general store and mini-café on a small island in Japan’s inland sea, two centuries after mankind was nearly wiped out by a virus.

One day, Yamaguchi Yukiko, the kamaitachi of legend (The Cross-Time Kamaitachi), and her daughter Mikoko, appear in front of Tsurue’s shop, and she invites them in for tea.

That’s when Tsurue discovers she is anything but ordinary. And in the end, the island she is sworn to protect will depend upon it.

FROM JENNIFER RUST: Dream Not for Sale: How I Chased Riches but Found True Wealth

Desperate to break the humdrum of her life and begin achieving her dreams, a young Jennifer chased riches for years before realizing what she was truly after couldn’t be bought.

In 1994, Jennifer Rust moved to a small town in South Carolina to work as an assistant editor at the local daily paper. Things seemed exciting; her first few months, the only story that splashed over the headlines centered on OJ Simpson.

Glamor fades with time, though, and as a newly-minted late-20s-year-old, Jennifer began to look for an escape out of her grind. She was lonely thanks to her afternoon and evening shift job-not to mention, struggling from paycheck to paycheck with the salary of peanuts from the newspaper.

One day, one of her few friends in town introduced her to an opportunity to make money. Skeptical at first, Jennifer walked away but soon realized she didn’t have much to gamble-and she’d always put trust in betting in herself and her work ethic.

Before long, Jennifer was all in, spending money to make money. At one point she turned her career upside down in the chase for riches. She endured months of rejection, lost friends, and spent thousands of dollars before learning the secret to true wealth. She discovered that dreams are a goal to achieve, not a product to purchase.

Dream Not For Sale is an immersive memoir that reads like a novel about a young woman on a journey to find true happiness. Inspired by true events, the memoir can be compared to any book showing how someone got out of the multi-level marketing business and paid off their debt, learning only the expensive lessons they can teach.

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 KAREN MYERS: King of the May – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 3)

Book 3 of The Hounds of Annwn.

MORE VALUABLE AS A WEAPON THAN A KINGMAKER, HE MUST MAKE HIS OWN CHOICES TO SECURE THE FUTURE.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, had hoped to settle into a quiet life with his new family, but it was not to be. Gwyn ap Nudd, Prince of Annwn, has plans to secure his domain in the new world from the overbearing interference of his father Lludd, the King of Britain.

The security of George’s family is bound to that of his overlord, and he vows to help. But when he and his companions stand against Lludd and his allies at court, disaster overturns all their plans and even threatens the Hounds of Annwn themselves.

George and his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, must survive a subtle attack that undermines them both. Other gods and gods-to-be have taken an interest, but the fae are divided in their allegiances and fear the threat of deadly new powers in their unchanging lives.

George and his companions must save themselves if they are to persuade their potential allies to help. But how can they do so, attacked on so many fronts at once? Will he put his family into greater jeopardy by trying to defend them?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Ice Storm

Everywhere Evangeline looks, a thin coating of ice makes objects gleam in the sunlight. However, the beauty proves deceptive, for it hides a deadly secret, one only she can recognize.

In her youth, Evangeline had aspired ot master the powerful magics of her world. Those dreams died the day her Gift awakened uncontrolled and plunged her into a vision of a full fleet battle. The Admiral’s Gift will not be denied, and for Evangeline there was no choice but to trade her mage’s robes for Navy blue.

Now she is faced with an enemy she cannot fight save by magic. Except those who bear the Admiral’s gift are forever barred from working magic.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

REVIEW: Review: Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land develops rich tapestry blending SF/fantasy tropes to imagine “first contact” with vast cultural, political and gender differences


Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

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: Pass.