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

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

I want to ask, as a favor, that if you liked Witch’s Daughter you leave a review. Amazon is still showing nothing but one non-review rating! I figure they’re playing games. AGAIN.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Witch’s Daughter (Empires of Magic Book 2)

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 BETH HOMICZ: Some Guy Wants to Buy the Fourth of July: A rollicking, lighthearted, timeless story for Americans of all ages

Imagine: Charlotte’s Web and The Pushcart War meet National Treasure!

SOME THINGS SHOULD NEVER BE BOUGHT — OR SOLD.
When ten-year-old Allie Campion wins a finalist slot in the Friendly Family Freedom Franks national Fourth of July essay contest, she and her dad, Dan, depart their small Virginia town, embarking upon a zany whirlwind adventure in the nation’s capital. During their week in Washington, Allie and her spirited fellow finalists discover a conspiracy of crony corruption in high places, and – inspired in part by a curmudgeonly American bald eagle – gallantly set about revealing the truth and righting the wrongs, all while navigating betrayal, defamation, and their own growing desire for independence.

Intelligently and charmingly written by a former licensed D.C. tour guide, Some Guy Wants to Buy the Fourth of July™ offers readers a heartwarming, wholesome, laugh-out-loud tale of the indefatigable American spirit.

“A bedazzling book! A fun read for all freedom-lovers… Former D.C. tour guide, Beth Homicz, takes readers on a rousing ‘tour’ of the capital that includes political chicanery, vile villains, an eloquent eagle, and some very smart, determined children.”
— Claire Wolfe, author of Hardyville Tales and other books

Children’s / Middle Grades / Young Adult
American patriotic adventure fiction
Suitable for independent reading by ages 8 and up. Family-friendly, educational, enjoyable entertainment.
Highly recommended for helping young readers to build vocabulary and civic knowledge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beth Homicz is a national award-winning former local reporter and a co-author of AMC’s Best Day Hikes near Washington, D.C. (Appalachian Mountain Club Books: 2011, 2017, and 2023). As a licensed professional tour guide based in the nation’s capital for many years, Beth hosted more than 15,000 travelers from all walks of life – primarily student groups – on their own memorable Washington adventures. She now lives in the mountains of Virginia, where she is at work on several other stories. Some Guy Wants to Buy the Fourth of July is her first novel.

FROM MAX COSSACK: Deep Fakery (The Wilder Bunch)

When the State of Minnesota arrests and charges Ojibwa City local Aaron Fishel with murder, his defense lawyers Sam Lapidos and Jacob Laghdaf face an impossible task—the single security camera video shows Fishel murdering his victim in gruesome detail. As trial approaches and his lawyers try and fail to protect Fishel, they recruit help, and everyone involved begins to ask tough questions.

What is a crime?
What is justice?
What is reality?

Will this ripping suspense tale answer any of these questions? Only the reader will find out

FROM J. MANFRED WEICHSEL: Action Girls: Triple Threat

The Action Girls are a trio of wannabe Hollywood starlets whose failed movie shoots send them on absurdist pulp adventures. This omnibus collects all three novels (Jungle Jitters, Into the Bush, and Space Escapades) into a single volume, allowing new and returning readers to experience the complete Action Girls saga.

Jungle Jitters: The Action Girls are trafficked into the Congo by a cult of mad scientists who want to create a new race of hybrids by mating humans with apes.

Into the Bush: The Action Girls try to shoot a movie on the body of a 300-mile-tall giantess whose pubic hair forms a jungle ecosystem teeming with monstrous mites, crab-like beasts, and human-sized bacteria.

Space Escapades: A space witch teleports the Action Girls across the galaxy and into a fight for survival on hostile planets, lawless space stations, and worlds beyond imagination.

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 GIULLIANA LOCAY: Pemberley and Pastelitos

A Hot, Laugh-Out-Loud Pride and Prejudice Inspired Story in Sunny Miami
Lizzie Benitez is Miami’s undisputed queen of efficiency. She’s this close to landing the career-defining project that will finally give her the financial security she’s worked her entire life for… until the infuriating, far-too-handsome Mr. Pemberley shows up to see if she’s really worth it. He’s rude, condescending, and seems determined to undermine her at every turn. Lizzie’s confidence is unshakable—except now she’s counting down the days until she can escape his judgmental stares without causing her to lose the project or her mind.
Enter her chaotic Cuban family: her influencer sister who thinks every crisis needs a TikTok, her no-filter Abuela dropping truth bombs over cafecito, and the sudden appearance of charming Mr. Wick with his easy smile and confusing signals. As deadlines tighten, family meddling intensifies, and the holiday season arrives just in time to cause maximum mayhem, Lizzie begins to wonder if the biggest obstacle to her perfect life isn’t Pemberley at all… but her own stubborn heart. A modern, multicultural enemies-to-lovers romance packed with Spanglish banter, pastelitos-fueled chaos, workplace tension, over-the-top Cuban family love, and enough sazón to thaw the coldest professional pride with one bite.
Tropes: Enemies to lovers • Workplace romance • Big, loud Cuban family • Holiday chaos • Pride and Prejudice retelling
Heat level: Spicy
Setting: Vibrant Miami

BY ANTHONY GILMORE, HARRY BATES AND DESMOND W. HALL, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING : Space Hawk: The COMPLETE Hawk Carse Stories: The Retro Pulp Space Opera Non-Classics!

In 1931, Harry Bates, the editor of Astounding Stories, was dissatisfied with the quality of the fiction he was getting from writers. So he, along with his assistant Desmond W. Hall, rolled up their sleeves and created a protagonist, and antagonist, and wrote four stories to show the other writers “how to do it right”.

The result, Hawk Carse, and his nemesis, the diabolical Ku Sui, are certainly memorable. As critic Schuyler P. Miller put it, “Hawk Carse was so bad, he was almost good.”

This iktaPOP Media collection of the original stories includes, for the first time, the fifth and last Hawk Carse story, “The Return of Hawk Carse”, written by Harry Bates alone, and published in 1942 in Amazing Stories rather than Astounding.

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the stories genre and historical context.

EDITED BY DAVID BADURINA: Crashed Landings: Stories of First Contact, Strange Arrivals & Cosmic Adventure (Raconteur Press Anthologies)

Ten writers. Ten crashed landings. Zero warnings.
In Crashed Landings, editor David Badurina has assembled ten all-new stories inspired by the group-adventure films of the 1980s and ’90s —The Goonies, Explorers, Stand by Me, The Sandlot–where a strange event throws mismatched kids together and nothing is ever quite the same afterward.
A boy and his bully chase a fallen meteorite through the woods — only to find out it belongs to someone else. Three friends on prom night stumble onto a robot that fell out of the sky, and have to put it back together before the town pays the price. A fungal alien heart crash-lands in the forest and starts rewriting the wildlife. A teen grief camp gets an unexpected visitor from a crashing seed-pod. A space trucker with a time-traveling rig and a trunk full of contraband coffee recruits a girl with a slingshot and a very good reason to disappear. A boy in Kansas realizes the thing living in his skin isn’t quite him anymore. Bird-like aliens help a crash-landed human pilot evade an enemy patrol on a planet that isn’t Earth. And more.
These stories share a DNA: emotion, banter, wide-eyed wonder, and the kind of friendship that only happens when the world gets weird enough to need it. Good guys and bad situations. Stakes that feel real. Characters you’ll root for. Endings you’ll remember.
If you grew up watching kids on bikes outrun something impossible, and you’ve been waiting for that feeling in prose, Crashed Landings is for you.
Ten stories. One anthology. Infinite crash sites.

FROM PATRICK K. MARTIN: Threads

Science tells us that there are an infinite number of possible universes and nearly as many versions of you. Imagine if you had to be all of those lives. Imagine all the things you could ever be, good, bad, lover, fighter, benevolent or evil. Imagine if all the possible threads of your life became roads you had to walk. . .

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)

Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.

And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.

This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . . .

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Starlight Running

Eight lives depend on Kyle’s desperate trek across the Moon to get help. But someone — or something — intends for him to fail. Can he defeat it in time?

FROM JOHN BAILEY: THE AFFAIR OF THE SILENT TERRAFORMER (The Detective Stories)

On a world where machines breathe for an entire planet, one silent failure could mean catastrophe.

When Chief Atmospheric Engineer Dr. Lucien Korda is found dead inside a sealed control tower at the Helios Atmospheric Control Complex, the case appears straightforward: a disgruntled technician, a history of safety complaints, and a system breach that triggered a dangerous storm over the colony’s capital.

But Inspector Matthias Veyron does not believe in obvious answers.

As he walks the towering machinery that governs the air itself, Veyron uncovers a deeper and more unsettling truth. The terraforming network—designed with perfect redundancy to prevent failure—has been quietly drifting from its intended balance. Calibration shortcuts, corporate pressures, and buried decisions have created a system no longer entirely understood by those who operate it.

And someone knows.

Someone with intimate knowledge of the system.
Someone who staged a failure precise enough to alarm—but not destroy.
Someone who needed a scapegoat.

As political pressure mounts and the colony demands answers, Veyron must unravel a mystery where the weapon is not a blade or a gun, but a planetary machine—and the motive may be buried in years of compromise.

Because on Rigel 5, the greatest danger is not that the system will fail…

…but that it already has.

AND JUST IN CASE YOU’VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK: FROM SARAH A. HOYT: NO MAN’S LAND

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: FRIGHTENING