I am a novelist with work published in science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical "novelized biography". I've won the Prometheus award and the Dragon award. I also write under the names Elise Hyatt and Sarah D'Almeida. http://sarahahoyt.com/
Specifically the mistakes were made by me. It was one, and fairly boneheaded. I knew what today would be, and I should have traded days with my assistant, instead of being blithely convinced that I could do what I needed to in between two fairly lengthy appointments.
I was wrong. Also dumb. In my defense, I have been up since six, so we could make it to appointment in time.
First, do not be alarmed, they were NOT medical, but financial/money appointments. Also don’t be alarmed on that, though I might still be in moderate pain from it, but that’s because I’m what’s the technical term… oh, frugal. Or if you prefer a skinflint. (Look, I married a man from Connecticut. After a while these things transfer.)
In the approximately fifteen minutes between appointments I might have ruined the marbelizing on the bedside table I’ve been working on for two weeks. Okay, hopefully not, but there’s a big “hopefully” in there. Look, it’s too hot to be working outside (in a tent) with glazes, and I know that, but I had a visit from the good idea fairy. It was the imp of stupidity instead, and I should have known that.
Dan says we need to get done with all this other stuff because I haven’t been writing fiction for a while and I’m starting to act peculiar. The glaze thing was a symptom of that. “I can’t afford not to write” is the thing.
To compensate you for blowing today (Unintentionally) I’ll try to blog tomorrow.
And now I’ve been pinned down by the Muse, which you’d think would mean I was going to write, but it’s the other muse. This one.
Look, I can’t argue with her, so I’m going to nap, then HOPEFULLY work.
Posts will be late this week. This is because we have early morning appointments every single day, and I can’t stay up late as usual to write the posts, or I’ll never be able to get my behind off the bed at six. (Which is needed for the entire morning duty list, including feeding cats, before I leave the house at seven thirty or so.)
I’ve been reading a series of mysteries set in WWI which has been fine, except for a creeping realization that no one — not a single person — in that series is a decent human being. Momentarily, in the last book, I thought we’d found a woman who wouldn’t become an adulterous doxy at a nod and a wink. Until we find out this is because she’s actually a spy playing a part.
Meanwhile we’re supposed to believe that the main characters have these wonderful families and are honest and straight as an arrow, and you tilt your head sideways. Because by the third book you know they can’t be. The mind that conceived that universe cannot possibly believe in fidelity.
The problem is that this is more or less the default of popular entertainment. I don’t mean just infidelity. If that were all, we’d still be in relatively good shape, despite it being fairly horrifying. It’s everything else.
Dan watches a lot of stuff, and I kind of sit here on the sofa and blog and look at it now and then, and it’s like there isn’t a single honest or truthful or — worse– truly kind character. Even the main characters tend to be “practical” i.e. they don’t actually care, it’s just convenient.
It’s gotten to the point that if I’m reading something — oh, I don’t mean (by and large, though even there at times!) regency romances, or cozy mysteries, or sf — something historical, or something that has pretensions to being a little more intellectual; or if Dan is watching practically anything, if a character does something kind or appears to be an admirable person, I start to expect the big reversal.
Because there is always, lurking in there, somewhere, the manic rictus of “gotcha” or what I call the clever-fool bait and switch.
No one who has read my books can possibly imagine that I don’t think those exist.
It’s just that even in the worst societies, alongside them, there is heroism, bravery, kindness. And there are genuinely good people. I’ve met a lot of them. A lot of them have honored me with their friendship. One married me.
Look, I’m not calling for writing polyanna bright and shiny stuff. Actually I’m not calling for writing anything. I do that over at Mad Genius Club on the regular, but this is more a READER’s blog. And a thinkers.
What am I calling for then?
Well, I know how this trend started. If you’re used to stories going a certain way, the first time you subvert it, it’s a shock to the system and the person is likely to become famous. And the book too.
But at this point, encountering a decent person or an honest relationship is the shock to the system. I’m absolutely convinced that Friends became the mega success it was because they were…. friends. Not wonderful, not perfect — they were all sitcom characters — but they were and more or less remained friends throughout the whole thing. And also by and large (look, TV needs characteristics exaggerated. If those people existed, they’d all be in the loony bin) normal people, just trying the best they could.
The problem I’ve found, reading that series, otherwise well written, etc, is that it leaves a patina on your perception of the world. You start looking around at normal families and wondering who’s cheating on whom. I imagine if that’s all I saw and read all the time — I control the intake as it were — I’d become a lot more doomery and less likely to look at the future with hope.
One of the things that the world cup visitors kept saying was how optimistic, how confident Americans are. You know why? Because over there the darkness really is pervasive over everything. Europe takes itself a lot more seriously, and even the books they import from here are the ones from major imprints, by and large.
They live on a steady diet of doom gloom, no one is clean, no one is good. Of course it starts to reflect in the lives they live.
Honestly if I thought the would be oligarchs were half a turn smarter, I’d think they’d encouraged that kind of entertainment in order to rule over the dispirited populace.
It has become a funny joke for my fans who attend Liberty Con that I’m put on the dystopia panel. Yes, it depends on how you define “dystopia.” I like Black Tide well enough to have written now… four? five? short stories in the anthologies (the latest, whenever that comes out, has serious theological implications. Probably.) I like it because even though it’s post apocalyptic it’s a world where people are striving back. Striving back very hard, in fact.
And a lot of post apocalyptic stuff is like that. But not all. Perhaps not a majority. Either that or I’m seriously unlucky in the ones I first picked up which were reveling in the fall of humans and their civilization. And that makes me foam at the mouth. For that matter the “inevitability” of doom gloom, the end is coming soon makes me foam at the mouth. (Hence why you reprobates enjoy that panel so much. Because I TRY to be good but at some point it always ends up with me rolling up my sleeves, turning the Heinlein picture to the wall, and telling the truth in social situations.)
But the reason it annoys me so much is not (just) that I’m a depressive who carefully manages her interior balance and who thinks marketing doom is toxic, if not immediately then over time. No. The reason it drives me nuts is because it’s not logical.
It’s that whole “It’s too perfect.” Almost every history of “this is how civilization falls” requires you to swallow more coincidences and miracles than a rags to riches story. It’s too perfect, too constructed, and the good guys just disappear. The resourceful guys just aren’t there. Any luck is bad. And we’re not even in Russia!
As I said, I don’t expect stories to be all perfect and sweet and everything goes well. That’s not a story. (Though mind you in romances, everyone can be well intentioned and still screw up big time. In real life too.) But neither is it a story that everything is dingy and evil and no one can be trusted. It’s just an endless series of getting punched in the gut. And eventually you’re going to decide not to pick up a book by that person again. (And that’s not counting the unsubtle preaching.)
We shouldn’t settle for it. Now big publishing, and soon big Hollywood, doesn’t have all the control. We should seek out and actively promote and reward those authors who write books that make sense. Books that have, yes, villains, but also heroes. Evil, sure, but also good.
Because we’re not — thank heavens — communists. We’re not all dressed in the same dingy clothes with the same regulation stains.
Someone — P. J. O’Rourke? — said communist countries were landscapes bleached of color. I knew this just from footage from abroad, not to mention my parents’ tour of the East shorty after I got married. (To her dying day, my mom could do a skip on command, impromptu, which we will call “So many turnips.”)
I just realized while writing this that as the left took over the entertainment establishment they did the exact same thing to it.
I call it grey goo, and a lot of it, but even books that are readable and have characters still smear everyone in grey because in their minds good just isn’t realistic.
Well, I’m here to tell you it is. People still run into burning buildings to save strangers. People still try to protect innocents. And let’s not forget some years ago, in some Muslim hell hole, when the populace was getting ready to stone a woman who had been divorced/unmarried four years and turned up pregnant, even there her ex-husband came out of the wood work and said the baby was obviously his. And when they told him that was impossible, he brought up the sura in the Koran that says pregnancy can take up to four years. And rode away happily with the re-wived woman and the kid he’d adopted in the womb.
Was that man perfect? I doubt it. The culture wouldn’t allow it. And of course, because you’ve read and watched all the bilge they feed us, you’re now thinking he had a nefarious plan.
Well, maybe he did. Of course. It’s always possible. But it’s just as possible he was a decent human being who didn’t want his ex stoned to death for a peccadillo (or perhaps even for being raped). Isn’t it? Well, of course it is. Because decent people exist even in cultures where everything militates against their being any decency. Humans are tricksy that way. They’re not all one thing.
And yes, yes, if you write, you should beware the temptation to make everyone dingy.
And if you “just” read you should demand entertainment that gives you heroes as well as villains. Because it’s not a coincidence that as this type of dingy “entertainment” grew and took over everything so did the consumption of psychiatric drugs.
Demand entertainment that has light and dark, not just grey.
Stand for nothing less. The sanity you save might be your own.
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
Life never seems to get less complicated for Lee. The Earth Claims Commission collapsed when North America, was driven from the heavens by Central. What else to do but repossess it if they weren’t going to pay the royalties due? That meant seeing to it’s governance. She never aspired to being a sovereign. With a little luck she could govern with a really light hand by appointing a pair of Voices. She had good examples in doing that in her ally Heather, Queen of the Moon. Her quiet home was much less quiet after she gave shelter to her Badger friend Tish and her brother. At least the Badger Voice and Ambassador owed her a big favor for taking the teenagers in. Any year now she’d start collecting on those favors instead of paying them out. What was to be a quiet day trip found her in the middle of a civil war, and if that wasn’t enough there were mysterious aliens quietly spying on her and her allies. Of course they had to DO something about that.
The disruption of the attack on the 300, and then the invasion has left twin sisters unsupervised . . .
Noeme and Juna Jaeger, at the age of fifteen, might have put a toe over the line of strict legality to make sure they stayed safe . . . then they helped a couple of their friends . . .
And then . . . why not? Why not turn it into a business? Save some other kids, and make money doing it! What could possibly go wrong?
You were a weird kid once. So were they — right up until the monster showed up.
A boy brings a rotten sandwich back to life and discovers the truest friend he has ever had. A lonely girl pulls a crashed alien out of a cornfield. A grieving kid hides a fire-breathing salamander in his dead father’s office. And out past the porch light, something with too many tentacles is looking up at the same stars — and quietly noticing the marriage coming apart inside the house.
Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures that crash into ordinary lives, and the children brave enough to love them back. They are funny, they are frightening, and underneath every one of them runs the same current: what it costs to be an outcast, what it means to finally be understood, and how much it hurts to let go.
For readers raised on E.T., The Iron Giant, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and for anyone who still, on the right kind of night, half-hopes to find something waiting at the edge of the yard. In the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill: ten tales where childhood wonder shades, story by story, into the uncanny and the unforgettable.
Ten authors. Ten monsters. One anthology about the friends we lose, the people we become, and the small impossible miracle of being seen.
Can a human magic user re-ignite the flames of resistance against the Fae who have conquered our world? When the missiles and tanks and guns have failed, lying in twisted, blackened ruins, can a teenager girl and her supernatural mentor turn the elves magic back against them?
Eighteen-year-old Ashleigh Greene has already paid a terrible price, losing her family in the war. Driven to starvation and hunted for killing an elven lord in self-defense, she flees into the forests of the Pacific Northwest. There legends walk the earth and she forges an unbreakable bond with Gunny, a powerful Sasquatch who swears a life debt to her. As ancient magic returns to the world, Ash awakens to a dangerous gift of her own, an elemental control of fire that can be a weapon, if she can only learn to use without hurting herself or her friends.
Joined by a found family of rebel soldiers, unconquerable civilians, giants, a sentient cougar, and orcs who have turned against their masters, Ash is drawn into a desperate fight that leads from hidden mountain camps to the occupied streets of Seattle and deep beneath the volcanic slopes of Mount Rainier. Together with her friend, Shelly, a former soldier who has her own battles to fight within the Resistance, she must confront a ruthless elven war mage and forces that could tear the land itself apart.
As fire and ice collide in the frozen wilderness, Ash must master her power and decide how far she will go to protect the only family she has left — before it consumes her and everyone she loves.
A Kardyshev-1 culture can harness the energy sources of a single planet. A Kardyshev-2 culture can control the energy sources of an entire solar system. A Kardyshev-3 culture could harvest the energy of a whole galaxy. And a Kardyshev-4 culture…? This is one of the questions facing Captain Meridian IkedaCagney and her crew of Vanguard explorers as they attempt to solve the mystery of the Nibelungen, an extraterrestrial species that roamed the Galaxy for thousands of years and then, suddenly, vanished without explanation. Did the Nibelungen actually become a transcendent Kardyshev-4 culture, or were they annihilated by some hostile alien force? If so, does this force still exist, and could it be a threat to the human race? And how does that fit in with the violent human cult that worships the Kardyshev-4 ideal? These are questions that must be answered, and those answers might well be found in the vicinity of a Sun-like star that mysteriously jumped several billion years of stellar evolution to become a red giant virtually overnight. Those answers, however, will come at great cost, a cost far greater than Captain IkedaCagney and her crew could ever suspect…
The Screaming Tree divides the town of Verity, Tennessee, east from west. Its two knothole “Faces” gaze out like ancient lords over the half they claim as their own. As long as the spirits remain content, the town thrives, but everyone fears what might happen if their feud spills beyond the branches.
When 13-year-old Bea Durant and her father move into their new home, they are presented with the Rules for their side of town: Never paint the house anything but green. Hang a wind chime to be warned of foul moves. No matter how loud or sudden, never investigate the Screaming.
Bea never considered herself a rulebreaker. She has better things to do like make new friends and fit in at a new school. But a reckless decision on a stormy night draws the spirit from the opposite side of town to her doorstep. Specifically, into her bedroom. She’s left with no choice but to shelter the injured mage…and hope his mortal enemy doesn’t discover them. To protect her new home, Bea might have to break every Rule that has kept Verity safe for centuries.
There’s a rule in every fighter squadron: a story only counts if it’s at least ten percent true.
The eleven stories in Wyrd Warfare: Forgotten Fronts clear that bar and then some — they just happen to be the ten percent nobody wants to say out loud. A gunnery range that swallows the men who guard it. Crusaders staring down something older than their faith. Silver-loaded muskets in a Revolutionary forest. A Korean retreat where the cold isn’t the only thing hunting the column. From the blitz, to the Winter War, to a sky full of dragons over 1922 America, these are the battles history filed under “best forgotten.”
Edited by a retired Air Force colonel who’s heard every war story worth telling — and a few that shouldn’t be.
Charity had thought it dreadful, being sent like a package to a man who might refuse to take her on as a ward. But when a wolf comes to look her up and down in the woods, and the man she is sent to greets her, making her wonder if she remembers something that never happened, she finds that there are problems far worse than that in the duchy.
When legends walk among men, the first casualty is the world you thought you knew.
Ten years after civilization fell, Lexington, South Carolina is the closest thing to hope left in the American South. Hard eyed volunteers on horseback patrol the borders. Men and women who remember the starving times work the fields. Children go to school. It’s a hope, and a start, but in the new world information is the difference between living and dying.
The Mayor has a tool for this problem — the tough scouts of the 1st Cav. They’re already riding hard into Georgia, looking for a warlord, but what they find is something much worse and far older. The Fall did more than end civilization; it pulled back a veil, and on the other side, the gods are not dead. They never were; they simply learned to look like ordinary people.
Back in Lexington, three strangers walk through the gates: a storyteller with a gift for finding trouble, a girl who sees things she shouldn’t, and a small gray dog that is a great deal more than he appears. They’ve come looking for safety. What they’ve brought with them is a war that has been going on for generations.
A Hint of Malice is the first book in The Lexington Saga — where The Stand meets American Gods in the heat and ruin of the post-apocalyptic South
A young woman, drugged and assaulted, reaches out to Ex Army Ranger Thomas Cole seeking justice. In his hunt to find her an outcome she can live with, Tom uncovers a dark web of violence and corruption leading to a Compound isolated deep in the Tennessee woods, a compound whose members are too rich and powerful for law enforcement to touch. When another woman disappears, Tom knows he is the only hope of exposing the true purpose of the Compound, of tearing the cover off and exposing the evil to the world.
In February 1939, with World War II looming, the US Navy held a massive naval exercise in the Caribbean, involving almost fifty thousand sailors and marines. President Franklin Roosevelt personally attended.
In this alternate history novel, the US of 1939 disappears at the peak of the exercise, along with the rest of the New World. In its place is a New World still inhabited only by Indians.
While the US remnants try to make a new home for themselves, Nazis, Fascists and Japanese Imperialists scheme with Aztecs and other Indian powers to take over the resource-rich and now nearly defenseless New World.
Nazi Germany pours resources into it’s navy and into an advanced new generation of cargo planes. By summer 1941, the Nazis are ready to move. A mysterious “Operation Croatoan” is at the core of their schemes. Milo Gentry and a handful of other Americans race to figure out what the Axis powers are up to and stop them.
Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.
Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel “Dad,” who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world’s invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion. If that wasn’t enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel “Dad”.
After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.
Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off. But Ari isn’t “anybody else”. And her cult of admirers across two timelines won’t take “nobody home” for an answer.
Fast-forward thirty years. Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away. And now she’s been asked to use her special “saintly” skills as demonstrated on her last “mission” to make first contact with whoever they are.
And that’s only the beginning.
Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week. Or six.
Vampires in the castles of Europe. Hair-covered giants haunting the wilderness of the Americas.
The truth was far stranger.
Long before recorded history, two dying extraterrestrial civilizations crashed upon prehistoric Earth after a catastrophic interstellar war that extinguished nearly all intelligent life in the galaxy.
One species became the source of vampire mythology: elegant nocturnal refugees who survived through secrecy, ritual, and influence.
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America’s first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
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.
I’ve been having a bit of the black dog. Okay, okay, part of it was my fear of the tests — if you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely no cancer, and so far it’s a “we have no idea” but a maintenance antibiotic controls it — but it’s more than that. Perhaps it’s working through mom’s death? Perhaps it’s a dozen other things, but the black dog has been with me so persistently the last few months that last night I dreamed he was walking beside me like an old friend. Malamute, the size of a horse. Pitch black. Weirdly, he didn’t feel inimical.
Maybe it is because I use the black dog to stop me going berserker, so in a way it is a friend. But friends that sit on you and keep you from doing much get tiresome after a while.
Anyway, part of the black dog these days is telling me that I’m done. I’ve done what I could, and now it’s over, and it’s time to shuffle quietly into that good night.
Now part of this are my expectations from childhood, which are probably different from yours. But maybe not, since a lot of you are my age or older.
Used to be, or at least that’s my understanding from early childhood, that once the kids were out of the house, your life was more or less done. And that being sixty was being old, and sixty four, which is staring me in the face in a few months, was pretty much very old. You were done. It was time to hug up the grandkids, if you were lucky enough to have some, and to be very gentle with yourself. Eat only what the doctors prescribed. That kind of thing. And you know, watch a lot of TV as there really wasn’t anything else to do, since you could die at any minute.
Now you could tell me my grandmothers made 88 and mom made 91 and my dad is still ticking, so far as I know (my family and reporting bad events is iffy, but still.)
However the back of your mind is where the idea of what life is like lodges in your brain by the time you’re six or seven. And it stays!
And there’s the uncertainty of course. My parents lived much longer than this, my brother is still alive (though ill. Thank you for prayers) and so is my cousin who was raised with us and is older than him. BUT some of our generation has already died, in their sixties. You can’t tell.
And if you’re sitting there thinking “it’s always like that. You can’t tell how long you’re going to live. Children die, as do teens and then some people live to be very old”, you’re absolutely right. This is not a matter of logic, but a matter of back brain expectation.
On the other hand today I got tired of dealing with myself. Maybe it was the dream of the black dog.
Yeah, okay, my body is coming up with new and interesting ways to try to kill me, but what else is new? It has done that all along since I was about one year of age. And I’m still here. And given the state of science, and how life is — I’m not slogging in the fields sunup to sundown, unless you count slogging in words — there is absolutely no reason I might not have another 25 years or another 35.
I’ve been published for just about j25 years. It would be stupid to throw away potentially half of my career. And you know, Heinlein only got really big in his fifties and sixties. And, well, we live longer and healthier now.
Sure some of us age like Joe Biden. But some age like William Shatner.
I have no way of knowing which I am, so rationally I should behave as though I have the most time, and prepare for it. Because preparing to die is intending to die. And that’s just not who I am.
So?
So, I’m going to shut up and get back to it. More: I’m going to get better. I’m going to improve. I’m going to find new ways to do the writing and the blog (Well, other than my assistant taking two days a week.)
Oh, and I’m going to continue the allergy desensitization thing and figure out what is going on with the other health kinks. And maybe waste less of the coming 25 years being stupidly ill.
Will it work? I don’t know. But if I die I’m going to die on my feet and still fighting to live.
So I have no idea what I’m doing next for songs, but there will be other things. First I’m going to take a week, though, and start a spotify account, and maybe get CDs properly assembled for my substack subscribers.
I also think I figured out the problem with Orphans, so I can write again, and G-d willing and the creek not rising finish it.
Meanwhile, the last three songs in non-reverse order:
Societies don’t cope well with technological innovation that changes the way people live every day. Because once you change the way people live every day, you’re changing the way people interact, which means the structures of society are going to start not working the way they were intended to.
Right now we’re in a time of catastrophic innovation. What does that mean? It means that we’ve reached a point where innovation is building on innovation — which is to be fair what innovation does. First someone figures out how to dig in the ground and plant some seeds and next thing you know someone is planting kale, and then you have to kill them and… ahem… — and the new one is dropping before we’ve even started to process the effects of the last one.
Honestly, the Heinlein time line (not that one. I was told I can no longer mention that particular story here, not without doing the whole Black Adder dance for when someone mentions the Scottish Play) would have been easier on our institutions as they were when he wrote the juveniles. Going to space would just be a continuation of the westward expansion, and at least on earth there was no big innovation on communication and putting the power of communication in the hands of individual to counter the centralized big media. (Or the power of manufacturing, to counter centralized big industry. Okay, we’re on the early stages of that, but it could easily be the next big break through.) In fact, he had Earth become more and more the worst aspects of FDR, to be honest.
But no. We weren’t allowed to go to space (no, you can’t possibly convince me it wasn’t deliberate. The way the left hates any attempt at space exploration and becomes insane with their FEFer (Fix Earth First) bullshit, you know they did what they could to prevent us leaving this rock.) And so some geeks in garages created the internet revolution. Yes, yes, I now. Government, but be real. If it hadn’t escaped into private lands and cat memes, it would still be unimportant to all but defense geeks.
And that… well, that escaped containment again, at least in the US right after 9/11, when a lot of us trying to figure out what was happening and what should happen hit the internet and a lot of the big blogs now originated. And then there was social media, and then–
Well. Here we are.
And not only haven’t governments and institutions processed the internet, but they haven’t even started to realize the paradigm (remember how fond they were of the word in the nineties? Well, it actually does mean something) has shifted under their feet.
Their last two normal political campaigns (Biden doesn’t count. Nothing about that was normal) they got all the celebrity endorsements, paid all the networks, and sat back and waited for victory, and are still confused it didn’t work. With Biden they were in the middle of a massive psy-ops campaign with the help of China (as we now know, and honestly always suspected) that included memorex riots, memorex race war, memorex pandemic, memorex campaigning and very definitely wholly memorex campaigning with a character whose mind was definitely not real or at least not present.
But even with having locked the entire country to tank the economy and run a major psy-ops to distort everything and control all the information, the only way they “won” that election was to cheat massively in front of G-d and everybody.
And then, despite their attempts to follow the good old play book of the Bolshevik revolution (they only have one playbook, really) it didn’t work, and people pushed back on things like their attempt to establish a ministry of truth (how very dare they.)
Now of course they’ve decided what they really need is more foreign communists and crazy people in charge. And yes, of course they’re counting on fraud.
What they’re not counting on, though, is that everyone has a movie camera in their pocket to film any shenanigans, or that everything they try to cover up comes out or–
Honestly, as flat footed and wrong footed as they are, as snake bit and struggling, it makes me wonder how much they were hiding from us in the days of centralized media. Some of it of course I knew, like the immediate tarnishing of the Reagan economy when Clinton took over, or all the lies about how things had worked in the eighties or… But– really?
How much were they hiding from us in the past?
It’s hitting mostly the left, because the left had control of the old establishment story-dissiminators, be they “news” or fiction or songs or movies or… well, any of it. They had the old system completely under their control, and knew how it worked and what they could do. Which means that they partly refuse to believe it’s not working, and partly have absolutely no clue what works. The right — which let’s face it, at this point is everyone to the right of Lenin — on the other hand had found themselves slowly pushed out of every form of mass media until they were out in the wilderness. In the wilderness, you adapt faster to innovations, because it’s the only chance you have. We were, in fact ready.
Would we have been without Rush Limbaugh, who in fact used an old form of communication to get around the lefty-lock on everything? I don’t know. In a way he primed us to hit the internet running. We both knew there were distortions in the mainstream narrative and knew we were not alone. In fact, maybe that’s the difference between the right’s adoption of the internet in the US as opposed to the rest of the world. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh was the thumb on the scales we needed.
It would have got here, mind you, but maybe in another twenty years or so.
In fact, you’re seeing, abroad, where we were twenty years ago. The governments cracking down on memes are at the beginning or a long road of pain where they lose more and more control of the people. And the invasion that is supposed to replace them? Well, far more advanced there (by percentage) than here, or at least it looks like (None of the numbers are reliable, either side of the Atlantic, people. Yeah, they might be worse here. Or not. Again just by tracking “magazines in Spanish in the checkout stands” the peak was around 2010, because the Obama economy caused the first Gran Salida. And they needed to bribe the next waves with welfare, just to get them back.) But irreversible? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it, in fact. If they hurry up and catch up on the communication front, well, it will get ugly in Europe (Europe specializes in really ugly once they get pissed off enough) but they might yet save themselves. Or put it another way, when governments are trying to ban memes, they’re not winning.
Do I know how this will play out? No. But…
Look, it helps if you remember everything has two sides. Some crazy person on Twitter assured me that because of AI we’re going to be in a robot tyranny or something like. Sure, the potential is there. If we let things get centralized and controlled by bad actors. (Oh, Hello China!) BUT not if we let the free market handle it, all elbows and chaos.
Is AI disruptive? Oh, you bet your beepy. Majorly disruptive. And weirdly some of the professions that seemed like they would be the most immune to it are the ones who are getting hit hardest, like most of the liberal arts ones. And no one knows what it will come for next, so preparing for the future is difficult at best.
BUT it’s also disruptive the other way as well. In the hands of good guys, it might help us figure out answers to things like “what is really happening” and “where is our money going” as well as help small companies and individuals compete with the monopolies that are now almost all controlled by the left.
Used properly it can easily put Hollywood out of business. And it won’t even take long. Used properly, it can help you learn anything you want to learn without giving money to universities that have become pits of foreign influence and communism.
(No, seriously. On a lark I had it outline a course for me to learn Classical Greek and Latin from free materials on the web, and I think it will work, though I don’t intend to try until I’m done with the looming move. I very much think it will work.)
What else can it do? I don’t know. But if you think the establishment that hasn’t even yet coped with the fact they don’t have the only megaphone in the room can cope with the further disruptions about to eat them, you’re out of your mind.
Sure “it will be used for evil” — that’s a given — but not just for evil.
Orwell saw how the tech of his time could be used to lock society down. It could. In many places it was. His error was to think it would last forever.
Behold this one strange trick: we too have ability to create, to disrupt to innovate. (In fact, we have it far more than the left, because we have the need to.)
Let’s get to it, and use everything to build over, build under, build around.
And throw the stars ontop of that, because we’re going there too.
Set backs? of course there will be setbacks. And I guarantee the left will get crazier and more malignant as we continue to break their little (eh) red wagon.
I was talking to a friend last night, and the conversation demanded that we remember something that happened in — as it happens — 2016. Both of us had the impression it had been much longer ago, because so much has happened since then. and so much of it has bordered on the unbelievable.
Things we’d not believe could have happened before 2016: Trump winning the election; how he governed; the insanity of investigations that followed; the United States of Fricking America locking up a vast portions of its citizens against all sanity, with the excuse of a foreign virus; the lies about the virus that were propagated all over the world; the 2020 election with the mysteriously appearing votes for one candidate only at 2 am; January sixth; the capital surrounded by barbed wire and with the national guard camped in; the border wide open, with our welfare system serving the invasion at a level unheard of; the administration of the auto pen, both the audacity of things attempted and how ridiculously they failed and had things rebound against them; 2024; the insanity of the last two years (too much to list, but I will); Aliens; whatever is on the news today…. (I haven’t looked yet.)
And if you’re going “None of those were difficult. They can all be logically explained by–” Duuuuuuuude.
Look, imagine going back to January 2016 and telling yourself then that Trump would win the election. Then tell yourself how he governed, as the most pro-freedom president since Reagan; then tell yourself that in 2020 we got locked up for a flu virus from China and the entire apparatus of the state was deployed to gaslight us: about the origin of the virus; about what the casualties were and how bad; about what could and could not communicate it. Culminating in an untried, objectively harmful vaccine that employers forced employees to take. Then go into the election: that bizarre curve, the reports of poll watchers (two I personally know) about being shoved out of the polls, on non-existent emergencies; and EVERYONE going along with it, partly because the BLM riots the summer before were designed to make a big impact on the psyche of various judges who were having flash backs to the sixties and seventies and leftist terrorism. Oh, it was all memorex, sure, but they’d seen it and they believed it, without noticing how the disturbances, the major ones, were confined to one city at a time, because people were transported to the next riot. But it worked. And then they panicked, which is why the capital looked like a city under siege. Oh, and why Jan 6, in trying to create an excuse to go after everyone to the right of Lenin. And if you told your jan 2016 all that and he/she hadn’t had you committed, explaining how it all fell apart in their hands would be even stranger. Like, they tried so many things and none of them really worked. Oh, they inconvenienced us. They impoverished us. They BEYOND PISSED US OFF. But they didn’t work in delivering to them their reign of a thousand years, which is what they absolutely expected. And part of it was the people they brought in…. the people! The guy who stole luggage and who, in private life liked to pretend to be a puppy for sexual purposes. (Only his life wasn’t all that private, also EW.) The nominally transgender Surgeon General who, heaven help us, for a guy makes an incredibly ugly and unconvincing woman. The concatenation of clowns and mediocrities from the VP on down. Remember when they work-shopped “Ultra Maga” because calling us “Ultra” was supposed to make people hate us? Don’t even try to tell your 2016 self about it, because he/she flat won’t believe it. That entire thing was counteracted with the phrase “Ultra Maga, Assemble!” They made us sound like super-heroes for crying in bed.
The vaccine. We still haven’t had a proper investigation of that whole plot, but it sounds like a bad science fiction plot and no way in G-d’s green Earth would I have believed it until it happened. The border. The convoys, one after the other. Offering illegals disability and full Social Security and medical coverage at the border. AND DESPITE ALL THAT the left losing in 2024. (It tells you the extent of the fraud that countering SOME of it is enough for them to lose.) And since. I’ll just say that during the executive-order-palooza right after the inauguration, we had a friend staying with us. And at about an hour in, he said “I need popcorn”. That is the most appropriate reaction to all this.
And the last two years: guys, just what USAID was apparently financing. The mind boggles. At least mine does. And all the fraud. It is entirely possible all of our deficit is fraud. And then…. and then the wealth of the left. I always assumed the left had money because they have all the millionaires. But maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe they have all the millionaires because they have money from fraud?
And note that I’m not mentioning a dozen other things that would be flat out impossible if you’d told me in 2016: Elon buying twitter! From a minor upset over twitter deplatforming The Babylon Bee. Just …. Everything that came from that.
And– and– and– AI! The space missions! The….
Just trying to list the whole thing makes me dizzy. it’s like insanity piled on improbability on top of impossibility.
Aliens. All the “secrets” about aliens are being revealed, and they can’t even get SCIENCE FICTION PEOPLE to care. We just shrug and go “Yeah, okay. Maybe there are aliens. Don’t bother us now. We’re going through some stuff.”
Terry Pratchet had an expression for when people entered a highly unlikely time line, in his books. Going down the wrong leg of the pants of time.
First I’m not sure whatever probability disruption happened in 2016 was bad. I mean, there have been some bad things, but on the whole, honestly, things are going our way, and have given us the greatest cause for hope in many a decade. But second, it must be said, it’s not ONE improbable pant leg. It’s a pant leg, after a pant leg after a pant leg. These pants obviously belong to an octopus. And eldritch one with an infinite number of legs.
The truth of course, is that it’s not a random shove into improbability.
BGE said one of the most profound things I’ve heard in my life in comments the other day when he said the way you can tell conspiracy theories is that they are too neat. Because reality isn’t.
Untold is the fact that because of mass media and mass control of how history is viewed and taught, everyone has been taught to think of history in those terms: a just so story, too neat. It’s part of the reason the right plunges into doomerism so often: because the left also thinks in those terms and tend to make sure elaborate plans that they would seem to have covered every possible event.
… It’s impossible to cover every possible event. That is the primary refutation of all the fantasies of the left, from their economic fantasies to their political ones. It’s the reason their beloved controlled economies don’t work. It’s impossible to control every event and account for every second, third or fourth order effect.
It’s possible to hide those, and to fix the story aposteriori so that it mitigates the back lash. But that toothpaste is well and truly out of the tube. Not even all their stomping and cancellations during the rule of the auto-pen could stop the signal.
They kept panicking and piling on more and more, and have created a perfect storm of improbability.
Where does it go from here? I don’t know and neither do you. People, I’ve written some pretty wild fantasy, and even I wouldn’t dare! I honestly have no idea what happens next, except for the certainty it will be impossible. At least according to what we all believed reality was until 2016.
It’s been the weirdest ride ever, and we’re still on it. And here’s the thing, these improbabilities will build and accumulate. Will all of them be good? Oh, heck no. We will take some body blows.
But we’re not int he neat controlled relative that the left themselves bought, which caused their long march through the institutions, in the belief that they could control everything and then it was game over.
Too neat and controlled by half. That’s not how the world works. And now they can’t pretend it is.
No, I have no idea what happens next, but let me tell you I’m at the edge of my seat.
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 DAVE FREER, THE FIRST WINNER OF THE SPECIAL AWARD FOR YOUNG ADULT FICTION: Storm Dragon.
Winner of the First Special Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction 2026
Skut Harkkson hates Highpoint Station. He hates the concrete dome, the expensive food, the mean kids who know his father’s farm is three hundred miles away and that he can’t go home. He misses Faraway — real land, real tides, real work — and every day locked inside the settlement’s walls makes him feel like something important is dying.
Then he finds the storm-dragon.
The creature is tiny, half-dead, and furious — and somehow it talks directly into his head. Not words, exactly. Feelings. Hungry. Cold. Trust. Skut names it Snarky, hides it in his shirt, and starts sneaking outside the settlement’s walls to feed it. Which is how he ends up fishing the forbidden lower jetties with Podge Greene — the new kid who survived a planetary invasion at age ten and isn’t afraid of much. The two of them, with Snarky riding Skut’s shoulder and diving for fish, start to build something that looks almost like a life worth living.
But Vann’s World has three moons, tides that kill without warning, and predators that make Earth’s wildlife look like house pets. And none of that matters when the real threat arrives: a Ghat slaver ship, landing under false papers, loaded with soldiers who have done this to entire planets before.
Now Skut, Podge, and Snarky are outside the walls in the dark, with a handful of adults, two flechette pistols, a forklift, and a storm-dragon who generates five hundred volts and is willing to use them. The settlement is locked down. The hostages are running out of time. The VIP ship is landing in the morning — straight into a trap.
What follows is a boys’ adventure in the oldest, best sense: two kids who actually know things figure out how to win against people who should be unbeatable. Vann’s World is alive and deadly and extraordinary, and Skut and Podge understand it in ways the invaders never will.
Storm-Dragon is a standalone novel — fast-moving, funny in the right places, and built on the principle that boys who read voraciously deserve stories that don’t condescend to them.
William Wordsworth said that every book is a separate world; this proves to be true when two teenagers are swept into an alternate universe where Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo is a living, breathing person. Aboard Nemo’s incredible Nautilus and fighting an invasion from still another universe, they voyage from the Pacific to the Atlantic and, finally, to the ultimate showdown with the enemy on the shores of Antarctica. For any fan of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas.
An exciting new Marshal Ezra Flint adventure from the pen of best-selling author Scott McCrea!
Marshal Ezra Flint is on the trail of mad-dog killer Spider Ames. When the two men trade bullets, Flint wings the wanted man who escapes, leaving behind his engraved Sharps rifle.
Flint rides into the town of Mossy Creek, which is still reeling from the latest Spider Ames outrage. When Marshal Hunter Robinson sees the engraved Sharps, he’s convinced the Ezra Flint is his man … and he won’t rest until Flint dangles from the end of a rope!
“…hard to put down. If you like good Western fiction, you will love this book.” – Roundup Magazine review of Hard as Flint
Fresh from the Unified Fleet Authority Academy, Captain Calder Venn receives his first command: the ISV Kestrel Veil, a small scout ship assigned to a routine survey mission along the edge of explored space.
The assignment should have been uneventful.
Instead, a single impossible sensor contact changes everything.
As the Kestrel Veil follows evidence that should not exist, Calder and his crew uncover signs that humanity’s oldest assumption may be catastrophically wrong. Beyond the borders Fleet has charted for generations lies not an empty galaxy, but a civilization that has been watching from the darkness all along.
Far from home and operating under strict protocols designed for a simpler universe, the crew must balance caution, curiosity, and survival while every observation carries the potential to reshape doctrine, diplomacy, and the future of humanity itself.
The Kestrel Veil Incident is the first novel in The Solmare Cycle, a military science fiction series blending first-contact mystery, realistic space operations, and institutional decision-making in the tradition of thoughtful, character-driven science fiction.
Perfect for readers who enjoy military science fiction, first-contact stories, and hard science fiction with a strong procedural focus.
John Wolff has been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Again.
He’s already saved the love of his life from an early death – thirty years after she died.
Now, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly his daughter, has appeared from the timeline branch where that same love of his life survived and married his counterpart.
She says they need his help fighting off invaders from the far future. Who, by the way, are looking for him. Why? Because they want the starship drive he and a friend invented, the precursor to their time machine. Problem is, in her timeline, it hasn’t been invented yet.
What man can resist a cry for help from his own daughter?
Particularly when the invaders think she’s a saint. Or possibly, a devil wearing saint’s clothing. And they’re looking for her, too.
Thus begins the Timelines Saga, and the story of the Lion of God.
In February 1939, with World War II looming, the US Navy held a massive naval exercise in the Caribbean, involving almost fifty thousand sailors and marines. President Franklin Roosevelt personally attended.
In this alternate history novel, the US of 1939 disappears at the peak of the exercise, along with the rest of the New World. In its place is a New World still inhabited only by Indians.
While the US remnants try to make a new home for themselves, Nazis, Fascists and Japanese Imperialists scheme with Aztecs and other Indian powers to take over the resource-rich and now nearly defenseless New World.
Nazi Germany pours resources into it’s navy and into an advanced new generation of cargo planes. By summer 1941, the Nazis are ready to move. A mysterious “Operation Croatoan” is at the core of their schemes. Milo Gentry and a handful of other Americans race to figure out what the Axis powers are up to and stop them.
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.
The Empty Hills – George Talbot Traherne arranges a small tour of the local human world for his fae family and friends, hoping to share some of the sense of wonder he discovered when he encountered the fae otherworld.
He’s worried about discovery by other humans, but things don’t turn out quite the way he expects.
And one reporter may be the only man who can expose it.
When veteran Anglo correspondent Martin Hale is assigned to Aurora Prime, he expects censorship, surveillance, and carefully managed propaganda. What he discovers is far more dangerous. Beneath the gleaming towers of the Aurigan Directorate, citizens disappear without explanation, resistance networks operate in the shadows, and a massive military buildup threatens the fragile peace of human space.
As Hale digs deeper, he finds an unlikely ally in Elena Voss, an Aurigan archivist whose loyalty to family gradually draws her into a struggle she never intended to join. Together they uncover evidence that could alter the balance of power across dozens of star systems.
But the Directorate has its own defenders.
Colonel Lukas Renn, a cunning security officer with ambitions of his own, is determined to possess both the truth and the woman Hale has come to love. Above him stands Colonel Viktor Draeg, a relentless enforcer willing to sacrifice anyone to protect the regime.
Caught between spies, secret police, resistance fighters, and rival star nations, Hale must decide how much he is willing to risk for a story.
Because in a society built on lies, the truth is the most dangerous weapon of all.
Correspondent from Aurora combines classic wartime espionage, old-fashioned adventure, and sweeping science-fiction worldbuilding in a tale inspired by the great newspaper thrillers of the 1930s and 1940s.
As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.
Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can’t promise a nomination until he’s won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother’s chance of re-election, and with it Frank’s slot at an Academy appointment?
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
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.
According To Hoyt 