Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.
*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. – SAH*

IF YOU’RE DOING A SALE FOR CYBER MONDAY SEND THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE EMAIL ABOVE AND PLEASE DO PUT “CYBER MONDAY” IN THE TITLE. I INTEND TO HAVE A PROMO POST HERE AND AT MGC.

ALSO, BEFORE THE PROMOS, DARKSHIP THIEVES AND DARKSHIP RENEGADES ARE NOW ON KU. AFTER LOOKING IT OVER, I DECIDED TO PUT THEM IN THE PROGRAM FOR A YEAR. IN CASE YOU WANT TO TRY THEM.

Darkship Thieves

Darkship Renegades

FROM LEANN NEAL REILLY: The Last Stratiote: A Dark Urban Fantasy Retelling of A Tale of Two Cities

Foul-mouthed and bloodthirsty, Elira Dukagjini should have died 500 hundred years ago. Instead, she left her Albanian homeland at the start of the 16th century to fight as a stratiote, a mercenary. She wears a gruesome keepsake in a leather pouch around her neck and a telltale scar on her breast. Driven to enforce the primal Blood Law, Elira spends her days running a café and bookstore in a modern Boston suburb while hunting human prey at night.

Until one fateful night when the prey Elira hunts have their own prey: Mirjeta Gjakova, the intended honor sacrifice of fundamentalist imam Xhemajl Krasniqi — Elira’s uncanny and more civilized twin living the life that Elira never had.

The war that Elira left behind in the Balkans never really ended. And now, in the 21st Century, she once again must choose between slaking her endless bloodthirst and finally quenching it.

FROM J. M. NEY-GRIM: Artemis in Chase (The Hades Cycle Book 2)

The goddess of the hunt burns for justice…

When Artemis discovers her handmaiden dead in the forest—slain by Dìs, lord of the underworld—she demands that Zeus punish the murder. But Zeus upholds Dìs, who boasts that he will steal a nymph away to his dark realm whenever he so desires.

The indifference of the other Olympians forces Artemis to take matters into her own hands.

Because Dìs wields powers beyond any Artemis commands, she crafts a complex scheme to secure the magical artifact she needs to bring Dìs to his knees.

But unless Artemis learns the essential truth at the heart of all vengeance, her strategy must fail. Will she do what she knows is wrong to defeat Dìs? Or will she do right and condemn her nymphs to death by his hand?

Artemis in Chase is the second tale in the immersive Hades Cycle. If you’re entranced by the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece—if you long to visit their mythic world, to witness their passions and triumphs—you’ll love J.M. Ney-Grimm’s compelling story of revelation and revenge.

FROM C. CHANCY: Oni the Lonely

A grieving mountain cove doctor. A pair of wayward oni. A curse borne on the black wings of crows.

The Rivertown Shopping Village has seen a lot of strange proprietors. An oni painter on the run from a bad breakup is a new one. Maple Leaf Studio opened with blazing color, but will a haunting end Kyosai Momoji’s dream before it begins?

At the south end of Rivertown, Rain McKee delivers soap and perfume with a hint of mountain blessings, picking up her life in the wake of her grandparents’ deaths. Deaths that may have been from a firstborn curse….

Kyosai’s a firstborn, and oni attract trouble like lightning strikes. If either of them want to survive, they’ll have to face haunts, monsters, and a curse so ancient no living mortal knows its name.

The Appalachians are old; the evils lurking there, older still….

(If you want ancient folklore, modern magic, and a love story that prioritizes friendship first, this is the slow burn for you!)

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Zombie Maggots

What could be worse than a zombie apocalypse? Two tales: A nameless protagonist faces off with humanity’s worst fears. The motley group just needs to find someplace safe. Maybe, then, they can think about the families that were left behind.

In the second story of the apocalypse, the defenders of what’s left of civilization discover the cold winters of Alaska are not enough to save them. Right now, they need some redneck engineering, and a whole lot of luck. Time is growing short, and the skies are buzzing…

FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Familiar Tales

Smiley Lorraine: Wolverine. Rosie Jones: 100-lb. Skunk. Morgana Lorraine: Witch with Editorial Problems.

Welcome to a world where Familiars choose magic workers, and a few others, as their partners. A world of adventure, tax-deductions, bad publisher tricks, and odd veterinary clinics, where wolverines wear glasses and iguanas sing along with the radio—badly—while casting spells and keeping their chosen humans out of mischief.

Or try to.

(Five short-stories.)

FROM BLAKE SMITH: Fairyland: A Short Story

Eleven-year-old Branna fell asleep on a hill in the foggy Irish countryside and woke up in a land that was supposed to be a myth. Fairyland is a beautiful place of green oaks and golden light, but it is also a dangerous land, and Branna must use all of her cleverness if she is to escape the clutches of the fey creatures who rule over it.

FROM JAMES Y. BARTLETT: Rainbow’s End: A Swamp Yankee Mystery (The Swamp Yankee Mysteries Book 3)

All seems peaceful in Little Penwick, the smallest town in the smallest state. Then, Police Chief Gus Haddock is run off the road, someone shoots at the police station and the realization sets in …

… She’s baaa-ack!

Janine Stone, the Glitter Girl in Book One of James Y. Bartlett’s Swamp Yankee Mysteries, has returned to town and she’s looking for the pot of gold she was owed from the human smuggling ring she ran for the criminal element up in Providence.
So Chief Haddock and the Little Penwick department start searching around town … for Janine … for the stash of money … for the local idiots Janine paid to shoot up the station.

At the same time, Gus Haddock’s personal life is set aflame when his girlfriend, the Providence lawyer-turned-abused-women’s-advocate Maggie Wells announces she’s pregnant.

It’s all in a day’s work for a Swamp Yankee like Gus Haddock in this exciting new small town police drama.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Chained Adept: A Lost Wizard’s Tale

MEET A POWERFUL WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS–AND AN UNBREAKABLE CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.

Have you ever wondered how you might rise to a dangerous situation and become the hero that was needed?

The wizard Penrys has barely gained her footing in the country where she was found three years ago, chained around the neck and wiped of all knowledge. And now, an ill-planned experiment has sent her a quarter of the way around her world.

One magic working has called to another and landed Penrys in the middle of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away.

No one has any reason to trust her amid rumors of wizards where they don’t belong. And she fears to let them know just what she can do — especially since she can’t explain herself to them and she doesn’t know everything about herself either.

Penrys has her own problems, and she doesn’t have any place in this conflict. But they need her, whether they realize it or not. And so she’s determined to try and lend a hand, if she can. Whatever it takes.

And once she discovers there’s another chained adept, even stronger than she is, she’s hooked. Friend or foe, she has questions for him — oh, yes, she does.

All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.

The Chained Adept is the first book of the series.

FROM DOROTHY GRANT: Between Two Graves (Combined Operations Book 4)

He swore he wouldn’t be back while his parents lived…

Now, almost thirty years later, AJ is going home.

Ordered to attend his mother’s funeral in the rugged northern border of the Empire, AJ is baring old wounds to his new wife, and burying familial feuds.

But the past won’t die that easily, and grave secrets will threaten all the survivors and the women they love. Because the Feds are after AJ’s unwanted inheritance…

And they’re willing to risk a war to get their hands on it.

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: NOD

It never fails. Whenever I post about something that a vast number of people have issues with: from ADD to “being on the spectrum” to serious anxiety issues, to a million other things, someone either here or on FB (usually on FB) plants feet square, puts hands on hips and goes “Yeah, right. We’d never heard of those problems forty years ago and now it’s everywhere. This isn’t real.”

Okay then. Spits on hands. Let’s have it, shall we?

You’re making a lot of very weird assumptions Some of course are that because issues weren’t diagnosed they didn’t exist. Almost everyone “on the spectrum” or with “sensory issues” or even with ADD and anxiety or other problems can look back through the family tree, and as the realization dawns on them, slowly cover their face in their hands and go “oh dear Lord.” Because you see the signs galloping through the family tree as far back as human memory goes.

Look, these problems are a problem because for the last 100 years crazy people have been social engineering, instead of trying to figure out how and why some things existed. Or because those things were “bad” according to their new and “urgent” doctrine.

Kind of like what they’re trying to do with fossil fuels, they’ve done with everything.

Take anxiety. I only realized recently that I have near-crippling anxiety, and it’s been getting worse. (Eyes times we live in.) Why did I only realize it recently? Because I pray for it. That is literally my treatment. I hand it up and say “You deal with it.” Does that solve it? No. But it allows me to sleep and kind of function. And then –that looking back thing — I realized I came from a family of obsessive pray-ers who get more so as they age. And who came through some incredibly bad upheavals looking like they didn’t have any anxiety at all.

But praying is evil bad, religion is the opium of the people, and there are probably a lot of people to whom the concept is actually alien. So they medicate.

Or take ADD — please. No, seriously, I don’t want it — which people say is treated with “legal meth.” They ain’t wrong, but running around assuming everyone getting it is just looking for a boost and “pretending” is mental. Particularly when it’s kids.

Now legal meth — eh. Adderal — and a bunch of the other medications have hellacious side effects, and I’m seeing if I can control it with sleep hygiene and routine. It might work. Well, it doesn’t banish it, mind. But it makes me functional enough to get my work done and not forget the turned-on stove or the unfinished email… most of the time. (Illness and sleep interruptions play hob with that.) Mostly because Adderal makes me psychotic, and when I crash it makes me incredibly depressed. (No, that’s not the lack of patience. Right now my lack of patience is that I’m tired. Really tired.)

But do you know what else treats ADD? Nicotine. And if you look back, not that far back, either, all the people in “thinking positions” smoked. Heck, dad started smoking at 12 (and quit at 31 because MY lungs couldn’t take it.) which probably accounted for his academic success versus the brother who didn’t. Even in my generation, in Portugal, that was normal. I didn’t, because I couldn’t. (I smoked for a year, and got a pneumonia that wouldn’t quit, so I stopped.) But I lived on enough espresso to sink a battle cruiser all through school. I didn’t eat, I just caffeinated.

Somewhere over the last 40 years tobacco became the forbidden. Now, before you yell at me, yes, due to the method of conveyance — ANYTHING burned and inhaled has that issue — it caused health issues, sometimes severe ones in susceptible people. Though I’ll also note generation “everyone smokes” broke new horizons in longevity, so you figure it out.

Note this is me speaking: tobacco was not only a non-starter for me because of smoke, but I’m one of the very few people who could and did legitimately object to second-hand smoke because of ridiculously reactive lungs.

But after the war on tobacco, TPTB started telling us pot — with same delivery mechanism — is just fine, and possibly health-enhancing. Tilts head. Yeah.

BTW pot smoke in public is worse on me than tobacco. I don’t detect it, often, because I no longer have an accute sense of smell, but I can detect it by “oooh. I can’t breathe.”

At the same time we have a war on e-cigarettes, which do not in fact have the problems of burning stuff being inhaled into your lungs. Yeah, they’re still nicotine, which raises your blood pressure, does things to your heart rate, etc: As does anything effective for ADD.

Has anyone done a study on nicotine versus micro doses of meth and long term effects of both?

Well, no. Because the church of experts has excommunicated tobacco and nicotine and you will not partake of it, sinner. NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT HELPED.

You will either take a medications for your ADD, or you’ll lose your job/be unable to finish your studies, and here, have some pot for your depression and anxiety.

In the same way in the last few decades, we’ve demonized alcohol to a ridiculous amount. No, I’m not saying alcohol doesn’t have dangers. EVERYTHING HAS DANGERS. And yes, alcohol addiction can cause serious problems. What addiction can’t? (Except perhaps to prayer, and even then, unless you’re a contemplative monk, you’ll have another life.)

However the size and shape of the problem became clear to me when I realized they were defining “has a glass of not high alcohol wine with dinner every night” as alcoholism for women. (No, not me. We can’t afford that, even on cheap Verde Wine. Mostly I drink Adam’s Ale or tea with meals.) By that definition all of Portugal, Greece and Italy are raging alcoholics.

Now besides having bad effects in excess, alcohol in small doses has a ton of good side effects, including aiding with brain connection pruning, which might help delay Alzheimers or other dementia. It also helps with anxiety. In fact humans have used it in small amounts for most of history.

But it is evil bad. You will instead use these medications, all of which also have side effects, some of them heinous. However, you don’t want to be an evil alcohol drinker, do you?

(And yet weirdly life expectancy keeps dropping. Uh. Must be bad luck.)

As for “aspergers” and the lowest reaches of the autistic spectrum (the high reaches are something completely different yet again. At that level, it’s completely non-functional and well… scary) … after spending some time reading actual books written during the regency I started wondering if most of the English nobility was “on the spectrum.” It “tastes” like it. But they had a work around: they had incredibly detailed etiquette that guided you through 99% of situations, even if you couldn’t “read” people.

It’s a good thing the 60s liberated us from all convention and manners and now it’s “just” what feels good and how it feels, and how do you react to people…. except even I — when tired, frazzled, etc — have issues with that. And I’m so functional I might not (maybe) be on the spectrum. Maybe. It might just be introverted weirdness. With luck and a following wind.

Then there is the treatments for the common ills of menopause. I’ve heard people on the right fulminating on this as on Viagra. “Women just want to keep having sex way too late. It’s like men taking viagra.” Facepalms. HARD.

In women the after effects of menopause or being post-menopausal are not restricted to sex. Not even vaguely. And if you think they are, the women in your life must be very forebearing. There’s memory loss (as in inability to keep a memory in mind) and that’s the kindest. There’s issues with sleep. There’s…. just nasty stuff, okay?

Yeah, my foremothers did it, uphill both ways, with a grandkid on each hip. And I’m so glad for them. But you know what none of them had? A thought-job. One in which I have to channel coherent thought, complex chains of ideas and manage the emotion for it all.

No, I don’t take medication. (Because if you live long enough it will lead to dementia earlier than you might otherwise have had it. And in a triumph of hope over my perpetually breaking down body, I hope to live long and write to the end.) BUT I DON’T JUDGE THOSE WHO DO.

Because we live unusual lives. And the last 20 to 30 years of our lives, when the kids are grown MIGHT BE the only time we have to accomplish what we must do. And what we must do requires functional brains.

Which leads us to “There wasn’t all this cancer when I was little.” Cancer is the failure mode of human cell replication. One of them. If you live long enough you WILL get cancer. Whether you die of it or not depends on a lot of things. (And Biden’s promise to “cure cancer” (which is not a single thing, and can’t really be ‘cured’) is chilling if you know this.) BUT if you live long enough FOR YOU (not the next guy. It’s genetic) you WILL get it.

So.

None of these things are new. Some had coping strategies going back to the beginning of humans. Those are broken through the “experts” of the 20th century. And therefore people must medicate.

Is medication the best way to go? Who knows? Until we grope our way back to sanity and actually test things, in reproducible tests, no one knows.

However, and no matter how I choose to accommodate for my own issues — chronic depression, ADD, being an older woman, anxiety — which in my case is to avoid meds as much as possible as long as possible, but knowing there might be a time I can’t, THIS IS MY HAND DEVOID OF STONES TO THROW.

These problems aren’t new. Except for the ones which are longevity related, they’ve been with us forever.

What we have is a society that kicked the crutches away from the people who need them, and now shames them for using new ones or being unable to do without.

And that’s evil. Which I guess is what we expect from TPTB.

Don’t you join them. Let your brothers and sisters in this screwed up time cope as best they might. Suggest other help if they need it.

But stop throwing stones. You too might need a crutch eventually.

I’d have written this post earlier, but after the Amazon annoyance, I realized there’s a party going on over at twitter and headed over to do the equivalent of dancing on the tables, scattering memes and lawless commentary. Is fun. And at heart I remain the sixteen year old who didn’t fully understand the issues, but was always ready to make the communists uncomfortable because it was fun. Oh, I also seem to have acquired 1000 followers over night. Weird, uh?

Ahem. Puts respectable clothes and glasses back on. Steps down from the table.

Okay, so — shakes confetti off her hair — that weird discussion on conspiracies. Just because I tell you what we’re seeing is not the whole truth, it doesn’t mean that I’m willing to accept conspiracy theories, particularly crazy or mentally challenged ones, but in general all of them.

All of y’all who attribute perfect plans, perfect oversight, perfect ability to guide things over forever to the other side — be they the rogue agencies of our own country or the remains of USSR agencies or any of it — are out of your ever loving minds. Also, you need to stop drinking the other side’s koolaid.

Yea I know, “but there’s this interview where this defector predicted everything that’s happened since! Game over, man, game over.”

I can’t blame the poor defector for believing in the plan. Commies live and die (literally) by the five year plan. And learning to fit whatever has happened into “the plan worked perfectly” was a survival skill in those days and to those people. (Likely still is in Russia and in our own “corridors” (of increasingly less) “of power.”

You kind of get used to thinking that way. Kind of like you got used to thinking that if you wrote a “big enough” book it would go yuuuuge, even though you knew it was all push and blessings from above, (Including possibly getting picked up by Hollywood) and if you didn’t get it, the chances were lower than of winning the lottery. It took me 5 years after dropping out of trad (or being dropped. You figure it. It was fuzzy there in the middle) to get that thinking out of my mind.

So, I’m not blaming the poor guy. I’m just saying most of the plan you have to be willing to believe it worked. That you are should give you pause and make you think.

IF the Soviet plans worked, they wouldn’t have been the USSR we knew and loathed. For that matter, if the CIA and the FBI got their plans to work — even in other countries — the US wouldn’t be taken for a ride half as often. (No, seriously. They’re known as the world’s worst patsies. They routinely believe things like dictator’s self-reports on population, productivity and armament. Remember, most of these people were educated in the ivies. No. Today’s ivies. They can sign their name correctly three times out of nine. But they’ll inform you of their pronouns. The ability to find their own *sses is lower than that, even with two hands, an *ss locating GPS and seeing eye dogs.)

In the same way, I remember being an 18 year old college student, and sitting up late with my host brother, imagining how powerful the CIA must be, and how they probably were recording our very conversation that night! That’s all very well for two geeky kids in the 80s but DO grow up. Yes, I know many of you are close to my dad’s age. This is precisely why it’s time you re-examined your premises. Yes, I do realize that opinions ossify with age, but our world changes too fast for that and there have been two huge paradigm shifts (Reagan and Trump, plus the even bigger ones of Obama and Biden (And what clusters that has been)) in the last forty years, and you really should be blinking awake any day now, or you risk the ability to laugh at the NPCs on the left.

No, we shouldn’t underestimate the enemy, but overestimating it is just as bad. Remember that during wars, people spreading ideas that the enemy is invencible are called, what’s that word? Oh, yeah, collaborators. Or enemy agents.

Put out the fire in your hair. Sit down.

What paradigm shifts?

Um… for one the fact that all the super-powerful, full of experts agencies were full of f*ck ups and time wasters. Reagan proved that, and heck, he might have underestimated them. Just because the last two years were a disaster don’t assume they expected disaster. No. They expected glorious triumph. Which is not what they got. They didn’t get compliance and kneeling outside some specific crazy areas. And yes, even our crazy areas look good by comparison to abroad, but remember what we hear from abroad is also biased, because we”re not hearing of massive revolt. (And boy, is it massive.)

Schwab might bleat that this is the great reset, and our idiots might have tried to push the New Normal, but it didn’t go that way, and it’s going more the other way, faster every day.

As for nukes and all that… Well, dear LORD did you not notice AT ALL that nuclear detante was not the way to win against the USSR? Were you having a nap? Or did you fail to examine the underlying premise?
The left was convinced if we challenged the USSR at all we’d all DIIIIIIIIIIE. Instead, the USSR folded. Because they had nothing. But while that looks like a given now, it took courage.

I beg you to apply those lessons to now and Russia. Do they have functional nukes? Maybe. And maybe they’ll even use them. But I’ll note Putin is a kleptokrat, not a religious fanatic. Assuring his own death (why, yes, we still do have superior firepower) is not going to get him paradise. Might he lose his mind and nuke the world anyway? Yeah, sure that might happen. The chances however are probably really low. And what do you suggest precisely? That the world buckle down and give Russia everything? WHY? Because you’re nostalgic for the seventies?

Note that I’m agnostic on how much Ukraine even NEEDS our help, or how much real help we’re giving them, and how much the “aid to Ukraine” like the “inflation reduction act” is more of the left’s putting their hands in our pockets. Honestly? I’ve had people go through line by line, and a lot of the “aid to Ukraine” is more Nude Green Heel.

HOWEVER buckling under to the “Stop or I nuke you” is the same as giving Russia and their pet paranoia (Which is larger than the country, runs through the culture, and won’t be appeased even if they control the world — it just means they’ll need to subjugate the universe — ) the run of the world, control over our allies, and ultimately over ourselves.

Do examine that. Yeah, Tulsi Gabbard thinks that’s a good idea, but then again, look at her other good ideas. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more no less. And that’s all she is.

And then there’s the “We’re all going insane because we are too prosperous.” That one makes me want to reach through the screen with a baseball bat.

Yeah, yeah, the fourth turning has some credibility based on styles of parenting, maybe, but there’s a big hole in that. Y’all are running around assuming everyone is America.

Styles of parenting changing, throughout most of history, and thereby causing generational changes… cool story bro. We know they did change in the upper classes, from the eighteenth century on. The lower (or middle middle) classes and back further than that? Yeah. Hold on. I’m rolling on the floor giggling hysterically, and have to pull myself together.

Deep breath. Okay. So, throughout most of history and for most classes styles of parenting were “keep keep alive until he/she can help, then load him down with tasks.” That didn’t change because that COULDN’T change and have people and families survive.

What has no credibility whatso-fricking — ever is the “good times make weak men” or “hard times make strong men.” Consider definitions of “strong.” Sure, the Lafitte brothers, grown during the French revolution were strong. And lawless. And outright evil. And so broken that any sane society would have put them down, which is why they took to the seas.

What this is alluding to is bringing in strong “government” European style. I.e. dictators tinpot or not. And that’s correct, but not generational. And it’s not good times or wealth. It’s LAWLESSNESS. And “decadence” however you interpret that. Which is not, and has never been a result of “wealth” but usually of infiltrators determinedly attacking the culture.

So, you know, Weimar Germany was booth lawless and decadent, but you have to be out of your frigging mind to think it’s from an excess of wealth.

In the same way tell me how much our wealth increased in the last 10 years that all of a sudden pronouns are the holy grail, and schools are holding drag queen twerking contests.

You know d*mn well except for partial recovery under Trump (partial) we’ve been bleeding wealth. So this isn’t good times make week men. It’s the idiots that infiltrated the culture are trying to destroy it, because if they can’t have communism they can throw the world’s worst tantrum, so there.

We don’t need hard times. We need to keep our heads on straight, and start fighting back. Which is why we don’t need “It’s all lost!” doomerism either.

The whole idea that wealth equaled decadence was Soviet propaganda, leaked over here. It was their way to explain that “you see, America is just the decadent new Rome.” It’ would be helpful if y’all would think instead of believing that sh*t. Do try to find the balls of your cultural ancestors who viewed wealth as G-d’s reward. No, don’t go all wealth gospel on us. You can be poor without having sinned. But you can be rich without being decadent either.

Which is why the left can’t find anything on Trump, but keeps trying. Their gospel tells them it MUST be there. Granted, at the base of all great leftist fortunes is a great crime. But that’s because they’re leftist, not because they’re wealthy. When you believe that envy is a virtue, you become a twisted homunculus with no moral sense. So, why would you believe anything the homuncul-press-and-culture propagates.

What is causing our exceptionally crazy times is that the left still has enough of a megaphone that it can scream to the heavens the world is ending, and demand increasingly crazier consolation for this fact.

They are correct, btw. Their world is ending. The world of top down, center out, “experts know best.”

I know it’s hard for those of you who grew up under this paradigm to understand it was never true. It was just kept going by a centralized communications system that covered up for it and kept it alive (barely.)

Even then it was failing spectacularly before the last two years. Which is the why of the last two years. It was their desperate attempt — by those of them capable of planning, that is — to seize control back.

How is it going? Well…. It’s not. It’s falling apart all over.

So yeah. The sky is falling. But it’s their false sky. And once it’s gone, the sun of truth will reveal…. well, a righteous mess. What did you expect?

It’s been a good 100 years of bullsh*t.

Fortunately if you stop setting your head on fire and running in circles, you can grab a pooper scooper. All of us can. And start shoveling.

Because buying the enemies premises and lies might not make you the enemy. But it means you’re giving them a big heap of help.

They can’t win. We can lose by believing their premises and paradigms and applying them to the rebuild.

Bullsh*t is a sucky building material. Let’s not use it.

So think instead of emoting.

I should learn never to say something uploaded to Amazon without a glitch.

I woke up this morning and the paperback version was “publishing” (fingers crossed) BUT the hardcover was punted back because…. sigh the spine lettering was over the fold. No, it was not. It’s just that the frigging bots can’t tell the difference between LETTER and shadow/background around letter.

Weirdly hard to fix, and took me 3 hours. BEHOLD my happy face. (Not.)

I will link here when paper and hardcover become available. (If Drak doesn’t beat me to it per usual.)

Now I’ll write the normal blog post.

H*ll’s Bells (Not H*ll’s Belles, which are the succubi who won the latest beauty contest) people! This is getting in the way of my finishing my story for the next Black Tide antho, dang it.

Grumbling. (A-grumbling she goes, a grumbling she goes. Hey Ho the dairy-oh agrumbling she goes. I might be undercaffeinated and over snarked.)

In some ways, this book has been in the planning stages for ten years.When Noah’s Boy ended, Tom’s dad requested Tomato Soup, i.e. Bowl of Red.

Then, as they say things happened. Mostly my health went South. Baen went in a direction that didn’t allow for this series to continue, not as I had planned it, at least and at the time — being sick — I didn’t have the mental flexibility to change course. (Changing course on a series is hard even if you are healthy.)

All my properties with Baen reverted at the end of 2020. I meant to re-publish everything and continue this and Darkships, but health was really bad and we were moving.

So… as I started improving — I won’t claim to be WELL mind you — and the writing thing came back on line, I fumbled at this series. For a while I thought the world was dead — that is when you are so much not the same writer that you can’t get back to it. (it happens. Sometimes you’ve changed in however long since you wrote that and simply can’t be that writer again. Sometimes in three years, sometimes in twenty. Depends on how close you are to who you were.)

Then I realized no. I’d just got addicted to bigger stories. And heck, a bigger story was teased out in Noah’s Boy.

So I wrote the book I sort of planned to (both start with Kyrie’s kidnapping and her stashing in the Goldport version of Garden of the Gods.) But then it changed. Honestly it required my structural editor to point out since this was Rafiel’s book (POOR RAFIEL) it needed restructuring at the beginning in order not to be a fractured mess. He was right, and even betas who read this twice unprompted told me how much better it read now.

If this works (meaning, if it sells well enough to justify it) there will be another in six months (All Hot) and one six months after that. Yes, I know that’s a long time for indie, but I’m starting another series, and continuing… counts…. six, so, you know.

This cycle can take up to five/ten books and is the beginning of a “we’re fighting for the world and all life on Earth” epic.

Oh, and yes, I’m putting up the paper versions. I had trouble with the covers (yes, probably user errors) probably because still getting over being sick.

Anyway, it’s up tomorrow. and the paper ones might be too. (I’m doing them right after this.)

So… without further ado:

Bowl of Red (The Shifter Series Book 4)

At the top of a tall mountain, there lives a dragon. And the dragon is the master of all animals.
Okay, let’s rewind that. Tom Ormson is a dragon shifter, the scion of a line that was created to rule both Chinese and Norse gods. But he doesn’t want the job. He co-owns a diner with his wife, Kyrie, who is about to deliver their first child.
In fact, they just got married, when the entire shifter-world, which centers on their diner goes insane.
You see, it is a time of Ragnarok, which means all of the shifter clans are in turmoil, with changing leadership. And the lion clan, to which Kyrie belongs has just lost its leader. Also, the Queen of the Norse dragons has woken, and wants a word with the Great Sky Dragon.
Hold on to your hats. A wild ride is about to begin, with Tom, Kyrie and their friends at the center of it.
When it ends, the world will never be the same again.

And how it begins:

1

It had been a dry winter in Colorado, following an exceptionally dry summer and fall. Now at the tail end of December, a dry but freezing wind, carrying particles of ice like an excoriating whip, flung through the streets of the town, making the Christmas decorations dance.

It was almost dark at three pm. Which was good, because in his room, in his parents’ house, in one of the old suburbs of the small mountain town of Goldport Colorado, Rafiel Trall, Officer of the Serious Crime Unit of the Goldport Police Department, lay in uneasy sleep.

It had been busy all through Christmas, mostly make-work as the new Police Chief insisted on “organizing” the force.

He needed a nap. Desperately. He was supposed to be Tom’s best man at Tom and Kyrie’s wedding. He had to be awake and alert.

The howling wind poured into his dreams, turning into baying in his darkly-dreamed night.

In the dark forest, Rafiel, in his lion form, stood in a dark clearing in an impenetrable forest, while around him the snow blew and bit, and thoughts not-his echoed in his mind.

He was vaguely aware of his human body, on his bed, in his cozy book-lined bedroom. But the lion in the dark forest didn’t know it. The lion was all alone, terrified. At any minute, a claw would come from the darkness and flail him. He could feel death and hatred in the darkness he couldn’t see through.

Out of his fear, he decided he had to make a stand. He set all four feet firmly on the spongy, shifting ground. Throwing back his head, he opened his mouth and roared his defiance.

The thin cold air came in through his mouth. Particles of ice penetrated his flesh.

Round about things that weren’t lights, but more like light reflected upon unblinking eyes, ten, a dozen, a thousand, came on, and from the darkness around him, carried round and round by the whipping wind, came the sound of mocking laughter, and words, spoken in a high and thin singsong voice, as if by a deranged child, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty. Come and be killed.”

The lion jumped and made a yelp-like sound. A claw reached for him– tearing, slicing–

Rafiel woke, up a strangled scream in his throat. He was covered in sweat, and his heart raced, as though he’d run a long time.

There was a knock at the door, and his fiancé, Bea, asked, “Raf? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just a nightmare.” His eyes, adjusting to the scant light in the bedroom, fell on his tux over the chair in the corner. Tom’s wedding–

He looked at the alarm clock on the bedside. An hour. “I’ll shower and get dressed,” he shouted back.

But he felt slow, stupid, and as though that horrible dream meant something terrible would happen. On Tom’s wedding day.

Rafiel shook his head. No. Nothing bad would happen. Rafiel would not let it.

***

Atop one of the highest mountains of the world, there lived a dragon. And the dragon was the most powerful beast in the world, able to listen to – and control – all of the magical animals everywhere.

And the dragon looked nervous as he said to his bride, “Are you sure it will be all right? Closing the diner for a whole hour? The week between Christmas and New Year?”

Kyrie Smith, the dragon shifter’s bride, a panther shifter, and co-owner with the dragon – her very beloved and permanently worried fiancé, Tom Ormson – of The George Diner in downtown Goldport, Colorado smiled while shaking her head, and pulled back a strand of dark curls that had worked free from Tom’s ponytail. “It will be fine, love. It’s just an hour, after lunch hour and before the dinner rush.”

Tom still looked worried. Tom always looked somewhat worried. It was part of what was so endearing about him. But Kyrie had worked hard at blocking the time from three to four pm so that they could get married with a modicum of privacy. The right kind of privacy. Though every table was occupied, it was occupied by their friends – a lot of them from the police department, others, regulars at the diner – and people who mattered to them, not whatever rando might wander in from Fairfax Avenue.

Rafiel Trall, one of Goldport’s finest, and a lion shifter, patted Tom on the shoulder, “Come on. You’ll be fine.”

Rafiel wore a tux, which looked odd to anyone used to seeing him in Hawaiian shirts and white pants or jeans. He was nominally Tom’s best man, not that anyone was getting that formal about it. “It’s actually impossible for the diner to go under in the time it takes Anthony to pronounce you man and wife.”

Tom looked doubtful, and Rafiel smiled. Tom mumbled, “That’s what you say.”

Anthony, server extraordinaire – he’d taught both Kyrie and Tom the trade of table service – stood nervously between the salad station and the corner booth, wearing a dark suit. His wife, Cecily, carrying their son in her arms, periodically ran out to adjust the hang of his coat or dust imaginary hair from his shoulders. The bridal cake, four layers – created by Laura Miller, The George’s baker, who had waved away any attempts at payment – was topped with a plastic couple, created by another diner regular – by bashing gaming figures– and didn’t look particularly like Tom and Kyrie, except for hair color, but were both attired in aprons that read, “The George,” over their bridal clothes.

Kyrie thought that, all in all, it was a very fitting setup. And more than she could ever have hoped for growing up as an orphan without a family or a steady environment.

Conan Lung, dragon shifter, former enemy turned friend, sat at one of the small booths by the window, dressed in the western wear he’d adopted when his country and western singing career had started showing signs of life. He looked a little lost between the ten-gallon hat and the cowboy boots, but no one had the courage to tell him that, and at any rate, his fiancé Rya liked him that way, so what did it matter?

Kyrie herself had just switched her normal jeans, T-shirt, and apron for a short formal dress in ivory. This had been done because everyone else said she should have a wedding dress. It was just that wedding dresses rarely came in maternity sizes, and she was due in two months. Which meant her belly was huge, and sometimes you could see the imprint of a foot as the kid kicked out at the world.

Tom had proposed months ago, but it had taken this long to organize the wedding. And for Kyrie to get over her jitters.

Which was silly, honestly. After all, she and Tom owned a business together and were having a baby together. At this point, marriage was an afterthought, and just a way to make sure everything was legal, should anything happen to one of them. It was just that Kyrie had been alone so long – basically her whole life before Tom – that much as she longed for a family, she was also used to having sole control over her life and hated the idea of relinquishing any of it.

But Bea, the dragon shifter who was dating Rafiel, had come to spend Christmas with his family. And the loose friend group who called the diner their home away from home had come together and told them to get married already.

So. Kyrie took a deep breath, smiling at the crowd around them. So. They were getting married.

Rya and Bea had pinned a short veil over her multicolor-dyed hair. She thought it looked slightly silly, to be honest, but it also seemed strangely formal and traditional. At that moment, she’d stopped being just Kyrie and was now that strange, symbolic creature, “the bride.”

Honestly, she should just have had Tom and his friends kidnap her and call it a wedding. And yes, that idea had been brought up by the trio – Tom, Rafiel, and Conan – and heartily endorsed by Cas, Nick, Jason, and all the other miscreants. They’d probably have done it, except that no one could figure out how to kidnap Kyrie from her home and bring her to Tom’s when they lived together.

Kyrie grinned, remembering the suggestion that they should kidnap her and run around the block three times before bringing her back. In her mind, they were a massed multitude of their shifted forms, dragons and lions and bears, running around carrying a very pregnant woman.

That would surely have given the various cryptozoologists and collectors of weird news something to write about.

Tom gave her an odd look, and she realized her smile must be very strange. She shook her head at him and smiled.

He gave her a dubious once-over as though wondering if she had some secret plan but never said anything because just then, Rafiel came up.

“Come on, bridegroom,” he told Tom. “I don’t want to have to marry your woman. Bea would burn my feet off.”

Tom laughed, and Rafiel pulled Tom towards the front, near Anthony.

Kyrie shook her head again. Bea – probably already dreaming of her own wedding – had choreographed this whole thing. According to the script, Kyrie moved way back to stand near the cash register. Tom’s dad, the only parent in attendance, came up from where he’d been waiting at the door to the annex and gave Kyrie his arm.

Kyrie swallowed a lump in her throat.

She didn’t know who her parents were. She’d been found, newborn, at the door to St. Anne’s Catholic Church, in Charlotte, NC, on Christmas Eve and been raised in the foster system. Tom’s dad had agreed to do the honors.

She couldn’t say Edward Ormson had matured much since the time when he’d been a lawyer working for the triads in New York City, but he’d … grown in different directions.

Tom said that his father was trying very hard to be a good father and prospective grandfather. It was just that he had never really learned how to be an adult, so he mostly got very excited about the idea of being a father or grandfather but really had no idea what that meant. He was already planning the grandkid’s first car but would be shocked if asked to change diapers.

Still, he was the best they had, and it was nice to have a parent with them. Weddings were things that called for family, and mostly their family was of choice, not of blood. Except for Edward. All told, Edward wore a very handsome tuxedo, and with streaks of silver on either side of his head, he looked the part.

Even better, Kyrie thought, he’d stopped showering them with the weirdest baby gifts ever, from little squeaky mouse toys to little nets, which he thought would be necessary since he was quite convinced that Kyrie and Tom’s babies would be born as “kitten-dragons” with wings. Kyrie hoped she had finally got it through his head that the ultrasounds showed a human baby, male variety.

But she’d rather not make any bets. He’d probably give them a sandbox to use as a baby potty. The best way to look at it was to be amused by the man’s insanity and touched by his joy in their relationship. Otherwise, she’d live angry. And he meant well, so it wouldn’t even be fair.

Conan, looking solemn and strangely nervous, struck up the bridal march on the acoustic guitar.

Edward offered her his arm, and she took it. At the last minute, someone – she thought Cas’s ditsy fiancé, ran up and put a bouquet in Kyrie’s free hand.

It was white roses, in a tight, circular arrangement, with a wrapping of lace. Looked homemade but very lovely, and Kyrie felt tears come to her eyes. Heaven only knew where Dyce had found white roses in December. She walked on Edward Ormson’s arm, slowly and solemnly up to the salad station.

Tom turned. He still looked slightly worried but beamed at Kyrie, his blue eyes filling with appreciation.

A ray of sun came out and gleamed off the polished surface of the very expensive fryer that they were still paying for, and which Tom was perpetually worried would explode.

It was going to be all right, Kyrie thought.

She realized her mistake immediately afterward when there was a bang behind her, and a flash of light reflected from the polished metal surface of the salad station.

***

Tom had just thought that Kyrie was the most beautiful bride in the world.

His throat tightened when looking at her, and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten this lucky. If someone had told the confused youth he used to be that someday he’d own a diner, be the center of a group of devoted friends and marry a gorgeous woman, he’d have thought they were nuts. He was still nervous about the whole baby thing and unsure how to be a father, but as long as he had Kyrie at his side, he would be fine.

And then, as he was looking at his amazing bride making her way from the register to the salad station, something exploded at the door to the diner.

There was a loud bang, a flash of light in his peripheral vision, and, looking up and at the door, a cloud of smoke.

And Tom said words he never thought he’d say on his wedding day. The words were perhaps shocking to the people around them, or at least to those who didn’t know that Tom was a dragon shifter and not the only one in the world, but part of a complex hierarchy of dragon-kind.

The words that reluctantly tore from Tom’s lips were: “Oh, no! Enter the dragon.”

AND for you maniacs who have been waiting for this, from, I THINK chapt three:

The queen screamed, but before she could react, an alligator tail, seemingly coming out of nowhere, hit her midsection.

The Queen of the North stepped back, lost her footing, and went tumbling into the snake cave.

And the alligator tail closed the door.

Kyrie blinked. There was an alligator, wearing the remnants of plastic armor, a plastic Viking helmet, and a fright wig.

“Old Joe?” she said weakly. “But you’re dead.”

Y’all have fun now. I have some publishing to do ;)

I’m starting to get really worried.

Probably a decade ago, someone who dropped by said I was pounding the lectern and yelling “you’ve been lied to” about pretty much everything.

At the time this startled me, because the things I was questioning were rather limited and specific. Stuff like: Marxism doesn’t work; true Communism won’t work with humans; the publishing business is not a meritocracy, and neither are most of the arts. Etc.

Not things, I thought, that were a big mystery or things that anyone would dispute much, not once they looked at the facts which were either readily available or easy to infer from other easily available facts.

I assumed the person was maybe a little invested in — say — Marxism working and I’d accidentally gored his ox.

But I’m starting to get really worried.

Because I’ve been at this ten years now, and poking here and poking there, and trying to get at the sources of things.

There are things I know, in my own person or through close friends that make everything yet again more worrisome. And there are people I trust who know things and those are worrisome too.

Why worrisome? Because none of it accords with commonly accepted, public, consensus reality. And some of the “I’m sure, but can’t prove to anyone” facts are massive. Like I have reason to believe the world population is much smaller and possibly half what it’s claimed. Even here I suspect we’re inflated by 1/3 if not more. And it’s already dropping. Proof? That would be nice. The best I can tell you is that I have no reason to believe it’s accurate and a lot more reasons to disbelieve, among them that — as BGE has also noticed — that a falling and aging population is the only thing that can explain what the markets have done the last 10 years or so.

But there’s more than that. Something smells about the war in Ukraine. No, not in the sense that “the Ukranians are evil-bad.” I have no reason to believe they’re any better or worse than the little kleptocracy in that part of the world.

It is rather the war that makes no coherent sense. Particularly our role in the whole mess: like, for instance the fact Joe Biden first gave the all clear to a “small incursion” then withdrew it, then once Russia went in — something that went unpunished with Crimea under his boss — it was the worst thing ever, and we needed to do everything possible up to and including provoke Russia to a nuclear war… All the while Russia — specifically Putin — was our mediator in our (and by our, I of course, mean FJB’s) effort to hand more pallets of cash to the Iranians.

It’s almost like there’s footsie being played beneath the painted curtain that serves as backdrop to our “news.”

Also, we know the war went badly for Russia, but weren’t they supposed to have lost decisively by now. No, I don’t think they’re winning. No, I don’t think they’re stronk and powerful country. They’re just another dime a dozen kleptocracy.

But the point is, nothing about that scenario makes any wit of sense. Not as sold to use, not as Russian apologists online push

. Just… no sense whatsoever.

In fact let’s look at the last two and a half years. Oh, no. I insist.

Speaking of things that make no sense…. Lockdowns for a respiratory business made no sense. We still don’t know if the videos from China were real or amateur theater productions.

Then the vaccine. There are signs it’s bad, very bad. Probably like all mrna vaccines before it. How bad it’s impossible to tell due to massive obfuscation and governmental malfeasance. Does it sterilize people? We don’t know. Cause heart attacks? The numbers are compelling, but we don’t know. Cause strokes? There are indications, but we don’t know.

We do know that every other vaccine of that kind, vaccines that have had a lot more time for development and testing, have had so many adverse effects that they were shut down. Now, that didn’t mean half or even 1/10th of those who took them died/were injured. I have the articles around here somewhere (sigh) but can’t find them. It was if I remember correctly more like 1% of the people taking them suffered some kind of adverse effect.

Which, you know, if SARS-Cov-19 were a calamity on the scale of the Black Plague would be a completely reasonable price to pay. Instead of losing 1/3 the population of the world, we’d all line up gladly to take the vaccine, and voila, it would be like 1% of the population or so.

But it was clear, from the time of the Diamond Princess that we were facing nothing like that scale of calamity. In fact, Wuflu might be no worse than a bad flu year (Before you throw things, if we tallied bad flu years like the Wuflu, it’s about comparable. Normally we don’t attribute deaths of pneumonia to the flu even if it was there before. The recording is loosy goosy on both ends: how we tally flu and how we tallyed the Wuflu.)

And even assuming that knowledge takes a while to propagate through the bureaucracy, by the time the vaccine came out, it was obviously not needed, except PERHAPS for very old and very at risk people.

But that’s not how it was treated. Instead the government brought its thing out in the face of the world, and stomped around demanding everyone within its reach take it.

Now you can say “They knew it would kill people. Population reduction.” I could buy that. For one, we know what enormous racists the left are, and this idea that they were giving the vaccines to minorities first makes complete sense then.

Except they made every government employee they could take it. And every medical person, and a lot of people who would be essential to them, after the population reduction.

Closing the schools for the year? Two years? The mask insanity?

None of it makes any sense for a grand master plan. No, hear me out. Not a bit of it. It makes no sense to combat the virus (As I figured out in Setp 2020 traveling across the country, if the measures implemented made any sense, they were so inconsistently applied that some countries would have 90% dead, while others would have 1%. And yet mortality was pretty consistent across the country. And don’t get me started on the fact that Europeans only needed to distance 3′. I mean, did someone look at that and say “Well, Americans don’t get that close unless they’re married to each other or related, or trying to get something going on. So, they won’t feel it unless we double it.”

I mean there is some sense behind the idea that they did all this, and ran completely insane JUST to steal the election. How else to let Biden campaign from his basement and make it sound plausible that he’d won? How else to take the economy down? (And it didn’t fall as fast as they’d planned.)

But why involve the rest of the world? Or are they so utterly blinkered they didn’t realize the rest of the world would get involved, and can less afford it?

And why the vaccines?

I mean, I can see this as an attempt to suppress rebellion the world over, but it makes no coherent sense. Not as a grand master plan; not as much of anything.

The problem, of course, is one of information. Not only do we not have the information we need to evaluate the truth of things, but it’s entirely possible that no one does. So TPTB are making flailing and uncoordinated, makes no sense in the world responses and set pieces for our edification, only sometimes they too believe part of their set pieces.

And what happens is mass insanity. And what people believe is something else again.

The thing is, I came into a world, and grew up in one, in which there was a reality consensus, and accepted sources of information, and if you were even mildly informed, you knew where to look to know if things were true or not.

Except of course, that I took part in some “world-importance events” (mostly on the periphery) where I knew that all available sources either lied or were completely, insanely wrong in their interpretation, so that what they reported had no resemblance whatsoever to the truth. Not even a little bit.

But I could sweep that under the rug and think that in most events, the sources were mostly correct. Or at least in events without a clear political nature. Or in events in the US.

For a while I convinced myself.

Then came the internet and the ability to get first hand viewpoints, which, like mine, in no way accord with the “consensus.”

And the more I poke into history the more that consensus — FRD saved the nation from the Great Depression! — crumble at the touch.

It’s like…. there was this grand play, going back at least to the beginning of the 20th century and likely before, and it made perfect sense and was in all the books, and everyone agreed.

But the more thought put on it, the more sources found of people at or close to those events, the more the whole thing — realistic, logical, well thought out, with psychological and economic reasons and antecedents — melts like spun sugar in water.

Which makes it very hard to figure out one’s actions, or to anticipate what might happen next. The whole history of civilization is turned into a postmodern play, full of wind and fury but making no coherent sense.

I’m starting to get the uneasy feeling that no one has ever made sense of history, and even what we think are well established events were misunderstandings, or didn’t happen the way we think, or happened for a whole different reason.

And on the tail of that, there is the sense that…

I know that I exist. I know what happened to me.

But lying here, all alone in the dark, I wonder who else exists and doesn’t, and what really happened to each of them.

What is truth? Well, truth is that which doesn’t go away when you stop thinking about it.

And I have a feeling we’re about to find out the incontrovertible truth.

Hold on to your seats, fasten your seat belts.

I have a feeling this one is going to sting.

I’m in the part of the country that is starting to feel like fall. There’s a briskness in the air, morning and evening. Early morning the air smells like a crisp freshly-cut apple.

It’s the type of fall I always loved. And I always loved Fall best of all the seasons. Where I grew up, it’s a season of heavy fogs, though which the turning leaves show like jewels. The mind naturally tuns to warmth and softness. Soft warm clothes, and sweetned teas in a comfy chair. And favorite books, of the kind that make you feel warm.

Because of course, there is the dark side of the Fall. We know what’s ahead. And that Winter is a hard season for most of our species’ history. A season of scarcity, disease, cold and death. At the end of it the survivors would be changed.

But there were always those who didn’t survive.

We know this instinctively. Which is why we crave comfort and soft and warm things as we sense what’s ahead.

This year… this year feels like something bad coming for us, something hard and cold, something that glints in the darkness of the colder days, something that’s been kept away by our prosperity and ease.

Scarcity of course, but … things we’re not sure of.

Look, win or lose, this will be a hard winter. And we’ve seen how in other lands, even successful elections are subverted and overturned, because the mechanisms of the state are corrupted and infested.

These things never turn easily or cleanly. Like the ridiculous infection I’ve been battling, you get better you get worse, it comes back a little better everyday till it’s finally gone…

It’s going to be difficult and it’s going to be hard. This winter might be the first of many hard ones. And perhaps not the worst.

There is an unfunny joke going about:

Q – Are you ready for the Fall?

A – Of civilization, or Season?

A2 – Yes.

It is unfunny but it gets a bitter chuckle, as it captures the mood of the time.

But let’s keep things in perspective: It’s going to get bad. In some places, and for some people very bad. If you’re secure-ish help those who aren’t. And work, it both keeps the black dog at bay and it will provide security for you and those you can help.

But as bad as it’s going to be, it’s not the Fall of civilization. Just one of those unlovely periods one must go through on the way to an improved future. A major mistake that turned into a cul de sac is on its way out: this idea of rule by experts, from the center out and the top down. It’s maybe not completely discredited in the world, but in America it’s getting there. And the next few years will completely destroy it.

And then … And then we’ll start again, and create the conditions to meet the future.

Look, civilization isn’t dying. It’s just changing profoundly.

Change can feel like death. It is in a way a death of things that were good before.

Just like Fall is the death of the beautiful, easy days of summer. Truth is, they were always going to die. Forever Summer is as lethal as forever winter. And our summer of prosperity came with the seeds of its own destruction.

Gather warmth and softness around you, real and metaphoric, for the winter. And let’s work to make sure there is a spring.

Be not afraid.

They’re demanding her weight in cheese crackers, and let me tell you that’s a lot of cheese crackers.

Okay, that’s a blatant lie. I mean, look at that face. Could he kidnap anything, except perhaps with an excess of cuteness?

Actually the writer has come down with something, or perhaps re-come-down with something. Seems to be stomach flu with a side of exhaustion.

This wouldn’t be a big deal for posting the promo post, which requires no original writing, BUT it’s a problem for getting a novel — Bowl of Red — ready to upload. And it must be uploaded by midnight, or bad, bad, bad things happen.

So I have my trustworthy team — Amy B. deserving particular notice as thorough and lightening fast — going through, and I’m entering corrections as fast as I can.

Of course, part of why it’s so late is that I was doing structural tweaks while coming down with this and took forever.

So, wish me well. And yes, I promise to crash and rest tomorrow. Also, possibly to put up promo post.

So this is not an I’m well post, but definitely an I’m alive post.

Debate: Does the left side of the isle behave like clinical narcissists? And if so is it because they are or because the dictates of their philosophy make them act that way?

While doing so, I beg you with tears in my eyes not to set fire to the koi pond — again — and not to feed the dragon marshmallows dipped in peanut butter. We all remember what happened last time you little maniacs did that, don’t we?

So. Behave. No. Behave the other way.

I’ll be back.

No, I didn’t lose my remaining pixie sticks. I’m speaking metaphorically.

Over the last few days I’ve been listening to a lot of people, some older, some younger than me getting trapped in the “coulda shoulda woulda” and berating themselves and wishing they were on some other path in life.

It’s not like I don’t have the same regrets. Oh, boy, howdy, do I ever.

It is the curse of humanity to forever wonder about paths not taken. The curse particularly affects smart people for some reason.

I spent my first twenty years after school locked in a full depression tantrum over the fact I hadn’t been allowed to take engineering. And being too stupid to realize in America I could have gone back and done that, even if it would have cost us, or I’d have had to hustle for the scholarships. But I didn’t know much of how things worked here, yet, at least for about 10 years, so I didn’t realize that university is not something you do by permission and at the prescribed time. And after ten years we had kids and were dead broke.

I’m mildly annoyed — I no longer waste much time on rage-depression tantrums. I don’t have that much time — that I wasn’t prescient enough to realize indie would come, and to start writing for the drawer 30 years ago.

Then again, without the feedback (from fans mostly, not editorial houses!) would I be the writer I am now? who knows?

And if I’d become an engineer, would we even have kids? Dan spent most of the 90s working in hero-mode. I don’t think the two of us doing that would have led to kids, or even to continued marriage.

And that’s the flaw of coulda shoulda woulda. We assume the path not taken would be utterly flawless and cause no issues whatsoever. But that’s not how humanity works. And when it comes to careers these days, it’s definitely not how here and now works.

But the mind will turn on it. You’ll wonder “What will people think of how little I’ve accomplished.” And your mind will turn on “How could I have been so stupid.”

The fact is…. you weren’t. We change and grow through experience. Any decision made more than yesterday, you weren’t the same person, or if you were, you didn’t have the same information.

And beating yourself up, while an interesting hobby (People pay GOOD money to watch) is not productive. And doesn’t lead to making good decisions in the future. At best it leads to paralysis. At worst it leads to self-destruction.

Years ago, when I profoundly depressed, I came up with a mind trick. You know all those stories in which you send your mind knowing everything it knows now into your past body, to “fix” what you did wrong then?

Groundhog day is a limited, and a bit weird form of that, but I assure you there have been a ton of (mostly written) short stories on that theme.

Well, pretend you came back from the future to fix whatever went wrong. You were sent to today, because today is an inflection point and today you can do better. Now.

You’re allowed to be upset at the mess everything is, but that was another you, so long ago you don’t even remember it very well (We’re assuming you lived another ten or twenty years or more before you came back.)

And it doesn’t matter. If you prefer to think you were sent from a parallel world where things had gone seriously wrong, and are in this world to fix this timeline, that’s fine too. Then you can shrug that the other you was an idiot.

The important thing is that you’re here now, because this is an important inflection point in your life. A place where you can change courses and make everything better.

Start today.

What can you do? It might just be changing your attitude to be more open to possibility. It can be being in a better mood because you’re not beating yourself up.

Or it can be cleaning your room. Doing the dishes. Looking for work. Eating better from now on.

Start today. Establish new habits.

You’re a time traveler and this is your challenge. Make it better today. Your future in this timeline might not be wide open, but it is open enough.

Go fix what’s broken from here on.

This is not a religious post. It is a creedal one.

Guys, gals, mantis shrimpies, we’re headed into pretty hard times. We’re already living in a clown timeline, or if you prefer we’re living in a clown car that is inside a dumpster fire.

It’s situation normal, really. We’re doing pretty well for a country that’s been invaded and conquered by a death cult.

And no, I’m not even hanging out at the black dog cafe. Not this morning. I sent the second of the series Barbarella script out late last night, and I’m editing Bor, so I can write a novel that is downloading into my head at speed. I might have to write all six before it’s done. In the middle there, the USAian anthology will get compiled. I’m too busy to be depressed.

I’m also too busy to fully reality check, much less make sense of the news that make no sense what-sofluffy- ever and which are maybe hiding nuggets of truth or maybe not. Pravda is always hard to read. Half the time you have to make a judgement call on whether there’s something behind it or not. And you really can’t tell. And these days the “trustworthiness” of the news have nothing to do with it.

After all trustworthy means part of the establishment, by and large, and the establishment has lied to us by every means available and some they invented for the last two years. We had a spokesthing from Pfizer yelling at me in the comments (I don’t object to that. I object to her stealing a friend’s first name for her handle) because of what I posted at insty about a CEO of her company having said the wuflu is just like the flu. She wanted to know how I very dared post that. The CEO never said that. And how could I post without verifying.

I spammed her, because frankly yelling at me on my blog is over the top. Yes, I did realize the guy was saying that the Wuflu was like the regular flu season NOW but frankly, I preferred to make it sound like he was apologizing for past deception. Because not only was the Wuflu “just a bad flu” hitting only the most vulnerable, but his company conspired with others and the establishment to make it worse. Granting him the pretend-grace of admitting it a-posteriori is merciful of me, and much better than what he deserves, which is one of those creative Tudor executions.

And no, I certainly wasn’t going to do a deep dive of “trusted sources” to find out what he’d said precisely. The word-parsing of con men doesn’t interest me.

And the establishment is con men all the way down. Oh, pardon me, one must not be sexist. Con women. And con gender neutral critters too.

I don’t know where the over-under for “conspiracy theory is revealed to be true” but I think it’s probably under two days at this point.

The “blue” — which is to say centralized, statist, center out and top down “rule by experts” — model is dying ugly all over. And it’s a bit of a problem.

How is it a problem you’ll ask, if it never worked?

It’s a problem because in the US full implementation of the blue model was FDR, which means most of the people who are older but still active in politics were raised when it seemed to be shiny and new, and when enough of the original American culture remained to give them the bizarre idea not just that the model worked but that the corporatist fifties were a sort of halcyon age.

I think this is like the golden age of science fiction being twelve. The halcyon age is always when you were under five.

Even I have misty-eyed memories of Portugal when I was under six, and we were all poor as Job due to government malfeasance. And indoor bathrooms were a rarity. And baths were accomplished in a hip bath of Napoleonic vintage, with water heated on the wood stove. (Ah, but the festas, the orange tree, the kittens, the meadow full of daisies. Stop laughing.)

The problem with this is that the blue model is failing EVERYWHERE but we have a bunch of people with power and influence that think it would work, if only it were more traditional and enforced THEIR values.

To be fair, if I had to choose national socialism or international socialism I’d come down on the side of national all the time (to the idiots who just said AHAH, take a powder. I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. It’s not original but it’s truth nonetheless, and that applies to BOTH forms of socialism. This choice is under “Do you prefer to be drawn and quartered or slow roasted alive?”) because at least the nationalists by definition don’t hate their country.

Which doesn’t mean they don’t impoverish it and slowly destroy it, only that that’s not their aim. Also they’re slower.

Anyway, as the model fails and burns — and I think this winter not to mention the next, a lot of it will burn just for heating — nations revert to their basics. In Europe that mostly means nationalism. God, Country, Family, more or less in that order.

And there are any number of people who want to bring the same here. The problem being of course that Americans are Americans. (And have always been. I think American is one of those things embedded in the matrix of the universe. Before we existed as a nation, it was probably pronounced “Those ornery SOBs”)

We probably have the largest percentage of religious people remaining in the world, but any attempts to impose a universal religion on us are going to meet with knives. And probably guns. And ooh, boy, would it then get hot.

All of y’all who say America needs to turn to G-d aren’t precisely wrong, but half the time the form your comments take offends half the other commenters who are sincere believers and most of them offend me, because honestly, so much heresy it’s almost funny. (The heresy train has no stops.)

What I mean is Europe can turn to their state church, which is what they mean when they say G-d and enforce attendance while killing faith, but despite all the vapors of some of my favorite authors (including the one, yes, RAH) a theocracy was always unlikely in the US, because there is nothing a sincere believer resents more than having another’s sincere belief imposed on him/her/it/kumquat.

Marxism almost managed it — and arguably it’s the STATE religion, just not the people’s — by pretending not to be a religion, but it’s now headed down. (Which is the good part. It’s a death cult.)

Family… ooh, boy. Y’all are aware it doesn’t mean the same here as it means in Europe, right? And I’m not just talking of our charming habit of serial monogamy, which yes, perhaps could be less flamboyant. (Except that we live very long lives, and have the ability to change a lot in that time, which in turn means our partnerships change. I don’t approve, but that doesn’t mean I don’t UNDERSTAND. Also I don’t approve for myself. I’m not in the business of judging my friends and neighbors.)

In Europe “family” really means tribe. As it does in most of the world. And while we have those, they tend to be… self-chosen. Witness the vastness of this duct tape family and its ever-increasing glory.

Country I’ll give you means the same as in Europe. Kind of. Sideways and upside down because it’s what we do to concepts.

Country for an American means not “our old and respected boundaries full of people who look like us, because frankly the paint is still drying in some states, and well… my mom nailed it when she said she couldn’t figure out what the American “look” was. (This because any European can usually, with some fails, identify another’s origin on sight.) I told her “A look of justified and self-assured arrogance” and she made the sound she makes when she doesn’t like my response.

So– As the wheels come off old blue, there’s going to be a tendency from the bien pensant, who are forever sorry they weren’t born in Europe to turn on a dime to the new shiny European model.

… Which means it’s going to need us. It’s going to need us to point at the constitution and the bill of rights. It’s going to need us to dunk their heads in the nearest toilet bowl and flush hard. (What? I didn’t say we should hold them under until bubbles stopped coming up. If they’re going to behave like middle schoolers, a swirly will give them a world of good. Yes, we could also lock them in lockers, but there aren’t enough lockers.)

They need to be made fun of, and stopped as relentlessly as we’ve laughed and ignored the commands of the Marx Commands.

Because they are the same, just another form of plague.

The fun part — I swear this is not the black dog, just realism — is that whether we manage to vote our way out of this, or not, we’re in for another massive round of destruction by the Marx fanatics.

If we win the election, they’re going to hurt us in revenge. If they manage to fraud their way in, they’ll hurt us because they’ll think they’re untouchable.

Either way, it’s going to hurt like a mother. And they’ll find out. Eventually.

But through it all remember, a nation can come out stronger and more faithful to its principles after a terrible time than they were before.

Hold on to your scrap of flag. Remember the words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government …

We’ll come through this. We’ll endure. We’ll survive.

We’re part of something bigger than us. We’re free, no matter how they try to enslave us. We’ll remain free. And we’re going to the stars.

And if I die before we’re through the time of troubles? This is possible. I’m turning sixty this year, and heaven knows how long we’ll wade through stupid.

But as long as I’m here, I’ll keep the light on.

It’s all right. I was part of something greater. I was part of something magnificent.

Tell the boys I died standing pat.