Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Book promo

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FROM AMANDA S. GREEN: Fire Striker (Tearing the Veil Book 1)

Some say monsters aren’t real. Others say the only monsters are those people who aren’t fully human: the witches and shapeshifters, elves and dwarves, and all the others who one day stepped out of the realm of fairy tales and into “real life”. Morgan Walsh knows the truth. Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and some of the worst are human.

She didn’t start out life as Morgan Walsh. Once upon a time, her name was Adriana Grace Hensen. Everything, including her name, changed the day she turned thirteen. That day she learned several lessons she’d never forget. The first was that monsters were real. The second was that her parents were two of the worst “monsters” alive. The third was that those you trust the most can and will turn on you.

Morgan’s parents betrayed her because she wasn’t “human”. Now she’s back with one goal in mind: vengeance.

Never, ever conspire against a Fire Elemental, especially one with other “talents” as well. When you do, you’d best be prepared to get burned.

FROM TIM WUEBKER: The Forbidden Book: A novel

Mark and Rose are typical high school seniors: afraid to speak, aware of the cameras watching them in every room and on every street, and smart enough to walk away if anyone dares discuss the place known only as “The Island.”

They know how to stay invisible. But on his way to school, Mark gets caught in the crossfire between two revolutionary gangs, and later that day, Rose’s friend…just…disappears.

When violence happens, Mark—who is destined for the NBA—knows the unspoken rule: don’t talk about it. You weren’t there. It didn’t happen. And when someone vanishes, Rose–who gets away with things she shouldn’t—knows denial is the only ways to survive.

But each has reached a breaking point. Mark decides to smuggle his family out of the country. And Rose will risk everything to get her friend back.

“The Forbidden Novel” is the story of two people who live in a nation hell-bent on domination and control. Will they be crushed beneath the wheel?

Or will freedom strike back?

FROM J. L. CURTIS: Rimworld – Diplomatic Immunity.

Fargo’s latest attempt at quiet retirement is going haywire quickly.

Hiding the officially missing Dragoon heir at his cabin is about to get interesting.

A GalPat change of command brings new attention to his militia and their capabilities, just as he’s falsely accused of murder. Facing a stacked prosecution, he finds that friends have hidden abilities when they come to his aid, including hiding the heir.

When he comes back out, he’s got an agenda and an heir to get home in one piece… A young man thought lost, whose homecoming will shake an entire empire. And hopefully Fargo will survive the experience.

FROM PETER GRANT: Wood, Iron, and Blood: A Classic Western Story Of The California Trail (Annals of Ash Book 1)

Sometimes wanderlust skips a generation… but when it strikes, it strikes gold.

In 1852, fourteen-year-old Jeremy Ash rises to his grandfather’s challenge and sets out on the adventure of a lifetime – the California Trail.

It’s four deadly months and 1,600 merciless miles from the Missouri River to the goldfields of the Sierra Nevada. There’s alkali water that’ll poison you; desert heat that’ll fry your brains; mountain passes that’ll crush you; swarms of biting insects that’ll drive you mad; deadly diseases that’ll plague you; and warrior tribes that may make it lethally clear they don’t want you there.

Will the California Trail kill Jeremy, like so many others before him? Or will it make a man out of him?

FROM CHRISTIAN TOTO: Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul

Inside Hollywood’s Descent into Dreary, Dull Leftist Groupthink
Hollywood’s Dream Factory is now a nightmare of woke restrictions, Identity Politics run amok, and freedom-snuffing rules and regulations. The Oscars are unwatchable, as are many films and television shows thanks to the woke revolution. Virtue Bombs breaks down where Hollywood went so wrong, illustrates the slow-motion disaster infiltrating the industry, and offers a glimmer of hope for a woke-free tomorrow. Award-winning film critic Christian Toto has all the receipts, showcasing Hollywood’s virtue-signaling follies and how it could get much, much worse before it gets better.

FROM DAVE FREER: CLOUD-CASTLES. – NOW ALSO IN PAPERBACK!

Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.

FROM KATRINA LEGG: The Case of the Rollerskating Armadillo.

Spacestation: Arcadia is a vacation destination for the rich and connected.

When a midnight call from one of the guests includes assault from an unfriendly lawn decoration, Deputy Corbin knows something isn’t quite right.

It’s not just the grumpy old man who needs his help but it’s going to take all his wits to uncover the other victims in the mess he’s stumbled upon.

FROM DALE COZORT: Raphaela, Princess of the Jungle: A Snapshot Novel (Snapshot Jungle Adventures Book 2)

Nearly a hundred years ago, in an alternate reality Africa dotted with lost cities, Raphaela of Zan was eleven years old and dying of a rapid aging disease. A mysterious gray-eyed man gave her a drink he claimed would cure her. Instead, it stopped her from aging at all, trapping her in an eleven-year-old body, on the verge of life, but never able to truly live. Now, the rapid aging disease is back, threatening to turn her into a withered crone before she has a chance to live. Can she survive man-apes, Romans and Mad Puritans to find the gray-eyed man and convince him to save her?

FROM DANIEL L. NADEN: Parting Shot.

“A brutally smart gorefest, and uproariously funny to boot!”
James H Longmore

Brian has survived for ten years beyond the end of the world, but he’s not sure why. He’s not even sure if he cares anymore.

When the dead began strolling around and eating people, society was certain to collapse. Brian never realized how lonely a guy could be in a world with six billion hungry zombies hanging around. Or how empty a life of just surviving could be.

Meeting survivors in Brian’s world is dangerous. Living with survivors is almost suicidal. Zombies like large groups of people: the more, the merrier. Caring about people in Brian’s world is insane. How often can someone lose every person they’ve ever known or loved before they just quit trying?

When he hooks up with a new group of survivors, they all find a way to…well…survive together. After so many years, surviving is easy part. The real challenge: can they find a reason to live? To love? Can they find a reason to hope? Can they remember how to laugh when so much of the world is dark and despairing?

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: Army of One.

Collection of my best essays and one-liners, thoughts on history, the War on Terror, current events, pop culture and lots of humor. Get yourself a cup of Rococo Coffee and read this book. Or just buy Rococo Coffee and ignore this book. Wait, what?

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.

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: wretched

Weirdly this is not about governance. Well, self-governance maybe, in the sense that you govern yourself through life.

I was 53 the first time someone told me I was ADD. The someone was my kid. Ask me how he knows. He’s higher functioning than I am — I barely held it together through University, and then it all fell apart — mostly because I refused to believe either of them was ADD because they were like me and no one had ever told me I was ADD. So they had to learn to function without meds or crutches. One of them is way better at it, but he’s finding out it too has limits.

So, how come no one noticed I was ADD before then.

In retrospect, it was floridly obvious. My parents and the teachers who gave me grades and comments like “You could be perfect if you applied yourself” are excused. First because ADD is highly inheritable, and Portugal seems to have a very high baseline of ADD (even if mine is freakish even for there, and was thus noted.) Second, because the concept didn’t exist.

All my other doctors and various evaluators aren’t so. Oh, my family is also excused. Husband because he’s also ADD — but the hyperfocus kind. Or I should say more hyperfocus than I tend to be, though I have my moments — and because my extreme ADD was viewed as doing things to be a pain. (Yes, there are reasons for this. Part of it being because it’s really hard to believe an adult can’t control things like: not wandering off from your full shopping cart, aimlessly, because you’ve been more than two minutes in line.)

As for me? Well, I’d been this way all my life.

A friend recently said that he’s getting very tired of everyone labeling themselves “neuro atypical.” Mostly because when everyone is neuro-atypical, no one is.

Is there even a “neuro-typical”? yeah, sure. There is a range. Out of that range things get dicey.

I’d add there is a range where you can function fine with discipline and non-medicine strategies, too, and I keep trying. I hate medication. But after the last three months, I’m about ready to go back on meds, though still fighting it.

The question ultimately is ‘Are you atypical enough that anyone would notice?” (None of us is standard issue.) AND more importantly “Are you being impaired by whatever it is that most people seem able to do, and you can’t?” And then the money question “Can you mitigate most of your issues by strategies of various kinds.”

Ultimately the question is “Is the work being done?” and “Is the work being done to about 90%” (because people rarely notice that 10% though you might.)

For instance, when I say I barely held it together through University, note I was still getting top grades. My studying strategies, or even the ability to be in class on time, every week, kept disintegrating more every year. But because I was in a field that was a given for me, had a deep reserve of knowledge AND could fake even more knowledge (like a pro) with high verbal fluency, I still could get very good grades. Would that have continued through a doctorate? I doubt it. My brain was trying to check out at 3 years, and I’m not sure I could have held much longer than 5. Particularly since my interest in the field kept diminishing (and it was never high.) Which is why I was disintegrating more and more every year.

However, not only shouldn’t I have been medicated, but frankly what I should have done is be in a different field of study. Now, the result might have been the same because I’m ADD AF (guess) and once I master something, I get worse, but the training time would have been better.

Another friend yesterday posted a thing that said: Let’s face it if you’re ADD the only way things are going to get done is if: It’s new and interesting; it’s an inherently pleasurable activity; you are in a panic and it’s life or death; there’s food at the end of it, and it’s food you like.

His conclusion was that we are cats, and he’s not wrong.

For years my strategy to get work done was to wait until publishers got really mad, then panic and write the novel in under a week. The problem is that I couldn’t do it till that point.

BTW part of the problem is it doesn’t matter how much you WANT to do it. “Executive dysfunction” which is what ADD is, often means you simply can’t start. Even if you want to, you need to, and you think you’re a lazy ass for not doing it. (Chances are you’re not a lazy ass. Your head is just broken.)

If I REALLY wanted to write a novel, I might be able to write it, but it involved chasing myself around for a varying period — could be weeks, months or years — then forcing myself to sit down and write it in a few days. If I were interrupted and it took more than a few days, I had to start again (which is how one of the current novels in progress is 40 years in the making.)

The reason I know it’s not laziness is that some of the stuff I’ve been “avoiding” is quick, simple, easy and I NEED TO DO IT. But I don’t. I can’t start.

Like this morning I got up with a few goals.

The quickest/easiest: BILL FOR WORK ALREADY DONE. This is money I need in the business account, because it’s funding things like my paying an editor. The work was done third week of December. The money is…. well, for most of my years it’s about 20% of income.

Next, not so easy but needed: work on Bowl of Red. Because I’m three and a half weeks late on it. (Yes, I’ve been sick, and?)

Third, typeset Odd Tales to FINALLY get it out.

What did I DO? I looked at and downloaded fonts. I also considered buying some graphics that are things like “Build a person” “build a couple” and “build a family”. Think “components” to all of these, and it allows you to make cartoony covers, super-useful for cozy mysteries, yeah, but NONE OF THIS IS STUFF I NEED TO DO TODAY. Or this week.

So why the heck didn’t I do what I needed to do? Because I couldn’t start. I kept trying to. I.e., I was chasing myself around inside my mind.

One of the things my thoughts do, which is beyond annoying is interrupt each other. Like, I’ll be thinking about potatoes and my mind goes “you know what we need? A recipe for bread.” (No, I shouldn’t be eating either potatoes or bread. And I really don’t. The reason those examples popped into my mind is that I’m hungry. And my mind loves potatoes. Frankly it couldn’t care less about bread. I love baking, but I rarely eat it. Eh.)

When I first took Adderal was the first time I figured out my thoughts interrupted each other. It was bizarre to just be able to think of something to its logical conclusion. This was strange, and had never happened to me before. I do think things through, but in the middle I think other things through. It’s also made easier, if I’m doing something else at the same time, which is why I could never understand why I couldn’t crochet while on panels. (“It makes it look like you don’t care.” “No. It makes it much easier to concentrate.” So I doodled, extensively. Otherwise, I was going to blurt out something completely unrelated and highjack the panel because I was bored. And this had nothing to do with not respecting others opinions. It’s just how I think. I do it to myself too.) And why the minimum I needed to study was REALLY LOUD AND DISTRACTING MUSIC. With words.

My mom who weirdly is just as ADD has had her mind …. uh…. propagandized so she thought what I really needed was perfect silence. And what I really needed in school was to be on the front row and have the teacher watch me like a hawk. This was exactly opposite what I needed. Some of my best years were listening to a lecture, while writing a novel at the same time. And she should have known that, because her most productive years were designing clothes while listening to audio lectures. The problem was in that one thing — and because when I space I tend to space inside, while perfectly calm outside while she’s the opposite — we are actually exactly alike, and she didn’t realize it.

Now there are things you can do to make it easier to get stuff done when you want to. These usually include “establishing a routine” “Not being stressed because potential buyers of house are insane and you’re sick and tired of the whole thing” “not being stressed about money” (Weirdly this stress makes it hard for me to bill for things, or remember to cash checks. Everyone I’ve worked for has been driven insane by this.) “Not having to navigate social landmines and conventions” (part of the reason I prefer to work for myself. Do you know how many times I ignored office politics until I was made into the devil by mean girls of either sex, and found myself fired? Uh… practically every job, including free lance. Part of it being because when someone decides to make me into the devil I’m annoyed and appalled by it, and I disconnect.)

I lost an entire year to my son having issues in middle school. To be fair, this could have been remediated if I’d been allowed to set people on fire. (I told you I’m a dragon.) But — waves hand — NOT ALLOWED TO.

And we’re going on to a year lost to moving, and now attempting to sell the house.

Executive dysfunction affects everything. You might find yourself in the kitchen, eating things you don’t even like, because “it was there.” And “My body wandered off without permission.”

Am I going to have to go back on meds? It’s possible. I’d prefer not to, but it’s possible, if the world in general continues being a peeve, and if I can’t chivvy myself into establishing a routine. Maybe. I really don’t want to do it. And it’s difficult to do it after you moved, because doctors tend to view you as a drug seeker (which to be fair you are, even if sometimes reluctantly.) They also tend to have a lack of understanding for “high functioning” and the cost of ADD anyway. Like, sure, I’ve written 30 some novels. BUT without ADD I could probably have written that in a year. (Okay, probably not, but 3 years is doable and not even a stretch.) Which would be better for me and my family. But they will say things like “If you can write novels, you’re not ADD”. Dude, walk a mile in my brain. Or of course, my favorite — for any illness. I mean someone tried to do this to me for pneumonia, until they measured my blood ox — “You’re just depressed. I’ll give you a prescription for depression” — this is the one psycho-drug every non-psych doctor wants to prescribe, which is bizarre. It’s like they think everyone is depressed all the time. 90% of the time, I suspect they’re wrong. (Or I’m highly atypical. Look, I’m always at least mildly depressed, but I know the limits, and I can control THAT. It’s not executive dysfunction. It’s an evaluation dysfunction.)

Anyway, you know what doesn’t help with executive dysfunction? Convincing yourself you’re both lazy and stupid, and trying to abuse and berate yourself into doing what needs to be done. Or actually, worse, it works great when you’re young and everything else aligns perfectly. but it works less every year.

Which is why I need to figure out how to stop doing it.

And actually fulfill my to do list.

(It would take a miracle, but I’m going to storm the castle, nonetheless.)

For my entire life, the right has made noises about being brave and stopping the slide to the left. Though I’ll note many of these, like the whole “standing astride history yelling stop” assumed that the future was leftist, no matter what we did.

The point is that to a certain extent that was correct. Oh, not correct in the sense that the future was communist. That was always crazy. I mean, the system was not one any grown up could imagine would work. But about the short term future. About the ever ratchetting left of our public institutions? They were absolutely right. We could sort of slow it but not stop it.

Until the institutions they’d taken over before my birth and heck before my parents’ birth beclowned themselves enough, the body politic was running under the impetus of three irresistible ideas:

1- That industrialization not only made possible but required the redesigning of humanity.

2- That centralized production/government/etc. was always more efficient.

3- That the experts were better at guessing/directing the future than the common individual.

Taken together all three of these were not just a guarantee of a “slide ever left” but were also a negation of the entire American system. And they were brought to America well before FDR and by both parties equally (Silent Cal was a “Progressive” after all) because in the flush of the great mass industrial push these ideas were conquering the world, and were perfectly reasonable and “sensible.”

Why? I don’t know. I mean some people intuited that the whole “we’ll remake humans” thing was crazy. But some people were in short supply.

What the crazy progressives took from the entire nazi fiasco was that remaking humanity to make it more Aryan was wrong. However, remaking humanity in every other possible way was great, and should definitely continue being done. Standardized everything! Propagandized everything! Let’s remake the world by hectoring people!

Did some of this work? I don’t know. Look, our history is a passel of ill-told lies, only holding together as long as they’re repeated everywhere at once and in the same exact way (which by itself would tell you is a lie.) The covid nonsense isn’t unusual for being so crazy. It’s unusual because thanks to new media a lot of people know how crazy it is.

Take racism for instance. Yes, there was a lot of racism in the past. There still is in most of the world. Was there a lot of it in America specifically, until government “made it bad.” I don’t know. I don’t know because I KNOW a lot of that racism was stoked and created by the “progressives” who had a broad stroke of eugenics.

Did it stop because the government made people stop it, or because they stopped enforcing it? I don’t know. It would take very careful study to determine.

However given centralized government at everything else they’ve allegedly tried to do, from ending poverty to educating our children, I’d say that racism to the extent it existed and still exists in America is the result of the governments alleged “anti-racist” actions. Because we have no idea what the federal government is good for. I mean it used to win wars, but even then, I think it was by sucking slightly less than other governments — slightly — and having better people actually doing the fighting. Recently, though, it has successfully prevented Americans from winning any wars, too. In fact, the only things the government seems to be good at is taking all our money — and eating it or something — and hurting Americans.

No? well, tell me how much better the schools are since we’ve had a department of education. Tell me how the EPA running around declaring everyone’s backyard a natural preserve and demanding absurd levels of “cleanliness” to the point it hurts the actual environment has made our environment better. Tell me how the Defense Department wins wars. And let’s talk about the Department of (In)justice persecuting the people who messed with our voting and sold us out to China’s petty tyrant. Oh, wait. They actually have run around arresting anyone who protested the outsourcing of our votes to communists and the installation of the ever serene Zhou Bi-den, Winnie the Xi’s vice roi on our shores.

The problem is that while those principles above remained unquestioned, there was no wrestling back control.

They retain SOME belief, but less every day.

The first smack between the eyes of the governmental Bull running out of control was from Ronald Reagan.

I know you young people don’t know this, but until Reagan, the US and Europe were unified in the idea that OF COURSE some important things, like energy, needed price controls! Oh, and salaries needed to be controlled too. Negative economic stuff should be worked on by “the best people”. Any downturn required MORE regulation!

Reagan dismantled all that, along with the USSR.

Of course, the left regrouped. They still controlled education, the news, entertainment, the intellectual life of the nation. They regrouped, and continued selling their poison.

They could because — ironically — people still believed in the efficiency of the central government.

It took complete *ss clowns in control to disabuse of that notion. W. was a beginning, with his “war on a tactic” and “Islam is a religion of peace.” But Obama? I think the big crack up started under Obama, both because the net and peer to peer communication were gaining steam as an every day thing, and because the image fostered of the little man who wasn’t there as some kind of intellectual giant (ROFL. The laziest, most conventional thinker of his generation, who never grew past his freshman year in college, because it was never required of him) was so at odds with the utterly unremarkable, intellectually incurious pop celebrity he actually was. Worse, the media tried to sell his fashion blind, frumpy hausfrau of a first lady as some kind of icon of style and beauty. And even people who were too dumb to see that Obama couldn’t be that smart (or they’d show us his tests) weren’t blind. The general reaction to all the magazines praising Michelle to the skies was a giant, audible eye roll.

Of course, the press thought it had won. Because the left lives in an increasingly narrower eco chamber, they thought that everyone believed their snow job (Oh, pardon me, choom job. No cocaine involved, at least not that anyone admitted to.)

And then they tried the reverse on Trump. So hard that they were taken completely by surprise on election night that a majority (I suspect a vast majority. I mean, look, there was fraud before this. A lot of it. And no one runs the potemkin campaign they ran for Zhou Bai-den without having enough FAKE votes in the can to win no matter what.) hunched their shoulders and voted for Trump.

Since then they’re running around like crazy people screaming they really won, and Zhoe is a really good president, and besides inflation is good for you, and–

And it keeps backfiring. Nothing big and spectacular yet, unless you count the fourth of July of 2020, in which we collectively hoisted a finger to the lockdown-crazed left who cancelled all celebrations, and lighted the skies with our bombs bursting in air. Or unless you count the viral popularity of Let’s Go Brandon! Or the quiet resistance to the mandates for vaccines. Or the headlong flight from blue states. Or–

It’s backfiring.

In response, the establishment gets louder and more shrill, trying to convince us that they really, really are doing well, and the future belongs to them.

They’re attempting to stand athwart history — real history — yelling stop!

But the more they yell the more obvious the lies become. It’s impossible to look at or listen to the collection of radical losers and delusional morons running this administration not to mention the vaunted deep state, and not go “LOLROFL, Get out of here!”

And the left has nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Now they’re stuck on this bizarre idea of “Create chaos = ?????=communist revolution.”

I suspect the brighter among them just might be starting to suspect that a) they’re in power. b) a revolution won’t be for them. c)their time has passed.

But of course, not many of them are bright. Even those with excellent natural faculties have been indoctrinated into idiocy.

Hold on to the sides of the boat. The water is about to become extremely rough. Tsunamis are always scary. They’re the result of an Earthquake, such as is taking place in our foundational assumptions. Or rather, back to our foundational assumptions, right here, in the good US of A.

Resist the temptation to head to the seashore as the sea retreats, to “see what is happening.” Yes, I know, but do resist it. Study, prepare. Be ready.

Above all, continue believing your lying eyes over their pretty lies.

The slide has changed directions. And it’s a good thing, as the other one was a slide to h*ll.

But it’s still better if you walk where you wish to go, instead of being shoved by the tides of history.

Take careful stock of the moment. Decide where you want us to end up.

We’re going to need every possible rational actor, if we are to avoid a massive butcher’s bill.

Historical corrections are never fun. Sometimes they are inevitable.

In the end we win, they lose. Be not afraid. Reality fights on our side, and she’s a stone cold b*tch.

Today I’ve felt better than in weeks. From the fact that I still had to take ibuprofen to subdue a headache, I don’t think I’m fully well, but way better than yesterday.

How do I know? For the first time in weeks, I did what used to be the morning routine: pre-prep for dinner (lunch is usually snackish, as we’re both working.) In this case, it’s a little more than pre-prep, as I have beef stew in the crockpot, and einkorn sourdough leven resting to make French bread to go with.

Cooking and writing are linked for me, and if I’m sick, I can’t do either. For some reason it’s easier to convince myself I’m sick, not just lazy, if I skip cooking.

BUT here’s the important thing, they shut down at the same time. And what I eat becomes a matter of indifference, which means I eat a lot of canned stuff (not a normal thing.)

So, you should blame this post on that.

Look, the idiots have control of all the big structures. And their big push is to…. create a war on things that work. (Okay, contributing to this post is the fact that the dishwasher in new to me place is a bizarre piece of cr*p that proclaims it’s “eco-wash!” on the side, in big letters. (Yeah, if/when we have money, it will be replaced, but I’ll be honest, all the last 5 dishwashers we bought were crap. the last good one we bought in 1991 and it was great.)

Also a war on people that work. Their regulations/push is to remove effective people from the market place and replace them with people who view work as a kind of sinecure. This is probably because their minds are organized much like those of 3rd world country peasants who do view work as a sinecure. Work comes with privileges, not obligations in their heads.

(And I’m not diving down that rabbit hole, but this probably has to do with self-esteem education and never being given a reality check.)

This is why they can come up with inanities like everything that makes you an effective worker being “white supremacy” or “privilege.”

A few years ago, I’d have said that their intention was not to make you miserable, but I’ve revised that since. The left has always hated people, but they used to think they did that “for your own good.”

I don’t think they do any longer. Instead, they’re finding excuses to make you miserable in the service of some greater good. The Earth-worship has been the biggest one, leading to crap doesn’t clean or cook, or– And now of course covidiocy. There is no excuse for barring treatments that weren’t killing anyone, even if you don’t think they’re effective. And there’s zero excuse to make everyone wear face masks. Or trying to push a vaccine with horrendous side effects for an illness that is not killing even 1% of the population. (Yes, yes, every death is a tragedy. But death is still a part of life. You can’t avoid all deaths. And you have to ask what the cost is to other lives — and deaths — to protect crazily against a not very dangerous cold. Look, the plague that ate my January wasn’t COVID, therefore it doesn’t exist, but it’s at least as nasty as persistent. These things happen.) Masks are utterly non-effective. There might be some point trying them, if this were the Spanish Flu. It would at least give comfort. But this ain’t the Spanish flu, and they’ve gone on too long for anyone but the utterly brainwashed to believe in them. So, they’re just humiliation cosplay. “You have to act like a moron, because it amuses me.”

Same with the recent totally insane push to force people to eat “plant based” and bugs.

We DO NOT HAVE A FOOD SHORTAGE. Sure, it was predicted by the same loons who thought we were overpopulated. BUT THERE IS NO FOOD SHORTAGE.

There is a shortage of food in the grocery stores, yes, but that’s a DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM (as it is btw in almost all Marxist regimes.)

If it were a straight up supply problem of too many people, too little food, the push for “plant based protein” (And none, none of them are good for you long term, sorry) and “eat bugs, peasant” might make some sense. (It wouldn’t actually, because both plants and bugs take more resources to grow/are more expensive.

But that is not the problem. There’s plenty of food. The problem is DELIVERY of that food to where people can buy it. Because the idiots in charge have borked energy production and are using eco-rules and covidiocy to make it impossible to transport things. Because all Marxists are crazy in the head about distribution. Marx thought it was “exploitation” to charge more for something you bought and transported, so they all think that. It’s like he was patient zero for stupid economic thought and it communicates by reading his barely coherent even after editing ramblings.

So, what’s the point of trying to force people to eat vegetable based — harmful in the long run, if only in terms of reduced vitality — or truly icky stuff, like bugs?

They hate you and they want you to be unhappy.

No, they really hate you and they want you to be unhappy. They’re taking away conveniences that allow you to live like the kings of old could only dream of. And they force you into humiliation play. And they want you to hit bugs and live in sewer pipes that are repurposed (yes, I’ve seen that) and–

So we’re waiting, still on that awkward stage. I think they already know they’re going to lose long-term. Subconsciously, at least, because their “religion” won’t allow them to admit it to themselves. Which only makes them crazier and more destructive in the long run.

This will end, one way or another.

But until then, what can you do?

You can live as well as you possibly can. Note my activities this morning. Yes, I could have heated a can of food, but if we have to eat — we do — and I’m feeling well enough to cook, I’m going to make our meal this evening fun and an experience that would cost a lot of money we don’t really have at a restaurant.

Now, because of how they’ve borked the economy, doing this kind of thing requires learning, but we live in the most information-rich and education-rich time ever.

Sure, the information streams are corrupted, but there are free videos on cooking tasty meals for all budgets and levels of issues with food, as well as for all levels of experience. The same for repairing machines (and some of you are getting into “how can I 3-d print parts to improve this machine.” GOOD FOR YOU) and for if you wish making fancy clothes, or whatever.

Now, your time is not infinite. None of ours is. but there’s usually something you can do every day, ranging from small to great, that will make you and those around you feel better and live happier lives.

I suggest you do it.

Multiple streams of income. Multiple streams of activity. Multiple streams of learning. As the man said, specialization is for insects.

Do that which sparks joy, even if it’s a little thing every day, like, oh, cleaning something really well, or doing an extra little step that makes something you have to do just…. better.

The idiots who are trying to control everything are profoundly sad people who have killed their own ability to experience joy, and now run around looking for ever greater power and ways to make others miserable. As though that would help.

Make them truly miserable. Do everything you can to make your life and the lives of those you love better.

Be creative. Be happy. Be joyful.

Go.

I’ve been fighting some kind of respiratory thing all year, and finally got meds on Friday. No, it’s not Covid, or at least those tests were negative (Thought he reliability of the tests is low, since three of us tested, you’d expect at least one positive.)

Other people who had this took two weeks to get better. To be fair, we are better, just not yet well. I suspect because we were so rundown from working on the house in CO and multiple trips back and forth.

Anyway, I’m trying to get done with Bowl of Red, and I thought some of you might not have listened to this yet, and might enjoy it. And yep, I’m being supremely lazy and echoing this interview at Mad Genius Club too.

If you need incentive: I say Moose and Squirrel at the end. ;)

Worldshapers Podcast interview.

Let me repeat that, in case you’re one of those people who don’t read the title of a post: If you buy only one book this year, forget about my poor efforts. Yes, I’m continuing the shifters and DST and the one that started with Deep Pink and there’s other stuff, but forget about my poor efforts!

If You Buy Only One Book This Year, Buy Cloud Castles by Dave Freer.

You may thank me later, at your leisure.

Cloud-Castles (Commission earned on this link)

Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.

Now, the skinny on the book. First of all my bias disclosure: I’ve known Dave Freer for what feels like my entire life. It’s not true of course. Only about twenty one years or so. But Dave Freer is the person who introduced me to Georgette Heyer; who got me to understand that there was nothing wrong with my plotting, I just didn’t know how to foreshadow; and who kept me this side of the sod when everything came crashing around my ears in 2003. (Okay, not true, but helped. My husband was also doing quite a bit of making me realize it wasn’t me, it was the industry.)

Used to be, when we were younger and life was not quite as crazy, that we spent my early morning and his late night telling each other horrible jokes. And by gum, some day Necrophiliac Duck Press will exist. Other than as a joke so stupid I’m not going to explain it. BUT for the record I’m chuckling as I write this.

That said, it didn’t take me very long to realize Dave Freer was one of the great, if not one of the greatest (Well, Pratchett was better…) writers of our time.

I also won’t lie and say there isn’t a slight cultural mismatch with Americans that means we have to work a little harder. Not that it’s insurmountable. What Dave Freer never got was enough publisher support to surmount it. In that, he’s not different from Pratchett who languished for ten years in low midlist in the US until he changed publisher and agent and THEN suddenly was very high list indeed.

However, like Pratchett, Dave Freer has a deep insight about the human condition that pays off your “slight more work” to get in the mind frame.

This book was given to me free (And yeah, I’ve also bought a copy, because I want it on my Kindle) in manuscript form, to read for Dave.

For perspective, this landed on me when I was so sick I could only stay awake for about an hour at a time, and keep a thought in my head for ten minutes. What one of you described to me as “I was so sick all I could do was passively stare at a pictures.”

And yet, the book grabbed me enough I wanted to know what would happen next. So when I was awake, I was reading and following as best I could.

It starts as an “innocent abroad” type of story. Some of the situations seem rather…. obvious. But they manage to be both hilarious and horrifying, so you limp along going “Oh my heavens.”

And you slot all the characters into easy, not demanding, stereotypical roles, including the very wealthy family you slot as robber barons.

And… and it changes on you. And the characters change on you. And they become achingly human and important, and people you know and care for deeply.

And then in the end you cry at the love affair. Even though you knew it was coming all along.

I’m going to repeat this, in case you fell asleep through my “still groggy from being sick” prose: IF YOU BUY ONLY ONE BOOK THIS YEAR, BUY CLOUD-CASTLES.

Now go read it. We do not hold any responsibility for your coming out of this speaking horrible pseudo-Australian slang. In my case it was transitory since holding a thought in my head is still an accomplishment post virus.

Go. Read. And if you think you should nominate it for a Prometheus award, I’ll say you’re probably right. ;)

I am heartily jealous of all of you, getting to read it for the first time.

Someone yesterday, in comments, expressed confusion that we “refused to accept” that China could do things perfectly with 40 year old technology. Leaving aside the fact that this wasn’t the claim that started the whole thing: that claim was that China had got the capacity to deliver a missile (or infinite missiles) anywhere in the world at will, while the US was stumbling about in pronoun land, there’s tons of reasons to doubt anything China says it’s doing or has accomplished. Some of them are cultural, some of them are — more importantly, because this will happen again in the future, just as a dog returns to his vomit — the problem of information inherent in all despotism.

Before I get started though, let’s talk about people who run around with their heads on fire screaming that China — or Russia, or Northern Elbowstan at the right hand of the devil — are so much more advanced than us, and all is lost, give up now.

There is a name for this, boys and girls.

I don’t know what anyone else is seeing, but I am, sure as shooting, seeing a war with China and possibly Russia. In fact, the soft coup that took place last year was orchestrated by China, for the purpose of just such a war. And it will bite them in the fleshy part of the butt, because America is not a top-down country, even if all the people the Chinese talk to also think we are (Never mind, they’re finding out differently) and if we get hit, even Zhou Bi-den, the serene Emperor Xi’s vice-roi will be forced to attack them. Because if he doesn’t, his survival will be measured in seconds. Sure, Obama survived the destruction of our embassy, but it was an embassy far away, in a troubled land, and the mass media still had more power than it does now (Or Obama would never have been reelected without fraud that everyone could see. Yes, he was elected by fraud, but it was hidden fraud. And a lot of people who should know better actually bought his image as a healer, even the second time around. Now those masks are well and truly off, probably forever.)

Anyway, in the event of a war with either China or Russia, the softening of the population by convincing us that all is lost, and we can’t catch up, and we’re decadent and soft compared to these stalwarts of military accomplishment — snort, giggle. It amounts to armed forces composed of little emperors, and armed forces composed of stumbling drunks, but okay — is doing the enemies work. It’s called “spreading fear and despondency” and frankly? I’ve had it Up To Here with it. Anyone who does that is not and has probably never been an America patriot. Or at least values their carping, whining and assumption of superiority over their country and their country’s safety. For the love of heaven, at least THINK before you open your big gob and do the totalitarians work for them, okay?

But Sarah, you’ll say, Heinlein compared us unfavorably with Russia (wrongly, as we found out, though he never did) and talked about how much more work we needed to do.

Yeah, he did. And that was different. It was different because we were in a long cold war. Yes, he was buying into enemy propaganda, part of it being because he was a man of his time, and he didn’t see the problems inherent in central control (of anything, really) and part of it was that he desperately wanted us to do more to defend ourselves. So he circulated, with his alarmist statements, a petition which the reader was supposed to sign, saying we’d bear any cost and do any work to supplant the Soviets. That last is a big difference from “We might as well surrender to the amazing might of China and Russia” and if you don’t see the difference, you need to go and think about it a good long while, and stop being open-mouthed gabies whose only use is getting us depressed and to give up. Unless, of course, you are actively being paid by the other side to make us so. In that case, I hope you get what you richly deserve, and a bit more on the side.

Now, why the heck do I have a problem with a rumor of a rumor about the amazing Chinese might and their laser focus on creating super-powerful missiles, and–

Dudes!

Btw the one of you who said their scientific papers are “workman like” except for the ones that are crap, and that’s the same proportion as everyone else…. How many of the workman like are papers stolen from other people, and possibly other times? No, seriously.

Look, China has the same problem with its science it has with its literature, and frankly with its commerce, its economy and its …. modernity.

My friend Dave Freer something like 20 years ago — feels like 300, which I almost typed — told me that the problem with China is that it’s a beautiful lacquered vase, hiding cracks all over, underneath. He was, as usual, right. (Depressing habit of his.)

What he didn’t say, possibly because it was obvious to him, just like mathematical answers are to younger son, who then struggles to explain how he got there, is that the lacquer is modernity. The cracks are China as China has always been: the China where Emperors pursued immortality, where all books got burned repeatedly, where they tried to ban grandmothers from telling stories, and where the individual counts for very little, and oppression lasts forever.

Look, this is not a racial thing. There might — or might not, who the heck knows. As a friend told me recently, genetic coding for personality traits does exist, but we are so far from figuring out how it’s done, that we might as well be kids playing with cans and string and trying to understand cell phones — be a higher quotient of agreeableness in the personalities of the many subraces that make up “Chinese”. Agreeableness in humans is that thing that makes it easier to go along to get along, and that makes a person a better employee, marriage partner, but also a more likely subject to totalitarianism. And it seems to be one of the traits that is coded for genetically, (Yes, that’s why you tend to have entire families of “only if you drag me” stubbornness and why parental curses of “you’ll have one just like you” tend to come true.) But again, how the heck would we know?

Because humans aren’t creatures just of genetics. They’re also creatures of culture. No, I don’t mean environment. Yes, that goes into the pot, too, but the strong part of the environment for any human is “culture.” We are each born and raised in a culture. And cultures behave much like a “collective unconscious” in that they implant in us all sorts of cultural and subconscious detritus, which we would realize are nonsense in the full light of day. But we never take it out in the full light of day, since most of these things were implanted before we could even talk. It’s what allows us to function in our birth culture after we learn to talk. Even those of us who are less people oriented do know to run from a certain tone of voice, etc. And there’s a much deeper programming. Even after you immigrate and acculturate and become super conscious about everything that went into coding your reactions, there are things you’ll not be aware are weird in what you do. If you’re lucky they’ll be small enough people in your culture won’t reject you based on them. (America is much less likely to reject anyone on minor things, simply because our regional variance is so large, and we move around so much. So, there’s a broad tolerance for “weird.” Which as it happens has other advantages, like allowing the really creative, who rarely fit in well, to create.)

BUT the operational thing is: China is a very very old culture, overlaid on others very very old cultures which were repressed and suppressed but probably not completely.

And until recently they were stuck. And might still be. “Attain a certain level/destroy it all and rebuild” seemed to be their thing.

They might or might not have invented most trappings of modernity (so what, the Romans invented the computer. There’s more to invention than merely a single act of “I made this.” To pull humans into modernity there must be tolerance (yes, you heard that) even if no reward for the maker, and also a way to propagate the invention) but it never took.

It never took, because over the millenia of struggle and stomping down, China found some answers to “what is life? what is human?” and more importantly “what works.”

Part of this is that they utterly rejected individualism (as a culture, not people) in favor of collectivism. And part of it is that what they come up with that works is …. adjacent enough to science to totally f*ck it up.

This might be a human characteristic, as our own science is evolving towards it. It’s a “the most important thing is to LOOK like science.” And “feels like” and “sounds like” is more important than results and experimentation.

As a friend mentioned, “harmony” is more important than truth. (So, you know, science by consensus.)

And all of these bits are very old. So old that its almost impossible to uproot them. Because even people who learned and worked in the west carry these undigested bits inside them, and to break them is like dying.

One obvious one is what a young man found in the Peace Corps: medicines that need refrigeration and are sent from the west will go bad, because to inject something cold into the body violates things the Chinese KNOW from their culture they should never do. (This wasn’t China, btw, but an adjacent culture, but yeah.)

We see this “if it looks like” it’s the same in a ton of things. Almost every case of chemical contamination of products like the one that killed cats and dogs, is because the substance substituted had enough characteristics of the right one that for Chinese culture they were the same. It’s not just trickery. It’s a very old way of thinking. If it were trickery and chicanery it could be extirpated from the process, and arguably they wouldn’t do it to themselves. But it’s not. It’s part of things learned so young that you can’t get them out of your brain. So it will happen again and again and again. It will happen in shipments to us (which is why it’s bloody stupid to have anything technological or medicinal made there) and it will happen in vitally important things they want to do.

Now layer upon that the information problem of all totalitarianism. ALL OF IT.

You can measure how badly the chain of command of a country is informed by how much freedom there is. It is also why the freer country will always win. No, it doesn’t matter the relative power. The war can turn into a centuries-long morass with a much less powerful country trying to win, but in the end freedom wins. (If they resist corruption by totalitarianism) because in the end freedom has better information.

This btw was never taken in account by the progressives of the middle 20th century who were enthralled by the idea of “efficiency” and thought centralized was always better. This led to a lot of assumptions, like thinking the Nazis were way better than they were. And the Russians too. And almost cost us the survival of the free world. We haven’t cleaned up that back brain assumption yet, though I wish it would die already.

The problem of totalitarianism is that it reduces the individual to an isolated unit standing before the state, trying to survive.

In survival mode, humans kill, steal, and definitely lie to survive.

If you add on top of that that the totalitarians of the twentieth century have and had a fairy tale view of what humans individually can accomplish if they try hard enough, well…

When your local komissar tells you that you must build an entire city overnight, you’re going to do cardboard cut outs, and tell him you did. And he is going to pass that along and not look too closely, because he too has a boss he must answer to, and there’s no forgiveness in the system. And he wants to survive.

It is said — ah — that Krushev knew that the Soviet Union had “nothing” when it came to missiles or space program (in terms of comparing to the US. We’re only now kind of finding out how many losses and ridiculous failures their space program hid. They only got as far as they did by not giving a heck how many humans they killed, but that only takes you so far.) I wonder if it was true, or if he was one of the duped. Because almost every time the one at the top of the pile is living in a fantasy land.

Even our current bastards, with the level of control they have, and the absolutely refusal to listen to or consider bad news, have created an entire parallel world in their heads, where things work, but only if they never come in contact with reality. (Which is why they’re so panicked. Because nothing is turning out the way they thought it would.)

How parallel and fairytale? Consider that she of the Occasional Cortex, fully steeped in their fantasy land, but not smart enough to realize how bizarre that sounds, made it part of the Green New Deal that “native americans” would be asked to help us learn to live in harmony with nature. I mean, forget that Amerindians were genetically overwhelmed and what remains now is something like 10% Amerindian and the rest European. Even if this knowledge of how to live in harmony with nature (snort giggle) were transmitted through genetics (snort, really giggle) the chances of anyone who claims a blood connection to Amerindian tribes having it would be …. very low. On top of that, there is no proof any of their ancestors ever lived “in harmony with nature” and there’s plenty of proof that like all other barbarian humans they were very bad for the environment. Then take in account she’s talking about fully grown, modern human beings, who grew up in the late 20th century. It’s mind-blowing and brought to mind Good Omens, and the Tibetans digging tunnels and popping up to tell us to live in harmony with nature. But if you scratch most of the Leftist would be elite, in their hearts of hearts they believe this utter bilge, and it’s part of their vision for the world.

Now, as I said, we all have fossilized bits of things learned too young to realize they were crazy cakes, but most of the time we are called on them.

The left here hasn’t been. Not for almost 100 years, because they controlled the media, the education and everything that could break that bubble. So it’s bad.

It’s far, far worse in China, where that repression had more teeth than social posturing and blacklisting if you stepped out of line.

Now am I saying that China is not dangerous? Uh. No. Just like I’m not saying that the left is dangerous. They are both particularly dangerous because in many ways they’re both involved in a desperate struggle for survival, one they’re terrified they’ve already lost. (Population in China’s case. Possibly the left’s too, but in a different way.) So they’re going to fight crazily and do very bizarre things which in the end will hurt them but will incidentally also hurt us. And since we have a vested interest in civilization going on (Barbarism sucks for humans) we have to fight much harder.

But if the last two years have shown us anything is that whatever they can achieve with science, even with the help of western researchers, is not that impressive. Yes, we would totally be all dead, if they could have managed it. But their bio weapon was a dud.

What wasn’t a dud was their psychological warfare.

And they’re counting on that. They’re counting on the custard heads of the west carrying word of their amazing might and power, to make us preemptively surrender. (And btw, if they managed to win this — they can’t — their attempts at empire would last negative amounts of time. It’s not going well in Africa. They are such an old culture, they can’t unbend enough to understand the rest of the world, which they culturally don’t consider human, anyway. So it backfires. Every time.)

That is their best hope, and their best offensive. It’s how historically they’ve won. A lot.

So think before you open your big, credulous maw. Think about what you’re saying, and what it will do.

The only way they can win is by making us give up.

Unless that’s what you want, consider your words carefully.

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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM M.C.A. HOGARTH: An Heir to Thorns and Steel (Blood Ladders Trilogy Book 1)

Morgan Locke, university student, has been hiding his debilitating illness with fair enough success when two unlikely emissaries arrive bearing the news that he is prince to a nation of creatures out of folklore. Ridiculous! And yet, if magic exists…could it heal him? The ensuing journey will resurrect the forgotten griefs of history, and before it’s over, all the world will be remade by thorns and steel….

Book 1 of the Blood Ladders trilogy, an epic fantasy with sociopathic elves, vampiric genets, and the philosophy students mixed up in the lot.

FROM SABRINA CHASE: Sky Tribe (Guardian’s Compact Book 3).

Engineers always find a way!

Jens-Peter Oberacker thought the secret research facility for magical craft would be peaceful and quiet–the perfect place to finish his engineering research paper. He didn’t expect a violent gang of thieves to have their eyes on the ships, or having to escape to save his life. Worse yet, he’s now being blamed for the entire thing!

On the run in the last, badly damaged ship, an unexpected encounter with a housemaid on a mansion rooftop saves him from immediate disaster. But why would she lurk on a roof at night? And where did she learn her utter fearlessness of heights?

Perhaps unwisely, Jens-Peter ignores these questions—and the housemaid’s unexpected knife—desperate to find someone, anyone, who can clear his name. And let him finish his paper…

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: The Gear Engages (Martha’s Sons Book 4)

It takes more than a single terraformer to start a new world.

The human colony on the lost world of Not What We Were Looking For faces fracture and schism. On one side of the river, the settlers from Earth remember what it means to live in a free society. In the Marss-controlled city, the governor cancelled elections long ago and strives daily to cement his grip on the inhabitants.
Thaddeus Dawe and the Hudson cousins, including the one who agreed to marry him, save the colony’s last terraseeder from the governor’s political grandstanding, and head for the secret northern enclave started by Thaddeus’ brother. But all Thaddeus’ careful planning takes a wrenching turn when not one but two parties race in pursuit.

Thwarted in his original goal, faced with repairing the consequences of what he does to escape arrest, and besotted by the discovery of newspapers, Thaddeus wrestles with new ventures and roles in which he dare not fail. He must save not only Earth’s microbial legacy but its knowledge base as well. Not to mention, he’s getting married.

But when the governor’s chief of staff decides to weaponize Thaddeus against both the city’s farmers and the newspaper’s publisher, Thaddeus must fight the governor’s attempts to steal the farmers’ land even as someone destroys everything Thaddeus himself tries to build. In the end, he must do what he can to save those his own betrayal put at risk.

Picking up where Under the Earthline left off, The Gear Engages is the fourth book in the gripping science fiction colonization series Martha’s Sons. If you like action, political machinations, and a driven hero, you’ll want to dive in heart-and-head first.

Pick it up now to join the fight for a lost world!

FROM ELLIE FERGUSON: Danger Foretold (Eerie Side of the Tracks Book 5)

Mossy Creek, TX is not your normal town. For more than a century, it’s been a haven to Others, people with special “talents”. Magic and shapeshifting are normal there. Others and Normals co-exist as friends, neighbors, lovers and family. But all that is in danger of being destroyed as an untold evil comes to town, determined to destroy not only those sworn to protect the town and all who live there but the very town itself.

Mossy Creek’s wayward children have returned, one by one, to town. Annie Grissom Caldwell, Quinn O’Donnell, and Meg Sheridan are back and determined to do all they can to stand between their town and the oncoming danger. Dr. Jax Powell, the Rogue, leads them and, in her role as one of the town’s Guardians, will do whatever it takes to keep everyone safe. But another of their group, Maddy Reyes, may very well hold the key to victory.

But can they trust her?

Do they dare?

FROM ROBERT BIDINOTTO: HUNTER: A Dylan Hunter Justice Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers Book 1)

“A masterwork of thrills and suspense.” –Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassins

#1 KINDLE BESTSELLER in “MYSTERIES & THRILLERS”

WHO IS HUNTER? WHO IS PREY? WHO WILL SURVIVE?

Award-winning true-crime author Robert Bidinotto makes his stunning fiction debut with a gripping vigilante justice thriller that has earned more than 500 “5-star” rave reviews from readers.

Two people, passionately in love.
But each hides a deadly secret.
He is a crusading vigilante, on a violent quest for justice.
She is tracking this unknown assassin, sworn to stop him.
Neither realizes the truth about the other.
And neither knows that a terrifying predator is hunting them both….

FROM KAREN MEYERS: 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 ROBERT WOERNER: The Facts of Roses.

Side A: Current events, the world is falling apart
Side B: Pop culture
Side C: A discussion about Cerebus

As always, little tidbits are included in-between each essay. With current events, they’re news headlines. With pop culture, they’re random jokes I threw in. The essays on each side are in chronological order, the headlines/jokes are in chronological order but the two do not mix.

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.

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: BABIES

Sure, okay. We’re decadent. Why not? I’ve been hearing it my entire life so it must be true (giggle and since I was born in the sixties, nooooo, it was totally not Soviet Agit Prop. That’s Un-possible. Our top men would surely see through that!) but let’s talk about what decadence is and what it looks like.

I’ll start with the image I picked, that of an incontrovertibly lost civilization. Weirdly, despite all the “decadence” of Greece and Rome what caused the ruins wasn’t that they slept with one too many unapproved partners (look, for Greece is that decadence) but that they were invaded, conquered and dismantled.

Most of the images when you look up decadence on pixabay are of…. Cuba. So, I’m going to guess that the definition is actually “invaded, conquered, dismantled” because that’s what communists do, even if they theoretically are from the same culture they’re taking over. Because their assumptions and goals are antithetical to any real human civilization.

Yes, sure. I hear any number of you gnashing your teeth on that side of the screen: the soft living, the snowflakery in — mostly — our universities, the demands that everyone cater to them, people being completely terrified of a bad cold. Oh, yeah, rampant crime and bad sexual morals. We’re OBVIOUSLY decadent. How can I make fun of it?

Very easily.

For one your gnashing of teeth rhymes eerily with Romans gnashing of teeth for millennia, long before Rome was anywhere near ripe to fall, and in fact while Rome was the bad ass of the world. Second, it echoes even more eerily all of the Christian explanations of why Rome fell, which curiously also echoed the Christian beliefs in the loss of paradise.

“Decadence is sinfulness, and then comes the end and only G-d can save you” is the narrative there. Which is fine, in a spiritual sense, and completely bonkers insane when it applies to cultures and history. But it served the nascent theocracy that replaced Rome quite well. One of the things it served was to explain why life was now much, much harder. Because you know, abundance is what leads to decadence. Life is too soft, you don’t work hard enough and …. bam! suddenly you’re in the middle of an orgy or worshiping a goat or something. Never you mind that the Romans pretty much did that all along, even when they were the badasses of the world. It’s really easy to shape the history of a fallen civilization so it suits the purposes of its successor.

Which brings us to the fact that Communism is a Christian heresy, complete with paradise — the supposed egalitarian and property-free pre-history (it’s also really easy to shape a period that left no account of itself that we can find) — until greed — and in one version PATRIARCHY and in another “whiteness” WTF that means — kicked us out of it. Now we must force the perfect human (Homo Sovieticus!) to emerge, so we can go back to living in caves in (sing it) perfect harmony. (Yeah.)

The complaints of decadence I heard as a young woman were mostly Soviet Agit Prop. Yes, yours were too. They ranged from incoherent to frigging insane. Some of it was a very old rhyming chorus: Americans were decadent because they were too rich. They had too many choices. They were too immoral. They never had enough, and would commit crimes to be richer. They ate too much, drove too much, slept in too comfortable a bed, and in general were DECADENT. Just like Rome before it fell. (If you realize the actual structure of Imperial Rome was closer to the Soviet Union’s, a plunder culture that could only survive by stealing, the whole thing will take your breath away with its chutzpah.

The fact that our (even though at the time it was your, as I was a foreigner at least in some ways) entertainment and art echoed these crazy accusations only made the whole thing stick, so even the right, American loving side (which anyway always has a vast side of puritanism in America. And speaking of puritans, let’s talk about what some of them did to…. turkeys? If weird sexual kinks are a sign of decadence, we’ve never been non-decadent) bought into it. I mean Spartacus (the novel) portrait of the decadence of Rome was meant to echo how bad America was. What’s that I hear? The author was a communist? You. Don’t. Say. I think I sent my shocked face out to be mended, but I won’t be a sec while I retrieve it.

In a more personal sense, my own family told me Portugal too was decadent. Why, unlike mom, I didn’t have to walk beside the train line to pick up enough coal for the family to cook. We had butane bottles delivered, even if they were super expensive, so we often cooked on a petrol lamp in the patio, if the weather was fine.

Decadent and soft living, I tell you. Sure, the bathroom was outside, but it was a bathroom, with running water included. JUST like Rome before the fall. How much longer till we started screwing Nightingales’ Tongues, eating Bear Sausages and electing horses to congress (I think in America we’ve been doing that all along, too. Though I’d prefer if every now and then we elected the front half of the horse.)

Yeah, so, I took packed and irregular trains to school, but I didn’t walk both ways. (Dad never tried to claim he did so in snow. Let’s be grateful for that, because given the rate of snowing in Portugal, I wouldn’t have believed him.)

But Sarah, you’ll say, we’ve really gone decadent, compared to our founders and their principles.

Decadent? No. I mean, look, guys, there was a miracle in (Filthy fuming) Philadelphia in how our founding documents were worded and that has kept us weirdly safe despite the rest of the world, and an evil conjunction of technology and ideology that has almost destroyed humanity several times (but not without our paying a price in liberty, and more on that.) But the people, themselves, were not some mythical giants of liberty. If you went one on one, without the media in between, more people are likely to understand individual rights and their importance now. Look, we have some experience of them. Most people back then simply didn’t.

Unfaithful to our founding and squandering liberty? Sure. But that’s because we’ve been invaded and propagandized by an enemy ideology for decades now. (Close on to a century.) Which, frankly, we’re holding up admirably against, because America retains a dose of horse sense that is the despair of the world. (And no explanation of why we send horse halves to congress, but that’s something else.)

It has bloody nothing to do with decadence and/or a falling in morals.

It has to do with having our problems diagnosed as the wrong thing, and more poison prescribed — which is part of what this post is about — because our institutions have been co-opted, taken over and weaponized by people who hate everything we are and do.

But SARAH! Screwing everything that moves! And letting criminals out of jail. Oh, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Sure. Look, Americans have always been extreme. We have extreme trends. We create extreme art. We even dress in extreme — meaning not all the same — ways. That is a foreign complaint about us, that has been going on a long time.

Sexual immorality? Yeah, there’s plenty of that to go around all over the world. Our media makes much of it, though honestly, part of what shocks me about leftists is how little joy they derive from their sins. If you’re not going to have fun screwing that turkey (we’re looking at you, Hillary) why do it? But they seem to have co-opted the French idea of all sex, no pleasure. It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for them.

Most of the most visible and atrocious behavior in America is either created, enforced or propagandized by those same institutions that have been taken over by the leftists. Yeah, I know, it’s touched some of your own families, etc. But that’s because public schools and mass entertainment are two of those institutions (Thank heavens losing power.)

As for divorce, which in America is almost the norm (Husband and I are weird as we were each other’s first spouse, and are chugging on at 36-almost-37 (for the Summer anniversary) years of marriage) there are tons of reasons for that, which have bloody nothing to do with culture or decadence.

Oh, sure, Hollywood normalized divorce, but 6 of one, half a dozen of the other, let’s talk about longer life spans, smaller families, dual careers, etc.

We were talking in a group the other day about how to stay married you must choose to grow together. (And even then transitions like from parents to empty nesters will try you) but no one mentioned how much harder that is, when each of you functions as an independent economic unit, in a different environment from your spouse, which was in no way the norm throughout history or most of the world even today.

While the feminists are crazy-go-nuts about how women weren’t allowed to work in the past (Also full of sh*t, but that’s par for the course) the fact is that throughout most of history people couldn’t choose not to work (Their idea of history is wealth Victorian families, and then the imaginary fifties.) But families usually worked together, or in the same field, or — as my grandparents did — in different crafts, but in the same house, so each was intimately acquainted with the other’s business/contacts.

Now, weirdly, this work at home brought on by the covidiocy might bring the later condition back, and slow down the divorce rate. Maybe. Because the major issue remains: our marriages are really, really long. Because we live long, healthy lives. (Eh, TPTB are trying to mitigate that too.) And being married for 25 years, happily is one thing. For 75 it’s a whole other ball of wax.

Fact remains most of the people I know who get divorced don’t do so because they must have some strange (oh, there’s always one or two, but those are usually super-young) but because their whole life just doesn’t “fit” or “work” anymore. (It could be argued the husband and I move, instead. But since I’m hoping not to move much for at least 10 or 15 years, I hope not.)

But! Soft. On. Crime.

Uh…. sure. We’ve seen that before in the seventies, haven’t we? And it does make all of society WAY more dangerous.

So– decadence?

Oh, bullshit. You tell me which Americans, i.e. every day people, are demanding that murderers be let go to save them from Covid.

No. This is more of TPTB which are not Americans (no matter where they were born) but Marxists trying to destroy America. I suspect their being ridiculous on crime (Truly? Public camping for feral homeless?) is their attempt to make us look decadent according to the propaganda of decades. I’m not sure they know why, either, or what it means except that Make America look decadent = ??????? = Communist paradise.

Yesterday at Legal Insurrection there was a post saying “If the left controls everything, why are they so scared.”

Well…. because things aren’t working out as they expected.

Look, — cues Sympathy for the devil — if they weren’t such despicable creatures, I’d feel sorry for them. Or at least for the ones who are true believers.

Like the rest of us they’ve been propagandized on the “decadence” of America and how we were falling and then…. the Soviet Union fell? Those who are older than I are still in shock, and the younger kids are convinced there was some evil capitalist trick.

To make things worse, they don’t think much, so they’re not cognizant of what’s happening.

You see, communism as we know it didn’t die as the crackpot brain child of Marx because it hit at a time when mass communication became a thing. And it’s an ideology that appeals to crackpot grifters who are likely to be “Journalists” and “novelists” and “media executives.”

So the left has been able to shape the narrative, particularly so after they took over education.

Which means everything they know — everything — is things that aren’t so.

And when things stopped working — oh, to an extent, and to some effect — in the late nineties, and the wheels really came off in 2016 they didn’t know what to do. They ran around in panic, doing crazy things.

I’ll admit the covidiocy has been…. breathtaking in its stupidity. What has most interested me is how the rest of the world fell for a con that was designed to f*ck with the elections in America. I’m still not absolutely sure if their leaders did it, because they too feel the terror nipping at their heels, or because they simply assume if Americans are doing something there must be a reason, because the future comes from America.

I can almost guarantee that for most of them it’s not “the great reset” or if it is each of them has a different view of it. (Mostly because in Europe none of their leaders really trusts the other countries.)

And yet, despite everything, the American people hunched their shoulders, lifted their middle fingers, and voted for Trump in numbers that made the left have to fraud in front of G-d and everyone, at the last minute.

And despite their lavish praise of ice-cream-Joe, we made Let’s go Brandon! go viral.

That’s why they’re in a panic.

And you could say they’re decadent in the ways that count.

What? Well, yes, there is a way you can go decadent, and the American public is at risk for it –though less now that public schools are losing power and parents are becoming aware of what’s been going on for fifty years or so, in those hallowed halls — which is where you lose the skills that made your ancestors great, so you can’t keep civilization going, no matter how you try.

The American public at large is at risk for this, to the extent our kids aren’t even being taught to read. But as Dave Freer said, years ago, America has lousy primary and secondary education. It’s the largely self administered tertiary that’s superb.

He’s not wrong. And the kids are all right. I’d like to claim my generation started the great re-learning, in some ways, trying to learn to do things “from scratch” and do for ourselves. The kids are even more like that. Oh, not all of them, but a good percentage. And again, the crazy lockdowns accelerated that. And dear Lord, what Americans will do for fun. I have more friends with backyard forges than makes any sense.

We’re all right. Sure, the overculture is trying to decadence us in the only meaningful sense — invade and destroy — but they’re losing. And they know it. Which is why they keep going crazier.

It’s going to get rough, but we’ll innovate, create and learn our ways out of it.

The overculture though– yeah, they lost the skills their ancestors had — none of them are a patch on FDR (And those of you who think of his time as the pinnacle of America should take a good look at it, then take an emetic, because it will make you sick.) He knew what he was destroying, even if his vision of glory was cockamamie and based on the idea that “mass everything” was the future.

They have no clue. They’re half propagandized, half indoctrinated and all ignorant.

They keep acting as if the media still provided them full coverage for their insanity (which has always been florid) and are always shocked they’re doing things out in the open, in the age of cell phones and peer-to-peer.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But the communist model depends — always has always will — on tightly controlled communications.

And that means they have already lost. The mop-up is just going to hurt US like a bitch.

It will hurt worse if we confuse ourselves with them.

Sure, they’re decadent. They have lost or never had critical skills their ancestors had. This is largely because — thanks to Mass Media and the charming commie habit of only hiring their own — they’ve had it soft. Being a “liberal” (What an interesting euphemism for Marxist!) was living life on the easy setting. They’re not ready for anything else.

They’re decadent. But what does that have to do with us?

They don’t understand us, and tell lies about us constantly. Some of them old, old lies from the Soviet Union propaganda (some of which was designed to keep the happy people of brutopia happy they weren’t rich.)

You’re not required to aid and abet them. In fact, if you want to avoid decadence, you’re required to do the opposite.

In the end we win, they lose. Because when they scream “decadent” they’re projecting.

It’s going to take all our skills, all our determination, all our invention. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t need Americans.

Go and get her done.

*Ken offered me a fiction story, and I think frankly you guys need something fun. Or maybe I do.
Now there’s a small problem: since I am blocked from posting at Facebook for seven days (for joking with a friend over his truly horrible pun. FB decided it was “coordinating harm” — note Statist Josh didn’t complain.) I can’t propagate his story. Could you guys do so? – SAH*

Glutton By Ken Lizzi

The first baked potato went down nicely. It always did. Loaded with all the toppings, the pillowy starches glistening with melted butter, white hummocks of sour cream speckled green and brown with chives and bits of bacon. He chased it with another before switching to a plate of au gratin for a change of pace, just warming up for the main event: the steaks. He figured he’d have one of each cut, maybe experiment with different levels of doneness. A delay occurred between the New York cut – rare, dripping red with succulent juices, nearly fork tender – and the medium rare filet mignon. He filled it with another appetizer, shrimp cocktail, each little coral-hued morsel slurped down noisily. So good. At intervals he swilled a glass of red wine – a chateau something-or-other, he could never be bothered to remember the appellations, simply trusting the sommelier, waiter, or bar-tender to recommend the appropriate accompaniment – swishing each mouthful vigorously to dislodge any stray bits of protein or strands of vegetable matter. The top sirloin, medium, he found a trifle tough, but gobbled it down contentedly enough with a few healthy dollops of steak sauce for lubrication. He knifed through the medium-well chateaubriand, which he found tolerably tasty though he suspected a certain amount of flavor had been cooked out. He waived away the well-done bone-in rib eye not out of satiety but boredom. He could still eat. He still had room. He always had room.

He called for the desert cart and indicated that each selection would be acceptable. While waiting for the server to deliver the crème brulee, vanilla cherry tart, chocolate three ways, and apple crumble ala mode he retrieved from the briefcase beside his chair what was, despite his personal views about the status of the steaks, the actual main course of the meal. Sealed into lubricated condoms were the broken down components of what he assumed, though certainly had not ascertained or inquired about, was a handgun. He examined the dimensions of each. One or two looked a bit tricky but still within his capabilities. A couple bottles of brandy or port might help relax his jaw and throat muscles enough to get the parts down. Even with the three bottles of wine and the pair of aperitifs he had only the barest buzz going. Inebriation wasn’t as impossible for him as a full stomach but it still took some doing.

Assisted by fortified wine and the assortment of desserts he earned his living, the tangible evidence of some malfeasance or other disappearing permanently.

#

Marcus Unger was a glutton; a man who’d never experienced a surfeit, heartburn, indigestion, or even an uncomfortable sense of bloat. He didn’t appear out of the ordinary. If anything he was on the thin side. His childhood appetites were certainly normal but his anxious parents, with the assurance of exasperated, even disbelieving pediatricians, wrote off his prodigious consumption as a healthy appetite and a robust metabolism. Marcus himself grew up considering himself entirely normal. It wasn’t until after high school that the ribbing and half-serious queries of his friends ginned up enough curiosity within him to consider making his own inquiries. That curiosity he shelved after a visit to the family general practitioner and glimpsing an estimate of the price of consulting specialists. The unsolved mystery cost him no sleepless nights; complaisance was second nature, one might even grant it primacy.

It wasn’t until a stint in the Navy – the armed forces seeming to Marcus the path of least resistance – that another impetus to investigate his gift arrived. He was on leave in San Francisco, wandering aimlessly through Chinatown, grazing through one buffet after another. Passing by a narrow storefront his attention was drawn by a hand-painted sign claiming that a certain Doctor Wong, practitioner of ancient and mystic Eastern healing arts could diagnose infallibly, among other things, “digestive tract ailments of whatever nature, source, or symptom, no matter how esoteric or unknown to Western medicine.” While Marcus did not consider himself to be suffering from any ailment, he was willing to concede that his symptoms were uncommon.

To a tinkle of little brass bells he entered a cramped chamber of wonders, a dim space packed with oddities and large glass jars and carboys whose contents were revealed by pasted-on calligraphied labels. Not, of course, in English. From behind a beaded curtain emerged a venerable, bespectacled figure in black silks who seemed composed primarily of white beard. Marcus submitted himself to examination by Dr. Wong (for it was the great man himself) an examination consisting primarily of prodding by a stiffened, arthritic finger, grunts and mumblings from deep within the beard, and about a dozen cups of fragrant tea.

It was thus that Marcus learned the facts that were to set his feet on a new and utterly novel career path. “Only a small portion of your stomach opens to your intestines,” Dr. Wong informed him. “The majority of your stomach is a conduit, a portal to a place located nowhere in Heaven or Earth. Little of your meals are digested. Most goes – elsewhere.”

Marcus did not immediately formulate a plan upon absorbing this information. Initiative, drive, ambition were foreign to him. His was not the entrepreneurial spirit. It was not until after he’d completed his active service that he stumbled upon his future. He was lazing one evening at the home of his friend and purveyor of marijuana when their repose was interrupted by the peremptory demands of the police for entry. Recalling the words of Dr. Wong, Marcus volunteered to dispose of his friend’s stash. By the time the police gained entry he had gobbled down all traces of contraband. A toxicity analysis of blood, urine, and saliva samples that he acquiesced to provide were free of any taint of cannabis.

Word spread. Demand accumulated for his services from a class of clients possessed of uniquely compelling needs to dispose of items quickly and irretrievably. It was not an overnight success of course. A certain degree of distrust had to be overcome from a category of humanity that already tended toward suspicion. But satisfied customers who appreciated Marcus’ incuriosity and nearly bovine complaisance served as valuable word-of-mouth advertisers.

And so Marcus Unger began plying spoon and fork rather profitably. His contractual stipulations were few: cash payment and an evening at a fine – and discreet – restaurant. First time clients were often surprised at how similar the two outlays turned out to be. But they did not complain. Marcus delivered. He swallowed numerous firearms, broken down into manageable components. He downed thumb drives, hard drives, ledgers, wallets, footwear with distinctively worn tread patterns. He didn’t care what. He only noticed the makeup of the main course incidentally to the act of consuming it. Once he gulped down, wedged into the filling of cannoli, what he suspected were human fingertips. It did not even give him pause. The mascarpone was smooth and delicious, and the prosecco he washed it all down with was fruity and delightfully effervescent. Life was a banquet and the courses never ceased.

#

Marcus leaned back in his chair, conjuring up a belch of satisfaction in celebration of an excellent meal and a job well done. He beamed with his accustomed contentment, a svelte Buddha. The fee should keep his feedbag full until the next contract came along.

He belched again and frowned. That belch was not artificial. Strange. When he swallowed air it simply vanished down the rabbit hole along with most everything else he consumed. Why –? His abdomen convulsed. A discomfort settled in his gut and spread. That was new and he didn’t like it one bit. A hint of pain followed, accompanied by an equally novel sense of unease. Complaisance, long unchallenged, was dethroned, usurped by accelerating dread. So many years of dumping things through to someplace else. And now…. Something stretched within him, something thrust upwards.

He gagged, then transitioned to sustained, agonizing retching, horrified as he realized that the conduit was not just a one-way passage after all.

End

The Semi-Autos and Sorceryseries is available from Aethon Books. It is also available, along with most of my published works, at Amazon. Keep current with my nonsense at kenlizzi.net.