Recently I’ve been hearing of a con almost every other week. Some, in the still very early stages of planning have even contacted me and asked if I wanted to be a guest of honor, and attending guest, or if I knew of someone they should be inviting.
All of these cons either claim they want to be Liberty con and/or they were inspired by Sad Puppies, specifically the idea that science fiction (and stories in general) could and should be fun again and not some doleful “literary” exercise approved of by college professors and looked down upon by everyone else.
Meanwhile what I’d call the history structure of science fiction fandom has been captured by the hard and insane left and has at this point — through exploiting the control mechanisms put in to avoid a popular revolt — gone to China, probably — due to the rules — permanently. It’s also merrily nominating only Chinese authors, and the happy figleaf of “maybe these are great books is bs”. First, we know the Chinese government is financing voting memberships and if you think they’re great SF readers…. well, there’s no help for you. And for another, if they were good we’d already have found them and translated them.
But the loss of the Hugo, which at any rate had been tainted with literature and the academic version of missionaries trying to get geeks to wear pants and not on our heads where we prefer them. Or if you want it plainer: for a lot of years, with rare exceptions, the Hugo had gone to boring stuff and become a “do not buy” signal. So it’s not a horrible loss.
OTOH the little cons waking up everywhere are a sign of hope and that the fandom itself isn’t dead. It’s groups of friends here and there (the expected attendance at these cons so far is fifty to a hundred people) going “You know what, after the covidiocy I miss cons, and we don’t ALL fit into liberty con. How about…”
For a year or two they’ll be unorganized and frankly pretty terrible at it. But they’ll get better and they will grow.
And as for our polity, our beloved Democratic Republic, which has been sold to China by the execrable Fraud In Chief Of The US, which is why they installed him in power by massive, unremitting fraud? (Look, not in dispute. They wrote a Times article bragging about doing it!)
Well, if our courts won’t act, and all the instruments of our sovereignty have been pulled away, there remains one bastion: us.
Right now our only hope is to do thinks locally and at state level. Let the feds spin in their own filth, and do what needs to be done.
OTOH there are things we can’t do. Sure, Texas can get other states to help it protect the border. But a lot of the border states had their elections frauded. I’m looking at you Arizona. Precisely, I’d guess, to facilitate the invasion. So, what to do?
Well…. the cities could start coming up with plans.
In fact at all levels, it’s going to devolve to the individuals, the municipalities, the states. Because the Federal government is not only bankrupt. It’s gone crazy. What it does is not only NOT what we need, but it’s often actively against us.
So, it’s down to the equivalent of a few fans and their friend group.
And as you know I think we’re going to be all right. Sure, there’s difficulties. There’s things that don’t scale super-well. But America is the land of innovative solutions, and we don’t know what’s possible until we do it.
The more they tighten the hand of officialdom, the more we escape between their fingers, like sand.
And sand has an advantage over water. We chafe all those who hold too tightly.
Sure, there will be rough patches. We can all feel one approaching. But in the end we win, they lose.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
When the Roman legion sweeps through the farmlands of Syria, Sophie loses everything: her home, her family, even her freedom. Changes to the marriage laws under Caesar Augustus bring her to the attention of Procerus, a Roman soldier stationed in Judea. Procerus is looking for a wife. Sophie’s looking for a way forward. Neither are looking for love. But will they find it anyway? A historical romance set in the sweeping drama of ancient Rome.
Michael Trehearne sensed his difference from other men, but he little knew he was a changeling of the only race able to conquer the stars!
Leigh Brackett’s 1951 novel, which first appeared in Startling Stories, not only prefigures books like Alfred Bester’s The Stars, My Destination and movies like Joss Whedon’s Serenity, it also makes a strong case for open source software and free culture in general, decades before either of those terms were coined.
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.
The gunslinger. The rancher’s daughter. They share the same dangerous secret – magic.Silas Vendine, mage and bounty hunter, follows a trail of strange, dark magic to the remote Wildings town of Bitterbush Springs. There, he lands in the middle of a violent feud – and discovers that a local rancher’s daughter is hiding a deadly secret.Lainie Banfrey has been taught all her life that wizards are unnatural creatures with no heart and no soul. If anyone finds out she has magical powers, she could end up on the wrong end of a hanging rope. But when a gunslinger named Silas Vendine arrives in town, searching for the man who has brought Bitterbush Springs to the brink of open warfare, his power calls to hers, and she agrees to help him.
A journey to Mars… by zeppelin? Seven German university professors travel to Mars and find a utopia far in advance of civilization on Earth. The problem is that it is almost too perfect and the Martians’ tolerance of their presence may be growing a little thin. A long-lost classic of early science fiction, popular enough in its day to be reprinted in several editions, has now been translated into English for the first time. Originally published in 1909 at the height of popular enthusiasm for the existence of canals on Mars, the story vividly illustrates then current ideas about life on the Red Planet and how the presumed canals were constructed. The science is sometimes dubious, the author had a message of social reform he apparently wrote the novel to convey, the story is more contemplative than adventure — but it is a product of its time, often quaint and always inventive with occasional flashes of humor and satire. There are also genuine science-fictional moments with stopovers on Earth’s moon and the asteroid Eros. This edition includes the 1914 sequel, From Mars to Earth, which completes the story begun in the first book.
Life is much better when nobody is trying to kill you.
Sara Hawke, now a university professor, has had five years where nobody was trying to kill her…if you don’t count her course load’s grading. Five years of watching over and helping raise orphaned young dragons.
Her comfortable life comes to an end when she’s attacked by Eastern Dragons, once again—this time, though, her attackers aren’t in the ruling elite. She’s in for the fight of her life again, only this time, Mordred is on the other side of the world, and she must first reach his side before they can succeed.
The running fight to survive brings to light old treachery, blackest magic…and new hope and new allies.
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America’s first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
EDITED BY LES JOHNSON AND KEN ROY, WITH A STORY BY DAN HOYT COLLABORATING WITH MARSHALL HOYT: The Ross 248 Projecthttps://amzn.to/3BJ6g7A
HUMANITY’S HOPE FOR A BETTER FUTURE AT A NEW STAR
A bold journey into a future where humanity and its children travel to a new star where they must overcome the unexpected challenges on the exoplanets that await them—or die trying.
Traveling to the stars will be difficult, but not, perhaps, the most difficult part. What about when we get to another star? What then? Will the planets be immediately habitable? Not likely. Will those who undertook the journey be able to easily turn around and come home if they don’t find “Earth 2.0?” Almost certainly not. Therein the lies the challenge: Finding worlds that are potentially habitable and then taking the time, perhaps centuries, to make them compatible with Earth life. They will encounter mysteries and unexpected challenges, but the human spirit will endure. Join this diverse group of science fiction writers and scientists as they take up the challenge of The Ross 248 Project.
Drunken mermaids — a clan cursed to become crows — a magic book that even the Nameless Necromancer fears — and more in this reprint collection of thirteen stories and a poem.
Current events as the world is ready to burn. This material is edited and polished from the monthly booklets and weekly pamphlets, but it’s a good view of what’s going on. This was all planned-in-advance against us. It’s all falling together at a predetermined time, the middle of May. I don’t pretend to have an explanation, I just analyze and identify as much as I can.
A Go-To Manual for One of the Fastest Growing Shooting Sports, With Invaluable Information for Both Newbies and Seasoned Hunters
Hunting with handguns has seen a huge growth in popularity in recent years, with hunters from all walks of life picking up the sport. In Handgun Hunting, author Kat Ainsworth examines all the game one can hunt in North America, from bears and deer to rabbits and coyotes. In each chapter, she touches upon such topics as:
The habits and habitats of each game animal
Recommended firearms and cartridges
Techniques and tactics
Shot placement
Game edibility
And much more
Aside from analyzing each game animal and the tactics required to take it, Ainsworth gets into skills and drills, care and maintenance of the different platforms, plus the pros and cons of various holsters and scabbards. There is also advice on building your own handguns and creating your own loads; it is easier than many people think! With information useful to beginners and veterans alike, Handgun Hunting sets the new standard for this challenging sport.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
When I was a hardcore, Libertarian Party Libertarian, back in the nineties we had a joke that riffed on the “evil Kirk” shtick of moving out of your parents basement and taking your posters off the wall… It went like this: The Democrats want to be your mommy; the Republicans want to be your dad. We want you to move out of the basement and get a job.
I hadn’t thought of that in years. But this morning, in the Discord group, someone posted a small snippet of a video about how Communism is the politics of toxic femininity. They’re not precisely wrong, but it doesn’t quite fit.
And then it hit me. Yeah, we all know that communists claim fascists were on the right, because Stalin said so. In fact they’re both flavors of socialism and more like each other than not. Which both makes the visceral hatred completely understandable and makes the absolute certainty they’re opposites bizarre.
Yes, sure, some of it is the press and historians who of course wholeheartedly believe Stalin. But that’s not all.
And finally it hit me. You see, I’m now on the other end of that meme. My kids are raised and though they both did live in the basement for a period when they both needed financial help they never really lived in the basement in the full sense (and we had an independent basement apartment in the former house, to be fair, with its own entrance, though they often used the inside one when it was dark, because there were bears in the neighborhood and they were less likely to be up front in the light. Um… real bears. Brown bears to be exact though one looked big enough to be a grizzly.)
However, even now, with them just over and just under thirty, I have to constantly rein in toxic motherhood. Which to be fair is just standard culture in Portugal, so that makes it harder.
There is a fine line between being supportive, and being a family that looks out for each other — the good portion of large Latin families — and being … well, the word for being related to each other in Portuguese is to “belong to” each other. And at least when i was growing up, regardless of what the law said, the police would haul kids who were of age but unmarried back to their families if they “ran away.” And even now, parents have an amount of say over the household and effects and financial decisions of their married children that appalls me. One thing is to give advice, another to go over and redecorate someone else’s house because you disapprove of their taste, for instance. But it is permissible in Portugal and probably, honestly in much of the world. Romeo and Juliet makes more sense in those cultures, because the idea of the kids rebelling and choosing their own partner retains the frisson of shock, even if — even in Portugal — parents haven’t chosen the kids’ spouses for a long time.
So my temptations might be higher than other people’s. And part of the problem is that I really like the kids, and enjoy their company. No. It is a problem because I want to spare them pain and suffering. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I made. Etc.
Which is fine if what I’m doing is facilitating things, but not if it is browbeating them into complying, or somehow forcing them to do what I think best. (I can’t really do that. They’re both bigger than I. But this is an analogy.) And even on the facilitating things, you have to be careful, because if you make your place/support a feather bed, they’ll leave forever in the basement, never do anything, never live their own lives.
Such style of mothering in the Freud obsessed seventies was called Castrating. This is not wrong, because it is a form of extreme mothering, that accepts no limits and doesn’t understand when the child should by rights separate.
And we all know about the extreme forms of Fatherhood. You have the right of life and death over your children, and you order them about. You expect them to be perfectly regimented and go to extremes of heroic obedience to make you proud.
If you think about it, the two competing forms of socialism — national socialism and international socialism (the second is a lie. It was more Russian national socialism. The only thing international about it is that everyone was supposed to revere and adore mother Russia.) — were actually Toxic Fatherhood and Toxic Motherhood.
Neither of them recognized that adult human individuals could make their own way or choose their path, or even earn their own livelihood. Or at least choose what they worked for and how much they’d be paid. Or what they could work at. Essentially the essence of adulthood is to fend for yourself and make your own decisions. Both forms of socialism deny people the ability to do that. (Even the soft socialism of “social democracy” that Europe indulges in is Toxic Motherhood with a happy face. It’s “But dear, you shouldn’t have knives. They’re nasty. Little boys don’t need to defend themselves. Let mommy do.” But the police still stands by to disarm you. So it’s a distinction without a difference.)
However, they’re different in how they do it, and what they expect you to do.
The supposed international socialism sells itself as being so caring. Mommy adores you. She wants to smother you in kisses. No, no, you must not be better than your little sister. It hurts her feelings. So you shouldn’t walk because she can’t. Is it really so much effort to crawl? See how happy it is when you also crawl.”
It uses weaponized empathy to convince you that no only shouldn’t you struggle away — the government is only doing what’s best for you — but that you owe everyone around you handicapping and even hurting yourself in order to make others happy, or even no embarrassed, or not worried or….
Socialism of the kind that viewed itself on the way to communism is a blanket with happy faces snuggling everyone till it smothers them.
In the end, because humans tend to not do well in perpetual infantilization, it always turns on humans and starts killing them batch lots — yes, you ARE the carbon they want to eliminate — rather than letting them go.
It’s the jealous control of bad mothers. “If I can’t keep you, no one can have you.” and “You’re better off dead than outside, in the cold cruel world without mommy.” and the vicious defense of she bear with cubs when she decides you’re too nasty to be hers, and you’ll hurt her precious babies (how the left behaves to anyone else.)
It is the “love” that fills cemeteries — Canada is now considering euthanasia for the homeless, because after being coddled into uselessness they’re useless. Making them shape up would be cruel, but killing them is humane and now they’ll be safe forever — and wrecks civilization.
It also explains the communists/socialists/greens/democrats love of inefficient forms of energy over safe and clean nuclear. And their hatred of space. They want to push us to an earlier phase where we’d be better controlled, stop us walking away from them, keep us bound in the nursery. Because mommy loves baby soooooo much. Baby would be better off dead than without mommy.
The Fascist/National socialist model, which to fair is slightly more functional than the international socialist model, in the sense that toxic fatherhood allows some form of adulthood, or at least the appearance of it, and which only exists now in former communist societies (the poor things, they have no idea how to grow up) like Russia and China, is … well…. toxic, but in a very masculine way.
The National Socialists want you to toughen up and be a credit to them. They brag about you all the time. Both socialist regimes expect vast amounts of praise of themselves by their captives, but national socialism praises the captives too. Provided they’re perfect, of course. Which means the people better tell the government what it wants to hear or there will be spankings.
There is usually much talk of how tough the people are. Taking away of “soft” things like excess (by the father’s estimate) food or clothing, but not to make you infantile, but to toughen you up. There is much emphasis on being machine-like and perfect. And of course being good fighters in defense of the country/polity. Not yourself, because you really belong to father-state.
You’re allowed to own things, instead of those being distributed so no one feels bad, but you have to use the things the way father government wants or they will take your things and give them to someone more worthy. (So, you really don’t own them, really.)
You’re supposed to perform and do things, but only as Father Government dictates, and in exchange Father government will give recompense for being a good boy (you’re all supposed to be good boys, since women are fairly irrelevant in this. So even if they say they’re for women, and the heroic women who have children, the women are supposed to behave as disciplined, production-and-results obsessed men.
National socialism, Father chooses the objectives, and you’re supposed to fall in line and perform to the best of your ability for the glory and the honor.
The truth though is that both these forms of toxic parenthood are more alike than not, no matter that they think they are absolutely different from each other.
Left untended they both end in mass deaths, to cull out those bad children who aren’t extremely compliant to their parents’ will.
And if they go on long enough they both end in the infantile enslavement of feudalism.
Like the more literal toxic motherhood and toxic fatherhood, they both should be shunned and reproached. Because both are evil and both deny humans the right to be … human and serve their own lawful individual purposes.
Both need to stop and let humanity move out of the basement and off to its destiny.
This post is a follow up on yesterday’s. Sort of. I mean, you don’t need to read yesterday’s to get this, but you might want to read it afterwards.
Part of the reason I wrote yesterday’s post is that I can feel a great disturbance in the force. There is turmoil ahead. The image is a shovel tearing into an anthill, but it’s not exactly right, because it’s not so much a destructive as an upside-downer event. A rebuild.
To the ants, and us, though, it won’t feel that different, so it will do.
Look, this is not new. The second half of the 20th century has been a wild ride of catastrophic innovation. I realized at one point, while talking to my kids about what they intended to study and why, that almost none of my friends, not even those with doctorates, worked in the fields they had trained for. The only exception was medical doctors and one biological doctor/scientist, but even there a lot of them have other careers going in parallel.
I don’t know if that’s because I’m an Odd among Odds. I mean, that’s always possible. We tend to assume our circles are the norm. Except that the wider circle is like that too, and…. so on ad infinitum. In fact, when we hear from a friend or acquaintance we haven’t heard since our twenties, and they’re still on the path we left them, and doing the same thing. Because that’s the exception. The normal is… bizarre, and often well-nigh unbelievable, since a lot of it are against known skills or characteristics.
Without giving away anyone’s stories, picture us, with Dan’s phone. and Dan going “Uh uh, so…. okay, Mike became a mountain guide. Wait, wasn’t he the one so afraid of heights he couldn’t stand on a step stool? Uh. He’s still like that? But he controls it for mountain climbing? Uh!” We exchange a puzzled look.
Now imagine that a couple hundred times over, and you have the picture. The shock is more “Oh, Mary who wanted to be a nurse is a nurse? Has been a nurse for thirty years? WOW. Odd.”
There are reasons for it. One of them is that, given how long we live now, and it grew by a third in the late twentieth century (yes, I know the average is creeping down, but look, to an extent that’s no real, because it reflects people living very risky lifestyles enabled by prosperity, etc.) Let’s remember the original retirement age was 60 for social security, and they thought they’d make out like bandits (the government) because most people didn’t live that long, and the ones who did died in two or three years maximum, except for a statistically irrelevant number.
But we live longer. More importantly, we live healthily longer. The first eighty year old I met, I was 14 and he was a wreck. Last time i saw my dad he was over 90 and he wasn’t THAT MUCH of a wreck. Or anything close to it. Unhealthy, well, at that age goes without saying, right. BUT NOT A WRECK. Still functional and doing things. Yes, I know it varies greatly. But I met my first 80 year old at 14, and now when friend dies at 80 we don’t say “so early?” but we often think it. 90s is now the more “fitting” time of death than 80s. Though of course it happens in the eighties with high frequency.
We live longer healthy lives, and in fact my dad retired at 80, and husband has worked with 80 year olds who got bored in retirement.
What does this mean? Well, we choose our career absurdly early, and expect it to last life-long. That’s half of it. A lot of us come to not like/loathe what we loved as kids. Now, I’m not suggesting the training to be self sufficient should be later. Let the kids grow up. Just …. we probably shouldn’t going for graduate degrees before 32 or so. Because we will change. Or at least a significant subset will.
The problem of course is that our legacy educational system is still geared for people who live till sixty just about, and therefore if you don’t pursue your education early and hard and to the extreme you want to take it, people will look at you funny, which in the case of people who work for college admissions might mean you don’t get in.
So we’re stuck taking a gamble on what we’ll do professionally for the rest of our lives, often signed, sealed and delivered by our early to mid twenties, though these times — and I wonder if it’s an unconscious attempt to fix it — stretching to our early thirties.
Anyway, the second leg of it, and the reason rarely stay in the same professions is that the things are changing much much faster. We’ve been caught in an era of catastrophic change since at least the fifties, maybe the sixties. It’s called catastrophic change, because even when the innovation is for the good or does good things, the speed of it has catastrophic results for the people caught in its path.
Sure, electrical light was life altering for candle makers, but not really. Because it took so long for places to be electrified (and there had been a false start first with gas lights) that the industry just slowly dwindled until it was the size needed for “candles for church” and “candles for pretty.”
I mean, even traditional publishing is being hit faster and harder than that in the last 20 years, and it’s still a manageable change, it just s-l-o-w-ly dwindles and finds niche places.
But the phone companies…. well. Yeah, some have gone cell, but…. It was hit hard. I honestly don’t know how many lines remain but it’s not many. And say a prayer for those people who’d just trained to become phone booth maintenance men.
Okay, I’m only part joking. Most of the catastrophic change you can’t see, nor I either, because it’s not even a whole industry (though I’m sure people in the comments will give me examples of that, too) but it’s “how things are done” within existing industries. Many ways of doing things, and highly specialized things people went to school for years and trained for are being swept away over night by a combination of technology and the idiocy of the last three years sending a lot of people home to work. (Not to mention the stupidity of showing to restaurant and small shop owners that they could be destroyed like that, making it a high risk to even begin to start such a business.)
I’ve been noticing it, back of the things: lots of friends getting laid off. Entire departments disappearing. Companies swallowed. People finishing degrees and having trouble finding jobs because they specialized in something that objectively doesn’t exist, really. Though it did five years ago.
We’re of course trying to help our own.
But it goes deeper than that. You see, centralization doesn’t work very well, but everything has been centralized and all credentials for most jobs are central, as are accreditation for the institutions, etc.
It never worked very well, but the utter horror events could be hidden, so we thought it worked well and was “so efficient.” But it never was. And the same openness and ease of communication that’s been showing the flaws of the system has hit every institution, enterprise, avocation, job, etc. hard. Really hard.
The short hand for this is “everything is broken” from hiring to promoting, to everything in between, in most fields, including STEM ones. It’s frankly a miracle that things more or less work and more people haven’t died from the necessary fields not working.
Sometimes the image I get from this is the coyote, just off the cliff, running on air, but he’s still suspended because he hasn’t noticed.
“Everything is broken” and this effect is exacerbated by a lot of companies, not to mention schools or government appendages going “woke” in a futile effort to appease the unappeasable and also having propagandized themselves into believing it’s the wave of the future.
This generally leads them to run off the even mildly competent for the stupid who can say the slogans really loud.
Also it means that for many people their dream job, for which they trained and which they thought they’d work in the rest of their lives is now something to get away from. But they have nowhere to go.
I’ve talked of this problem here before. If you have your identity tied up with your work, particularly if you’re good at it and have justifiable pride in your achievements, finding yourself professionally homeless which is worse than unemployed can break you. Particularly in late middle age. (I call it “unemployed middle aged man syndrome.” Though a lot of the sufferers are women, there are fewer, because mostly men invest everything of themselves in the job.)
As this accelerates and it is accelerating both through innovation and through the sheer stupidification (totally a word) of work places and fields, more people find themselves in this position.
I don’t want people to be stuck. I don’t want our people to be hopeless. And honestly, we need to thrive, so we come out of this ready to rebuild.
Do I have pointers? No. But I have suggestions.
1- Before it happens, be aware it’s happening to a lot of people that thought it was unimaginable, or that they were indispensable. So…. Don’t be paranoid, but watch your six and sniff the air. Be aware that things could change in a moment.
2- Prepare yourself mentally. Understand it is not your fault. It’s happening to you, sure, but just because you’re in the path of the shovel ripping up the anthill, it doesn’t mean it’s your particular fault.
3- Help others now, and extend your network. Most jobs, in our falling-trust society are now obtained by word of mouth and friendly push. It’s also possible this is due to online application systems being worse than Kleenex soaked in pepper juice.
4- be aware of where your field/expertise is going, and of possible “indie” opportunities, if it’s even remotely possible. So, if you’re say a widget maker, consider becoming profficient n 3-d printing, thinking through licenses, etc. For writers, publishers, editors, etc. this track is now well established. Yes, there are opportunities in indie. And you should find them with minimal effort. A little more effort is needed to figure out how to make more money than you do in trad, but this is also possible to find with a little research. These are still the wild frontier days, but now the trails are marked.
5 – Help others you see coming up behind you. This believe it or not will help. For one, you might stumble. For another, making the alternative healthier and stronger when a system is on the verge of dying makes everyone more secure.
6- Be ready to pick up a completely different field, and/or find a way to make a living in the gig economy.
7- The watch phrase is “Multiple streams of income.” PARTICULARLY if these idiots manage to destroy the economy and the chance is high they will, but also because frankly, in a catastrophic change environment you need backups to your backups. If you already have three or four streams of income, the loss of one won’t be catastrophic, while you hunt around for a fourth way to supplement.
8 – Donate to food banks. Yes, I know, but you’d be amazed how many people are already hurting.
9- Have a place you can crash if your job disappears without warning. Ditto, make like a Mormon and have food for a yer.
10 – Preparation will avoid catastrophe, if not unpleasantness. Prepare now. Forget the idea you were “born for” a field or forever in your path. (Yes, that’s a bit do as a I say, but I have few skills, honestly.)
Rough days are coming. Probably. We might still escape them, but it would take greater luck than I think even America has. If we escape the really rough times, I’m going to assume it’s a miracle. Particularly given our current idiots in power.
Rough days and poor economy in a time of catastrophic change is a deadly combination.
Be ready to jump and be productive, and give your friends and friendly acquaintances a hand up to a safe place.
I was going to post this yesterday, and– So life has been semi-weird. Then I was going to post this today and– Well, today is easily explainable. I had to take the face that launched a thousand purrs, and her brother,(now renamed Indiana (Indy for short) for his tendency to go on adventures, explore odd places and come back very happy and bearing odd treasures. (He needs a hat.) ) to the vet for their first appointment. They’re healthy and sassy and we thought the nurse wasn’t going to give them back, because she kept kissing them…
Anyway, but then we had to book boarding for liberty con for the two older cats, and we had to stop at three stores to get stuff we’ve been putting off, and– so, oh, hi.
And on the way here, I took a detour through my discord group, where we were talking of motherhood, and I remembered how many years I spent paralyzed I was doing it all wrong, or that I’d somehow taken the wrong path.
Yes, I know any number of you are going to say “it’s not worth worrying about what you can’t change.” Wise words, but they mean plain nothing for that annoying voice at the back of the head that says “if only.”
“If only we’d gotten married earlier. If I’d stayed here and not given up the offered scholarship for tech field. If– If– If– If–.”
I kept obsessing I was on the wrong path too. To be fair, it took me 13 years to break into print with the half a cent a word short story. A good three years from there to crawl to pro. Everyone else I knew, including members of my writers’ group, were starting and getting published in three years.
In my head this was because I was totally unsuited to being a writer, and who the heck even tried to do this for a living. Also, third language and dyslexic.
Well, with the years of experience, the language had less — way less — to do with it than a weird sense of story. (Portugal has completely different tempo and beats for story. And though I read a lot of translated stories, something tot he internalized culture still made me too slow, and … odd until I acculturated. Which, yeah, took about a dozen years. But I couldn’t see that, so I thought it was the language.)
I was sure I was, to us Pratchett’s phrase, down the wrong leg of the pants of time, and headed into even more wrongness.
How long did I spend on this? Decades. I was in my mid forties when I started getting over it.
Now, I’m not going to say I have no regrets. If Dan and I had married sooner, we might have a couple more kids. And he might not have had some issues in college. And if we’d understood things better, we’d not have lost money in our first house.
But mostly the regrets we have now are of the “We’d have gotten where we are faster.”
Am I meant to be what and who I am? I don’t know. It feels like I am. I don’t know when that changed, though, and it might be survivor bias. I.e. nothing else worked, this works, well, this must be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Am I still totally unsuited to be a fiction writer here and now? Well, yes. For one I’m dyslexic and it’s my third language. For another I tend to have no patience with mass media or the fad of the moment. My time waster is politics, followed by economics. Okay, there’s also improbable history (like, the big rocks were put there by aliens) but that’s more when I’m either depressed or just being silly. And even when doing deep dives, I remain aware of how silly it is. Oh, also, I really need security to function well, which over the course of my career was maybe five minutes one of those days there.
And?
And nothing. I’m a writer. And it feels like it’s what I was meant to be, crazy as it is. And it’s not just me, you know? The world is full of dyslexic professional writers, ADHD chess players, asthmatic runners, etc. Sometimes I think that the Author of this novel likes playing against strengths.
It just is what I is. What I am supposed to be.
Again, I have no clue when I came to this conclusion. The last time I looked for a job was…. five years ago. Or rather I didn’t look. I opened my word processor and tried to craft a resume, and realized I didn’t have one. the last job had been 25 years ago. I no longer remembered my languages, so getting another translating job was stupid. And…. well, what do I have to show anyone?
But then I also couldn’t think what job I wanted to do. Not really. “I just want to do something where I can’t be fired out of the blue for reasons not in my control” wasn’t a thing. For one, you know, I’ve looked at husband’s career. We actually tended to find ourselves unemployed at the same time. For another, I still wanted to tell stories.
I mean, I did consider just selling crafts (still considering, but more because sometimes I need to do things that aren’t words, and if it pays so much the better. I’m highly money motivated.) and writing for a hobby. But that’s about it. Then the indie writing started paying. (Yes, I know. I need to do a lot more of it. Bear with me.)
And I keep coming back to two things: the first time I met Glenn Reynolds, he came to Liberty con, and we were at a Baen party together, as part of a group, oh, 14 years ago or so. And someone asked him how he’d become THE Instapundit. And he said “Like most major things in my life, more or less by accident.”
Which gave me a great feeling of relief, because that’s pretty much me. I mean, 20 years ago, the last time I talked to my best friend from childhood (she’s alive, so far as I know. Or was three years ago when she crossed paths with mom. We’ve just lost touch and not managed to find it again. She married a Frenchman. Things happened. Some of them strange) and she said “Of all of us you’re the only one who is where she said she was going to go and doing exactly what she always wanted to do.”
And that’s true…. from 100 feet up. I was in Denver, and I was a professional writer. But the story was in the details. (Including the fact that me at eight had no clue about different cultures, or immigration, let alone effectively switching out your native language.)
I mean, I navigate in life by aiming myself in a general direction and running, and the route gets pretty interesting as I careen pinball-like in various directions, pushed by things.
Sure, I set out to write science fiction. Space opera to be exact. And by gum, my 20th novel was indeed that. And the most successful thing I’ve written to date. But on the way was all this other stuff that sort of happened by accident and accreted into a career.
And then there is this blog, which feels like a major part of my calling, but was supposed to be, like my newsletter is, just a cute thing to keep in touch with the fans of my fiction, and post cute cat pictures.
Then…. well, I got in my way, and here we are.
Exactly where I’m supposed to be? Or in the wrong place, doing it all wrong?
It feels like in the only place I can be, doing things the only way I could.
Could there be better? Well, this brings to mind the second thing, in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies, two successful older middle age people, a wizard and a witch, who had been sweet on each other when young but broken up for not very well defined reasons, come together again, and are talking about it. And it’s obvious he has regrets and he asks if maybe in another world, they got married, and now have children and grandchildren.
And she says, “Ah, yes, but you forget when our house burned down in the night, and we all died. Us, and all our seven children.”
Because you know, sure, things could be better, but they could be massively worse, too.
And for our country as well.
As they are right now, for what they are right now?
We are alive and doing what we can in the only way we can do it and in the place we’re in.
Keep doing that. Sure. It might all turn to dust and destruction tomorrow through your actions or not. I mean, there are no guarantees.
You are required to do the best you can where you are, that’s all. At least if you care about what you do and the world in general.
You are not required to be perfect.
Sometimes the fairy godmother will pick you up and put you in a place you could never have imagined, but to which you are perfectly suited. And sometimes all your efforts will be for nothing and everything you do will come to dross. And then the very strange fairy godmother….
I know it’s trite to say that when a door closes a window opens, but that’s literally been my experience, although often it’s the opposite, as in my inimitable way, I’m likely to find the window first, only know about it, and have been coming and in out through it for ten years, completely unaware that that giant wooden rectangle on the wall actually opens to allow people through.
I’ve never seen a complete fail with no alternative. And an alternative that often leads to people being more fulfilled in their new place.
I have no explanation for it, except we are in a novel, and well…. you’re not required to accept that, so call it the workings of a chaotic system.
The only people who fail forever are those who decide they are doing so, and thereafter close every door that tries to open then return to pumping arms and legs on the floor and screaming they never should have failed.
So, here we are. Maybe not in the best of all possible worlds, but where we have to be. In the way we have to be.
This is Holly reporting in on our intrepid leader.* Sarah has been, together with her long suffering husband, kidnapped by the kittens to act as hands, drivers, payers of vet bills, for well-kitten appointments.
Or at least only slightly troublesome kitten appointment. Or something like that. The amount of trouble depends on if Sweet Helen is in charge of the matter or if her brother is.
Sarah will be back, by and by, with kittens. Please don’t make too much of a mess of the blog: wordpress kind of hates me and I don’t want to have to try to fix things.
*She gave instructions, I followed, is not a leader determined by if she has followers?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that while the Left has rats in their heads, (Marxist rats, at that. No rat that could survive in the real world, even), they come up with pretty catchy phrasing.
Not that they use the phrases right, of course. I mean, we could tattoo “I don’t think this word means what you think it means” on their foreheads (backwards, so they could read it in the mirror) since that problem is pretty much constant. Because as usual they mistake form and function, container and contents, and compelled speech for truth.
Their idea of a truth bomb is running around screaming “Women are paid less than men” and cancel you if you point out that a) it’s a lie, if you compare apples to apples. (Women actually make more than men.) b) the fact they’ve screamed it a million times doesn’t make it any more correct than it was ten years ago c) It’s a lie and we’re tired of hearing it.
Then they accuse you of being afraid of the truth, of trying to preserve your white male privilege (even if you’re not male or while) and repeat it some more. The fact that we tell them to pound sand is viewed as proof of how true it is.
See, rats.
But without rats in one’s heads truth bombs are inherently very powerful things.
So, what is a truth bomb, when not a leftist lie-screed masquerading as such?
Well… It starts with being true. But being true by itself doesn’t give it that power. For instance, leftists truthfully have rats in their heads. Marxist rats running around on little cultish treadmills. But since Marxist teaching has been so universal for almost a hundred years, so do you. And I. Though I keep putting out glue traps for them. So, most people don’t know that leftists, truthfully, have rats in their heads. And if they do they, like me, are beyond caring, and just say it, like that, out loud.
Also, for instance, it’s true that Havey is a very fuzzy and adorable cat. But my saying it has no power, unless you’re a cat lover, in which case you go “Aw” which is not an amazing power.
So clearly for a truth to act like a bomb you need something more.
So, truth bombs, as far as I can tell are truths that everyone can see, but everyone is afraid to say out loud for whatever reason.
And when uttered out loud, even in veiled form, it has a disproportionate power because the people who hear it feel liberated and also relieved. It’s a combination of “Oh, thank heavens, I’m not crazy.” And “Preach it sister/brother of mine, say it loud.”
Even veiled, truth bombs have the power to sweep the nation. Look at Let’s Go Brandon. The incident combined people’s knowledge the media lied to them and the truth that everyone hates the unelected puppet installed over us. Let’s Go Brandon went viral overnight.
Admittedly what propelled Donald Trump to his win in 2016, despite all his mistakes in campaigning (gleefully highlighted by everyone) was truth bombs: America can be great again and is being held up by the leadership. And: real nations have borders.
Against this, all the left could pose was the weak sauce of “jobs are never coming back, but we’ll give you so much welfare, peasants” and “racist.”
Those weren’t enough, because we’d heard them a lot, and we knew PLAINLY they weren’t true. Because, well, obviously the truth is that we see everyday a nation being kept in shackles by sh*tty leadership and the woke infection. We are capable of so much, and we all know that, even from our friends’ groups — even those who have semi-helpless friends — but between fantastical (in the sense they should apply only in a fantasy world) environmental regulations and stupid “sensitivity” to other’s potential sadness or humiliation (I am for humiliating people who steal, yes) we are letting the bad elements run insane, and holding back the productive, the sane, the law-abiding.
And we know d*mn well we’re not racists. Heck, in public places, weddings, etc, I keep running into groups of Americans that would give Hitler nightmares. Sure, in some places, and some people — mostly hard left — are still trying to keep their groups “pristine race x” but the rest of us are gleefully making friends, mating and adopting (if only the states let this happen more often) across color lines and feature lines and hardly noticing.
No one cares.
And if they stopped making us fill little “race” lines in forms for everything, we’d not even know. There might be the occasional glee when getting a 23 and me report “Hey, this says I’m 1/32nd Pacific Islander. I wonder where that comes from!” but that’s it.
Also, the people pouring over the border are every race known to man. The stereotypical Mexican family portrayed by the left isn’t even close to representative these days. There are Africans, South Americans, Asians (about 50% in some areas) and even people of pallor, a lot of them from Eastern Europe. Being racist against that kind of genetic soup would imply that we are racist against all non-Eskimo lefthanders with a club foot. And even then.
No, Americans knew the reason they want us to have borders is that we’re being invaded. The race of the invaders doesn’t matter, but culture does. And culture is very hard to shed. And it’s even harder to assimilate into American culture when our culture is being riven by streams of people with very different cultures (who don’t even agree with each other, btw.)
The left are culture denialists. Which is kind of bizarre. they think that culture doesn’t exist and it’s all genetically determined (Nazi “scientists” have entered the chat.) So if we oppose the invasion of people who will try to drink from the toilet because they’ve never seen one, and think it’s a water fountain (yes, that was what was behind that incident. Now you know.) or who can’t read or speak our language, or read any language, because the language they learned has no written form, or who have … loose ideas of private property, or who consider everyone beyond their tribal group (and a tribal group that in some cases is not much more than immediate family) as non-human and prey; or who are wholly wedded to not exactly legal clans and tribes and allegiances (I’m looking at you South America) at more or less perpetual war with each other, the left calls us racists. To them all behavior, even language is genetically determined. (This is built in in school assignments where they ask your kids to describe their culture when they mean their ancestry. As a note, pushing back on that has hilarious results, since the leftist-indoctrinated teachers can’t process what you’re saying and end up metaphorically speaking dropping to the floor, flailing arms and legs and demanding their binky that you respect their authoritah.)
But in fact assimilation is possible and you can change your language. I’m writing this in my third language. I will never lose my accent, mostly because it would take months of work with a speech specialist and I don’t have the money or time (though the ability to dictate in standard programs might make it worth) but I can function in the language just fine, thank you. (And if you immigrate before some ill defined boundary around 17 or 18, you do lose your accent. Interestingly, the left is sure that the fact that I — or Melania Trump — have an accent means some kind of mental retardation. This means the cosmopolitans…. aren’t.)
Assimilation is just difficult, takes a long time, and is best done in isolation from your original community. None of which can be done while the world is pouring over our border.
And the invasion comes with its own hatreds. Which means Americans are not racist, but a lot of the newcomers are. If you want to see race wars, stand by and oprima 2. Also and more visibly our rather generous safety net is being used almost exclusively by the invaders. Social services, schools, hospitals are all straining under looking after the newly arrived indigent who have neither the means nor the cultural capacity to be productive members of society.
So when Trump said, “You’re not a racist, you have a right not to be invaded” the truth bomb blew up in the minds of everyone who felt that if we were going to have welfare — and some of us do think we shouldn’t — it should go to people born and raised here, and that our schools shouldn’t be trying to teach — badly — in five different languages, and that old hatreds shouldn’t be replayed on our land.
And that plus “you can be great, if the government gets out of your way” wafted him to victory. A victory for which the left was completely unprepared because their cult prevents their seeing the truth.
Truths that everyone can see but not say have been revealed again and again since then. Off the top of my head and missing a lot, I’m sure:
This country is indeed being held back by its government and the Deep State will KEEL you before losing their jobs.
The state wants to import a new citizenry. And they don’t like you.
Destroying Trump — because they think he has Svengali like powers — is their number one priority, even as everything falls apart.
They either have no clue how anything works, or gleefully want to destroy economy and society. And probably “yes”.
They have some weird fetish with wanting you and your kids to eat all the bugs.
They can steal elections with impunity and there is not even a shred of credibility or security to our elections.
Our courts are useless against a color revolution.
They have a weird fascination with sexual fetishes, and a need to parade them before our eyes at every level of power and control.
Right now, the strongest repressed truths which everyone knows, but which will destroy you if said or written, in most circumstances; the truths that even a lot of “right wing” (which sadly is now anything to the right of Lenin) sites suppress because they’re either afraid of being cancelled or because they don’t want to “sound crazy”.
The 2020 election was stolen. We all saw it happen. The bizarre stoppage of counting and suddenly it’s all Biden. The idea that someone like Biden had 80 million votes. The fact that most of us who live/d in vote-by-mail states call it vote by fraud. The fact that a lot of states changed to vote by fraud for the occasion. A lot of us have friends who either directly were or have friends who were among the ejected poll watchers. And we know that what we saw, after the Biden Potemkin campaign was impossible. We also can tell from the way all talk of the election being stolen has been suppressed and from the bizarre inauguration under guard, behind barbed wire, that not only was the election stolen, but they know it too. Opinion is more divided on whether 2022 was also stolen (Spoiler, it was) but we are sure that our election integrity is such that it’s almost impossible to tell what is legitimate any more.
The Covidiocy was in fact idiocy, engineered from the top, partly to steal the elections, but in part because the so called “elite” are terrified of us, and were afraid we’d legitimately revolt. (They don’t understand this country. Americans don’t revolt easily and when they do, you’ll know it. Late and thorough is practically our motto.) And they wanted to install a new-normal in which we all obeyed them like automatons. The vaccine might very well have been intended as a mass contraceptive. (It hasn’t worked superwell, because “chinese science.” And some of them might also have hoped it would reduce population. (Again, I think they wanted that, it’s just their science is made of Chinesium.)
We are being invaded and need to stop it right now and deport all the “not the best” who’ve been coming over from every sh*thole in the globe. Because a nation without borders isn’t a nation.
Now the interesting thing about the elections coming up is that each of the main truth bombs is being spoken only by a “eye catching candidate.”
Well, Trump speaks two, but he has serious issues with admitting the covidiocy was stupid. And while he wasn’t the one who locked us down, he also didn’t stop the governors and mayors from going crazy cakes. Yes, in a way it was admirable. He was respecting local authority. But– all the same, it is held against him, and the fact that he can’t admit it’s true will hurt him with the public. How far, who knows?
DeSantis cannot admit that the 2020 election was stolen. Heaven knows why. He thinks it’s a stick to hit Trump with. I think it will hurt him majorly. Running without admitting there’s something wrong with the elections brings the two way too close.
And yep RFA Jr. is the only one saying the entire Covidiocy was wrong and the vaccines for it are worse than the disease. Yes, sure, DeSantis has made noises in that direction, but not loud enough. Of course, he’s neither admitting election theft nor that open borders are daft. (Also, according to a friend, he has a voice that will make most sane people want to stop it. Possibly with a mallet. Don’t know. Don’t know if it matters that much to anyone not music oriented.)
There is an outside chance that the truth about the entire Covidiocy is THE MOST SALIENT suppressed truth in people’s heads right now. (Though fast getting crowded by the border. As the fall out of both reveals itself more and more.) In which case RFK Jr. will have the advantage.
But each of those truth bombs are powerful in the way truth bombs are. By hitting people’s resentment at being silenced, and at having to lie even to themselves, they release very powerful emotions and a sense of righteousness, which, fully unleashed, can transform the face of the world in a relatively short time.
And they will be unleashed. They have to, because the longer it takes for them to be unleashed, the more power they gain.
At this point, we’re living IN a powder keg. The question is: who will dare speak the truth to us?
I would like to talk about finding your place in the world, loving it, fitting in and being ousted by it by politics, and political insanity and resentment.
I do this at the risk of being told to cry you a river, and in full understanding that at least I can still earn a living. It could, and for a lot of people it is, worse. You wouldn’t be wrong. Except…
Except that the left is a deranged cult, affirming things on fiat that have no contact with reality and demanding more and more that everyone agree with them, or be ousted, and it is part of what is contributing to a malaise of the soul for a lot of those of us already affected. But more importantly, it will come for you. All of you.
It affected the artsy and creative and academic communities first, but it’s hitting medicine, and engineering, and retail, and food service and honestly? everywhere now. And you need to know, you need to be prepared, you need to know what is headed for you and how you can jump or perhaps insulate yourself and your livelihood from them.
First the trauma.
It’s probably not news to anyone who reads this blog that the black dog has been very very bad. But it’s more than the black dog, it’s a malaise, an inability to pull up and deal with life. It’s not just writing not happening, it’s bookcases still taking up half the garage, not assembled. It’s my bedside table needing a coat of paint, it’s I haven’t called the handyman to deal with the leaking window, it’s–
Now part of this is physical. Don’t know much about it, yet, but tests are scheduled. The other part–
I was trying to reason my way out of it, because that’s what I do, right? And my reasoning goes something like this: Why am I so depressed? Yeah, we lost my father in law. It was a punch to the gut, but it was expected. And there is some trouble on the horizon, with a half dozen things, but they’re not as dire as they could be, and if they turn dire, we can deal with it. There’s trouble with the country, but man we’ve seen it coming since 2020. And —
And then I was watching a movie — I don’t remember what, just that one scene, because I don’t really watch movies or TV, I look up from the computer at whatever Dan is watching, and catch scenes –where the main female character falls in with a group of artisans and you can see her fitting in for the first time.
And… I remember that. It was a great part of my falling in love with America. There’s room for creatives here. There’s entire communities. If you feel a strong need to make things even if you’re a little strange, there’s space for you. And you fit in, and it increases everyone’s output. I think it’s part of the reason that the future comes from America.
Now, I’ve never considered myself an artist, but I’ve always considered myself an artisan. I might have been wrong on the artist thing. Watching it in the kids, and DIL and DIL in training, I might be an artist. It’s not the need to write as such, that defines it, it’s the sudden “Look, yes, I have to make a lampshade entirely out of crush eggshells! My brain won’t leave me alone till I do.”
In the US there are entire groups, and communities — we’ve lived in an entire small mountain town like that, and hung out in a part of downtown Colorado Springs where such people gather — dedicated to those like us. We don’t quite fit in, you know. We’re the Odds own Odds and being around our kind “feeds” us in some way.
The happiest years of my life I had such groups.
I do not have such a group now, though if the medical stuff isn’t as scary as it sounds, and things slow down just a bit (Did we really subscribe to the catastrophe of the month club?) I’ll start one. I have the beginnings of the making of one.
But things I used to love to do, like take art classes, or join craft groups are closed to me now for the same reason a lot of you have lost your D & D groups or your favorite little cafe. Because most places like that have gone crazy woke, and you can’t, you just can’t.
Even if they don’t make out who you really are, you’re surrounded by people eternally wishing death on those like you. It wears on the soul. Over time it drains you and makes it impossible to work.
So, instead you cut yourself off from that fun group, that cute little coffee shop, that bookstore you used to hangout at, that egg-shell-craft group that had such great ideas. And you feel a little less energy.
In the same way a lot of us had to leave our neighborhood or even our state behind, and if we loved it, if we were connected to it, it was like losing a chunk of our soul.
I know refugees of lefty progroms who used to work in the arts, in academia, in music, in theater, and yes, in writing and crafts.
We feel cut off, dislocated, exiled in the middle of strangers who aren’t like us, because even in the new places, those occupations and interests are likely to be left.
And if you’re saying “But there’s bound to be people like you”! Well, of course there are. And we’re re-establishing connections and networks, most of them on line, and eventually we’ll reconquer, but probably NOT in my life time.
And it’s not death or starvation, but it does suck. It sucks.
Creatives cut off from “their” circles die a little. And rebuilding takes time.
And this is coming for you. All of you. The left demands loyalty tests and vocal endorsement of their insanity. And if you don’t follow along they’ll cut you off from the places and things you love, from the kith and kin of the heart.
So… prepare now. Build alternative networks. Have plans b and c and d and e and f and while you’re at it g too.
And make friends and connections that will be your kith and kin and keep your spirit alive.
Because it might all boil over tomorrow, or it might be years and years in the desert.
But in either case the past isn’t coming back. And you are not secure in your niche, no matter how much you love it, no matter how much you think you are.
Hear the voice of the exiles: prepare your path of retreat, and your way back to kith and kin.
Be not afraid, but look before you fall, so the fall doesn’t kill you.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
While removing a prototype sensor from the prow of her new Alliance battleship, the Ausa, Captain Elizabeth Goodwin and her crew encounter a setback when one of the engineers sent to remove and stow the device is injured in an accident. Before the other engineer can help the man, the two are surrounded by amoeboid creatures which seem immune to the effects of vacuum.
Thought to be hallucinations experienced by early spacers who had been alone in deep space too long, these creatures – known as “angel fish” – startle the crew by their sudden appearance. Despite her misgivings, Goodwin allows three of the aliens to be taken aboard for study. But less than an hour after the aliens have been brought on the ship, one of Goodwin’s men is killed and another is seriously wounded.
Her search for both the murderer and the escaped “angels” soon leads to a disturbing revelation. Eventually, Goodwin must decide which threat is greater: an old enemy of the Alliance, or the fabled “angels” encountered by the first explorers from Terra.
John Wolff has been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Again. He’s already saved the love of his life from an early death – thirty years after she died. Now, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly his daughter, has appeared from the timeline branch where that same love of his life survived and married his counterpart. She says they need his help fighting off invaders from the far future. Who, by the way, are looking for him. Why? Because they want the starship drive he and a friend invented, the precursor to their time machine. Problem is, in her timeline, it hasn’t been invented yet. What man can resist a cry for help from his own daughter? Particularly when the invaders think she’s a saint. Or possibly, a devil wearing saint’s clothing. And they’re looking for her, too. Thus begins the Timelines Saga, and the story of the Lion of God.
TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?
It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.
Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.
Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.
Magical doors and other mischief mix badly with tales about murder, as young scholars return to Graytowers.
Kenneth, as prefect, thought he had his hands filled with the beginning of the new session, but when one magical door takes him and another scholar far past the bounds of a prank, they barely escape with their lives, and their escape means only that they are in graver danger. They must hide, leaving the school, and casting all their spells in secret.
The disastrous war of 1913 is over, and young journalist Isaak Babel has used his fame as a war correspondent to win a peacetime job covering an international chess tournament in New York City. However, trouble is aboard the airship Grossdeuschland, in the form of the notorious Bolshevik terrorist Koba and his henchmen. Men with a dark plan, and New York City will not welcome their visit
“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke
Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.
Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…
The Three Hundred Families control the Three Part Alliance. To the Elite, their Family is their first priority.
Twenty years before the Fall . . .
Lord Dzon Konstantin Aslanov returns Home after a five year long assignment to another World to find his Family as poor a fit as ever. He is about to find out the cost of disobedience.
If only they’d tell Konstantin why he needed to marry so soon, to the right woman. And not like his idiot brother eloping with . . . the daughter of Kon’s new boss at the Bureau of Intelligence. And why should Kon marry this particular woman when her aunt was so much more interesting . . .
Uneasy rests the head upon which rests the leadership of the River County Hunter clan. Arthur Saldovado’s older brother grows distant and untrusting. Arthur must balance his duty to the senior Hunter with protecting the shadow mage Hunter in Shadows and preventing strife within the clan. Arthur’s adopted daughter, Lelia Lestrang, watches and worries. That is, when she’s not trying hard to keep from ordering her children to marry (she wants grandchildren!) and sighing mightily when her much loved husband leaves his clothes lying in front of the laundry hamper yet again.
Then a sorceress discovers the remains of a gate between the worlds, cast with blood-path magic.
Where can an out-cast Hunter find shelter, save for the grave?
“I wish something would happen and clear the air!” When the storm breaks, Lelia, André, their Familiars, and their family pull together to fight a battle Lelia though had ended fifty years before.
The end of an era? Or the start of something Preternaturally Familiar?
Teenaged author Charles Cloukey did not lack for ambition when he wrote The Swordsman of Sarvon. It combines Edgar Rice Burroughs-style planetary romance with an anachronistic planetary culture (they have airplanes, but never discovered gunpowder) with an espionage technothriller about averting a world war between Europe, Asia and North America; with the secret of atomic energy, and its potential to annihilate all of civilization, as one of the MacGuffins in play. And he did all this in 1931, sixteen years before the birth of Tom Clancy, eleven years before the Manhattan Project began, more than ten years before the US entered WWII, and at least six years before the beginning of WWII as a whole.
Sediryl Galare’s first official function as the formally invested heir to the Eldritch Empire is to open the summer court, on Escutcheon and on the world of Chalice. But behind every big event are a myriad of stories—some smaller in scope, and some enormous in implication. Join the Eldritch and their allies in this Fallowtide collection for a glimpse into those everyday stories. Who are the musicians of Ontine? What happened to the nobles of Asaniefa who didn’t care to fight the Empress? Will Jeasa and Haladir ever come to an accommodation? And how are the social changes sweeping the world affecting those who wish they hadn’t?
This reader-commissioned collection includes stories written by the author at reader request. Come home to the Alliance with seven tales of hope, renewal, romance, and change.
Eight fantastic tales of swords, sorcery, love and justice.
The honeymoon is over…. before it even began. Nico and Emie face the biggest decision of their lives, and hope that it won’t kill them.
Cecelia’s dowry is a worthless field, and a friendship begun in a macabre deal.
Soleh fights her way out of a cruel marriage and swears vengeance by the lost gods of a dead clan. She rides with the darkest of companions at her side.
In a breath of air on an unmasked face, the worth of a life is laid bare.
Amaya Lombard faces her past, risking her future, in the very place where her magic was stripped from her blood and bone.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
According To Hoyt 