Category: Uncategorized

Book Promo

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

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Gnawing the Bones of the City.

Tikhon Grigoriev has a problem.

He’s a member of the civil police, but has come to the attention of the political police. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, that is a very dangerous situation. He’s hanging on by his fingernails in besieged Leningrad, and he has a family to think of.

Worse, he has reason to believe that something uncanny stalks the frozen ruin that is a besieged city in subarctic winter. But as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he is not supposed to believe in the supernatural.

How can he keep his head in this impossible situation?

A short story.

Note: includes intense scenes that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

FROM HOLLY LEROY: Remember the Dead – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller

Love J. A. Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels? Try Lt. Eve Sharpe.
In the world of serial killer hunters, Lieutenant Eve Sharpe is a legend and well known in every cop shop in America. But when one gruesomely posed body after another are discovered in the middle of Chicago, ambitious politicians and an aggressive press are threatening to derail Eve’s investigation.

And with her partner Walt on an extended second honeymoon in Mexico, it doesn’t look like help is on the horizon.

Then a friend from California, P.I. Jillian Varela, shows up on a job that parallels Eve’s case. Together they pursue the killer into a nightmare world of obsession, torture, and murder where no one may survive.

A dark follow up to the first Eve Sharpe/Jillian Varela mystery, ONE EIGHT SEVEN.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Help! Nobody Taught Me to Cook

If you have never cooked and need to gather the tools and start TODAY this 26 page booklet will get you started without taking half a day to read. If you don’t have funds to eat carryout or go to a restaurant until your next paycheck it can be a life saver.
It assumes you live in civilization, have some funds, and aren’t homeless but not much more than that. More than feeding you it can give you the dignity and independence of not demanding charity of others. It suggests common well know dishes with easy to find ingredients. It should hold you for a week or two until you get tired of the limited selection or win the lotto.

FROM MARK D. TINDELL: The Giant Catfish Caper of 1943

Duke was a lanky young man, perfectly suited to the Army in that fateful year of 1943, but familial complications kept him at home, where he led a crew maintaining the shiny rails of the railroads.The men worked to keep transportation running smoothly in a time of war while the Texas heat worked to make them crazy.
The crew stopped for lunch on an old bridge over an almost dried up river, hoping in vain to find a breeze. They heard a strange noise from the small stagnant pool below, so they decided to go fishing. What they landed would lead to events crazy enough to make any sane person accuse them of telling tall tales.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Cataclysm

The end is coming.

Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…

FROM MARY CATELLI: Winter’s Curse

Who but a fool would linger after Zavrien laid his curse? Ill luck can kill — and all the more in Zavrien’s enchanted, endless winter, haunted with ice giants and frost fairies.

When the soldier Gareth is cursed, the young wizard Perriel learns how dangerous lingering can be.

But she can hold out a sliver of hope for breaking the curse — if it doesn’t break them first.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT (AND YES, THE SEQUEL IS ALMOST READY TO PUBLISH): Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1)

Lilly Gilden has a half-crazed cyborg in her airlock who thinks he’s Nick Rhodes,
a fictional 20th Century detective. If she doesn’t report him for destruction,
she’s guilty of a capital crime.

But with her husband missing, she’ll use every clue the cyborg holds,
and his detective abilities, to solve the crime her husband was investigating
when he disappeared.

With the help of a journalist who is more than he seems,
Lilly will risk everything to plunge into the interstellar underworld
and bring the love of her life home!

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: INTERRUPT

“Today is not that day.” by Charlie Martin

“Our long national nightmare is over.” —— Newly-sworn President Gerald R Ford, August 4, 1974

Honestly, I try not to get passionate about politics. Becoming passionate about politics leads to dissatisfaction, which is suffering. The cause of suffering is a thirst to make things be the way you want them to be, which when unsatisfied leads to — you guessed it — dissatisfaction and thus to suffering. The end to suffering is to recognize the things you cannot change, just like in the Serenity prayer, and since politicians firmly insist on not doing the perfectly reasonable and essentially correct things as I would do them, for my own peace of mind I try not to get too excited about political things.

That’s by the way, was your Buddhist sermonette for today, I just laid out the first three of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. Keep your eyes open for my upcoming collection of my PJ Media Buddhism columns, Undocumented Buddha.

But hey golly, the last 10 years or so have been awfully tempting to get passionate.
Yesterday (as I write) was Inauguration Day for Daonald Trump, the 45th and now 47th President of the united States. Or, as Glenn Reynolds has named it on his Substack, DJT Day.
I was less than enthusiastic about Trump at first, and I can prove it: I wrote Not Fond Of Trump After 100 days I tweeted just before the election that my worst fears were being realized — Either Trump or Hillary was going to win.
I admit I was a little relieved, and looking back I should have voted for Trump (I didn’t vote for president at all that year) on the basis that he couldn’t be worse than Clinton. And there was some comfort in the observation that the amount of crazy on both sides was to my advantage, because I get paid to write about crazy.
By the time of the “Not Fond Of Trump” post, I’d started to come around. He nominated Neil Gorsuch. He eliminated a raft of regulations. He seemed to be adopting FDR’s ideas of trade policy, but even then it was becoming clear that he viewed those things as a starting position in a negotiation. As I wrote then, he was a David Mamet character with the motto Always Be Closing. And while I was less than totally enthusiastic about Trump at first, I wrote Stop Making Me Defend Trump on Inauguration Day 2017, while Kevin Williamson was making arch allusions to Eric and Don Jr as “Uday and Qusay,” essentially saying that Trump was Saddam Hussein.
The truth was, Trump was a very good president, comparable to Ronald Reagan — who was also reviled and insulted.
Well, guess what. “Always Be Closing” worked pretty well. The problem was that Trump Derangement was incredibly powerful, so powerful that it led to Trump Trance, a strange condition in which TDS sufferers literally heard Trump say things that he didn’t say, and insisted on it even when presented with video proof. (Of course, now that Elon Musk has been elevated to the Worst Person In The World, or at least second-worst, it’s happening to Musk too.)
So, between Trump-deranged press and the general opinion of the Democrat Party that Trump was an illegitimate president for a half-dozen reasons, but I think primarily because he’d beaten Hillary Clinton in an election when it was Clearly Her Turn, we got the 2020 and 2021 with an impeachment, leveraging Covid, and some shall we say questionable decisions by election officials, and Trump lost the election.
They weren’t satisfied with that — he had to be utterly destroyed. So we got a second impeachment, followed by some very questionable court cases.
But he just would not die. He began to look like Rasputin — shoot him, stab him, beat him, he still wouldn’t go down. At the same time, Biden or Biden’s puppet masters were doing amazing things. Leaving Afghanistan in, if not the worst possibly way, certainly among the top five. Opening the borders by revoking everything Trump had done and then expanding on it. Implementing authoritarian control over the supposed-free press.
Trump derangement or not, over time it became clear to people that they were being lied to. Musk then bought X and freed it from the “Nice website you got here” control from the government — and people started to see exactly how they were being lied to.
Every legal reversal for Trump became a positive — the more indictments, judgements, and legal setbacks he faced, the better his approval became, while as the economy tanked and the essentially authoritarian regime proved that they really truly thought everyone should just do what they were told and shut up, the better Trump, and Trump’s first term looked.
Until now, Trump has won the election, survived attempts on his life, and in his first 48 hours done more to reverse Biden’s damage than any president in the past has done in the first months of their administrations.
Honestly, I think the only real comparison was Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate.

My friends, you bow to no one.
But this day does not belong to one man but to all. Let us together rebuild this world that we may share in the days of peace.
But there may come a day, when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.

What Trump has proven is that for the American people, there may come a day when courage fails, and American ideals die
But it is not this day.

I don’t like to assume the left is stupid.

I mean, naturally stupid or incapable of thought. I suspect they have the same IQ distribution as the right, they’re simply addled through their reliance on credentials, which means their reliance on misguided philosophies and ways of thinking taught in our factories of irrationality, aka universities.

They also tend to be advanced with less effort, because the intellectual/artistic/political pathways of influence have been dominated by the left for so long.

But given their absolute acceptance of Marxism in its Gramscian retcon, and their ignorance of actual history, their thought pattern is usually understandable. Which is good, because it’s one of my peculiarities that people acting completely irrationally, not to to say against reason BOTHERS ME, like… an itch in the middle of my shoulder blades where I can’t reach bothers me.

So watching the left break into a chorus of “Elon did a Nazi salute!” gives me a migraine level headache of sheer frustration.

I want to yell at all of them “Say again, you’re coming in broken and STUPID!”

Sure, they edited what he said, and talk about intent and malice and repeated it and…. But while they run off down that fascinating rabbit hole, what they haven’t explained is: WHY would he do that?

Look, let’s assume that Elon Musk, who visited Israel right after 10/7, who wore a tag for the hostages, who supports freedom of speech which is the opposite of what the Nazis did, has secretly been a Nazi all along.

Let’s assume I can actually buy that. All the other evidence to the contrary is just because he’s THAT sneaky and devious. You can see it as a movie plot, right?

Now, see if you can follow along: this secret cabal of Nazis has taken power, right? And are going to unleash their evil plot, right?

And then, after all the careful deception…. Musk throws a Nazi salute on stage. TWICE.

At this point, while the left is pointing at the screen and going “see, see, even you see it” I’m going to pause the tape, and turn to the audience and ask the crucial, the most important, the ONLY question:

WHY?

No, people, straight up. Having faked his way in WHY THROW A NAZI SALUTE AND GIVE HIMSELF AWAY?

Isn’t anyone even a little curious about THAT?

Look, the man didn’t get to be a … what is he now? trillionaire? by being stupid and doing things against his advantage. So what advantage can he possibly gain from giving the Nazi salute?

Even if he were a Nazi, even if he memorized Mein Kampf and believed it, what would he have to gain from the salute?

It could get him ostracized. It could make Trump — willingly or not — separate himself from Elon. It could make the right weirded out. BUT WHAT COULD IT EARN HIM THAT HE’D WANT?

There is nothing inherent in Nazi beliefs that forces people to do the Heil Hitler salute compulsively like some sort of political Tourettes.

Besides the bright bulbs on the left are saying what makes it a Nazi salute is INTENT and malice. So…. uh… what was the intent?

In Nazi Germany it served as a rallying point for other Nazis and a salutation to Hitler.

Hitler has been dead for 80 years give or take a few months. Saluting him is rather after the fact, unless you believe the evil son of a bitch is undead. But if you believe that, you have more problems than I am in fact going to be able to address.

And if you’re on the left and believe that there are LEGIONS of Nazis in America, walking around, you also have more problems than I’m going to be able to address. I think there are like maybe one thousand Neo-Nazis in the US and 80% of them are FBI informers.

I can prove it too. Unlike in Germany, Nazis aren’t forbidden here. But while every high school has a young communist (sometimes young Hegelians) club, there are plenty of uninformed idiots wearing Che t-shirts and sometimes there are Communist marches here and there, when is the last time you heard of a Young Nazi parade, or seen someone wearing a Hitler t-shirt. No, not people the left deems Nazis, but people who call themselves Nazis and march around, and form clubs in high schools and colleges, and proclaim their Nazis beliefs loud and clear?

They don’t exist. You see half a dozen rejects sometimes and again I bet you most of those are FBI informers.

“Aha!” the left will say “That’s because they’re undercover.”

Okay, that makes no sense if they’re so numerous, but let’s stipulate that for reasons unknown these people are under deep cover, for fear of… I don’t know, the righteous fury of the global south or some equally imaginary force.

IF THAT’S THE CASE WHY WOULD ELON GIVE HIMSELF AWAY?

“Because he won” isn’t an answer. He’d win just as much without the salute and not risk turning the dupes against him and his evil cabal (if he belonged to such.)

Again, there is no way to square the circle.

The only way to make sense of this idiocy is to have Elon secretly having a transmitter somewhere circa 1942? Nazi Germany, and he’s throwing the salute to tell them to send troops through the time portal. In which case, I hate to tell you this, but we’re not Russians. We do actually have superior tech and would smoke them harder and faster than we did 80 years ago.

Or perhaps you bright bulbs think that the reason he’s so hot on space is because there really are Nazis on the moon, and he’s calling for reinforcements.

No? — if your answer to either of those is yes, please, please, please see a mental health professional — Well, then your idea that Elon was throwing a Nazi salute makes no sense WHATSOEVER.

You truly are coming in broken and stupid. And you’re giving me a massive headache right over my eyes.

Stop. Just stop. People don’t make gestures or symbolic salutes unless it gets them something. And this would get him nothing.

I know you react to group thinking and by personality run after the loudest voice, but calm down, take a deep breath and think for five minutes.

None of this makes sense, and all it does is make me ill.

Stop. Think. If your hair is still on fire, pour a bucket of ice water over your head. That will do it.

Education – by Charlie Martin

I’ve been interested in education in the United States, really since I was embedded in the education system myself. I had good teachers and bad teachers, but if I were to summarize my whole experience in one word, it would be “stultifying.” I was suspiciously bright, loved to read, loved science, but was bored to tears by a lot of the content. I was reading adult books — my father, tired of being asked for science fiction books when I was about nine, handed me Stranger in A Strange Land. I think he expected it was to be advanced for me, and was surprised when instead I read the whole thing, wanted more Heinlein, and knew phrases like “knocked up.”
When I looked at the students around me, I was puzzled because I saw they considered school to be toilsome and an unfortunate interruption in their day. Then I got a little older and learned to feel the same way.
I eventually escaped education — well, sort of, anyway, as I had seven years of undergraduate school in something like eleven majors — and then got a job doing computer programming in California that eventually sent me to Germany. There I met a five year old who lived with his mom on the first floor of my apartment building, and who would invariably ask me to teach him some English whenever we met.
I would teach him some words and phrases and he would remember them and use them. This gave me pause. Lots of pause. Here was a five year old who absolutely craved learning, a feeling I remembered from being about the same age. I knew American kids like that. Then they went to school and by the time they were about eight, they saw school as, well, toilsome. They’d lost the attitude that my little five year old friend had.
But then, I didn’t have any trouble understanding it once I thought about it. Thinking back, school really was toilsome. I loved to read, and I read quickly — and was sent to the principal’s office because I not only read my half-hour social studies assignment in about five minutes, and worse passed the quiz on the material with 100 percent. Later, I discovered I wasn’t supposed to be liking the things I liked, reading the things I read. My sophomore year of high school, I got on an Ayn Rand kick, and wrote a book report on Atlas Shrugged. To her credit, my English teacher, Dorothy Robeda — who was honestly one of my favorite teachers, and encouraged me years later when I was really getting started as a writer. Dorothy was a hard-core liberal and teacher’s union rep, but she graded0 it fairly with only a little pinching about the eyes when she found out that I was reading.
I carefully didn’t tell her about reading comic books.
It continued in college. My freshman year of engineering school, I worked hard at calculus in the beginning, because I knew it was important to an engineer, and conventional math had been an issue for me. I worked hard, saw the free tutoring regularly, felt pretty good after the midterm, and deserved to — I had an 86 percent on the test.
Which was a D. Barely.
I discovered The Curve.
My high school in Pueblo, Colorado had no calculus. Instead it had a sort of pre-calculus course called “Elementary Functions,” taught as the necessary sinecure for the football coach, who didn’t approach of a six foot 200 pound male who didn’t go out for football, and — I later realized — wasn’t intellectually prepared for the sort of foundational questions I was asking. (To be fair, I only got some of those questions answered in graduate school.)
My classmates at the engineering school had generally had one or two years of AP Calculus before they started their freshman year, and were repeating Introductory Calculus because they considered it an easy A, and it was after all supposed to be one of the filter classes that determined if you were cut out to be an engineer.
In that population, the median grade was something like 92,
And no, I’m not (just) whining about that either. But there was an interesting discovery by psychologist Carol Dweck who had become interested in why some kids succeeded and others didn’t. It wasn’t well predicted by race, or socio-economic background.
In fact, there were a number of experiments that showed the opposite, the most famous being Jaime Escalante, who took a class of Hispanic students in East LA who were failing and over the course of a few years had classes that were maxing out math in standardized exams. (Escalante was the subject of the movie “Stand and Deliver” in which he was played by Edward James Olmos.)
What Dweck discovered was simple: she called it “growth mindset.” What it comes down to: In order to learn something, you first have to believe you can learn something. It’s opposite Dweck called “fixed mindset”, the belief that your ability to learn something was fixed and immutable.
My experience with The Curve made me feel like I wasn’t up to competing with my classmates. The reason didn’t become clear to me until much later.
Think about traditional education. It’s all really overwhelmingly oriented to the fixed mindset, from the organization into age cohorts — “grades” — to grading, to “college track” or “vocational track” or “secretarial track.” I tried to take typing in Junior High School, but I wasn’t allowed to because I was “college track” and why would a college student need to type, they have secretaries for that.
Sarah’s boys had a similar experience to mine with reading — they were purposefully deterred from reading ahead of their classmates, so that everyone would fit into their nice organized categories.
Maybe the worst example is affirmative action. I watched a documentary years ago about a freshman class at harvard, and particularly following a black kid who had been admitted under affirmative action even though he’d gone to a bottom tier high school.
He was failing, and when he talked to his advisor, the advisor assumed that he just wasn’t up to it or just wasn’t trying. What he didn’t assume was that he was actually capable of learning the topic, but that he needed more help or more time. Hey, he was at the bottom of the curve, it was a flaw in him — in his intelligence or when the advisor asked if he couldn’t have tried harder, in his character.
What happens. over and over in traditional American education, is that kids are repeatedly reinforced in a fixed mindset.
Too often, it’s not that they are failing school — it’s the schools that are failing them.

*Oh, like YOU did anything useful yesterday! Sorry, guys, this is what my brain is up to today.- SAH*

And here we are, poised at the highest point of the roller-coaster, looking around. the view is clear, the air crisp, and we’re about to start on the ride of our life.

The stakes are high. We placed a bet. We don’t know where the wheel will stop spinning. There are factors we can’t be sure of, things we can’t know to consider. The unknown unknowns are massive.

Even if it all goes according to plan, and Trump signs all the EOs he promised on the first day, even if Doge points all the waste and Trump borrows the chainsaw from Milei in Argentine, when you’re doing remodeling at this level, there will be strange second-order effects.

Understand, I don’t expect the consequences will be bad, but some will be strange, and we’ll be holding our breaths through the turns and the loops.

And then there’s the fact that the enemy gets a vote. Enemies internal are bad enough — Dave Freer said on X he’s afraid of the cornered rat effect, and so should we all be — but there are also enemies external, and heaven knows precisely what China will be up to, now they’re loosing his Serene Majesty Zhou Biden, vice-roy to Xi. Not to mention they aren’t sure what Trump will do, but are sure he’s not their willing thrall. And their economy is collapsing and they’re desperate. Then there’s Russia and Iran up in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G. The beginning of a new Axis of evil?

Anyway, the one thing you can be sure of is that the ride will be interesting.

On the other hand, this is the day we never thought would come. We thought they had the cheating sewn up.

So today we hold our breath they don’t think they’re clever and try an assassination and that their rent a crowds don’t set fire to DC.

And then we grip the handle bars and hold our breath.

On the good side, we might come out of this with colonies in Mars and regular flights to the moon and perhaps miners in the asteroids. I know, I know, it’s pie in the sky, but who knows.

For the first time in a long time, the future is wide open.

Oh, there will be bumps, and sudden drops (what they have done and probably will do to the economy doesn’t bare thinking about) but with luck there will be peaks and breathtaking heights as well.

Hold on to your hats. Here we go.

Book Promo

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

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Law of Magical Contagion

The capper to Siobhan Miller’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day was a dog, tied to the stop sign. She hates dogs. She’s terrified of dogs, and that was a big dog. Looking sad and lonely, tied to a stop sign. That was not okay. She was the only one around, so she took him home. Only to find that he wasn’t a dog, but one of the Good People, under a curse. And there were more of them.

And they were all after her. And all she had was the dog (who wasn’t a dog) to help keep her from being taken away from all she’s ever known. Because that dog? He and his twin sister are family that she didn’t know she had, and their appearance has upended everything she’s ever known about herself. Including that she was human to begin with. She has a lot of questions.

Starting with curses, and how and why they sometimes spread.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Empire of Japan (Chronicles of the Fall Book 13)

The Three Part Alliance is falling apart, with internal strife, and out-and-out war . . .

In the Japanese sector, everything is spiraling into a major crisis, but for two teenage boys, their personal problems seem more immediate. For Shato house Kujo the usual fate of a servant’s child looms, while his legitimate best friend and almost brother is powerless to help, while preparing for college.

But the murder of the Crown Prince is about to scramble everyone’s plans as Japan withdraws from the Alliance, and plans retribution.

FROM HOLLY LEROY: One Eight Seven – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller

Love J. A. Konrath’s Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels? Try Lt. Eve Sharpe.
Lt. Eve Sharpe’s mom doesn’t just enjoy guilt trips she buys your ticket, packs your bag, and stamps your passport. Now she has Eve reluctantly heading to San Francisco in an effort to solve the murder of a drag queen superstar.

Teamed up with a tough-as-nails local P.I., Jillian Varela, Eve figures it’ll be an easy case. But what her mom didn’t tell her was that she’d be helping a Mafia don with a long list of enemies.

As the bodies begin to stack up, it becomes obvious that her mom’s ‘simple job’ has turned into something both dangerous and deadly.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Another Word for Magic (Family Law Book 6)

Fleeing the Solar System after an attack by North America, the three Home habitats now have to seek their own fortunes. Heather, Sovereign of Central on the Moon saved them but now has to make certain the USNA can never threaten them again.
What was a tentative research partnership with the Red Tree Clan of Derfhome becomes a full alliance of equals. Lee finds she has to grasp authority and act for the Red Tree Mothers and herself to repossess the planet Providence she and Gordon discovered. The Claims Commission on Earth has collapsed without the leadership of North America. Explorers like her are cut off from their payments and the colonists on Providence are left in the lurch too. To do that she needs these powerful new allies.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)

Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn

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.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Deep Pink (Magis Book 1)

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Rockin’ the USA

It’s not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.

Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne’s Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band’s committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.

Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.

A story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.

This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Periodic

With the fires in California, as often when dealing with government at all levels, there are rumors that they’re doing this according to some long held plan.

Yeah. They might be. I mean, some of the more tin-foiley versions require all sorts of machiavellianc work arounds, and are probably not true. OTOH the givens are that they really hate their constituents and that they view themselves as harbingers of the utopian future. Oh, yeah, and that they mostly think things repeat as in the scant history they actually know, but mostly the fiction and just so stories they’ve read.

And after great fires, cities have been rebuilt to fit grand utopian visions. Actually pretty much every time: Paris, London, Chicago, and if you go back far enough Rome. So I could see them thinking: great fire equals bringing our wonnerful vision in, and working to make this a reality. Among other things it would totally explain Noisome’s self-satisfied smirk and little dance when being interviewed about the fire, and also how he’s been hell of cagey about his plan for the rebuild. (And FYI calling it a Marshall Plan is a bit of a giveaway since the Marshall Plan was imposed on a DEFEATED Europe.)

So could this be “according to plan?” Sure, I’ll allow it. I’ll at least allow that once the fire had started, idiots saw a “great opportunity.”

But wait, because there’s more. Sure, the wolfheads in power are malicious and possessed of a hatred of humanity in general and those who refuse to go along with their plans in particular. They also have a grand disregard for individual passions and interests.

BUT–

And it’s a bit but (or butt if you prefer) they’re also incompetent, and a vast number of them are absolutely rock-dumb.

I’ve — I think — covered this territory sufficiently before, but if you’re just tuning to this channel now, I’ll do a quick recap.

I’m not saying everyone on the left is stupid. That’s just the flipping around of their (dumb) certainty that everyone who disagrees with them is stupid and uneducated (an assumption that btw makes perfect sense for people of naturally compliant character in a culture that equates education with intelligence, and where education has become iron-clad indoctrination.)

People are on the left for any number of reasons, a combination of character, trauma, family tradition, self-interest and accident of personal experience. And their chance of falling, stumbling or being pulled into the left or even the hard left has nothing to do with their native intelligence. (I’d argue that they on average tend to have a more compliant character, to be “good boys and girls” because the establishment has been left for most of my life and you have to work less to be left. So some of them might also be smart but intellectually lazy. And some are ambitious and know that’s where the money and advancement is, or has been till very recently. (I could name some authors. i won’t.))

However, over time they tend to act stupider, and they tend to be less competent. This is not because something happens to their intelligence and ability to think, so much as the fact that they don’t NEED TO.

And the lack of need to starts somewhere about the end of high school if not before. You can just mouth back the platitudes and you get all the candy. You’re not trying to think yourself into your position, you don’t need to hold your beliefs secret against discernment, you just go with the flow and say “the latest thing” and you get rewards.

This is twice as bad if you come from a wealthy, lefty family and/or you’re a minority. Chances are the teachers never taught you much. They were far too busy making sure you liked them, and they virtue signaled as being the right political color and frankly if you were of a certain disposition making sure you didn’t get them into trouble.

And for the purposes of this, “female” is “minority.” I watched midwit girls in my boys classes get the royalty treatment while getting taught so little and having so little demanded of them that if they were my daughters I’d have had even more problems with the school than before. The treatment goes on through college. And heaven forbid you are female, tan and gay. You’re not going to be asked to do anything and will be considered a prodigy if you can pronounce your name correctly. I’ve seen it.

Am I saying women, minorities, gay people are dumber than white straight males. Oh, bullshit. Only the lefties reading this for rage points will twist my words to say that. There are statistical differences in the distribution of male and female IQ (Y’all have a lot more morons and a lot more geniuses than we do — keeping in mind those are still and always rare at either end — and we have more “normal bright.” (Which is what almost everyone needs to get through life, btw, geniuses share some difficulties with morons in getting along with society simply because they’re not the norm, come to that.) And sure IQ for minorities is all over the place, but IQ measurements are “weirdish” unless you get the people administering them being very careful about the background of the tested (if you’ve never done a certain type of test, you’ll test lower, just on familiarity. Also, not a lie that every time you take an IQ test, you’ll do better.) Also leveling and straight out, they’ve monkeyed with IQ tests so much since the 70s partly to make them more “equitable” that some of them aren’t even really valid any more. And the equitable thing is no better and might be worse.

But note that evolution doesn’t work that fast, even if you assume only the dumber are reproducing, and we’re now at a stage where states are doing away with literacy tests for TEACHERS. Teachers of all races, (though mostly female.)

The only thing falling IQ results and falling competence correlates to is “leftist governance.” Which means it’s two things: stupidity in selection (of teachers, superintendents, mayors, governors, and yes fire chiefs) and NOT TEACHING PEOPLE or not teaching people in a way that anyone can learn. (I maintain the failure of teaching languages in the US is that the method used can’t teach ANYONE languages. It helps to have a record/handed down the stories going back to the great flood or shortly thereafter for this. NO ONE IN MY FAMILY HAS EVER FAILED TO LEARN FOREIGN LANGUAGES. Some have an unearthly facility — that’s my brother — so that you could drop them naked in the Amazonian forest, and they’d emerge into civilization three months later speaking fifteen tribal languages flawlessly. Some are like me, and mutter and groan and scream at the books for the first two years, and then it clicks and we’re fluent. So when my kids couldn’t learn foreign languages I spent summers teaching them. They learned. They learned 3 years in a summer (Younger has forgotten everything, but hey.) The problem is that the pseudo-total-immersion method not only wasn’t teaching them, it was making it impossible for them to learn. Reading and writing are now being taught that way too, I think (I don’t have kids in school.))

Both operate because their blinkered sexist and racist notions enjoin them to demand nothing of females or people who tan or females who tan. I don’t know if at some level they believe we’re less capable, or they never thought about it. Or if it’s the magical theory of “raise their self esteem and they’ll automagically learn.”

So you have a population that ranges from illiterate to merely unlearned. From these they pick not the most competent, but those that fit arbitrary criteria in which “victimhood points” add up to create the perfect candidate.

For obvious reasons this results in a disastrous lack of competency at every level from dog catcher to fire chief, and even into elected positions, in a system as corrupt as California’s. (Almost every dem state is extremely corrupt. I wonder why!)

Here’s the secret: picking for any reason other than competence erodes the competence of the people hired, even if the educational system weren’t already completely borked.

ANY REASON. If you were deliberately picking only white, straight males, you’d hit the same effect. You might have a bump at the beginning, because white straight males have had to work harder to have any achievements for the last forty years so the current qualified crop is a bit better than the competition. BUT that won’t last. Because if you’re advancing white straight males automatically they’ll start suffering from the “don’t have to work” effects.

Or you could be picking people for being related to the people in the job. And then you get Latin countries. Or Gavin Newsome. You see where that leads.

For prosperity, safety and advancement, people must be picked for competence for whatever the position is. ALWAYS for competence.

We haven’t had that in a good long while. Even white males get picked for “Complies with leftist beliefs without question” and have been for the last almost a 100 years.

So, no, our “leadership” and “political” class is not all that. In fact they’re idiots studying to be morons.

Are things like the California fires part of a grand plan? At least at the level of taking advantage of a crisis? Who knows? Who cares?

It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking these are top of the line chess players. People, these are creatures that can maybe pour their piss out of their own boots with the instructions written on the sole, but only if they decide to work that hard that day.

It doesn’t really matter if they have a grand plan, to be honest.

As we saw during the Biden interregnum (two days and a wake up) their grand plans tend to turn to shite and their great constructions come apart in their hands.

They are at that level. It’s my opinion this is why communist systems fail after 70 years. No, we never fully went there, but our leadership sure was picked that way. After seventy years of picking for compliance and whatever proletarian points apply, you have people so incompetent they have the Mierdas touch.

Be not afraid. It’s okay to be angry, but don’t let it blind you. Stay alert for the opportunity to rebuild where things fall apart. And they will.

In the end we win, they lose.

That’s all.