Category: Uncategorized

Some utter savage painted the rays on the cross blue, on a cross that is very very old. How old I don’t know, these things aren’t precisely documented.

This cross stood once, before highways crisscrossed the entire village and refashioned it into something utterly alien, at the crossroads that led to the village.

As it’s normal, all sorts of superstitions accrued to it. My dad had this thing going that truly annoyed him. If it was even slightly overcast, when he passed the cross, it would start to rain.

And people left flowers for blessings on their relationships and such.

BUT–

But…. the most common one was the part of “bad things come in three” superstition. It was believed that when death managed to cross below the cross, it took three people.

In my headcanon, and note that I have absolutely no support for this at all, that cross was erected when — something I only found out on the net — the plague killed 90% of the residents. (It was unusually hard hit, probably because of being a large market town, back then. And it was reduced to a village size with one main road.)

In my head, it was put in place, precisely to make it difficult for death to come past it and claim most of the village.

Of course, whoever erected it never counted on highways bypassing the crossroads and providing other avenues into the village.

…. not to mention some BARBARIAN painting the old stone blue.

Grandma — not a fan of apocalyptic fiction — used to say “The world ends once for each of us.”

I only wish she was right.

The world has ended several times for me now, and then… I pick up my boots and build it again. (Note I’m sleepy and still weird-jet-like-lagged enough I almost typed “pick up my boobs.)

Look, the world ended for me when I left the village to go to high school in the city. It was a different world, and my past assumptions no longer applied. Then I became an exchange student and the world ended again. And I came back and strangely the world was yet different. And then I got married…

I’ve moved between states 4 times in my married life, and the world ends. And you build again.

I’m not making light of the devastation, particularly for those still digging out of Helene and Milton. For a lot of them, the devastation and the end of the world is so vast that there is not– or there seems to be no — tomorrow. The world has ended.

I’ve found myself almost in that place once or twice through my own stupidity not a natural disaster. And it took me years to dig out, and the scars remain.

But I’m saying: The world ended. You endure, you survive. And then you must build again.

And I’m saying it too if the unimaginable happens and the enemies of civilization, through fraud, capture the key points in our nation and manage to destroy it as close to utterly as possible.

The world ends. That is a sign that you must build again.

Because unfortunately there is no other choice. Humans build, and sometimes it all gets destroyed, and we grieve.

And then we build again.

Because to stop is to die. If you stop, you’re lying down and dying, as is everything with you. There is no future anymore.

My heart goes out to the people who lost everything. When the wild fires in Colorado took familiar neighborhoods and friends’ houses, it wasn’t as large a disaster. When floods destroyed and reshaped our beloved Manitou Springs, it wasn’t as last a disaster. I’ll continue praying for those people who were unfortunate enough to get hit by monster storms at a time when our government not only wasn’t helping but was actively undermining and almost making war on its own people.

First comes survival, and achieving a place where you can endure day to day without dying.

And then you take your broken heart and you mend it by rebuilding, by making things new again.

It will never be the same. You retain the scars and the homesickness for what will never again be, what never exists again, outside your mind and your dreams.

But you build. You go on, because there is nothing else.

I’ll continue praying for the victims of destruction, storm and man made. And that it’s not as complete as it could be.

And I’ll be here, to cheer on and help when I can, while you build.

We build. To build is to live. Even on a broken heart. Even when everything we built before has been destroyed.

We build.

Sursum corda.

They say death and distance dress people in their most winning smile. I’m not dead and neither country is dead, but from afar, looking back, it’s weird what stands out.

I could and would have deeper thoughts on this if I were here for longer — which pray G-d I will not be for more than a few days more — and I’m sure if I were forced to return — again, pray G-d and make obsequies this never happens — my view of America from here would evolve and evolve again, and now one aspect and then another would be foremost, like remembering the face of a lost loved one, one now remembers the eyes, now the hair, now the way they used to smile.

But right now what stands out for me most from here, looking longingly at home is how comfortless and random I find my surroundings.

Now, some of this to be fair is that I’m a writer of a certain age. Writer is relevant here because we are — to be fair — of a solitary and taciturn disposition and likely to enjoy our own company. This, once you add a certain age — over fifty really, but over sixty starts to be serious — becomes the tendency to want our things the way we like them, and our schedule predictable and also just as we like it, until we’re used to getting up at a certain time, having a certain breakfast and–

I’m not quite that bad — though I can fall into it — because my life is never that excruciatingly predictable. Things happen and throw my day into disarray so often that the more pertinent question is whether my day is ever arrayed.

But still this great a dislocation and it will make me feel uncomfortable. The thing is this happens whenever I travel anywhere, and it’s not normally THIS uncomfortable.

What I find is that even the newly built, expensive houses, seem to lack a basic level of comfort. Now a lot of this is Euro-eco regulations. Another part is… they simply don’t demand it, or they even feel a certain pride in not having it.

Take heating and air conditioning, for instance. Or rather don’t take it, give it to me. Because we’ve been here for what must be the greatest deluge of rain outside the hurricane zone. The humidity would make a southerner go “Too much” and on top of that it’s what we’d consider “somewhat chilly” 40 and 50, except it feels colder here.

The windows don’t fit QUITE right (they’re almost my age.) So last night, trying to sleep involved ignoring what sounded like a dozen energetic drum players all over the house.

Now, it was an exceptional storm and as I said, the windows are almost my age. But we found the same going out anywhere. I don’t know how to put it but “things aren’t designed to cater to comfort and convenience.”

I’m not QUITE complaining. I don’t live here. It’s their life, and they arrange it to their comfort. It’s just they … don’t.

On top of that anytime we’ve interacted with officialdom in any capacity, you have to approach as a supplicant and proffer the proper degree of humble abasement and it never works the same way twice. It depends on whether they like your face, or something.

The whole experience is kind of forlorn and somewhere between camping and trying to live in a house.

And I’ve been watching their news. I won’t go into details. No one needs to cry. But let’s say that perfect audience that the left wishes for? Yep. Brandon is an upright statesman and no sane person would listen to that wanna be Hitler Trump.

The things they believe are somewhere between bizarre and “that never happened.” BUT it is what their media sells. And they buy it verbatim.

No one blogs about current events or politics (or even so far as I can tell history.) It’s just food and mommy blogs and “today I did.” No one voices a contrary opinion, because that would mark them as “crazy” for standing out from the pack.

In the end? They live like this, because this is how they wish to live. They have the life they deserve.

People don’t protest when they get pushed around. They don’t expect something better, or try to bring it about. And they shut up when lies are told in public because they don’t want to be thought “crazy.”

There are people in our country who say that the Republic is dead. It is mortally wounded, but dead is something else.

The Republic is not dead so long as there are Americans. So long as we are those people the world complains about: loud, demanding, refusing to settle or be sensible…

As long as that remains, the Republic can be brought back to its former glory.

Stay salty my friends. The rest of the world might think we are reprehensible, but we are still, and will remain the last greatest hope of mankind.

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 JON LAFORCE: Hell’s Belles: Love and War Downrange

Two souls collide in the middle of a deadly war.

Sergeant Sylvie Lyons of Her Majesty’s Royal Engineers wishes she’d listened to her grandda’s advice and stayed away from the military.

USMC Sergeant Hondo Cassidy wants nothing more in life than being a Marine and fighting.

Hondo and Sylvie find themselves thrown together when his artillerymen are assigned to provide security for her engineers deep in the desert of Afghanistan.. Amidst death, destruction, cultural misunderstanding and the inevitable that happens when you mix an all male unit of Marines with an engineer unit that is mostly female, Sylvie and Hondo find in each other a reason to live.

That is, if they can survive.

FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion

Invasion from an alternate timeline?
It’s December 1937 in a world exactly like ours except that it is about to veer wildly into alternate history. It’s less than two years before World War II broke out historically in Europe. War has already come to much of Asia, with Japan invading China. An isolationist US fears it will be drawn into that conflict, especially after the Japanese sink the US gunboat Panay. Just when President Franklin Roosevelt thinks he has that crisis under control, he faces a bigger issue. High tech descendants of the Wokuo, Japanese pirates and smugglers who should have vanished over three hundred years ago, flood into the Pacific coast off California.

The Wokuo are both refugees and invaders, fleeing from war in an alternate reality where they survived and grew strong, while looking for new conquests to replace their lost empire. They set their sights on California. President Roosevelt sends disgraced former Colonel Martin to California to organize resistance to the invaders, but the Colonel has his own issues, buried deep in his brain and waiting to cause disaster.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Madeleine and the Mists

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went. . . the Misty Hills were filled with marvels.

Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old.

But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband.

She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king — and the Misty Hills.

Some things are not so easily evaded.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Having a Pint (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 2

Even the dead have to make a living…

Meg Turner, vampire accountant and investments advisor, has plenty of living clients, but not many among her fellow undead. That’s about to change: she’s been invited to a regional business fair for her kind. She’ll get to meet and greet more bloodsuckers than she really wanted to (hopefully without having to suck up to any of them). than just the two Vampire cops she helped track down and stake her late, unlamented sire—and hopefully make some friends and answer some questions.

Unfortunately, she’s got a Line Progenitor who’s begun invading her dreams, and a serial killer stalking her future clients to distract her from growing her business. Throw in a sick roommate not long before the conference starts, a mafia messenger boy left on her front porch, and only one car to juggle all of her responsibilities toward her roommate and unexpected guest. And then on top of that, she has the business fair over an hour away that features vampire karaoke, nosy, pushy elder bloodsuckers, and one particular elder who’s friends with her unwelcome dream guest. Seriously, it’s enough to drive her to drink something other than coffee or blood.

Just why did she think this whole conference thing sounded like a good idea, again?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf

The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.

Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.

Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact

Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .

As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!

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: credit

By Holly the Assistant

Yes, there’s a Presidential Election.

But who and what else is on your ballot? Have you looked yet? Figured out who is running for those down-ballot races and how crooked they are? What that deceptively worded proposition actually means? This is where a lot of the shaping of how this country runs happens: if you liked your governor stepping up to support Texas, your Attorney General filing that lawsuit or amicus curiae brief, your county commissioners telling that federal agency to shove it . . . this is where it happens, and this matters, quite possibly, more than the national votes, because of how our country runs.

A lot of these are local or state matters, so I can’t give you a brief overview of what you’ll see on yours. But please, don’t wait until Election Day to figure it out. I know at least one of you has an Anyone Would Be Better Candidate for something because someone always does. Probably more than half of you, honestly. Sometimes just getting a different crook who isn’t part of the current scheme in is enough to upset the rotten apple basket.

And, while we’re at it, here’s my most useful emotions based anti-mail-in voting argument, if you should happen to have anyone you need to talk to about it:

County Sheriff is an elected position. Prosecutor, too, here. So if you have mail-in ballots, and you’ve got an abuser who is getting away with it because he’s got a buddy in power who declines to charge or fumbles the investigation on purpose, you’re giving him his victim’s vote, as well as his own. Someone who will beat his wife for other things will beat her to make her vote right, and if he can watch her vote, she has no chance against his buddies in power. Some of these rural county votes will swing on a handful of people: I’ve seen votes as tight as three here. If you support mail-in ballots, you support abusers getting to keep their buddies who protect them in power.

When did she grow to be a beauty? When did he grow to be so tall?

Wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?

I don’t remember growing older. When did they?

From the Assistant, since apparently WordPress doesn’t show y’all who made the post.

We were very glad to hear from RES yesterday in comments, and would like very much to hear from the other Huns and Hoydens that everyone is all right, as time, and internet and electricity access permit.

Well, hold onto your hats, Huns and Hoydens.

First off, a brief housekeeping note. Some of y’all are really tasty according to WordPress, and it keeps tossing you in spam, or scary and it throws you in trash. If I am sure I recognize the handle, I’ll fish you out. If I am not sure I recognize the handle, the usual procedure is to ping our hostess with “Hey is so-n-so okay?” and she goes and looks. Since she’s a bit away right now, newcomers or very occasional posters will be languishing a bit longer: it’s not because you aren’t wanted: it’s because I respect this isn’t my blog and the hostess is gone. If you’re a regular and you know how to ping me about a strayed comment, please feel free to do so, but realize that I may be away from a computer for quite a while at a stretch and WordPress and smartphone do not play well together, so I can’t get you out til I’m back at a computer. I have a medium size and fairly busy family, so it’s really not you, it’s having to get kids to stuff in town.

Here locally up in the high desert mountains, we’ve had a long and warm summer. It’s now early October, and we’ve had no frosts (should have happened in late August) and no snows. In some ways this is good: a friend gave me all her extra peaches (which is most of what I’m doing this week, canning peaches, by all I mean nine boxes), but of course we didn’t know we’d have two months extra of growing season so didn’t plant for it. The garden in general didn’t do so well, but my husband has now put up deer fence which will help in the future. I’d guess in milder climates, that is, most of the USA, various harvests are underway. Potato is going on out on the plains below here. May you all have a good season and fill your root cellars and pantries, because looking at current news, we’re going to need it.

I urge you to check your snow shovels and winter prep, if you are so fortunate as to have battery operated fire and CO alarms check those, etc. If you’re on the other side of the world I guess you’re swapping to summer emergency gear. Do you have what you need, do you need to restock anything? Check your medicine cabinet, too. We can’t do all that much about a Hurricane Helene, but we can do quite a lot about a tire blow-out at -20F. Remember you are your own first responder.

And now, back to canning peaches by the quart jars. Things I have learned: Children cannot recognize a wide-mouthed jar in the dark of the pantry, the kittens think they are peaches or would like to be peaches or would like to eat peaches or possibly be canned, they do not like sugar syrup spills on the floor and are very, very funny when their paws stick. I have done forty-nine quarts with only two failures to seal, I have as many more peaches to go, and I’m racing spoilage. Also I’m down to one remaining wide-mouth quart so the rest will have to be quartered, or get more jars. And if you hear me yell “Get out of my kitchen!” scoot now, ask questions later, because everything’s boiling right now.

See you all in a few hours in the comments, if the internet stays up and the creek don’t rise.

As usual when I’m away from home, particularly in Europe, I’m…. Uh…. At the rate my Americanness and libertarianism are intensifying, I won’t need a plane to fly back. I’ll call an eagle to me through utter, intensity of my love for the Constitution, and it will then fly me home.

I’ve been trying to be good and behave, because we’re guests, but the country makes me itch inside my skin, and the level of governmental interference in every day life is a thing we not only don’t imagine but can’t imagine.

It’s stupid little things, like I found out that they have three trash collections a week, and have to separate in more bags than I can keep in my head at any one day. Then there is the fact that their bottle caps have a tether to the bottle so it doesn’t get discarded separately and maybe polute the oceans.

And I keep getting unreasonably angry, then telling myself I can endure it for a few days, but if it were longer, there would be a revolution.

This morning, when my poor husband got up for breakfast, he was treated to a “I don’t stop to breathe” rant on the subject of “these people spend so much time obeying the pointless commands of their government that they’re never ever, in the eve of ever be productive or invent anything or– Which is why our country is the engine of the world. Because by 8 o’clock in the morning local time, I had just about enough and a little beyond.

And as I hear well intentioned things about how America should be run — and let me point out that their news here make our news sound like they’re rabid right wing. Their news have my parents — my parents — convinced that Biden is a nice man, and a very smart one, who just recently became slightly impaired — and my blood pressure climbs to the level that I expect a little whistle to come up atop my head and whistle, Merry Melodies style. — and I start fuming.

It wasn’t till a few hours in that it occurred to me: Forgive them, George (Washington). Not only don’t they know what they do, they have absolutely no idea who and what we are.

That thing when my parents call me because there’s a fire in California? They imagined, when we lived in Colorado, that we might go for a nice Sunday drive, of an afternoon, and accidentally stray into California. If there’s a shooting in Pennsylvania they ask if we might accidentally be near it, perhaps because we took a wrong turn on our way to the grocery store.

They don’t at all understand not just American geography, but the scope and SIZE of our country. And they’re exactly the same for the size of our economy. The variety of law in our states. The amazing scope of our economy.

When they say something like “We don’t understand why a country the size of yours can’t avoid school shootings” what they’re actually saying is “We don’t understand you’re not half a dozen school children who can be scolded into better behavior.”

Part of the problem with this is that they don’t understand their post WWII little socialist dream was a thing facilitated and ultimately paid for by the US. Without our creating the future, improving continuously on processes to do everything, without us creating the internet and making this amazing transmission of data across countries possible, without us buying and selling and growing, and creating untold wealth, their relative impoverishment due to their hyper controlled economies would have become so dire they’d have starved or revolted already.

And they don’t understand if they could drag us down into their socialist dream of the state looking after you in all circumstances and you not being permitted to fart unless you have a fart permit and then only on alternate Wednesdays, it wouldn’t be paradise.

They would have killed the goose who lays the golden eggs, and things would get dire very rapidly.

Forgive them, George, they know not what they do. And let them never find out, because we remain free and obstreperous enough we’ll never sink to their level.

Now excuse me, I need to go out to the terrace and invoke Ayn Rand’s name of power, and call out in the name of the George, for the eagle of freedom to come and fly me home. I’ve been here 48 hours. How much longer am I supposed to endure?

Sure, I like seeing my parents and spending time with them, but you see, I have this medical condition. I am allergic to unwitting, willing serfdom. And I’m about at my limit.