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 RACONTEUR PRESS, WITH STORIES BY M. C. A. HOGARTH AND DAVID BOCK: Moggies Back in Space (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 14)

Cats go where they want. Moggies even more so. When humans go to space, obviously cats will come along to make sure their staff are doing what they’re supposed to.

Join these 10 authors as they explore what cats can do in space.

FROM DUSTIN BALLARD: Dueling Wizards: The Sellsword Saga

In the gritty fantasy world of Galhadria, a down on his luck mercenary limps into a dangerous border town.

Sellsword Cas is broke and battered, but he senses opportunity.

Three rival wizards vie for control of town and are paying good coin for mercenaries. Cas plays one faction against another, meaning to gather enough gold to escape – but as blood is shed and employers betrayed, he finds himself with fewer and fewer options to get out of this town alive.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Debris (The Rise of the Discarded Series Book 1)

Lost in thought, Ayar’s mind was on his invention that would allow premature griffin cubs to survive. He had no inkling he would rescue a creature that he suspected might be rational. Who would put one of their own out to die like that?

Rhys Callahan wanted to avoid a point of known pirate activity. Then he flew directly into one, and his ship was shot out of the sky. He managed a terrifying crash-landing on the nearest planet only to find himself among regressed humans who thought he was a god. When they realized he wasn’t, they became angry. Then they chained him to an upthrust boulder as a sacrifice to their local deity.

Neither Ayar nor Rhys ever expected to meet one another. But now that they have, maybe together they can fight for both their kinds. First, though, they need to learn how to communicate – and hope that neither of them is killed before they can get their enterprise off the ground!

Welcome to the first book in the Rise of the Discarded series!

FROM DANIEL ZEIDLER: Sarbotel Rising

Sarbotel Rising contains the complete Sarbotel Rising Duology (Book 1: The Standard Bearer’s Oath and Book 2: Ilse’s Game) in one volume.

When Ilse was five, the army of a mad alien mage known only as the Tyrant captured the capitol of the kingdom of Sarbotel, trapping all who were within its walls. Fourteen years later, she is the only surviving member of her resistance cell and free of the city, but rather than returning to the safety of her homeland, she has sworn an oath to kill the Tyrant and avenge the deaths of her family and comrades. The Tyrant is more dangerous than Ilse knows, and not all of her new allies can be trusted, but Ilse has teamed up with one of the Guardians…

Heldron, an immortal Guardian, has returned to the world of Seuthes on a mission to disable a powerful magical artifact that has kept the rest of the Guardians away from their homeworld for a millennium. He quickly discovers that, with a lost princess in need of assistance, a kingdom fighting to be free, and an anxious alien war machine considering destroying the planet, his mission is not a straightforward as it seemed…

FROM SABRINA ROSEN: The Sorceress Unbound: Chloe Delis Book 1

Chloe Delis has a new job as the Sorceress
for the city of West Rhodes.
But her spells are behaving unpredictably,
And she has a terrible case of imposter syndrome

The murder of the priestess who might have given her
Some insights into her new abilities plunges her in over her head.

Officer Skylos Whiterock isn’t sure the new Sorceress is all
the city council was hoping for, but he’s willing to keep silent about her quirks
as long as he’s sure she’s not a danger to the people he’s responsible for.

If only she didn’t look so much like his first love.

Then a beastial starts eating its victim’s internal organs
And it’s like nothing Chloe’s been trained for.

Can she find the creature and kill it before it takes another life?

FROM AURORA DAWN: Hallowing Eve: A Billionaire Boss Romance

Billionaire boss Lucas Danvers keeps his assistant, Evelyn Fontana, very close and very busy. He values her efficiency and intelligence and needs it available to him at all times. It certainly isn’t because he’s in love with her and wants to keep her away from other men. It’s simply a question of respecting her abilities.

That is, until she breaks their tradition of couples’ costumes for the company Halloween party, for which she is solely responsible. When she shows up to the shindig as Eve to his Executive Vice-President Nick Wilbright’s Adam, he has no choice but to disrupt their Edenic date plans dressed as Lucifer. Even if he wants to change the traditional story just a bit.

Nick Wilbright’s been in love with his best friend since college, but Lucas’ procession of supermodels, starlets, and superhot women of all sorts have kept him from making his feelings known. Not to mention that it’s obvious he’s in love with his assistant. Then Evelyn comes to him with a proposition: attend the company Halloween party with her, in matching costumes meant to provoke Lucas to finally pick one of them. Or both.
Will Lucas re-enact the scene in the Garden, or can he tempt both Adam and Eve into sin?

FROM RICHARD MEREDITH: The Crow’s Nest

Winner of 2021 Silver Falchion Award for Best Action-Adventure Novel at the Killer Nashville Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense Writers Conference
 
Submerged in a crude submarine hundreds of miles from shore and ten tons of cocaine stolen from a ruthless drug lord, Chase Brenner’s only chance to save his family rests with a drug addled smuggler and a desperate gambit to outwit the cartel.
 
Chase Brewer, a crewman on a commercial tuna seiner, barely escapes death after his boat and its crew are destroyed by el Hermandad—a sinister cartel hell-bent on eliminating all witnesses to its unique smuggling operation. After surviving an arduous voyage in a flimsy boat, he seeks answers and a little retribution. Hot on the trail for clues, Chase rescues Jonny LeBeau, a Louisiana shrimper forced into smuggling by the cartel but now on its hit list after skimming drugs. When the cartel realizes Chase survived and a witness is on the loose, both men are now in its crosshairs.
 
In a desperate gambit to bargain for their lives, Chase and Jonny hijack a narco-submarine with ten tons of cocaine. The secrecy of the cartel’s billion-dollar enterprise hinges on silencing this dubious pair of extortionists. Jonny, though, proves he’s as cunning as the cartel’s most savage sicario. But the cartel plays its trump card and Jonny faces the moral dilemma of his life—ditch Chase, the man who saved him from death, and escape with riches beyond his wildest dreams or lose it all and, maybe, his life to ransom Chase’s wife and children after they’re kidnapped by the cartel.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier

With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon’s Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William’s own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.

In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon’s Breath Organ.

However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon’s Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.

Now she must delve into the history of the cathedral, and the mysterious ancient magic that fills the organ’s windchest. A secret that may well cost this young woman her life.

Or worse, her sanity.

An Ixilon story.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Sleigh Bells and Starships: A Peltedverse Holiday Collection.

At last, all the Peltedverse holiday stories in one place… plus a whole new novella!

• Precious Things
• Season’s Meaning
• Christmas Lullaby
• The Snow Maiden: or the Case with the Holiday Blues
• Case Study: The Tree
• Longest Night
• Silver and Gold
• …and the bonus story TBA!

Indulge your holiday cheer!

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: REFLECTIVE

One of the funniest conceit of our age has to be the idea that the sophisticated and “bien pensant” are “citizens of the world.”

I was profoundly amused that Alvin Toffler fell for his in his last book I read sometime in the 90s. Keep in mind that, despite everything else, I believe his Future Shock is brilliant and explains a lot of life in the US in the last fifty years. (Note in the US. I’m not sure about the rest of the world. And I could explain why, but it would sidetrack us a lot more than this.) However the book about how the most powerful were the ones who had the most information (arguable) also pushed the “citizens of the world, not a country” thing as being the one for most powerful people.

I was amused because, though I agree this is the CONCEIT of most self-styled international elites, it is also in practicality, a load of stinking Hooey. (Or as we call it around here, #2son’s pre-school teacher. Yes, that really was her last name.)

Part of the reason the “elites” believe themselves multinational or “citizens of the world” is oikophobia. They believe themselves to have risen above their co-citizens in their lands of origin, who are …. well, in their minds, stupid and uneducated, which is a way to say “less rich” than the “elites.”

Therefore, in the same way that the nobility of old had more in common with other nobility from other lands than with their own country, they think they are a caste set aside and by reason of existing or having money inherently superior to all those who are loyal in and interested in their homelands.

Part of it is the belief that “nationalism” is bad and it led to WWI and WWII. Having been taught that (at this point it, drank it with mother’s milk) the richest and “best” (Most expensively) educated want to get as far away from that as possible, and be at a level when they’re free from that irrational passion, since it’s their conceit that they can rule “impartially” and from above for the good of all.

The problem with it is that not only is none of it true, but they are in fact both more provincial and less well educated than their countrymen. And also that what they aspire to is not only impossible, but really easy to manipulate.

So, the long war of the 20th century was not because of nationalism. In fact, the only explanation I have found for its being assumed to be so is that the international socialists who dominated intellectual discourse for the rest of the century despised the fact that, against their theory, workers of the world didn’t unite, but rather rallied to defend their homeland.

However, if you do a deep dive into the reasons for the first war, ignoring the opinions of those writing about it — which I did, because I was profoundly unsatisfied with the reasons given and none of it made sense — the war’s causation was attempts at internationalism. yes, the interantionalism wasn’t of the “supra-national, pseudo worldwide” type (Actually the mask worn by Russian national imperialism) but of the ‘extended noble family trying to grab the entire world’ type. But it was still internationalism, with all the problems of internationalism. (More on that later.)

And the current elites are not “better educated” and don’t rise above much of anything. In fact the world-renowned establishments most of them attend take so many “legacy” and “endowed an entire specialty” students, not to mention “admitted because diversity of skin color or origin” that their meritocratic requirements (I.E. knows or gives a damn about the subject), might be lower than your average state university. Also, once admitted, these people are guaranteed to graduate. Or at least will, barring some particularly egregious violation of code or “everybody knows.”

Look, guys, we’ve all Michelle Obama’s Harvard paper. I’ve taught high school kids. I wouldn’t let one of them skate by on something that vapid, much less an ivy league college student. But she, and her distinctly non-intellectual husband, graduated.

I have no idea where Chelsea Clinton graduated from, but I have a vague idea that she has a law degree, and let’s face it, she was too stupid to keep a talk show going. And the very fact that Kamala Harris couldn’t enter the college her parents attended (An ivy and I THINK Harvard) should be a fire alarm. However, she too has a law degree, despite the word salad betraying an IQ that wouldn’t rival my cat Havey, who has the brain of a peanut.

Heck, because these days the people chosen for financial and political (that they’re linked betrays that the fascists did indeed win, at least in the century-long run) advancement are chosen mostly on the basis or how well they chugged the Marxist koolaid, most of them aren’t so much educated as Marxist-indoctrinated.

Which both explains their belief they were made/educated to rule us all — the Intellectuals, leading the working class to socialist paradise, sing it with me! — and their utter, abject inability to see the problems with that.

This was brought home to me this morning, when I came across a discussion on X where a hapless gun-control advocate said he was tired of the government doing nothing, and they should just go door to door and confiscate all guns and arrest all gun owners.

Let alone that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and mentally ill people kill people in vast numbers. I think still the largest mass murder in American history was a bomb set in a school at the turn of the twentieth century. (If you don’t count 9/11 because act of war, though you know? Could be counted.) And you can’t confiscate all the means to make bombs, not if you want people to be able to function at all. Heck, Great Britain’s attempts to stop murder are getting to the point of confiscating butter knives, and yet the murders continue. (Partly because criminals don’t obey laws, but also because if you want to kill someone, you’ll find a way. I find it darkly amusing that the same people who think teaching abstinence doesn’t work in sexual matters, think rules will stop humans killing humans. Their approach to stop violence, if applied to sex, would require a license to buy a condom, careful mental examination of any woman wishing to take the pill, and probably forbidding diaphragms and implants. And they’d be astonished that people are still sleeping together.)

However, what betrayed the person posting that comment as a part of the imagined “citizens of the world” was his (or hers. The name could go either way. So using “his” because that’s what the English language prescribed before people went nuts) utter and complete certainty that going door to door in the US would work, and that people would meekly hand over their guns.

First, let’s talk about “who is going to do that?” Because I can tell you, having known a lot of policemen and sheriff’s over the years, I happen to know all of them have people they will not approach even to say “good morning” because “that crazy summabitch will shoot me if he sees my car.”And in fact, they won’t go anywhere near those people, unless there is a major crime reason to. Or what do you think all the “people of interest” who are left alone are? Tell your average policeman or sheriff dept deputy to go door to door and confiscate his neighbor’s guns, and they will find that they’re really sick that day. It’s probably Covid. They don’t want to spread it, you know? And it will last as long as the order is operative. Because they’re not stupid. And even leaving aside the known crazies, they know the rest of the population will at best lie about whether they have guns. And if they force the issue, it will get ugly fast.

But more importantly, these “Citizens of the world” have no clue how their country is constituted, nor how many miles of miles and miles with the occasional house there are in this country. Or that each state has a different culture. Or–

In fact, these people who by and large don’t mix with local populations have a vague idea that the country has a lot more cities/apartments than it does, and that people act more compliant than they do. Because like Europeans, what they know about America is what they see in movies, not realizing movies are made by people like them and are feeding their assumptions back to them.

They also have a vague idea most of the country is easily led, because of course the only reason to disagree with them is that we’re being lied to by extremely persuasive evil people. (that it never occurs to them this might be happening to them, is a measure of lack of self awareness.) Hence their reason to try to get Trump. Because without his evil persuasion, we’d be fully on board with their crazy-cakes insanity.

As for the European elites, I don’t know. I used to hobnob with them, in the sense that I tended to hobnob with the over-educated which were, definitionally, better off than I, but it’s been a minute. However, judging from that and what I see now, my belief is they’re not really “citizens of the world” so much as citizens of their homeland which they secretly believe should rule all nations due to the “nationality”-race/breed being obviously superior.

What I do know is that there is no such a thing as a citizen of the world, no matter the level of self delusion that induces people to believe they are such.

We are all members of our culture. While we can believe everything about our culture is bad and evil, we still project it on everything else we see. Therefore, you know, well to do Americans keep believing criminals and terrorists don’t really exist, and must be decent people driven to extremes by need or oppression. (The results of these beliefs would be hilarious, if they didn’t more or less break everything.) Heck, they keep believing the LAZY or lacking ambition don’t exist, and if people aren’t working hard to succeed it must be because of a terrible condition. (Look up “Bee sting” theory of poverty sometime.)

When the various international elites meet abroad, they each read in the other what they themselves would do, but don’t actually understand each other beyond vague fashion sense, and spending money like water.

Ultimately their entire attempt to be “international” seems to consist of an idea that if they just become the people of the song “Imagine” and don’t believe in or care about anything, they can lead people better.

They are wrong because it’s not only impossible to divest yourself of all passion and interest (well, without offing yourself or doing a lot of drugs) but also because it’s impossible to totally divest yourself of your basic culture. (You can acculturate, but that involves a lot of work, and ACQUIRING another culture, which defeats their purpose. The “citizen of the world” culture doesn’t exist, beyond some shibboleths like “humans are killing the Earth” and “The proles are really stupid, eh?”). MORE IMPORTANTLY, even if they managed it, that wouldn’t make them impartial or able to lead anyone to utopia. What it would make them is very, very people-stupid and unable to realize why certain people do certain things, and others don’t. Or why certain countries are the way they are.

In fact, to the extent they’ve managed to shed their culture and replace it with Marxism, all they’ve done is become an unreasoning cult, unable to realize the population isn’t in fact exploding — because people lie in census, and so do nations — but also that there is not only no necessity but no benefit in “eating bugs.”

What they’ve managed in fact is to become rulers completely detached from the nations/locales they’re supposed to read, and completely unable to conceptualize individual freedom and will.

In that they completely replicate the “nobility” and “elites” pre WWI.

And so, there is it. “Citizens of the world” leading us into chaos and war for a hundred years.

There are modes of failure for control of human society that most of us don’t think of. We don’t think of them because they’re rarely if ever shown in movies, and certainly not recently.

Let me explain: I’ve been cycling very fast between thinking swallowing the blackpill is a lack of information; and thinking the blackpilled aren’t blackpilled enough. And the sad thing? Both are right. It’s just which one I think is stronger that day.

Oh, I stand by “We’ll win this.” In fact we’ve already won this. We’ve turned the corner. It’s just the amount of destruction laying between now and when we obviously won is immense.

Before you rush off to learn hand sewing, or mining or whatever: I don’t think we’ll lose tech, no. Or not to 19th century level. Or even mid-twentieth. Lack of resources might make things slightly cranky and slow for a while and might take us to the level of… Europe in providing creature comforts and care and luxuries to our people. But that’s about it.

It’s more that we’re going to lose people. We’re going to lose trust which is needed for prosperity. We’re going to lose institutions we actually need (most of those are extremely corrupted right now, but still sort of functioning. Soon they won’t.) And we’re going to lose a generation or two. Oh, not in the sense they’ll die. Honestly, most of them will never be born. It’s not even abortion. It’s that most of a generation is extremely gun shy about even marrying. Part is economics. Part is the extreme rifts the illusions of the left have created between male and female. And we’re going to lose people to grinding poverty and unhappiness, both because alone/isolated and because well…. they’re going to have to work very hard to rebuild. And hence we’ll lose LIVES that could have been great, but never get a chance.

Oh, we’ll also lose people to violence, to the left’s bizarre idea of compassion, to the left’s bizarre idea of immigration, to despair, to lack of meds…. To a lot of things.

Since ultimately individual humans are the only true wealth for the world, (because humans can create wealth) that one is going to hurt badly.

But the failure mode that is destroying the left is also the reason the blackpillers take them by the fistfull. And the reason the fall is going to hurt like a mother.

Look, how many times have you heard one nominally on our side (nominally, because fear and despondency aids the enemy. IOW think, for the love of Bob!) say something like “They control the schools, and they control the media, and they control the arts and history. Game over, man, game over.”

I can adduce various reasons it’s not game over, starting with “They’ve done that for almost a century, and almost all of come out of school leftist, or at least unwilling to admit we have doubts about the received wisdom, and then we…. change.

But we still don’t control the means of mass communication, and most people still think what they hear on TV is “the truth” so, of course, they assume the left is still gaining. Even when they resort to portraying my generation as my grandmother’s to claim they’re gaining adherents. (Bah.)

However, what they fail to realize is how much the left is impaired by controlling all the means of narrative. And yes, I do mean impaired. Particularly in these days when they really aren’t the ONLY means of narrative, and more and more people are escaping the thrall of said narrative, sideways, and by way of blogs, or way of mouth, or random confronting the truth with their own eyes.

At this point the left — true credulous left — is confined to that number of people who are either absurdly respecting of authority — they need to know their source of knowledge is “certified good” by all the “right people” which are usually people like politicians and college professors — or to people who are so busy with other things (which unfortunately includes any number of executives and high-producing artists and the like ) that they never look closely at the news. They have the one news outlet their parents watched, and they still watch it and piously believe it. I peg it at about 25% of the public, on nothing but a gut feel. (Which I could unpack for you, but seriously. Let’s just say if they really were 50% of the country, they wouldn’t need to fraud and defend means of fraud so much.)

Since the outlets — and official entertainment — pretty much are composed of those people, this means that they believe the narrative, and keep pushing on it, further and further. Which means they get further and further from any glimmer of observed reality. Which in turn, yes, causes more and more of the still mildly sane people in their midst to wake up, but also causes the people who don’t and base policies (A lot of them are in government at various levels) or corporate decisions on “the news” and “the entertainment” and the narrative of “everyone knows” and “settled science” to make increasingly more disastrous and bizarre decisions, entirely disconnected from reality.

So, the reason they are failing is because their decisions are causing even those mildly convinced of the nonsense to snap out of it. But they are also taking the country down a bizarre, suicidal path that is going to hurt all of us in the short run. (And short can be a couple of generations in this case.)

To illustrate, take the open borders: At least some number of the idiots on the left are convinced that we have to keep our borders open, to accommodate refugees of the “Climate catastrophe” that they think is turning every land to the South of us sterile.

No, seriously. They really believe this. They believe we have to let people in, because to do otherwise would be to condemn them to death.

Think about it, it’s generations of bandaid, and climate propaganda, and you’d be surprised how many of them really believe the world will end in 10 or 5 or however many years. Because they believe the “authorities.”

They’re the same people still convinced it was a miracle they survived the “pandemic.” Because they trust the authorities, and/or don’t have brain space to question.

In addition, they believe because they were told, that humans are infinitely plastic. Therefore, people coming in will just ‘of course’ become Americans. The only reason you could object to bringing them in is that they’re in general darker skinned than you, you racist.

In addition, they believe wealth can’t be created. So if the US is richer is because we stole the “natural resources” from everyone else. Bringing them here, to enjoy those natural resources we stole is just ETHICAL. This btw results in idiots saying things like “We don’t need to live this well. We’re really living too well. We can share.”

Because wealth can’t be created or destroyed, so it’s all a matter of a giant kindergarten class nicely sharing the cookies around, see?

They also don’t really believe in culture. They talk about culture, but what they mean by that is interesting foods and nice clothes. AND those are genetic. As is language. Which is why they both get furious when you “appropriate culture” because somehow inexplicably, the language, the food, the clothes, is all genetic, and all genetically linked. So only people with the right genetics can enjoy such things, or you’re stealing it AND call you a racist when you object to cultural practices like throwing gay people off roofs. Because, you know, it’s genetic, so if you object you’re racist. Also requiring people to learn English is racist. Don’t you know that poor brown people can’t? This is when my fist itches to punch their faces. BUT the point is they really really really believe this.

When they kept putting my kids in Spanish-only classes, they weren’t trying to sabotage them or hold them back. The kids looked Latin and I had an accent. And language is of course genetic. So if they put them in Spanish, then the kids, who were doing pretty well in English, would suddenly be really super-intelligent geniuses, because they wouldn’t be fighting their genetics.

The person who has got the closest to describing this phenomenon is Scott Adams with the “Different films in the heads.”

But that’s not even it. It’s more: the people controlling the narrative, once there were alternatives, were the same ones who refused to leave it. And they kept piling on more bits of narrative, all of which — because they long ago made a practice of running off all dissent. And got far more picky about dissent as time went on — create a bubble of virtual reality.

So when they do things like open the borders and accept everyone as “refugees” they really think they are doing what’s needful and indeed decent, and if you oppose them it can only be rank bigotry.

When they try to stop the use of fossil fuels, only a few of them do it because “it will stop people traveling.” There are a few, but not most people. To most of them that’s an incidental inconvenience/convenience. Mostly they just don’t want to burn up, and they really think this will happen tomorrow. They also think scientific progress can be wished into existence so if we don’t have perfect renewable energy yet it’s because you — yes you — uneducated bigot are clinging to unsafe alternatives like nuclear. If they take that way too, then you’ll have no choice but turn to renewables, and then we’ll have paradise.

Or take the horrors committed by Hamas. The lefties are terrified that the Israelis will go too far and “commit genocide” in punishing them. The pieces for this that fit into the reality bubble they live in are: in general the Palestinians are darker than the Jews they know (Not necessarily those in Israel, mind.) Therefore they are obviously oppressors, because whiter people are always oppressors. (So saith Gramsci and their college professors.) The state of Israel is new and therefore a “colonizing” entity. They heard that the Israelis are an apartheid state and therefore evil. (This is unexamined as to what it means. No. it’s not an apartheid state.) Also they don’t understand Israel is more or less under constant attack. The news rarely mentions it after all. Also Israel wants to take military action, and the military is chauvinistic, fascistic and too masculine. Also, of course, Israelis are more competent than Palestinians therefore evil. (No, this really seems to be an underlying, though unspoken belief.) Also of course, the Israelis live better, so they must have stolen the “natural resources” from the Palestinians.

BUT most of all, they can’t conceptualize violence. I know this sounds hilarious from the side that deployed antifa and BLM. However remember they think antifa is composed of poor people and BLM of black people. (No, neither is true, but that’s what the media says.) And the left really truly is incapable of conceptualizing people who do violence, evil and mayhem for their own sake.

The fault is partly of fiction, which demands that villains be as understandable as heroes and have a reason they went sour. But the reason fiction demands that is that it’s mostly composed of leftists in the upper publishing reaches, so it might be a chicken and egg situation.

And these people apparently managed to go through elementary without ever being kicked and bitten by a classmate who just didn’t like the look of them. This means they either were teachers’ pets or very very wealthy, btw.

So they think humans ONLY ever commit violence after being extensively sinned against. The very horror of the attack perpetrated on Israel, to people who don’t really understand culture or history or anything outside their bubble, means they must have suffered horribly.

And there you have the incentive for all the Jew hatred in this country and the rest of the west, and for the manifestations in favor of sparing genocidal monsters. Note that none of these idiots seems to realize Gaza has NOT surrendered and given up either the hostages or the perpetrators and planners of the attack. Which in any sane dispute would be condition zero for peace negotiations.

No, they just look at their virtual reality bubble, and the weight of the outrage means to them that it must be justified. And now we (the west in general) are going to hit the poor abused critters more, and that will make them hate us more. The idea that their hatred of Israel — and lest we forget us — is ex nihilo and can only be appeased if everyone else stops EXISTING never occurs to the left, because it’s not part of their bubble of virtual reality.

The problem with all this is that the inhabitants of the bubble feel justified and VIRTUOUS. The general attitude about vote fraud is that they’re not doing enough to alter the elections, even when they’re self-obviously doing so. But even if they were, what they’re frauding in is for our own good, and will lead to paradise on Earth, which we’re obviously too stupid to see.

Yep, they’re silencing us for our own good. For the good of humanity.

Again, the crazier the bubble gets, the more they expel anyone who even has a clue as to reality. And the more they expel even the marginally sane, the crazier the bubble gets.

The more out of touch the bubble is, the more people escape it.

But on the other hand, the more deep-bubble the decisions made by the people who stay within — which are, almost all, circumstantially, hereditarily, and by reason of personality, people with the most power over both the bubble and the institutions it long ago captured — the less they fit with reality.

Objectively the deep bubble “the criminals are just hurting and we need to help them be happier” and “the homeless are just people who lack houses, so let them live on the sidewalks” has destroyed most great American cities in three years. And yet smaller cities, controlled by the same bubble are still following suit. Because within the bubble those decisions make sense. And they can’t imagine the bubble being wrong, because they never experienced anything else.

And our large corporations seem to think most of the country is the bubble. So the products they create and try to sell are to the bubble. Which means they fall flat, and they can’t figure out why, and get very angry and decide the rest of the country are racist and evil.

It just keeps spinning. What power they have in controlling the narrative, only serves to poison them.

The problem of course being we’re linked, and being dragged down the same crazy path.

And the bubble can’t completely implode. The time is coming — trust me, you can see it — when the people in the bubble have less and less power, though they might not realize that, and can’t understand why or how, and just turn outright vindictive.

After which…. I don’t know.

But whether it’s radical withdrawal of the consent of the governed or a Romanian Christmas, what comes next will damage civil society and culture deeply.

It is already becoming damaged, as we can’t trust any “experts” or institutions. But it still sort of works in extremis, when absolutely needed.

We’re going to lose that. And it’s going to hurt like a mother.

Their clever fool plan, in the end will destroy them. But it’s going to hurt us a lot too.

I’m convinced the reaction will be a healthier society. Maybe my grandkids, if I have any, will see it. Or their kids.

But till then, we’re stuck here, trying to stop the people living in virtual reality from destroying the real-reality. Where the rest of us live.

If I were to become incredibly rich — okay, this means winning the lottery — there would be an enormous temptation to leave my descendants a trust fund. And I probably would, but I’d make sure that there was something they must do before they got the money. What? I don’t know. Live independently and earn their own money for 10 years, maybe.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say they must amass a fortune before letting them inherit. I see the point of that, but my family is weird about making money. We seem to only be able to make it when we don’t need it, but would like it. I suspect this comes from being as neurotic as a shaved cat. If stressed we utterly freeze.

But the point is if you just drop a bunch of cash on someone the moment they become a legal adult, they tend to — not always but tend to — do nothing with their lives. They trust — eh — they’ll be taken care of, and so are. They are likely to become interested in utterly unproductive things, or just — if ADD AF — serially chase different stuff, never doing anything.

Knowing me, if many times when “baby needs shoes” I didn’t have to turn to the one thing I knew how to do, I’d have walked off writing probably after my first three books. For sure after the first six. Now, I know what I do is probably not something for posterity, but if you enjoy my books, you’d never have those, if I’d become incredibly rich via trust fund at … 18 or 22 or even 35. TBF if I’d become very rich at 18, I probably would never have written. Yes, yes, I’d mean to. I mean, I’m driven. But the entire process of making stuff publishable, often resembles scrabbling up a sheer wall by my fingertips. And said wall has been entirely covered in lemon juice. I’d have written a lot of … well, art pieces that not even my husband would want to read. (And he reads some very silly stuff.)

Anyway what does this have to do with a larger point? Well…

Ours is a high trust society. Not just in the sense that we trust each other (and that’s changing. But still high trust compared to the world) and can leave out tools or say rolls of plastic you mean to swathe all over your flowerbeds, or such, but one in which you contract someone to replace your roof and/or paint your house and don’t expect them to run off with the materials, you can hire an accountant and not be immediately scammed, you can hire a stranger and not have him take everything from your store and disappear, you can pay a stranger to clean your house, mind your baby, feed your cat.

Yes, that is changing. And some of us are less trusting than others.

But everything that allows us to live very well indeed by world and historical standards is based on that trust.

Recently a friend told of her husband going back to his native land, and finding that his parents’ house was choked with big bins filled with water. You see, the public utilities are iffy. Having lived very long in America, and this being a rainy clime, he offered to build his parents a rooftop cistern. The response was horror. “Then the neighbors would know we have money for that. We’d be robbed.”

I laughed (while crying) because though we’re from completely different regions, I could see it playing exactly like that with my family back in Portugal. in fact, Portuguese mount satellite dishes in the attic, often. (Seems to work, but yeah.) And the entire house is surrounded with high wall, so no one knows what you have. Only utterly trusted friends are allowed in.

I understand from a friend whose job took her to our ghettos and hoods that the same rules are starting to apply there. But not to the rest of our society yet.

Which is why we can have nice things.

But things are changing and breaking down.

Part of it is the importing of a vast number of people from the third world and not demanding or giving time for acculturation. The other part is the idiocy of not punishing evil.

Why this is is important: I absolutely agree with David yesterday: While you can’t change the whole world — something I learned painfully in 2020, when I spent the year screaming in the desert — you can save/fix/improve your little area.

I don’t know if I’d call it charity, at least not in my case. I just like to do nice things for people if I can. People I like, sure, but also completely strangers. And I prefer it to be anonymous, which isn’t always possible.

It’s part of “I’d like this to happen to me, so I’ll do it for someone else.” (Which means if I ever won the lottery I’d spend a lot of it just doing nice things for strangers, eh.)

It’s not so much charity as a hobby.

BUT I do try to do it. I try to improve and help others’ lives. Self interest? Well, I want to live in the kind of world where that happens, so yeah, I do it for me.

OTOH this is possible, and I can do it, because there’s a certain fundamental stability and trust in society. I can give away money, quietly, because there are ways to do that that don’t JUST enable theft. I can make cute things for friends, because society is prosperous enough I have time and money for materials. I can drive around and see people I love, because we can afford a private car and gas for it. Etc. etc. etc.

All the nice things we have depend on a fund of trust. A fund so vast that though the left is depleting it at a record clip, it’s still there to a higher degree than any other time in history, any other place in the world.

But they’re determined to destroy it. They are themselves indoctrinated paranoids who see only classes, and those classes perpetually at war.

There is no trust in such land.

So they’re convinced it’s all a ruse, and are determined to destroy it, to make us “face the truth” that is actually their nasty delusions and hatred.

Might they succeed? Yeah.

I suspect that they’ll succeed mostly in getting everyone so pissed off at them we stop them. But it’s a race between that and everything falling apart.

Thing is: you can have that happen and rebuild trust. It just takes blood, sweat and tears, and a lot of things none of us want to do, and will never forgive ourselves for doing.

And this is why the crazy paranoid Marxists should stop with their micro-aggressions and their “systemic” (And therefore invisible) oppression before all the trust is gone.

It’s not just that they won’t like us when we’re angry.

They and us, and the rest of the world, like trust fund kids endowed with great wealth, have no idea what losing the underlying fund of trust in US society will mean.

For us, for the Republic, for the world.

Let us hope they never find out.

Improving The World By David Bock

A few years ago I read an article about an interaction that an experienced shooter had with a novice at the range. While I don’t know if this story is true in all details, it still contains an important lesson.

The experienced shooter, let’s call him Bob, noticed that the new shooter I’ll call Jane, had a lower priced, lower quality, firearm and was obviously nervous and inexperienced.

Instead of ignoring this person or dismissing them out of hand because of their “lesser” firearm choice, Bob struck up a conversation and found out that this handgun was all Jane could afford at the time.

Jane had bought her handgun at the suggestion of a police officer because Jane’s ex had made threats of violence against her and Jane refused to allow him to victimize her or her children any more.

Jane had a strong impression that her ex was going to come back sometime over the next few days to make good on his threats.  Therefore, she had little time to become proficient.

Bob took her under his wing and spent *his* range time helping her learn the manual of arms for her pistol as well as basic shooting skills.

He taught her the usual stuff.  Loading, reloading, stance, grip, sight alignment and sight picture, trigger control, breath control, and follow through.

In addition Bob taught her the basics on how to clear a jam and how to disassemble her pistol for cleaning.

Bob urged Jane to practice as much as possible and pointed her towards some additional resources.

At the end of their range time, Bob had not done any shooting himself.  He and Jane had only exchanged first names and were unlikely to meet again.

How many of us can honestly say that we would behave the same way in those circumstances?

For myself, I can say that I’ve done *some* of the same things as Bob.  However, I’m a firearms instructor and work at a shooting range.  When I’m acting in my capacity as a Range Safety Officer I often give people pointers or tips on how to improve their shooting.

This does not rise to the level of being a random person at the range helping a complete stranger to the exclusion of your own shooting practice.

I hold Bob in high regard for what he did that day.

Reading this article also reminded me of the concept behind Operation Blazing Sword.  An organization started by Erin Palette following the Pulse Nightclub massacre to help bring together knowledgeable shooters who wanted to help and members of the LGBT community who wanted to learn.

The biggest difference here is that Jane didn’t seek Bob out for training.

Bob saw her need and reached out in the moment.

In Judaism there is a concept known as Tikun Olam which is generally defined as an activity that improves the world.  Bob, though probably not Jewish, demonstrated the true spirit of Tikun Olam at the range that day.

A stranger anonymously offering help to another stranger is also one of the highest forms of charity (called tzedakah in Hebrew) according to Maimonides, a twelfth century Jewish Scholar.

This form of giving is viewed as especially beneficial since you are doing so purely for the sake of helping.  Not to be seen as giving by others or to create an obligation from those to whom you give.

These are things that all of us need to do more of, not just in regards to firearm training, but overall.

We need to keep our eyes open for those in need and offer assistance.  Not because we might benefit in some way, but in order to improve the world.

Tikun Olam

Maimonides

Eight levels of charitable giving

Tzedakah

Brena Bock Author Page

David Bock Author Page

Team And More

Since I’m writing about a re-barbarized culture (yes, in the cursed book. Deal) I have been thinking a lot about barbarism and civilization.

The culture in the book is one that went into barbarism with a hammer, being the result of genetic and cultural manipulation, which robbed them even of the legacy of languages evolved on earth and made to serve mankind With the language, they lost the final tools to keep a high-level (or any level) of technology when the ship crashed and all adults but two died. Those adults were bizarrely or perhaps desperately trying to gestate all the embryos in artificial wombs, to leave the planet with a viable population. This allowed them not to scuttle their grand design, and to have their off-shoot of humanity survive. But it left them no time to teach the children. Which might be better and worse than if they had.

Worse, because the children could live with the stuff left to them, but were in essence primitives. Better because the crazy assumptions of the grand experiment weren’t imposed on them and allowed them, after very dark times to rebuild a civilization of sorts, even if not really a civilization.

There is an underlayment of barbarism to the culture, that I don’t know (quite) how to depict without making the people unsympathetic. The environment is hell on the very young and the very old, due to the cold equations of maintaining the lives of those who can’t contribute to their own care. True barbarians don’t care, but nascent civilizations, while still barbaric, have to come up with justifications for what they do. they might not even fool their own members, but they are, nonetheless, necessary for sanity.

But there is more, because of the nature of the world — yes, the damn hermaphrodite world — it is to some extent every hand against every other hand. They’ve had to band together to an extent, hence the nascent civilization, simply to survive, but there’s not the hard lesson humans had to learn about caring for pregnant females (they’re mostly self-sufficient on that, though at the risk of tremendous infant mortality that almost destroys the sub-species) and there is marginal advantage to that sharp-edged competition of women in the seraglio. To put it it bluntly, more or your children is fewer resources for mine.

Even in nascent or at least attempted civilization, millennia in, the best of them are what we’d consider unholy prickly and capable of sudden and horrifying violence. I have to write such a scene, and still don’t know how to make it both startling and horrifying to my civilized-world visitor/dropped-in unfortunate, and yet justifiable enough that the character doesn’t lose all sympathy. Because he (yes, way back in the eighties I was told I could sell it if I referred to them as “she” but that’s the entirely wrong image for the civilization I created) IS a good person and surprising gentle for their culture and time, and its exigencies. And yet, he has to commit violence at the drop of an insult, or risk being killed.

Now to an extent it’s a very fun civilization to write: Connan the Barbarian meets Jane Austen, with something approaching magic. The response to someone outside very specific conditions (Which have edge cases) calling you by your given name, for instance, is to threaten to cut their tongue out. And to try to make good on the thread if they succeed.

Barbarism is fun, in the same sense adventure is fun: if it happens to someone else far away.

Humans in a state of barbarism are subjected to pressures and imperatives that make the rest of us blench. And the exigencies and impulses of a barbaric culture make them very bad neighbors indeed, so note that barbarism is only fun far away from us.

And barbarism is not only the default nature of humans, when our carefully indoctrinated civilized imperatives are forgotten or stripped away from us by circumstances, but it remains in some part even in the most civilized of us.

It is nature, red in tooth and claw, inside our brains, against the best imperatives of our brains. And it hides itself in myriad ways. See women in offices and corporations often recreating the behavior of the seraglio, with “death of career” substituting for “death.” And “cancelling” for “throwing to the outer darkness to die with her children” (Or his.) See men who haven’t been socialized to harness and husband (I speak advisedly) their greater strength becoming “toxic” and abusive to those weaker.

The best civilization can do is NOT banish the barbarism in each of us, but harness it, in the service of greater humanity.

And greater humanity is the point here. The tribalism of the savage does not serve civilization. It allows some very ancient and barbaric impulses to survive.

Because, despite the appearance, this is not a writer nattering about her cursed book, but serves a purpose, let me start by telling a “joke” in very poor taste.

All of those screaming that Israeli response to the Einsatzgruppen LARPing by the Palestinian barbarians MUST be proportionate are out of luck. No one can convince the IDF to run around raping women and children, beheading babies and setting fire to children.

In fact, they are at risk, rather, as all civilized people are, of having their best impulses used against them. Already, in Twitter, there are idiot Hamas Bots demanding if I’m as horrified by Israelis “killing Palestian babies” for however long. I don’t answer them. Because I don’t answer questions with made-up premises. I might as well ask them when they stopped honor-killing their wives.

Yes, Israelis have killed some children and babies of Palestinians, over the years trying to defend themselves from a relentless enemy, but never on purpose. In that they take more care than these children’s parents. For the record, it’s not a war crime to bomb a weapons depot or missile launching station placed atop a nursery school or a hospital. It is a war crime, and despicable to a horrible extent to place such installations in places where you will use the children of your own tribe as shields.

It’s also a learned behavior. The Palestinians and other modern day barbarians wouldn’t do that if it weren’t for the fact that they’ve learned their scrupulous and civilized enemy hesitates to hurt innocents. The fact that they value winning against the civilized enemy over their own children is more a demonstration of how sick their barbaric culture has gotten, and how much it sees itself as inevitably defeated. Otherwise, they would value the future. If they thought they had one.

So, should we feel sorry for them because of their lack of future? We can’t afford to. When a culture reaches that level, there’s only one thing that can save it. And “save it” only in a very general sense, that their genetics have a shot at the future: Take every child under three away and raise them in civilization, with a different language, different parents, and never tell them they were adopted.

No, we won’t do that. Civilized people have learned to be wary of that sort of impulse, which in a way is too bad.

The myths and idiocies of the “noble savage” have caused us to allow generations of children to be raised in barbarism crossed with a sort of welfare state where everything material is provided for them, but they are taught only the impulses and practices of barbarians.

It is actually no wonder they hate us. It’s just that they hate us — and in the Palestinian case, both us and the Israelis — for all the wrong reasons. They also have an internal myth that goes something like: “Commit horrible acts of barbarism — ?????? — Victory.”

But they can’t have victory. If, unlikely as it is, they were to “win” against civilization, their barbarism would just consume them. And their lack of interest in their own tribe’s future would end them.

Not to pick on Palestinians, only. You see the same behavior among the lost and broken “ante-fa” and the other barbarians of our left. It’s all “Commit horrible acts of barbarism — ?????? — Victory.”

It’s all based on the idea that civilized people will behave as the barbarians will. That they will fight at the same level, but impaired by being “civilized” which for the barbarians translates as “weak.”

They miss the mechanism of civilization. The thing that kicks in, when all of us feel threatened with extinction.

Civilization allows individuals to be fat and sassy, and consider themselves secure enough we are horrified by violence, and don’t respond with the same level of violence, or not close enough for barbarians to understand.

The Einsatzgruppen LARPing was typical barbarian aggression. When tribe of human meets tribe of human in the wild, one of them will commit the worst atrocity they can think of, to cause the other to run away. This saves lives on both sides because it spares the tribes endless war.

However it works very, very badly when tribal humans meet civilization, where all humans are considered part of one’s “tribe”.

Oh, a lot of attacks are ignored, because civilization removes the knife from the civilized throats. We have lives to live. We are momentarily horrified, then move on.

Until an invisible mark is hit, one that is hard to quantify, so it’s always a surprise for the barbarians, but that mark does get hit in every confrontation between civilization and barbarism. Some atrocity so horrible, some outrage so immense is perpetrated by the barbarians, that the civilized cannot forgive, forget or even conceptualize. At that point, the switch in civilized society’s brain gets flipped, and they go utterly destructive. They turn against barbarism with a fury that can only be described as “exterminate them root and branch.”

The nuclear conflagrations in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the response of a very, very civilized culture. I’ll just remind everyone of that. As was the bombing of Dresden. (The Nazis, themselves, were bizarrely an advanced civilization which, under various pressures, had decided to embrace the worst features of barbarism. Let that rest under “humans are weird.” They were weaponized barbarism, though, once again showing there’s nothing as dangerous as civilization choosing barbarism.)

How close is that switch? It might already have tripped, though I suspect the barbarians are going to try for a coda, because, heaven help them (we won’t) they think they’re winning and that it’s business as usual.

Those barbarians in the Middle East, and our own rebarbarized left, for that matter, so in thrawl of the noble savage that they achieve savagery with no nobility whatsoever.

In the end, civilization always wins. But civilization can be shocked and left harder and harsher and closer to barbarism than it should be.

Which leads to very dangerous times indeed.

We’re sailing very perilous waters. For us, for our would be enemies, for humanity itself.

Be not afraid. Hold on to what civilization you can. And stand by to defend it and rebuild it.

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 JERRY BOYD: Cleanup on Aisle Squatch

Bob and the fleet are doing their best to keep a lid on things at Earth, when a desperate call for help comes in. Topper and Dingus ride off to square things away, until Bob gets another call, and joins the fleet. Can they handle what they’ve found? What’s going on, way out there in Commonwealth space? Only one way to find out!

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Dragon’s Sister (Timelines Universe Book 7)

Two Sisters, Separated By A Timeline

When most people find out they have a long-lost twin sibling they never dreamed existed, reactions can range from happiness to anger.

In the case of US Space Force Marines Brigadier General Mei-Lin Lai, her “twin” is her timeline analog she was told did not exist. And because of that reassurance, the expatriate Chinese taikonaut migrated to Timeline Zero from Timeline One Right, to take command of United States Space Force Base Terra Meridiani, on Mars.

But her analog did exist. And was pulled out of a cold-stasis chamber in Chicago eighty years after she’d been recruited into a failed plot to disrupt an American presidential election.

Twenty years later, Mei-Lin must grapple with a woman who is her genetic twin and wishes to join the Space Force Marines as a medic — and will go through Basic Training on the planet where Mei-Lin is the boss Marine.

Will the two women, identical but different, be able to form a sisterly bond? And will Mei-Lin finally come to grips with the very existence of her other-timeline twin?

FROM MONALISA FOSTER: Lineage (Ravages of Honor Book 3)

Darien and Syteria have been to hell and back. Their wounds and scars remain a part of them and who they are as they fight to stay together and prevent civil war. But when an old enemy is found alive he threatens their most precious secret as well as the future of both humans and donai. Will they be able to forge the new alliances needed to keep the Imperium from rising from the ashes? Or will the Imperium’s old guard carry out a genocide that will doom the donai to extinction?

FROM JOHN TALONI: Crisis on Stardust Station

The cats of Stardust Station have long hidden their intelligence from the humans that live there. Now a crisis threatens them both. Can the cats and humans learn to work together in time to save both the station and the planet below?

A few hundred years from now, Earth has gone to space…and come back. The remnant of a once vibrant space effort persists in the form of a few hundred solar power satellites that provide half of the world’s power. John Aldrin is one of four people crewing the last remaining space station, with the mission to keep the satellites operating. But Earth has neglected them so long that they are on the verge of breakdown.

Benign neglect has allowed something else to happen: In the station’s forest habitat, a group of genetically modified cats have grown to intelligence. Some have been adopted by the astronauts and brought to their living area. Natural telepaths, both groups of Cats have agreed to keep the knowledge of their intelligence secret from the humans.

Their equilibrium is destroyed when a solar flare strikes and knocks out the satellites. The Cats must reveal their secret to save both their station and the world below. But can they convince a skeptical Earth to work with them?

FROM BONNIE RAMTHUN: The Awful Solstice: Book Four of the Centerville Chronicles

The exciting conclusion to The Centerville Chronicles is here…

The Awful Solstice is just a few days away. Ray doesn’t know if he’s ready to be the Shining One, but he’s determined to try. For a kid whose biggest worry used to be trying out for the baseball team, it still seems crazy to be carrying the fate of the world on his shoulders.

But now Ray has new allies – which would be great, except all of them have their own ideas about what he’s supposed to do. Between strange prophecies and self-important secret societies, everyone wants to tell Ray how he’s supposed to behave.

Worst of all, these new allies keep herding Ray and Clancy, his best friend, from one catastrophe to another

The final battle is almost here. The forces of evil hold all the cards – they’ve got gods, monsters, legends, and the nastiest sorcerer who’s ever cast a curse.

And Ray knows that only he can make the choice that will decide the fate of the world. Ray never asked to be The Shining One. But he’ll see it through his way – or die trying.

FROM RICHARD MEREDITH: MASKIROVKA – The Russian Science of Deception

It may have changed its name, but the KGB is up to its old tricks, only this time with a new puppet-the American Public!

Steve Nguyen, a newly minted homicide detective with the San Francisco Police Department, is cut loose on his first solo case-the mysterious death of a young accountant with a public-interest foundation. Everything points to natural causes, but Nguyen, to the dismay of his chief, isn’t ready to close the book. With no motive, means, or opportunity, the anxiety-racked law school dropout starts digging anyway.

Nguyen’s tortuous investigation leads through the halls of Congress, the gritty oil fields of the Siberian tundra, stately Black Sea palaces of the petro-czars, and the mean streets of San Francisco. Aided by his misfit cousins, Tina Ngo, an attorney with a special practice in feral law, and Tommy Tran, a computer geek straddling the tightrope of legality, Nguyen unearths a malevolent alliance among a billionaire Russian oligarch, a duplicitous foundation director, and a renowned philanthropist hell-bent on tightening Russia’s monopoly on the European energy market by choking-off American exports. If it means corrupting the American electoral system through illegal campaign contributions, political blackmail, and a few dead bodies, so be it.

In this dark world of Russian deception, Nguyen unravels a complex tangle of illegal offshore accounts, shell corporations, and front companies, all while ducking the crosshairs of the SVR’s most skilled assassins. He may solve a murder and maybe save a republic.

FROM ANDREW FOX: The End of Daze

Jacob Zvi has turned his back on everything he was taught to value. His faith, his family, his citizenship, and even his morals. Yet seemingly divine fate introduces Jacob to the struggling members of an Orthodox congregation in the middle of a ghetto in New Orleans while terrorists explode a purloined Soviet nuclear artillery shell atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

But things quickly take a turn for the Biblical, for the worthy dead are returning to life to build a Third Temple atop the now radioactive Temple Mount, scoured empty by the atomic blast. They return not to bodies of flesh and blood, but to cybernetic bodies produced in an advanced robotics lab on the Tulane campus, part of a secret project funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

The End of Days has begun, but unlike anything that has been anticipated by Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. When Jacob is inexplicably selected to serve as God’s mouthpiece, and he finds he makes for a clownishly awkward prophet of God’s Kingdom on Earth.

But he will have to up his game immeasurably in order to broker peace with all the factions who bitterly reject this version of the End Times—chief among them progressive Jews themselves! THE END OF DAZE is a science fiction eschatological satire fitting for the End Times encroaching on the twenty-first century.

FROM DANIEL ZEIDLER: Cops and Dragons

This collection contains three Cops & Dragons stories: The Constable’s Quest, a Circle of Stars, and A Test of Time.

The Constable’s Quest – When a dead red dragon crashed in the alfalfa field on the outskirts of the city, Watch Sergeant Sigurd Arnson hoped it would attract the King’s attention to the remote frontier territory and the increasingly cruel duke who administered it for the Crown. What the dead dragon attracted instead was a runaway teenage girl with a magic talent that could lead her to the dragon’s lair and the treasure within. Now the duke has ordered Sigurd to take the girl into the Wilds and find the unclaimed hoard within seven days or they and their families will suffer the duke’s wrath.

A Circle of Stars – Brynn Starsinger, Lieutenant of the Queen’s Watch, is an anomaly among the elves of the City: an orphan seemingly born with no ability to work magic. After being falsely accused of murder, she is sentenced to face the justice of the mysterious Fey Lord. Though Bryn fears her life is over, the Fey Lord angrily declares the covenant had been broken and merely sends her off to sleep. When she is awakened by Turo, a dragon of many questions, and Bryn discovers the Fey Lord has been defeated, his forest left devastated, and everyone in her beloved City has vanished. Now Bryn and Turo must race against time to not only save the elves of the City, but also thwart the sinister plans of the Cult of the Fallen God.

A Test of Time – As Captain of the City Guard for the Market Precinct, the biggest challenge Saxon Tage usually faced was the occasional bellowing merchant-chief. Now he finds himself confronted by a serial killer, a mysterious woman who is either a witch or one of the fey, an ancient evil intent on bending him to its will, and a secret that will forever change his life.

BY G. J. WHYTE-MELVILLE, P.G. HAMERTON AND MORTIMER COLLINS, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Victober Collection 2023: 3 Classic Victorian Novels.

Black But Comely

Born to gypsies, raised by Jews, Jane Lee turns eighteen and decides to win her way into the upper classes of Victorian society. Her heritage won’t let her go, but her single-minded will and cunning are a match for any gypsy plots against her.

Marmorne

The British Segrave brothers were as different as could be. Emil, the eldest and a solicitor, was passionless and precise. Julius, the middle brother, had enough energy for three normal men, so his decision to mount an expedition to Africa was no surprise. Youngest, Adolphus, was the peacemaker between the other two.

How their fates became tied to the quaint French village of Marmorne, and the Prussian invasion of France, none of them could have foretold…

Sweet Anne Page

Sweet Anne Page is an ideal to everyone who meets her. To Stephen Langton, she is the youthful ideal of love. To Humphrey Morfill, she is the ideal way to marry into money. To Claudia Branscombe, she is the ideal foil, a distraction that enables her plots and intrigues. And to Raphael Branscombe, she becomes the ideal path to revenge…

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past to change it. And in the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.


Cataclysm

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…

Heisenberg’s Point of Observation

Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?

Entanglement

Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage — until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants’ rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

A short story.

FROM KAREN MYERS: To Carry the Horn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 1)

AN ENTIRE KINGDOM BUILT AROUND A SUPERNATURAL NEED FOR JUSTICE, ENFORCED BY THE WILD HUNT AND THE HOUNDS OF HELL.

What would you do if you blundered into a strange world, where all around you was the familiar landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but the inhabitants were the long-lived fae, and you the only human?

George Talbot Traherne stumbles across the murdered huntsman of the Wild Hunt, and is drafted into finding out who did it. Oh, and assigned the task of taking the huntsman’s place with the Hounds of Hell, whether he wants the job or not.

The antlered god Cernunnos is the sponsor of this kingdom, and he requires its king to conduct the annual hunt for justice in pursuit of an evil criminal, or else lose his right to the kingship, and possibly end up hunted himself.

Success is far from guaranteed, and no human has held the post. George discovers his own blood links to the fae king, and he’s determined to try. But Cernunnos himself has a personal role to play, and George will have to sort out just why he’s the one who’s been chosen for the task.

And whether he has any chance of surviving the job.

Find out what it’s like to live in a world where you can help the Right to prevail, even if it might cost you everything.

To Carry the Horn is the first book of The Hounds of Annwn.

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: MOTHER

Writing is a sort of madness. Undoubtedly. Or at least it is as I’ve experienced it and as a lot of my mentees, friends and associates practice it.

There is danger in dreams. Every human myth records that. The danger of the dream, like a deep ocean. You can get sucked into the dream and never find your way out. You can confuse your dreams for reality. You can suck others into your dreams too.

The Victorians weren’t entirely wrong that fiction is dangerous. Yes, yes, I know. It’s fashionable to make fun of the idea that novels made young ladies silly and immoral. And, as far as it goes, it is silly. Young ladies were — and are, like all humans — naturally silly and immoral. It’s just that the novels — of the time — didn’t provide any bulwark (ah) against that. Attempts to do so, hilariously, created the moralistic, annoying books my grandmother read in her childhood and adolescence (And I did too, because they were still kicking around, and no book is safe from my reading it. Even if they were so predictable they made me giggle, and even if in the end they gave you the moral in straight forward words, in case you had forgotten.)

Those novels, the moralistic ones, were not really dangerous, for the main reason that they were not really immersive. You could see the characters’ being manipulated by wires. You could see as each movement was prescribed by the author. It’s hard to forget someone is lecturing you, as they’re in full Karen mode, nose in the air and none of their characters breaks mold or experiences anything startling.

To an extent this is what the leftist mind-set has done to fiction once more. Because they are in their own way as “moralistic” as any Victorian, following received wisdom from a Victorian, even if some of the applications would make that old lecher and grifter Marx blench. But more on that anon.

The fascinating thing in the link that Steve keeps putting in comments, and which I saw first in my fan discussion group with direct link from Twitter: Hot take: Fictional characters can’t consent because they don’t have ‘agency’. (link) is that it goes way beyond the divine madness of writers. And is self-contradictory, which leads me believe that the person who posted it is trolling for attention.

Though heaven knows, I’ve at times assumed the same about other leftist shibboleths, like the idea that people who tan can’t be racist, because blah blah power relationships, (ignoring that in many countries people who tan are in fact in power. In fact, people, I saw my first blond at the age of 6. Scared the heck out of me. I thought he was a plastic doll come to life. I had nightmares.), or the idea that only women can be harrassed/raped, because men are just so darn persuasive, or the idea that a 120 lb woman can physically beat a 300lb guy who is neither paralyzed nor tied down. All of these are on the face of it so patently absurd that they can’t be believed, entertained, or even thought of for more than two minutes without evoking belly laugh. Unless they’re religious pronouncements, which of course they are, and therefore immune from examination.

Here’s the thing, and please keep in mind as I type this there are writers trying to scale my house walls to stop me, since I’m about to give away a trade secret. (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but it is a trade secret.)

I know you’ve heard writers in conferences and workshops telling you they create their characters piece by piece, assemble them like a puzzle, “fire” them if they’re not working, etc.

They very well might. Or they might be lying like people who dream for you wholesale would do. Or they might be lying to themselves because the truth is uncomfortable to anyone trying to stay sane.

I don’t hide from anyone — because frankly I believe in telling the truth — that I am a gateway writer. I get the stories pretty much wholesale from my subconscious. (Well, I sleep better thinking it’s my subconscious and not some sort of portal in my head that beams in the events of some alternate universe.) Now, 90% of the time, this is not as effortless as it sounds. It really isn’t. Because I get the whole thing in a bolus. What the character believes and his life and death battle, and also what he ate for breakfast on his third birthday and what his favorite toy was, and how he had this deep talk with his friend when he was ten. And I don’t get the words. Most of the time when “block” it’s not lack of story. It’s lack of distance, to clean up the mess that dropped in my head. Or being too tired to think of words. (Today there is a blinding headache added to it.)

Note 90% of the time. Have I got the story words and all dictated to me? Sure. Couple of times. One of them is A Few Good Men. I was typing at the limit of my not inconsiderable speed, and I saw about a page ahead of what I was writing. It must count as one of the most unnerving experiences of my lifetime, since I didn’t know how the story would continue, or if it would, or if it would suddenly leave me halfway through. Worse: I didn’t know where it was going. Would it devolve into something unutterably senseless? Would it have a conclusion I didn’t like?

Look, I only wrote it at all because it was coming out at speed. if I didn’t like it, it was 2 weeks of my life, not a year. I could put it in a drawer and refuse to admit I’d done it. Or burn it, so that the boys didn’t get brilliant ideas after I was dead. (I think I have, at this point, destroyed all copies of my first ever written novel, but heaven knows. I keep finding others when I least expect it. So I’ve told them I’ll haunt them if they publish it. On the good (?) side, my notebook of poems — 8 to 25 years of age — seems to have disappeared in the multiple moves. It’s probably a good thing, yes?) But it turned out I liked the book. Though if I had to do it again, I’d probably have called it something else. But hey. I never get titles, ever, and was struck by the punniness of it all. It happens.

However, there’s the other books. I’m not going to pretend that when I got the call to write –work for hire– Plain Jane (the story of Henry VIII’s queen, Jane Seymour) I was seized by sudden inspiration, or had the creature come into my mind and dictate.

I wrote it because children needed shoes and school books, and we were paying two mortgages in the middle of a house-move.

But here’s the thing, as I found a POV that allowed me to write it, having done the research, I HAD TO BELIEVE THE CHARACTER ‘Existed’. I had to believe in the character’s and the story’s intrinsic truth, and I had to let it escape my total control.

Because writing is like playing chess with yourself. As you turn the board, you have to forget you created it all, so it works.

And — in my opinion. I know writers who say they don’t do this. They’re writers. Lying is always an option — I have to let the creations escape my control a little, or none of it is worth anything. (Ah. And now you know. G-d is a pantser.)

Now, the level of control the characters’ and story has depends on how it came to me, and how driven it is. When it’s fully driven, a thing with a life of its own…. well, weird stuff happens. Like the character balks me. “I wouldn’t do that” is the basic description, though mind you, it’s not words most of the time, just a feeling of utter wrongness. You can force the character, but if you do the character dies, and you’re skin-suiting it, and the book becomes horrible or worse, dies. And sometimes it’s a lot of characters.

It used to confuse Dan when he came home and I told him I’d had a terrible day at the office (down the hall) because the characters wouldn’t and I had to find what they would do that worked. I think he understands it better now.

However, I think all of us at some level must believe the character exists somewhere, to make it seem real to others. Secure your dream-magic-mask, before applying it to anyone else.

Which is why the hot take that it’s immoral to make your characters have sex they didn’t consent to is both terrifying and hilarious.

It means you’re required to think of the characters as their own people, self-actuated, with some sort of free will. Because otherwise you’re being accused of violating the consent of puppets.

But if they’re self-actuated, and have free will, you can’t make them do what they don’t want to, because frankly it’s way too much work to force it.

So this hot take is simultaneously crazier than the average writer, and completely incoherent in application.

Either the characters are alive elsewhere — I call it character world — and you’re just telling their story, or they’re not alive at all, in which case…. well, my socks don’t consent to be worn. My blanket doesn’t consent to be washed. Objects can’t consent, even if they’re mind objects.

I can tell you it’s almost impossible to force into sex characters who just don’t wanna or aren’t there yet. (This once led me to send a note to an editor who was demanding more and more explicit sex in a book — no, not Baen — that said “Look, I can force half a page of generalities, but if you want more, you’ll have to write it yourself.” …. which didn’t do wonders for my career with that house.)

I’m still assuming the whole thing is a massive troll. However, having seen 4chan trolls, like “Free bleeding” be taken absolutely in earnest on the left, there is no telling this won’t be.

I anticipate in some giggling the trad pub — because it will be — books being published with statements that the characters have been interrogated and consented. (And to my friends at Baen, yes, it would be hilarious if you guys do it, though I’d just put something blanket on the website. Or not. I remember that storm of stupid from the left about the bar. Eh.)

However if the left buys into this, they will finish completing, sideways and backwards, their transformation into the Victorian moralists they claimed to despise for so long.

Their objections to the male gaze, their contempt for anything that isn’t useful to their Marxist religion, their belief in the superiority of their beliefs and evangelical fervor to the “benighted” communities, which in their case seems to be anyone having fun. (We won’t wear pants, even if they make us, so there.)

They are the new Victorians. And unlike the originals ones, which at least had a clear view of humans and their behavior, they’re as delusional and insane as a hedgehog on mescaline.

I guess first as tragedy, then as farce.

On with the motley.

*I am in fact staying away from current events, yes, because just screaming incoherently how angry I am does nothing. I’ve come close to that in my instapundit stints, for which I must beg your indulgence. Yes, it will get worse before it gets better. Like Heinlein refusing to read current events during WWII (If I remember he only read month-old newspapers) I’m just trying to keep a small sliver of sanity, so I can clean the house, and cook, and yes, write without standing in the middle of the street screaming. Bear with me, therefore for a week or so. I’ll return to the fray. I can’t help myself. It’s just a little time to catch my breath. (And yes, I’m fairly sure that Steve keeps posting that link to distract me from the serious stuff ;) I’m onto him. ) – SAH*