We all know that Hollywood is out of ideas. I have theories about why this is — having to do with running off everyone who wouldn’t mouth the platitudes — but there is a more fundamental cause: when an industry is in a tail spin due to whatever reason, it becomes more and more risk averse. It’s a sort of mental trap: they want to make it big, but of course, they want to make it big with tame stuff that won’t startle or upset anyone.

In the case of Hollywood and traditional publishing — which are in distress due to technological innovation hitting too fast to be responded to by normal mechanisms — there is another layer to this issue, though, in that what they interpret as “won’t upset anyone” is what wouldn’t have upset their college professors or/and what won’t upset the super-loud segment of the internet population. This usually agrees with their own biases (they had the same college professors!) so it gets lots of attention (why we have sensitivity readers in the big houses) even though it has become clear that no, this segment of the population doesn’t buy the product at all. Or if they do there’s really a lot fewer of them than even I think. Because they are utterly incapable of making a project that follows their directives successful. They are also, to be fair, incapable of sinking a project. However, again the problem is that because their biases agree with the loudmouths, the people in charge of Hollywood and trad pub will listen to them every time.

However, Hollywood — and probably trad pub to be fair — think there is a way out of this trap: make a traditional story that everyone knows, but reverse the heroes and villains, and make the newly heroified villains some kind of oppressed class (at least oppressed in Hollywood’s and trad pub’s minds): independent women; people who tan; gay people; trans people.

The right tends to assume the left tries to push gay and trans onto properties to “corrupt” the young. This might be true for some of them, who more or less announced it, but for a lot of them it’s simply the only way they can figure out to be allowed to tell a traditional story that would otherwise upset the gatekeepers: make the character gay or trans, and you can get away with traditional heroics and a pallet of good and evil.

If you don’t do that, the publisher/producer wants it new and fresh, which mostly means “reverse everything.”

I have to tell you that I’ve now watched a few of the reversed fairytales (in the sense that I watch anything — Dan is watching, and I’m sitting next to him, usually working on the latest story or the blog or something –) and none of them hold a candle to richness and complexity of the original. All of them have to rely heavily on some kind of group victimhood to effect the “reversal” and that usually makes them fall into the blah dross of group virtue and group evil. Which is not emotionally satisfying enough to support the catharsis that is inherently part of a good story. In fact, they all devolve into a sort of preachy blah that just puts people to sleep. In the publishers’ and producers’ minds the movie/book is stunning-brave, but all people see is platitudes they’ve been told a thousand times.

In fact, these days the “oppressed independent woman” is a trope that I was taught in elementary school in Portugal in the sixties. Now in Portugal it had some teeth, because women are in fact (still, though not economically or professionally) culturally oppressed (they’re supposed to be great career women, yes, and great wives and mothers, BUT they’re also supposed to have feminine accomplishments, and keep an immaculate house and defer to the males in the family.) Even there, that’s less and less with every successive generation. Meanwhile the US is arguably the only matriarchy where women clamor for rights and consider themselves oppressed.

No one looks down on independent and smart women. No one. They might excite envy and backlash, particularly if they have no social skills. However, the backlash they court comes equally from male and female and is more a matter of feeling threatened by ANYONE who is smart and independent. Men get hit with exactly the same level of backlash and envy.

And the whole “Everything that goes wrong in your life is the patriarchy” has been preached for at least three generations now, and probably four. So when we come across a book that preaches the same thing…. well…. it doesn’t light up the different and interesting reactions in the normal brain.

The same to a large extent goes for people who tan or have different habits. America was never very good at discrimination on that basis, really, except in pockets, and even there it had begs (All x people are terrible, but not OUR x people.) And whatever there was left has been preached against for the last three generations and probably more. Which means coming across it in your fiction is yawn inducing.

What makes it worse is that every time I accidentally download one of these books, or find myself stuck in front of one of these movies, it’s always presented as “AH! THIS IS GOING TO BLOW YOUR MIND.” As in, it’s the reveal that they work up to throughout the book. Or the movie. You see it coming a mile away, and you go “Surely they’re not doing that. That would be stupid.” And then they do the stupid. Yep.

Look, I don’t have to watch the thing in the image here, to know that the step sisters probably have some disability or are misunderstood.

As for the “bright new idea” joke hold on to that idea. I have a story for you at the end of this.

There is another way to reverse villain and hero in a story. I’ve done it without meaning to. I think every writer worse his salt has.

Look, we love our villains. We know their reasons. Sometimes we know the horrible crap that was rained on them before they finally snapped and went bad. We might have some of the same temptations ourselves. (Particularly among Odds it’s way too easy to want to do something terrible to people for whom all the social monkey stuff comes naturally.) Sometimes we can’t help giving the villain a moment in the sun in the sequel.

As a writer, I’m here to tell you: abstain from this. No, seriously, abstain from this. You can write redemption stories. Those are immensely satisfying, actually. But abstain from making the villain “the hero actually.”

I don’t care how much they’ve been “more sinned against than sinning” they still chose to sin. And they have to atone for that. And it should be hard fought and earned. And then, then, yes, the redemption can be amazing. But you can’t just wave the magic authorial wand and go “The other side was actually the bad one.”

Which is mostly what the left (and whether creatives are or not, the gatekeepers in the mass industrial entertainment complex are all leftist, often reflexively so, and thinking they’re centrists) does, often by making the villain “actually oppressed” by being some broad category of victim. Because the problem with the left is that a belief in group guilt and group victimhood and group worthiness has robbed them of the concept of redemption. Once you’re part of group x, you’re a villain. And irredeemable. Also probably prone to infestations by rodents and losing shape in the rain, due to being made of cardboard.

Anyway, the habit of “reverse hero and villain” is also VERY old in our culture. Well, it’s very old everywhere, and even fairytales going back to the dawn of oral tradition have “opposite fanfic”: except it was neither dominant nor generally very popular.

Mostly because our ancestors lived at the sharp end of necessity, where stupid-crazy bit hard. They knew evil existed. They’d experienced it in their own villages, in their own bands, in their own persons.

But the habit of reversing the normally told story to be stunning brave when it comes to history is very old as well. In my personal experience — but going back to the 18th century and the noble savage — it started with “Well, the Amerindians were the heroes actually.”

Were they? Well, no. The entire colonization of the Americas and interaction with Amerindians has heroes — and villains — on both sides, and both sides were in the grip of blinkered cultural assumptions that meant they both treated the other side very badly — objectively — and caused unneeded bloodshed and destruction. And the only way to solve it was for them to see past their cultural assumptions which is very hard for any humans. Which both sides were.

What doomed the Amerindians (no, I’m not going to call them “Native Americans.” They were no more native than anyone else. We’re not required to cater to their delusions that they’ve always been here. And yes “Amerindian” is wrong. But everyone’s group name is wrong. Ask the Germans.) was the software in the head, because theirs was less likely to lead to victory.

Anyway, the reversal of “every defeated group were really victims and the victors are always evil” has become insane. It has led to Land Acknowledgements which are beyond ridiculous. Land Acknowledgements, properly done, would go all the way back to the time the first amphibian crawled out of the sea. Sea acknowledgements would go further back, of course.)

And most of the reversals are just plain insane, because they try to make the previous villain groups into perfect Liberal Heroes. So the Vikings become multicultural, sensitive, and accepting of women and gays and and and–

The individual reversals are even crazier. Rex Stout believed that Shakespeare had done an injustice to Richard III — about the princes in the tower — and maybe he was right. I mean, yes, I know what the DNA youtube videos claim, but none of them are compelling. HOWEVER even if Richard III wasn’t the villain he was painted — and there’s a whole apologia that can be made that starts with “man of his time” and “kings did the things they did at that time, even if they are bad to us and our time.” — there’s no excuse for the entire sub-genre of romances that make him into the perfect, sensitive liberal male. To make things worse, when you are doing that kind of thing, you eventually hit something you cannot possibly reverse or cover up. Richard III might not have killed his nephews. He might have seized the throne because he was actually the legitimate heir. He might… But yes, he had mistresses. And he was probably mean to his servants by our lights. And–

Anyway, the problem with the brain-rott of let’s reverse the story every time has to do with poisoning by story. Stories are how we learn. If we corrupt that mechanism, we learn he wrong things.

I think these eternal reversals are at the basis of “What we need is to give the homeless more money and more latitude and not arrest them for public indecency or for bothering people.” If you don’t remember all the heroic and sage homeless of the 90s I do. And what it actually does is make cities unlivable for normal workaday citizens who aren’t villains just because they work, and clean and have their own spaces. At the same time it tempts people who would otherwise avoid it to fall into the addicted-and-homeless population, since they are obviously “victims” who get away with everything.

But more importantly it erases the concept of evil. Evil in personal or even historical matters is a fact. We’ve all — every one of us — run into evil people who do evil things, because evil things please them or enrich them or whatever. These people might have suffered in their lives (who hasn’t?) but they’re not victims, and they can’t be magically be made good with more tolerance and understanding. In fact, they are more likely to become worse, the more leniency you afford them.

Telling people that if you see evil it’s just because you’re not tolerant enough, is evil in itself and actually and for real harms real, living people.

Beyond that, historically, it leads to a sort of upside down, topsy turvy view of history where the winners are always bad. Always. There is no reprieve.

The screenshot above is funny. And not.

And not because my American Culture (it was a required course) textbook in college already managed to have the colonists be bad, the Southern plantation owners be bad, and the North be bad for defeating the South, when the South became magically victims. And they didn’t even seem to notice it.

I’ve been waiting for exactly that reversal — the Producer’s play without its being a scam in any way — since my very first literary agent, in the nineties told me she probably couldn’t sell my Red Baron novel (yes, my dears, but now I need to rewrite the almost finished, because I’m a way better writer) because she’d been trying for years to sell a young Hitler in love novel and no one would buy.

Listen — ignore the fact that Manfred von Richthoffen was not that I know a monster (and I’ve read countless biographies of him, and in fact, just bought a new one) — this woman had no clue at all why a novel with a “nice” Hitler wasn’t selling. She was connected to all the publishing people, and she had no idea —

And yes, I realize I just did a story with the equivalent of baby Hitler who turns out not to be bad. BUT the operative word in that thought is “baby.” Baby Hitler might have had — probably had — the basic impulses and desires that would lead him to become… well… Hitler. But those had to be “fed” over his education, his family life, his social life, his time in the trenches, etc. etc. etc.

It’s quite possible if his parents had immigrated to America when he was a baby he would be only a mildly annoying and corrupt American politician. And it’s even more possible if he’d been adopted by completely different people at birth, he’d be a totally different person.

Sure, impulses for power-seeking or even sadism might have been present, but there are normal and even laudable people who live normal lives, despite this.

Now, writing Hitler as Hitler and trying to sell him as good, even if say (I don’t know, she didn’t tell me any more about the novel) it was his tragic love affair that made him a monster? THAT is if not evil, actually wrong. Because if Hitler was sort of okay and maybe even a victim (if only they’d appreciated his art!) he wouldn’t have killed several million people!

No, just no. I don’t know when or how, but I know he made his decision to fall to evil. And he was evil. As was Stalin. As was Mao. As were all the other tyrants and monsters of history. Let’s not whitewash them.

To make them “Actually not so bad” will just lead to calling Hitler to anyone the left disagrees with. Oh, wait, too late on that.

At any rate, far be it from me to tell you what to write. However I find the reversal of good and bad has become tiresome — REALLY TIRESOME — as in, it’s now expected.

And this has the danger of reducing our moral map to a grey directionless fog, where there’s no good, no evil, only bad categories and good categories.

Frankly, if I want to manipulate entities with no free will that belong to natural groups, I’ll do math, not writing and reading.

It’s time for us to get as loud as the loud crazies and shout back in one voice “This is boring and stupid.”

Before the moral map loses every marking.

*Yes, this is very late, because it exploded in size on me. (And made me write mil-speak, which I have issues with. Have mercy on me, okay.) And yes, I wanted to use “on the bounce” as a Heinlein homage. I might be trespassing, I don’t know. But I really wanted it in – SAH*

It was Christmas day and I was lost.

***

“Is anyone alive here? Come out. Come out,” it was a male voice, young and confident, if slightly on edge.

I had a minute to decide. Did I speak up? Did I trust this voice? I’d been hearing explosions and screams for the last twelve hours. I could smell the blood.

But the screams and explosions had stopped a couple of hours ago. So, maybe it was safe now? Or maybe– Or maybe it was a trick of the attackers, seeking to make their mop up complete. Isabelle — the child — put her arms around my neck and shook. I’d stopped singing to distract her when the bad noise stopped, and I thought she was asleep. Apparently not. She was shaking slightly, and smelled of tired, sweaty child.

(Removed because book — Christmas in Time — will be available for sale on Amazon 12-14-2025)

Guys, this thing changed name. It’s now not Lost and Found, but The Stars In The Sky and it’s gone…. wails MILITARY which drives me nuts because I cannot CANNOT do mil-speak. As in, at all.

And I’m clocking in at 3 words, and have erased at least that many and…. am still in the initial movement of the story and….

Hand reaches above the computer: SEND HELP.

Okay, fine, you can have the opening movement:

It was Christmas day and I was lost.

***

“Is anyone alive here? Come out. Come out,” it was a male voice, young and confident, if slightly on edge.

I had a minute to decide. Did I speak up? Did I trust this voice? I’d been hearing explosions and screams for the last twelve hours. I could smell the blood.

But the screams and explosions had stopped a couple of hours ago. So, maybe it was safe now? Or maybe– Or maybe it was a trick of the attackers, seeking to make their mop up complete. Isabelle — the child — put her arms around my neck and shook. I’d stopped singing to distract her when the bad noise stopped, and I thought she was asleep. Apparently not. She was shaking slightly, and smelled of tired, sweaty child.

I took a deep breath.

“Hello?” the voice sounded again. Most of all he sounded young, and there was something else behind it. Something shaky, I thought, as though he’d just been shaken. By seeing a lot of death and carnage? Or by causing it.

I had no way to know. I had to risk it. I had to risk it. I couldn’t continue hiding in here forever with someone else’s child. If her parents were alive, they would be looking for her. And if they weren’t someone else would be looking. And my own parents would be worried out of their minds, if they knew where I was. Which Father at least probably did.

I kissed Isabella and whispered in her ear, “Be very quiet, I’ll be back for you.”

“Mama,” She said, and tried to hold me, her arms tighter. I pulled away gently, “It’s all right. Count to 100 and Mama will be back.”

I wasn’t her Mama. Her Mama was probably in the carnage outside, but I’ve given up on convincing her. During the hours of horror, when I said I wasn’t her Mama she cried harder. I hesitated a minute, then kissed her forehead, amid the little wisps of her bangs. She was maybe five, maybe six. She’d told me, but she was hard to hear amid the explosions. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I promise.”

And then I stood up, and walked out of the utility closet in which we’d been hiding, right behind the automated cleaners. I walked out with my hands up.

The young man in the uniform of Britannia’s Spatines jumped about three feet but — a witness to his training — spun around and had his heavy duty burner pointed towards me, held in both hands for better aim.

“I am Marjorie Starr Forster,” I said. “I was in transit through the station.”

He unfocused his eyes, and I suspected he was looking at a list of passengers projected by his memory nanos. I could tell when he found my name, because he relaxed a little. His shoulders went down just a little and he drew a deep breath. “Thank God,” he said, which I had a feeling is not something men in his service — the ones particularly tasked with fighting terrorism and mass attacks in space — usually said. But he looked suddenly very young. Maybe younger than I. Not that he looked old before, but the uniform — the grey, blue and silver camouflage that worked in space stations and technological environments, and the burner about half as long as he was and big around as two of his arms put together lent him gravity.

But the easing of his expression made him look young. Just a blond boy from a farm colony, with a bad haircut, and a look of relief almost as if he were the one being rescued. “Thank God you’re alive. You might be the only survivor of this station.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “There’s another one. She’s been hiding with me.”

He looked like he was going to kiss me or cry, perhaps, and said, “Where is she? Is she wounded?”

“No, no. I just told her to wait, because– Well, I couldn’t be sure you were friendlies.”

He nodded and said, “Brave,” as though to himself. He let his burner fall so it hung on its sling, and said, “Where is she?”

I led him through the hallway, to the cleaning closet and opened the door, “Isabelle? You can come out.”

I was surprised she didn’t come, but when we went back there to look, there was no one. The Spatine gave me an odd look. I was frantic. “Maybe she got out while I was talking to you,” I said.

“Miss, no one left. I’d have seen movement. After my training and after– Miss, there’s no way I’d miss movement.”

“But she was here with me,” I said. “Since last night.”

He shook his head, not in doubt but in bewilderment. “What… what’s her name, Miss?”

“Isabelle. She didn’t give a last name.” I’d had a heck of a time getting “Isabelle” out of her. She’d kept shaking her head and saying, “You know my name mama!”

“Uh.” His eyes unfocused. “There is no one by that name on the manifesto. Could she have given you an assumed name. Maybe an hostile?”

I shook my head in turn. “No way, sir. She was all of is five or six.”

He gave me a really odd look. “There was no girl that age on the station, not in the manifesto.”

“What?”

“Oh, there were children aplenty, in the Amber Sanctus colony ship.” He swallowed. “They were waiting while their ship stocked some tech form Neue Zambia.” He shook his head, and his eyes glistened suspiciously. “Ten infants, mixed genders. Twenty five toddlers. Ten boys between four and ten, and a passel of teenagers.” He swallowed hard. “They’re all accounted for.”

The tone of those last words was like the closing of a heavy stone over a tomb. I remembered again, “You are the only survivor.”

The Spatine was talking into his com. I couldn’t see the com, and he was talking just above a whisper, so it was probably a nano thing. Which made sense if you didn’t want him to lose it.

“Lieutenant Allsop, Leading Spatine Beech here. Section Three-Baker, Deck Seven, compartment seventy-two. Sir, I have a survivor—civilian, female, approximately twenty years. Name Marjorie Starr Forster.” He paused and listened. Then nodded as if his superior could see him. Maybe he could. “She’s conscious but distressed. No visible injuries, but she’s been here a while and she’s… she’s insisting there was a little girl with her, sir. A child, age five or six, named Isabelle. Says the girl was right beside her all through… All through what happened.”

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

FIRST THE ROLLING NOVEMBER TO NEW YEAR 99c SALE

ROLLING, ROLLING, ROLLING….. Remember that if you order these for delivery on Christmas to people’s kindles, they won’t know it was on sale, and you look like a big spender…. (If you order one of each, that is.)

Other Rhodes

When Lilly Gilden discovers a cyborg in her airlock, she should turn him in for immediate destruction—harboring any cyborg means death, no exceptions. These abominations are born from violent, illegal brain extraction, forbidden across all human colonies. But this tortured soul believes he’s Nick Rhodes, a legendary detective from the 20th century, and his fractured mind may hold the key to finding her missing husband.

The penalty for harboring him is execution, but Lilly is desperate. Her husband vanished while investigating a case that leads straight into the galaxy’s most dangerous criminal networks. With time running out and nowhere else to turn, she makes a fateful choice: trust the half-mad detective trapped in synthetic flesh.

Joined by a mysterious journalist with secrets of his own, Lilly plunges into the shadow world of interstellar crime syndicates, corrupt officials, and deadly conspiracies. As the cyborg’s detective instincts clash with his deteriorating programming, Lilly must navigate a web of lies and violence where one wrong move could cost her everything.

In a universe where love is the ultimate liability, how far will she go to bring him home?

A pulse-pounding sci-fi thriller that blends classic detective with high-stakes space adventure—perfect for fans of cyberpunk mysteries, noir whodunits and interstellar romance.

Trade Winds, A collection of short stories

A collection of science fiction short stories by Prometheus Award Winner Sarah A. Hoyt. What if aliens walk among us—not as conquerors, but as refugees seeking humanity’s moral guidance? What if our greatest creations return as lethal threats, and time itself has watchful guardians we never notice? From interstellar immigration crises to generation ships doomed by human nature, from aliens who set fiendish traps to futures inventing entirely new forms of misery—these thirteen thought-provoking tales explore humanity’s place in a vast and often bewildering cosmos. With the vivid storytelling and engaging characters that have made her a standout in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales, Hoyt delivers science fiction told from a uniquely warm perspective that welcomes readers into worlds both strange and intimately human. Discover what happens when probability itself defies replication, journey to the Darkship universe ten years after the Olympus revolution and witness an alternate history where Carthage sowed salt on Rome’s ruins. How long does memory truly endure? Reviewers praise this collection as “off-beat,” “light fun but thoughtful,” and note that “all stories are engaging and worth reading unlike so many which have one or two stand out stories and a lot of filler.” Standout tales include the clever alien refugee story “Yearning to Breathe Free” and the emotionally powerful “And Not To Yield” set in Hoyt’s USAians universe.

The collection contains the stories: And Your Little Dog Too; Who Goes Boing?; A Cog In Time; All Who Are Thirsty; Yearning To Breathe Free; Calling The Mom Squad; On Edge; Some Other Pieta; Leaving Home; Flying; The Big Ship And The Wise Old Owl; And Not to Yield; Trade Winds.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Tiger Hunter (Chronicles of the Fall Book 19)

A novella in the Chronicles of the Fall series

Yuri Popov was born and raised on a primitive Research World, where his scientist dad and uncle worked, avoiding the rest of the family.

But as he approaches his eighteenth birthday, it’s time to meet that family, and deal with a culture having more trouble adjusting to the new reality, than Yuri the Tiger Hunter will have dealing with a modern society..

FROM LLOYD TACKITT: Murder In Texas: Book One of the Colt Andersen Detective Series (Colt Andersen Murder In Texas Detective Series 1)

Colt Andersen thought he’d left the chaos behind. After a near-fatal shooting ended his Dallas detective career, he retreated to the solitude of Ten Dog Ranch—two hundred acres of wild Texas land, a pack of wary feral dogs, and the memory of a promise made to his dying cousin. But when the body of a beloved local brewer is discovered on the eve of Buchanan’s legendary October Beer Festival, Colt is pulled back into a world of secrets, suspicion, and danger.

Sheriff Elena Mendez knows trouble when she sees it. With the festival bringing outsiders, corporate interests circling, and tempers flaring over mysterious land deals, she needs Colt’s sharp mind—and his uncanny ability to see the truth in people’s colors. Together, they uncover a tangled web of greed, betrayal, and a decades-old family feud that threatens to tear their small town apart.

But nothing is as it seems in Buchanan. As Colt digs deeper, he discovers the murder is only the beginning. Hidden beneath the rolling hills and ancient oaks lies a secret that powerful men will kill to protect—a labyrinthine cave system filled with priceless archaeological treasures and rare earth minerals worth billions. The caves are mapped in ancient petroglyphs, guarded by warnings from a vanished people, and coveted by a ruthless corporation willing to do anything to claim them.

With the help of a determined sheriff, a brilliant local historian, and the murdered man’s courageous daughter, Colt must race against time to expose the truth. As more bodies fall and the stakes rise, he’ll face armed mercenaries, corporate hitmen, and the ghosts of his own past. The fate of Buchanan—and a legacy stretching back centuries—hangs in the balance.

Murder in a Small Texas Town is a gripping blend of mystery, thriller, and small-town drama, set against the evocative backdrop of the Texas Hill Country. Rich with unforgettable characters, atmospheric detail, and a plot that twists like a country backroad, this novel will keep you guessing until the very last page.

Perfect for fans of Craig Johnson, C.J. Box, and James Lee Burke, this is a story of justice, redemption, and the enduring power of community.

Can one man’s promise—and a town’s courage—stand against the darkness rising from beneath their feet?

FROM MICHAEL MORGAN: Three Righteous Souls

The lights have gone out, and nobody knows why. As society begins to crumble, Emma Pitts and her children set off to her parent’s place outside of Toledo, but the road turns bad. Out of gas, food, and water, Emma and the children are afoot wandering through unfamiliar rural landscape peopled with desperate refugees and even more desperate local authorities trying to control the flood. Fearing the worst, and out of options, Emma knocks on a farmhouse door. Three Righteous Souls is an award winning short story of humanity in a world falling apart.

BY JOHNSTON MCCULLEY, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMMING: The Rangers’ Code (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Cactusville needed cleaning up, Sheriff Tom Thomas knew that. But the deputies he kept sending to do the job always turned up dead.

Until ex-Texas Ranger Dick Ganley took on the job, at least. Or so Ganley claimed would happen. He would not only take out the gang running Cactusville, nor would he stop at identifying and bringing to justice the shadowy head of the gang, the “King of Cactusville”.

No, Ganley had his own score to settle into the bargain, and it was a score that could only be settled by blood!

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book historical and genre context.

FROM J.J. DIBENNETO: Ten Years and Then…

What if the love of your life was the one who got away… over and over again?


In 1988, Daniel Keller is a shy, brilliant college sophomore who never expected to fall for anyone—until Nora Langley crashes into his life like a thunderstorm in heels. With wit, ambition, and a wild heart she tries to hide, Nora makes Daniel feel seen for the first time. Their love is messy, exhilarating… and more than either of them knows how to handle.
When the pressure of family expectations and uncertain futures becomes too much, they break apart—but the story doesn’t end there.


Over the next ten years, Daniel and Nora keep finding their way back to each other. Different cities. New careers. Almost-relationships. But the connection never fades. Every reunion brings joy and pain, hope and heartbreak. And always, the question: what if?


Told with nostalgia, emotional depth, and aching romanticism, Ten Years and Then… is for anyone who’s ever looked back at a lost love and wondered what might have been. Can two people who never stopped loving each other finally get it right, or are some hearts never meant to stay?

FROM WILLIAM GEORGE MEISHEID AND ANNA MARIE MEISHEID: Remembrance: Book Three of the Chronicles of Moses the Lawgiver

This will be Moses’s last journey from the mountain’s high summer pasture.
Moses is eighty years old, and the fugitive shepherd knows his time is ending. For forty years, he has lived with his wife, Zipporah, and his two sons, sharing the life of Jethro’s family in the grasslands of Midian. He has been silent about the man he was before he arrived at Jethro’s well and saved his wife and her sisters from the bandit slavers. His sons, Gershom and Eliezer, know only the father who tends flocks and speaks nothing of the past. He is an uncommonly gifted man who changes everyone’s life for the better but remains an enigma to all who know him. No one knows the Prince of Egypt who commanded armies, who stood in Pharaoh’s court, who bore a name that once made his enemies tremble.
Tonight, before they descend the mountain for the last time, Moses will break his silence and open his heart to his sons.
Using the ancient practice of zikaron—remembrance that transcends memory and makes the past live again—he will take his sons into those hidden forty years. He will show them the palace and the battlefield, the friendships and betrayals, the prophecies and the choices that drove him into exile. He will open his heart and reveal everything.
But this is more than a father’s final confession to his beloved sons. For forty years, Moses has heard nothing from the Most High, the God of his fathers. Tonight, he repents of his failures and asks the Lord to give him strength to share what he has kept buried. After a night of revelation, dawn breaks, and Moses and his two sons begin their descent down the mountain. As they journey past Horeb, the Mountain of God, the Most High’s silence will finally end, and Moses will discover that his life’s true mission, what he was born for, is only beginning.
The hidden past becomes the present. The fugitive becomes the deliverer.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Khuldhar’s War

The war was over, but where was the peace the victors had promised?

Geidliv the Tyrant was dead, and the rogue nation of Karmandios now lay in ruins, its people prostrate before the occupying armies of the five allied nations. But now the winners are quarreling among themselves, and where brothers fight, enemies will enter to widen the gap.

Merekhet is a man torn between competing loyalties, tormented by guilt over his past failures. Raised the scion of a Karmandi noble family, he discovered upon puberty that he was in fact the son of a senior war commander of the telepathic People of the Hawk. Yet he could not entirely disavow his mother’s people, and thus became entangled in Geidliv’s regime and his nephew Khuldhar’s doomed attempt to fight it.

Now Merekhet has evidence that Geidliv used telepathy and the bioscience of the mer-people to create a living weapon from Khuldhar’s genetic material and hid it in plain sight. Worse, a former ally now estranged is seeking that weapon, and must not be allowed to capture it, lest all the world of Okeanos fall to far greater tyranny than Geidliv could ever have hoped to create.

Merekhet must regain Khuldhar’s confidence, and together they must find the five young men who are the keys to Geidliv’s final vengeance weapon.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Dragon’s in the Details

Six stories of dragons hiding in today’s world:
A Friend, Indeed–A little girl meets the best friend she could ask for when she finds a dragon sleeping in her wagon.
Tempest–What do you do when you find a dragon in your favorite teacup?
Clowder–These are absolutely not cats, no matter what they look like, and will take offense at your mistake.
Back Yard Birds and Other Things–If the dragon defends your chickens, you invite it to stay.
Houdini–When the pet supplier sends the wrong kind of dragon, the pet store’s got a problem.
Hoard–Not every dragon cares for gold, gems, or cash.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Through A Mirror, Darkly

What lies behind a reflection?

Powers have filled the world with both heroes and villains.  Helen, despite her own powers, had acquired the name Sanddollar but stayed out of the fights.

When the enigmatic chess masters create a mirrored world reflecting her own home and the world about it, it’s not so easy to escape.  All the more in that the people of that world are a dark reflection of all those she knows.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Land Magic and Shadows: Familiar Generations Book 10

How far will a seeker go to find an answer?

Thomas A. “Art” Chan struggles to balance his duties as university faculty with those of husband and Hunter. Toss in a tenure committee with members who insist on putting new obstacles in his way, and Art begins to contemplate a job in retail, almost.

Meanwhile, a professor searches for items in a place best left undisturbed. A place where darkness looks back. Darkness with an interest in careless magic workers.

Which is more dangerous: academics with grudges, or an irritated earth power? Or a third force, one that combines the worst of Art’s worlds?

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: I Never Applied for This Job (Family Law Book 8)

Lee seems to be getting a handle on this sovereign business. Mostly it is making sure you have exceptional people and then stay out of their way. She’s learning moderation a little at a time and commissioned a self programming AI who may be a he instead of an it.
Friendship is also a difficult process to master when you are torn between the standards of several species, but she manages to satisfy Badgers ideals, and her Human allies turn out to be very good friends too. A little working vacation with Jeff and April solidifies that bond and gives then a couple of adventures too. They really needed to check on the Bunnies and the Jeff had to teach the squids to keep their filthy tentacles off Lee.
Now if the Earthies would just stop trying to kill her, and they figure out how to deal with the impending death of money, maybe she can do some stuff again just for fun.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

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: ITCH

*’t was the ’tisms, m’lord. I had this story in my head when I woke up, but then my head hurt so badly that I was typoing all over the place, so I decided to redo the covers for my collections…. and then I couldn’t stop. So I’m starting this at 9:30. (and just had food for the first time since 8 am.) It might be later than midnight by the time you see this. I’m sorry. – SAH*

Time isn’t exactly an ocean. But then again, it is exactly like an ocean. I should know. I, Leith Pappas, am one of the lighthouse keepers in the sea of time.

You’ve probably seen the lighthouse. My house. At least if you have ever visited Goldport Colorado you were probably directed to the Lighthouse House as one of the local attractions. The brochures put out by the chamber of commerce say that the house was built by a sea captain who became a prospector and struck it rich. Far from his natural habitat, lost in the Rocky Mountains, he built his lighthouse, so that when the wind blew late at night, he could imagine he was at sea.

This is not so much a lie as rank nonsense, made up to explain the lighthouse in the middle of town, with a large Victorian house attached to it.

The truth is that the house was there when the first colonists arrived. Because the time corps built it there as far back as we could possibly want to go, in the case of this location circa the seventeenth century. I understand the lighthouses in Europe and two in the Eastern United States are much, much older.

I’ve been the lighthouse keeper in Goldport since shortly after I joined the time corps. It’s a quiet a life, a little lonely.

(Removed because book — Christmas in Time — will be available for sale on Amazon 12-14-2025)

It’s going to be past midnight…. Might be tomorrow morning. I’m so sorry.

The headache just returned today, so I started doing other stuff. Will have a story before midnight. Promise.

*Sorry this is so late. I had a blinding headache all day till about 2 hours ago. Probably allergies. Yes, yes, desensitization starts next week. Hopefully it works. – SAH*

None of it would have happened without Limpopo. Years later, she’d be sure of it.

He was just an assignment, not even an exciting one. At her protest that it was almost Thanksgiving and she was intending to take time and maybe spend some time in Kansas city where she’d grown up and hadn’t been for many years.

Commander Cathay had scoffed, “Oh, please. You come back to the minute after you left. And besides, it’s just up to Denver and only a hundred and fifty years past. It’s practically taking the bus to the corner.”

It wasn’t taking the bus to the corner. Cass had to go by props and costuming and get outfitted in clothes from two thousand and five. Nothing fancy. Jeans, a black t-shirt and a leather jacket. “Because it will be around the same time of year,” Jill in costuming said, as she threw Cass things from the racks. “Do you need to concealed carry?”

Jill was startled. “No. I’m supposed to distract him, maybe go on a couple of dates, so he doesn’t take the appointment at the University of Nebraska.”

“He?” Jill said. “And if it’s a razzle dazzle job, that shirt won’t do. Actually the jeans won’t do.” She’d stopped just short of saying that Cass wouldn’t do, because how would a slim blond with no special assets in the right place razzle dazzle anyone? “Take them off. Here,” Jill went through the racks and after a while threw a skirt at Cass. Cass threw it back. “I’m going to walk through a park not dance at a club.”

(Removed because book — Christmas in Time — will be available for sale on Amazon 12-14-2025)

It’s the AI, but it’s not the AI.

Look, I’m older than dirt, apparently. So old that I remember the widespread introduction of computers. Okay this was Portugal and computers were only introduced in the 80s.

Every time something went wrong, like, say your bank balance was wrong, the answer was, “Oh, I’m sorry, it was the computer.”

By then I had had one programming class, during my stay in the US. Which is why I knew what they were dishing out was nonsense. I’d only programmed for a year, but I already understood “garbage in, garbage out.”

Of course there wasn’t much I could do about it. It was still Portugal, so I had to pretend to believe them while they fixed their screw up.

Well, today I found that my credit card and Amazon are both now using AI for fraud detection. And doing so stupidly.

I’ve had this credit card for forty years. I’ve only ever had a fraud phone call before, and that was when someone tried to use it to buy a pretty strange item that I’d never before bought and would never buy… in another country.

Today I had a fraud alert. To explain, I bought nine ebooks on Amazon. Seven were books I’ve read and enjoyed before. They used to be on KU, but are now only available for purchase. And there are two more. So I did what any sane binge reader would do (would you really like me to be trying to buy them from the kindle at 2 am?) and bought all nine. They stopped the purchase of five and six for suspected fraud.

Apparently the balloon went up from Amazon first, and the credit card company thought this made perfect sense: that someone was using my card to buy books that are entirely in my wheel house — cozy mysteries — for my kindle. Now I could have understood if AMAZON had called me or pinged me or otherwise tried to verify that I’d not lost my kindle, as I could see someone buying books on a stolen kindle: though why exactly on my taste set, I don’t know. But…. thinking the credit card was compromised is a special level of insane.

And then, when I tried to call, I was answered by an AI which gave me only two answers, neither of which made any sense, and had to scream into the phone “I want to speak to a representative” for three minutes before it got it.

The representative of course said “It’s the AI’s doing.” And the ever helpful “We’re only trying to keep you safe.”

I do appreciate they’re trying to keep me safe. But to keep me safe, they should have a thinking human being, one who understands the language and the culture well enough to make a decision without doing so based on “Well, it’s a lot of books all at once.” Stuff like “Oh, they’re all the same series.”

Because AI can be — and is — badly programmed. It’s like Amazon restricting people from putting up more than 3 books a day. This makes absolute sense to prevent Chinese scammers, but without a carveout to allow businesses that have always done this, it impairs services like pubshare or probably draft to digital.

All of this is crazy cakes.

It reminds me of when I hired someone many years ago to take my edited manuscripts (edited by me) and enter the changes on the computer. I had a bunch of things indicated like “Use search and replace to change this.”

I got back a digital copy that was missing words and phrases. I couldn’t figure it out, until he showed me what he was doing. He had used search and replace but didn’t fill the replace box. So instead, it replaced the word/phrase with nothing. When I — baffled — asked why what I was told was that “I thought the computer would know what to replace it with.”

Obviously, the computer didn’t know. In the same way that the AI doesn’t know.

I feel like the name “Artificial Intelligence” has led a lot of people to think that they’re somehow dealing with…. I don’t know. Mycroft from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. they expect reasoning. (And even Mike didn’t really get the world. Anyone remember his “jokes?”) And so, they train it badly and use too general a case set with no exceptions and MORE IMPORTANTLY they don’t have an informed human on the other side dealing with this.

This is sort of what we get with AI checking social media (or AI drawing programs. Midjourney had decided that man and kneeling is somehow salacious and won’t allow me to do it. Men, no praying on your knees, for you. What? I have no clue. And it was probably a momentary glitch because of what someone else was trying to do. (I was trying to have someone kneel and incline his head in defeat, okay?)) when there is no appeal, or the appeal goes to people in other countries (meta!) with a shaky understanding of English slang. I mean this is how I almost got my facebook account cancelled for telling a friend I might have to kill him for a bad pun, or for alluding to Pratchett with “We all know the young deserve to be whipped every day for going around being young.” This was judged to be “Coordinating harm.” Somehow. Despite the fact that the friend remained my friend, and that obviously I wasn’t coordinating to have all the young in the world be whipped. As any human being who understood the culture would get!

Now, am I annoyed at the disruption of my evening? Well, it went with the computer problems for the day.

But like the problems of the day — it’s the software — it’s not the computers. It’s the people who program the computers. And the people who train the AI. And the people who don’t realize that “thinking” machines are STILL machines, and therefore you can’t really leave them to make final decisions on complex human things.

Yes, outsourcing this kind of thing to AI saves money, but you still need to pay SOME people on the back-end to backstop the AI and understand when there’s an exception.

Because when you don’t, it’s not the AI.

It’s the humans who trained it. And who aren’t checking on it.

In the end, it’s always the humans.