According To Hoyt

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Profit & Freedom (Chronicles of the Fall Book 23)

The disruption of the attack on the 300, and then the invasion has left twin sisters unsupervised . . .

Noeme and Juna Jaeger, at the age of fifteen, might have put a toe over the line of strict legality to make sure they stayed safe . . . then they helped a couple of their friends . . .

And then . . . why not? Why not turn it into a business? Save some other kids, and make money doing it! What could possibly go wrong?

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Fen Dead (The Groundskeeper Book 6)

In the misty fen on the edge of town, a murdered man refuses to stay buried.

Chloe Brandt, groundskeeper of Belleview cemetery and reluctant apprentice mediator to the dead, has been called in to help. The deeper she digs into the strange killing, the more she realizes some bindings run deeper than any grave.

Armed with a glowing jar of restless oil, a crew of sectretive gnomes, and more confidence than caution, Chloe must navigate deceptions and dangerous liminal spaces before the fen claims another soul. In a world where even the dead keep secrets, the only way forward is to get your hands dirty.

FROM KEN LIZZI: Long Gambit: Book Two of The Twilight Galaxy Series

The Long Gambit is the second book in Ken Lizzi’s Twilight Galaxy — the ongoing saga of the free trader Long Gambit and the crew who keep her flying through a slowly collapsing galaxy.

Captain Pyater Welloons is one missed payment from losing everything. His ship is clamped to the pad for unpaid moorage fees, his accounts are nearly dry, and the only job on the board is a humanitarian rush run: twelve million doses of medicine for a plague-stricken backwater called Owming.

The catch is that Welloons has to source the drug himself — on Ixtpa, a planet where nearly everyone is chemically modified and the automated factories run themselves while the population drifts pleasantly toward oblivion. The one compound he needs has been bought up to the last ampule to treat a cattle plague on another world. So Welloons does the only thing a man in his position can do: he plans a heist.

What follows is a working-crew space adventure with teeth — a midnight break-in through an automated underground, a street ambush, a slow-motion brush with suffocation when a part nobody replaced finally fails, and an ambush by two pirate ships that knew exactly where the Long Gambit would be. The crew’s best hope turns out to be a piece of bargain-bin junk the captain told them to throw out.

And when the ship finally reaches Owming, Welloons discovers that delivering the medicine and getting it to the dying are two very different problems — and that the people who ordered it may be the last ones who want it to arrive.

For readers of working-ship, declining-empire space adventure in the tradition of C.J. Cherryh’s merchanters, Andre Norton’s Solar Queen, and Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper. Dry humor, a crew worth riding with, and a captain who keeps his word even when it costs him. The story is the point.

EDITED BY DAVID BADURINA: Pet Monsters: Ten Tales of Monsters and the Kids Who Befriend Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 78)

You were a weird kid once. So were they — right up until the monster showed up.A boy brings a rotten sandwich back to life and discovers the truest
friend he has ever had. A lonely girl pulls a crashed alien out of a cornfield. A grieving kid hides a fire-breathing salamander in his dead
father’s office. And out past the porch light, something with too many tentacles is looking up at the same stars — and quietly noticing the
marriage coming apart inside the house.Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures
that crash into ordinary lives, and the children brave enough to love them back. They are funny, they are frightening, and underneath every
one of them runs the same current: what it costs to be an outcast, what it means to finally be understood, and how much it hurts to let go.For readers raised on E.T., The Iron Giant, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and for anyone who still, on the right kind of night, half-hopes to find something waiting at the edge of the yard. In the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill: ten tales where childhood wonder shades, story by story, into the uncanny and the unforgettable.Ten
authors. Ten monsters. One anthology about the friends we lose, the people we become, and the small impossible miracle of being seen.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: King of the Zombie Moonmen

Craig Holdren is a typical young slacker, until, thanks to an inheritance from his mysterious Uncle Jack, he finds his way into another world. It is a world much like his own, except for flying saucers, atomic-powered cars, rocket ships, unearthly zombies, renegade robots, giant spiders, ferocious rock creatures and an imminent invasion from outer space. Here Craig finds his true destiny when he takes Uncle Jack’s place as the legendary Flying Commando – the only man who can stop Retik, King of the Zombie Moonmen, from conquering the entire Universe!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Huntress on the Rocks (Timelines Universe Book 4)

A young military intelligence agent. Hunting a murderous drug dealer across a floating city on a water world light-years from Earth – with only his name, and a vague description of what he might look like. Will she finally find her quarry and bring him to justice, or will cases of mistaken identity mean she’ll simply end up

A Huntress on the Rocks

(A Delaney Wolff Fox story)

FROM MARY CATELLI: Even After

Mirror, mirror on the wall — can I be safe when I am tall?

Rumpelstiltskin got the baby.

Rapunzel and her prince never again met.

Snow White still sleeps in the forest.

Biancabella, Snow White’s half-sister, knows that if she is more beautiful than her mother, trouble will follow again. Her appeal to the magic mirror only gains her stories of how hard it is to fight the evil sorceresses and wizards and witches who have banded together to bring unhappy endings.

But with her mother seeking to constrain her, Biancabella knows she may have no choice to use that knowledge to attempt to escape.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Evening Performance: A Novel of Theatrical Discipline and International Espionage (The Aurigan Conflict)

A retired accountant notices that the actors aren’t saying their lines correctly.

Four intelligence services notice something else entirely.

At the Grand Imperial Theatre, The Kingdom at the Edge of the World appears to be an ordinary theatrical production. But beneath the costumes, stage directions, and carefully rehearsed dialogue lies an international communications network—one that has operated undetected for years.

British Intelligence is watching. The Aurigans are watching. The mysterious Grey Office is watching. Several other intelligence services are watching.

And then there is Cedric Pritchard.

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 to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: structure.

*This post was made using an app created by the Mathematician who got tired of watching me painfully uploading them one by one, after of course saving them over the week. JUST the mechanical act of uploading took me two to three hours. Well, he didn’t like that, so he automated it. It seems to have worked. We’ll see how it works out, shall we? – SAH*

In fair America, where we lay our scene . . .

By Holly the Assistant

We’ve long known that the image of reality has diverged in the two parties. Not the actual reality–whatever your party affiliation it’s still possible to talk to you about the doe with the twinsies by the old egg farm, you can see her same as I can–but the image, the view projected by others and accepted by those not personally present at the scene of, of the reality.

This got exhibited just now on a perfectly innocuous State Patrol social media post about checking trucks for safety at the border (northern). The trucks are entering a state that goes from 900 ft above sea level to over 10,000 ft above sea level (though I sincerely hope none are scaling the peaks, and are staying to the more paved roads that top out about 8,000). A little double check of the brakes and tires seems appropriate. One group is praising the State Patrol–by far the majority. Two small groups think either that State Patrol should be checking for illegal alien drivers or that they are there only to harass poor innocent brown drivers. Somehow, I suspect that the legality of the drivers entering the USA is really the department of the border crossing guards just north of the State Patrol stop, and the State Patrol is probably about as brown as the drivers anyway.

But I’ve seen it everywhere. One group condemning President Trump for not sending firefighting help to Canada, the other group condemning President Trump for sending firefighting help to Canada so it’s not available to local fires.

One group condemning Congress for grilling that poor old hero Fauci, the other group condemning Congress for not jailing that old crook Fauci.

One group condemning parents for not getting their kids vaccinated thus causing the spread of measles, the other group pointing out that the current cases are vaccinated adults.

One claiming that Russia or Iran has won and the Ukraine or the USA are done for, the other claiming that the Ukraine or the USA has won and Russia or Iran is on the brink of total collapse.

One claiming that ICE is arresting and deporting Native American Tribal Members, the other pointing out that the photo is too blurry to make out if it’s ICE, there’s no evidence that the arrestee was deported, there’s no evidence of the legal status or tribal membership of the arrestee, there’s not even a name attached . . .

The award winning children’s book is banned! The smut is removed from the school library, go buy it online you nasty person.

A rational person would think these are fairly . . . reality checkable things? As checkable as the doe with the twins is? But they aren’t . . . that is, we ourselves cannot go there personally and look. Well, some of us have looked at the lack of aerial support in the timeline we would prefer to local fires, but it’s a bit harder to tell if that’s because the planes are stateside elsewhere, out of country elsewhere, getting repairs, or some other reason why reality simply couldn’t conform to our expectations.

We rely on reports from others, and those others have their own agendas. We trust that others have fact-checked or ask people we trust to fact-check if we don’t have the knowledge. Or we accept the reports based on our own biases and previous knowledge.

I don’t think my leftist acquaintances are going to be born out in the midterms in their belief that President Trump’s supporters are abandoning him over “starting a war in Iran”. I don’t see that in my right acquaintances at all. Maybe a little pissed off he hasn’t ended it yet, but no one thinks he started it. Far more likely that the right rejects some senators for not passing the SAVE Act, (or shenanigans at the ballot boxes cost some re-elections) and the left interprets that as Trump’s supporters abandoning him.

I’m pretty sure the Huns are the most political fact-checking prone community out there on the internet, but keep in mind your neighbors have different fandoms, and the folks who are most engaged in the fandom of which breed of sheep has the lowest parasite load in your local conditions, what the best drought condition supplemental feed is, and which herd dog breeding pairing would be best, might could use a heads-up on what that ballot proposition actually will do, or even a reminder of when the various elections are. Just try to keep your geeking out short enough they don’t zone out, please!

*Alike in dignity? Well, yes. Exactly. I didn’t claim either had any amount of dignity at all, did I now? And neither did Shakespeare, did he? Also, recollect the next two lines of the prologue, if you would please, and let’s try to skip that, thank you very much, in so far as it is in our power to.

There is a comment in moderation I haven’t yet decided to liberate. It’s from a new commenter and I don’t think he’s a troll.

Or at least trolls rarely write wiffy-waffing walls of text that start by accusing me of either lying or being wrong (about an obvious point at that) and then proceeds to do the appeasing two-step ending in how he thinks we should have a social safety net. It reads in fact completely and bizarrely idiotic, in the way only a very smart person fed on disingenuous pap his entire life can sound stupid.

But the person self-identifies as a socialist and my assistant strenuously objects to freeing his comment, since she says no one practices the arcane art of the flounce, anymore, and we’ll end up having to block him. And because I am exhausted, I’ll defer to her. (Exhausted: turns out not just the last step on the marbelizing but the one before were a mistake. You see, having done the marbelizing proper (I’m good at painting marble-like substances) I found myself leery of doing the final step in epoxy, so I chose “layers of polyurethane instead” (Lacquer not indicated, since it’s a bedside table, CPAPs leak, and I occasionally slap my water glass instead of grabbing it.) Apparently high humidity and temperatures in the nineties mean that the polyurethane, being a plastic, remains soft. Since the intermediate steps involve sanding, and removing the mistaken coat definitely needs sanding, what happened is that I tried to sand and the whole turned into a gummed mess. I had to bring out the hot gun. In this weather! It’s now been scraped, sanded bare, and I made interim arrangements, so I can do both bedside tables at the same time since I’ll have to mix epoxy for the final step, and I only want to do it once. (I HATE working with epoxy. I can’t tell you how much.) Anyway, extensive sanding and heat gun left me beat.)

The mistake/lie he thinks I made is that “Socialists don’t want things to get worse.” Right. Lenin saying “The worse the better” was just a bleep. And by the way, don’t try to tell me communism isn’t socialism. The USSR called itself socialist, so did the DDR and so does every other tinpot communist dictatorship in the world. BUT if someone is stupid enough to claim Lenin wasn’t socialist, then they must think socialists are the word’s dumbest life forms, outsmarted by a paramecium because wanting to open the borders and bring in the third world, (I’m not saying people from the third world are bad. But they come from dysfunctional cultures and have no skills we need in our present society.) wanting to incentivize crime (not punishing crime is incentivizing it, unless you believe every criminal is secretly an angel. Also, for the love of Bob, this experience has been run again and again and again. The way to combat serious crime is to disproportionately punish trivial crimes, not the other way around) wanting to strangle energy and wanting to turn us into a command economy (again proven over and over again not to work) is to want to create disorder and destroy everything. I don’t care what pretty lies one tells to cover it up. That’s what socialists want.

But it was his soft landing of “We need a social net” that kept me awake last night. (And I really can’t afford to be kept awake just now.) It’s what people say when they want to appease the socialists. Hell, the mess we’re in, the whole welfare state and the bizarre “mixed economy” bullshit was an attempt to appease the socialists/communists so they wouldn’t destroy everything. It’s why the Victorians went soppy on “helping the poor and educating the benighted” and it’s why country after country has tied itself with velvet ropes, in the attempt to keep the commies from killing everyone and destroying everything.

It doesn’t work. Communists and socialists can’t be appeased. What they want is not what they say they want. What they claim worries them is not what worries them. Creating a social net is admitting that they’re right and the poor need the government to steal from those who have and give to them. Once you concede that, you’re like the prostitute who will only put out for a million dollars. You’ve already admitted what you are. You’re just quibbling on the price.

Quickly, what really — passionately — concerns socialists is that other people have more than THEY THEMSELVES do. Yes, they say they’re concerned about the poor. But talk to any one of them long enough, and the spittle-flecked rant comes out where they will scream that Elon is so rich, why isn’t he feeding all of Africa. Since only a fool or a knave will claim that someone can feed a continent indefinitely, it soon becomes obvious they just hate the fact someone is that wealthy. It bothers them. They’ll rant about inequality, etc. but what bothers them is that others have more than they do. And this is because the very wealthy can ignore them and evade their killing commands. And since at the heart of every statist is a dirty greed for power, this will not be tolerated. The rich must be brought down and they and the poor all made uniformly wretched and in need for the dole dispensed by government, which will, of course, be dispensed by our socialists. (In their dreams. In fact the most ruthless of them end up in power, and everyone else ends up in mass graves. But the dear socialists never see that. They’re blinded by their dreams of unlimited power over the lumpen masses.) Note the commenter that left the wall of text is going to object strenuously to it, and by doing so prove himself either disingenuous or deluded. Either a knave or a useful idiot. (I’m going to be on useful idiot, but I could be wrong.)

Now let’s tackle the whole idea of social net. I’m against.

Note this doesn’t mean I’m against “helping the poor.” Except at our most strapped, where $5 meant I didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, we alot money from our income for helping those who need it. Some of it we even do through extremely well researched charitable organizations. (Few. Look, organizations fall to organizational blinkeredness. Not only do they tend to be taken over by dear blinkered socialists, but they also don’t seem to understand the concept of different cultures. Look up the many misfires and stupidities of the Heifer project for elucidation.) Most of the help we give is personal, close-up and involves … well…. sometimes very strange things. Like, in the nineties Dan and I bought an average of a serviceable computer once every three months. No, our computers weren’t that bad. It was that when we heard of a friend who was a writer and either doing it long hand because they couldn’t afford a computer or whose computer had just died, we got him/her on. Sometimes we even gave it to them (when Dan knew he’d need to be tech support) instead of ding dong ditching by putting it on the door step, ringing the doorbell and driving away like some sort of deranged tech fairies. In the same vein, Dan would buy and repair computers, then put them in the classifieds (later craigslist) for a ridiculously low price, like $20. In that way, we furnished computers to single mothers whose kids needed them for school, to young couples who needed one for accounting or something, etc. (Why not put them for free? Because that attracted people wanting to get them to sell. We tried and found that out.)

We also of course offer more conventional help, like money for a month’s rent or moving expenses. When we can. Or a bag of groceries. Or whatever.

Look, when we needed help — we never went official channels because we suck at bureaucracy and also because I HATE government handouts, as they’re a trap — various friends gave us baby clothes, or a bag of groceries, or such. And that got us on our feet again.

I don’t say any of this to be thought a good person. I’m not in fact a good person. But I aspire to be someone Heinlein would consider a human being. And he said to pay it forward, so I do. Including, yes, making covers for friends, protegees and total strangers. And also when I can (the last few years haven’t been great) dispensing mentoring. Because in my head that’s just what a decent, not terrible human being does. As is all of the above.

But then, you’ll ask, why don’t I want the government to take the burden? Surely I know that I can’t help everyone, or even hear about most of the needs.

I concede the later, particularly since some people are like us and you’ll only find when the noose is tightening around our necks if you’re our close friend or we are in such trouble we let it slip.

And yet, even conceding the fact we can’t help everyone (but we’re not the only people doing this) I oppose the welfare state and utterly reject it and all its empty promises and all its false glamour.

But Sarah, why?

Well, first because the “safety net” is immoral.

How is it immoral? Because it is theft. The government creates no wealth. The government has no money of its own. Any money being used for “a safety net” was taken from someone with threats of violence. And kindly, don’t tell me it’s not with threats of violence. Look up what happens if you refuse to pay your taxes, or even the part of your taxes that you can infer go to “safety net.”

It is immoral, it will always be immoral, to tax an elderly lady who worked and saved her entire life in order to give the money to a young person who can’t find a job. (And note I have spoken sympathetically of young people who can’t find jobs. It’s not their fault. But neither is it their right to be supported by others by the use of armed robbery.)

Second, because the so called “safety net” is mostly a cage.

Look, most of the people on Welfare who stay on Welfare have problems that can’t be solved by handing them money. That is not a safety net. That’s a safety prison, through the bars of which we regularly pass money. Even in the cases when the people on welfare didn’t bring about their own problems — being insane or handicapped is usually not something one brings on oneself, absent some of the crazier new age theories — what they need is what we can’t provide by handing them money: either psychiatric help or a concerted effort to find something they can do to support themselves or, for extreme cases, a way to live with dignity while being unable to provide for themselves.

There is no dignity in Welfare. It enables the state to poke its nose into your business, and also to make decisions for you. (And the end result of the welfare state is always the metaphorical gas chambers. ALWAYS. Look up what’s happening with assisted suicide in the “compassionate” states of the west. Because ultimately the way to help those who won’t otherwise be made whole is to kill them, which does solve the problem. Permanently.)

Third, because all government social spending ends up misapplied.

It starts as money for widows and orphans, but because widows and orphans are few in our present age, and the genuine widows find ways to provide for themselves, it ends up as paying people divorce and have multiple kids out of wedlock. It ends up being paying people not to see work. It ends up, in its ultimate international application as paying for trans operas for peruvians because someone sold it as resolving institutional problems or something.

The money, stolen at gun point from working people, creates such a massive fund (particularly in a country the size of a continent like ours) that it ends up attracting the kind of people who see it for what it is: a concentrated source of power. Those people, in turn, search out not those who can be helped and move on, but for those who will remain clients and give them that power. Which creates a need for the money they dispense, by regulation, by bureaucracy, by design, ultimately.

Fourth because anything administered by an institution as large as the government will change much too slowly and will perpetuate problems it’s trying to solve.

Even when trying not to, (and that is rare) the institutional solutions for the problems are the kind that perpetuate the problem. For instance, kids who can’t find a job will be told to apply and apply and apply, and capture the applications as proof they have done so. They might be put in training for conventional jobs, etc.

More good could be done in our day and age by providing them with a small stake to start their own small business, and having courses that teach them to do so.

But that is impossible because we’re in an area of catastrophic change and government regulations and understanding move very very slowly.

Even the best provisions to make Welfare useful and temporary are perfectly adapted to the early twentieth century and useless to us now.

Fifth because welfare in general and in the end will impoverish everyone is society.

When socialists spit-fleck their rants on making Elon pay for everyone in Africa, or in taking the money from all billionaires to feed “every hungry child in America” (A trick as there are almost no hungry children in America, barring those who are actively being trafficked and those on a diet. The surveys are nonsense.) they are, besides screaming at the top of their voices “I am an envious asshole who can’t stand the thought that people have more than I do” declaring their utter and complete lack of understanding of economics. (If their declaring Marx a genius economist wasn’t enough to tell you that.)

You see, they will also tell you “no one needs” x amount of money. And declare themselves capable of telling you what money people have in excess of needs.

(Sighs. Massages the bridge of her nose, to ward off a headache.)

G-d forgive me, but I’m about to invoke their satanic gospel against them. What they’re ignoring is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Because of course, they think the government can see into those, and also that they’re competent to determine what each needs and can do.

And that’s the veriest, frothiest bullshit confection. They have visibility into exactly one set of abilities: their poor scrap of can-do. And into one set of needs: their own bottomless, gargantuan wish for more, more, more.

When they envision being “rich” or even someone like Elon their limited and blinkered imagination (No? Look at what Hollywood became as they ran off anyone even suspected of bad think) they imagine having money for everything they would like to buy and for the lifestyle they’d like to have. And above that they stutter.

I have yet to meet a single socialist who in their most secret of hearts doesn’t imagine “Millionaires and billionaires” as keeping their excess funds in a room or fortress. Whether they also imagine people swimming in the bills and coins like Uncle Scrooge is optional. (I suspect if they read comics as kids they do.)

What they don’t understand is that someone like Elon (and others, in a smaller way, but he’s such a glaring example) NEED that excess money. They need it to invest, to create new companies, to pay for research and innovation that will make all of us much richer.

If they can’t have that because they’re being taxed to their toenails, this impoverishes everyone.

Look, the very wealthy of the Victorian age contributed more to our world of extreme wealth and minimal true need than all the playwrights and novelists nattering on about the plight of the poor and downtrodden.

The reasons are too many to list, but some are for instance that people funding research into a process or idea that they want to use for their company or their ambitious undertaking tend to fund real science, not make believe.

Everyone with a brain should admit part of the problem in science right now is that the government pays for most of it, which means that they pay for the results they want. If you don’t see a problem with that, you might have other issues. What we need is for people who want to make more money by making better widgets or sending widgets to Mars. They don’t want faked results but real ones.

But also that people who know what to do and have the capacity for work can’t streamline processes, create better ways to increase crops (or lose less to pests) or ANYTHING ELSE if all their ‘excess money’ is being confiscated by government and mostly getting eaten by bureaucracy or misapplied to things that maybe might have helped someone in 1930.

And that’s where “their abilities” come in. I am — I flatter myself — a mildly decent futurist. I can see what’s coming down the pike when it’s written in letters of fire six feet high. Which makes me amazing compared to most “experts” and most governments.

So if I have that, why ain’t I rich?

Well, because the best I can do with my abilities is put it out here, on this blog or instapundit, and hope someone with more ability takes it on.

What I lack is not the intellectual ability (though I lack knowledge in some technical fields) but the risk tolerance. I couldn’t do what Elon does for half the time and twice the money. I’d be such a nervous wreck if I tried to start a company that I’d never start.

I also lack the capacity for work. I can work 20 hours a day for a while but I’m old and the body gives after a while. Some of the “millionaires and billionaires” are people who cheerfully work for 20 hours a day into their eighties. (Our president might be one of them.)

But what about the millionaires and billionaires that “simply” invest? Well, as Dan has taken control of our retirement funds and works at it, I can tell you that’s still an additional full time job, on top of his full time job. But beyond that, even if it’s “all” people do, because it’s their money and they’re interested in not losing it, they are more likely to invest it in things that grow and improve.

And the miracle of free trade is that what does well (absent governmental distortion, of course. BUT that’s not free trade) are things people want, things that improve their lives. Which in turn, by degrees, no matter how small, makes the world richer and better.

Still, given all that, you’ll ask what we’d do with all the genuinely needy. The halting, the lame, the congenitally incapable of striving for themselves shall always be with us. Beyond that, even those of us who are strivers and always on the go do at times hit a patch where we need help. And at any rate, all of us at some point will hit a place where we permanently need help. As I’m finding after making like I was twenty yesterday, your body changes and won’t let you go go go like the energizer bunny anymore.

I propose that we foster a culture of private charity. To be fair, this already exists and always has throughout the history of mankind. From people like us who help those within our reach, to people who are much, much better off and start schools or create programs, or HELP people we’d never event think of helping.

And there’s always churches as every major religion has a requirement for charity.

To let government usurp the rightful function of what is the basic requirement of being human is bizarre, and is made more so by the government’s war on religious charity (like the nuns who look after the dying in NYC or the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

You can’t say “But what if people don’t help?” Because people have helped throughout all of the centuries of mankind’s existence. Sure, often not lavish, but as we’ve established, from our perspective they were ALL POOR. And still doing what they COULD.

That is an a-historical piece of nonsense that is designed to incentivize armed theft administered by statists.

I can only conclude that socialists are either egregiously indoctrinated into a-historical nonsense, or judging everyone by the size of their minuscule souls and capacity for disinterested kindness.

I’ll leave it to their consciences to determine which.

I keep running into the idiocy that I’ll call “therapeutic approaches to crime.” Or if you prefer how my kids portrayed this on the regular, with extreme sarcasm, it went something like this:

“Hey, where are my comic books?”

“Don’t know!”

“What do you mean don’t know? They’re in your room. You took them without asking.”

“It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.”

Which was Monty Python, of course, but also what I keep running into from people with various letters after their name who come up with justifications in all seriousness.

You know, like the special flower on X who was sure we could get rid of crime if we just increased minimum wage to $30. Or the even more special flowers who think that paying everyone for breathing would get rid of crime. Or the socialists/communists who are convinced that you should abolish the police and have social workers intervene instead. Some of these are actually evil and don’t mean anything of that, except where they could make society worse to destroy everything so they can then install their dictatorship of choice. But some are just stupid, and truly believe this. Partly because — of course — this is indoctrinated into everyone in school. Which is why you find “serious” books about Jack the Ripper’s victims talking about how they were victims of society, really, not just of a deranged killer. (Yes, I know they were victims, not technically criminals. Kind of. More on that later.)

Part of it is years upon years of people being told anything bad anyone does is “society’s fault” for “driving them to it”, partly it’s all the stupid tales of how evil mean our ancestors were for executing people for “stealing a loaf of bread”, part is the remnants of the old bizarre early twentieth century idea that if only people were “educated” enough they’d stop committing crimes. And partly it’s the sludge of Freud working itself through the culture.

It’s hard to remember but in the mid to late twentieth century Freud was not only taken absolutely seriously, but also as the explanation for everything TM. Learned people and experts absolutely believed his crazy cakes theories. (Turns out Freud was a brilliant psychologist, who absolutely diagnosed the problems with ONE patient. The patient was himself.) So, you know, every geek who hadn’t yet got around to even THINKING of sex was known for an absolute fact to be a mass murderer just waiting for his repressions to burst forth and kill someone. It was a fact TM.

Because of this there are a lot of softheads running around absolutely convinced that if we just give the poor troubled criminals a bit more love and understanding, they’ll be completely law abiding.

After all, we’ve come a long way from the time they hanged people for stealing a loaf of bread, and to quote Obama’s speech writer: “The arrow of history bends towards mercy.” Which is exactly the sort of patented insanity smeared with bullshit we can expect from the SCOAMF.

Because history never came with an arrow, and mercy is a luxury good.

What do I mean by luxury good? Well, the reason people used to get hanged for stealing a loaf of bread is that for many families that daily loaf was all that stood between starvation and survival. A loaf of bread, in terms of worth, both in cost of materials and work and for that matter of ability of anyone to buy it was a much more expensive and vital thing than it is to us.

The baker who set up a hue and cry when his loaf was pinched was not the evil man willing to send the poor orphan to the gallows for so little. It was because the money from that loaf was desperately needed by his own family.

Now, Sarah, the loaf of bread thing is probably just an exaggeration of silly Victorian writers. Perhaps. But you find penalties for things that are almost as silly. To us. People hanged for stealing a few shillings, or a cheap piece of jewelry, or perhaps a length of fabric. Or other equally harsh penalties.

Look, what you have to understand is that we’re unimaginably rich when compared to most human beings throughout most of history that we don’t sweat the small stuff. Until someone impinges on our ability to survive (and it takes a lot), we’re willing to let it ride and to try things that anyone with two grams of sense would know wouldn’t work, or only work in very rare cases.

But throughout most of history what criminals took was normal people’s ability to survive, and it was trivially easy. Because people lived close to the knife’s edge. So they couldn’t afford romantic ideas such as that someone became a murderer because his mom refused to buy him a teddy bear when he was 3. (Or gave him a sexy teddy bear when he was three.) What they could do is deal swift justice on those who impinged on their ability to survive. (And sometimes yes mistaken justice, and mob justice. Because humans. Scared humans.)

It wasn’t until the Victorian age that it became fashionable to feel sorry for the poor criminals and talk about how they couldn’t help themselves.

Which brings us right around to the victims of Jack the Ripper. Who were of course victims, and no one deserves to die that way. BUT on the other hand, most of them were petty criminals. “Sex workers” then and now inhabit a half world, where other crimes happen, and most of these women were petty thieves as well as prostitutes. But more importantly, most of them existed in that space where criminal and victim flow into each other. They might or might not have ever turned truly criminal, but they lived on the petty scale of not having honest work, prostituting themselves, drinking themselves stupid, and seemingly being unable to pull up.

It is people like this that the good liberals of the early twentieth century envisioning rescuing with “education” as though by teaching people things they could stop them being alcoholics or having basic effed up personalities. And they’re the people that the late twentieth century people envisioned rescuing by asking about their mothers. And the people our blinkered little socialists think are only effed up because “capitalism is an unnatural order that causes mental illness.” (In the sense that it allows people to live long enough and eat enough to worry about mental illness, they might be right.) They have this entire mythology of a garden of Eden without G-d where everyone shared and shared alike and there was no private property before a mysterious fall (variously ascribed to agriculture or other nonsense) when suddenly capitalism entered the world and everyone became victims or victimizers. Look, it’s a stupid religion, but I don’t fault them for their beliefs. I fault them for trying to impose their nonsense on reality and making us worship their fucked up gods. If they contented themselves with living in the monastery of holy redistribution, snarling at evil capitalism at the proscribed hours of the day, I couldn’t care less.

But as is, they insist on bringing their fantasies into my reality. They claim that police is evil not because they use force, not because — on occasion — they’re less than honest, not because — on occasion — they don’t catch the right guy. No. Police are evil, in the dear socialists little minds because they enforce established rule and “capitalism.” So far they are telling the truth. They hate law enforcement because it keeps the established order going, with the dear socialists occupying the space between lunatics and academics (BIRM). Where we let them exist because they’re impotent and we’re merciful.

BUT what they want is to occupy the space where they command all force. Where they’re at the top and enforcing the rules. To get there, they need to encourage disorder and riot, and get normal people scared. (Also they believe if things get bad they’ll automagically be on top.)

This is why the socialists with power try to convince everyone else (And convince academics and the indoctrinated (again BIRM)) that what we should send to the scene of the crime is not a policeman but a social worker. Not because it will help anything, but because they know it won’t.

And that is a problem.

You see, we’re immensely rich. We can afford to let people steal any number of bread loaves. We can afford any amount of illusions, like that homeless addicts who threaten the public are “victims of society” who are “unhoused” and just need a place built at the expense of the public. We can afford insanity like USAID and its distributions of money for Peruvian trans operas or whatever the hell that was. We can even afford to pay people to riot in and burn our cities. And survive.

What we can’t afford are socialists and their bullshit.

Because what they’re threatening is the idea of private property and the ability to keep that which you’ve wrested from the Earth by the sweat of your brow.

And if we lose that, as a society, we’ll be back to being so poor we have to hang the urchin that steals the loaf of bread, because that loaf of bread is the margin between survival and not.

Coddling criminals is a stupid indulgence. Coddling socialists is a potentially life-threatening one.

It’s too expensive. We can’t afford it.

Specifically the mistakes were made by me. It was one, and fairly boneheaded. I knew what today would be, and I should have traded days with my assistant, instead of being blithely convinced that I could do what I needed to in between two fairly lengthy appointments.

I was wrong. Also dumb. In my defense, I have been up since six, so we could make it to appointment in time.

First, do not be alarmed, they were NOT medical, but financial/money appointments. Also don’t be alarmed on that, though I might still be in moderate pain from it, but that’s because I’m what’s the technical term… oh, frugal. Or if you prefer a skinflint. (Look, I married a man from Connecticut. After a while these things transfer.)

In the approximately fifteen minutes between appointments I might have ruined the marbelizing on the bedside table I’ve been working on for two weeks. Okay, hopefully not, but there’s a big “hopefully” in there. Look, it’s too hot to be working outside (in a tent) with glazes, and I know that, but I had a visit from the good idea fairy. It was the imp of stupidity instead, and I should have known that.

Dan says we need to get done with all this other stuff because I haven’t been writing fiction for a while and I’m starting to act peculiar. The glaze thing was a symptom of that. “I can’t afford not to write” is the thing.

To compensate you for blowing today (Unintentionally) I’ll try to blog tomorrow.

And now I’ve been pinned down by the Muse, which you’d think would mean I was going to write, but it’s the other muse. This one.

Look, I can’t argue with her, so I’m going to nap, then HOPEFULLY work.

Posts will be late this week. This is because we have early morning appointments every single day, and I can’t stay up late as usual to write the posts, or I’ll never be able to get my behind off the bed at six. (Which is needed for the entire morning duty list, including feeding cats, before I leave the house at seven thirty or so.)

So, indulge me, okay? Just this week.

I’ve been reading a series of mysteries set in WWI which has been fine, except for a creeping realization that no one — not a single person — in that series is a decent human being. Momentarily, in the last book, I thought we’d found a woman who wouldn’t become an adulterous doxy at a nod and a wink. Until we find out this is because she’s actually a spy playing a part.

Meanwhile we’re supposed to believe that the main characters have these wonderful families and are honest and straight as an arrow, and you tilt your head sideways. Because by the third book you know they can’t be. The mind that conceived that universe cannot possibly believe in fidelity.

The problem is that this is more or less the default of popular entertainment. I don’t mean just infidelity. If that were all, we’d still be in relatively good shape, despite it being fairly horrifying. It’s everything else.

Dan watches a lot of stuff, and I kind of sit here on the sofa and blog and look at it now and then, and it’s like there isn’t a single honest or truthful or — worse– truly kind character. Even the main characters tend to be “practical” i.e. they don’t actually care, it’s just convenient.

It’s gotten to the point that if I’m reading something — oh, I don’t mean (by and large, though even there at times!) regency romances, or cozy mysteries, or sf — something historical, or something that has pretensions to being a little more intellectual; or if Dan is watching practically anything, if a character does something kind or appears to be an admirable person, I start to expect the big reversal.

Because there is always, lurking in there, somewhere, the manic rictus of “gotcha” or what I call the clever-fool bait and switch.

Look, hypocrisy exists. Adultery exists. Evil exists.

No one who has read my books can possibly imagine that I don’t think those exist.

It’s just that even in the worst societies, alongside them, there is heroism, bravery, kindness. And there are genuinely good people. I’ve met a lot of them. A lot of them have honored me with their friendship. One married me.

Look, I’m not calling for writing polyanna bright and shiny stuff. Actually I’m not calling for writing anything. I do that over at Mad Genius Club on the regular, but this is more a READER’s blog. And a thinkers.

What am I calling for then?

Well, I know how this trend started. If you’re used to stories going a certain way, the first time you subvert it, it’s a shock to the system and the person is likely to become famous. And the book too.

But at this point, encountering a decent person or an honest relationship is the shock to the system. I’m absolutely convinced that Friends became the mega success it was because they were…. friends. Not wonderful, not perfect — they were all sitcom characters — but they were and more or less remained friends throughout the whole thing. And also by and large (look, TV needs characteristics exaggerated. If those people existed, they’d all be in the loony bin) normal people, just trying the best they could.

The problem I’ve found, reading that series, otherwise well written, etc, is that it leaves a patina on your perception of the world. You start looking around at normal families and wondering who’s cheating on whom. I imagine if that’s all I saw and read all the time — I control the intake as it were — I’d become a lot more doomery and less likely to look at the future with hope.

One of the things that the world cup visitors kept saying was how optimistic, how confident Americans are. You know why? Because over there the darkness really is pervasive over everything. Europe takes itself a lot more seriously, and even the books they import from here are the ones from major imprints, by and large.

They live on a steady diet of doom gloom, no one is clean, no one is good. Of course it starts to reflect in the lives they live.

Honestly if I thought the would be oligarchs were half a turn smarter, I’d think they’d encouraged that kind of entertainment in order to rule over the dispirited populace.

It has become a funny joke for my fans who attend Liberty Con that I’m put on the dystopia panel. Yes, it depends on how you define “dystopia.” I like Black Tide well enough to have written now… four? five? short stories in the anthologies (the latest, whenever that comes out, has serious theological implications. Probably.) I like it because even though it’s post apocalyptic it’s a world where people are striving back. Striving back very hard, in fact.

And a lot of post apocalyptic stuff is like that. But not all. Perhaps not a majority. Either that or I’m seriously unlucky in the ones I first picked up which were reveling in the fall of humans and their civilization. And that makes me foam at the mouth. For that matter the “inevitability” of doom gloom, the end is coming soon makes me foam at the mouth. (Hence why you reprobates enjoy that panel so much. Because I TRY to be good but at some point it always ends up with me rolling up my sleeves, turning the Heinlein picture to the wall, and telling the truth in social situations.)

But the reason it annoys me so much is not (just) that I’m a depressive who carefully manages her interior balance and who thinks marketing doom is toxic, if not immediately then over time. No. The reason it drives me nuts is because it’s not logical.

It’s that whole “It’s too perfect.” Almost every history of “this is how civilization falls” requires you to swallow more coincidences and miracles than a rags to riches story. It’s too perfect, too constructed, and the good guys just disappear. The resourceful guys just aren’t there. Any luck is bad. And we’re not even in Russia!

As I said, I don’t expect stories to be all perfect and sweet and everything goes well. That’s not a story. (Though mind you in romances, everyone can be well intentioned and still screw up big time. In real life too.) But neither is it a story that everything is dingy and evil and no one can be trusted. It’s just an endless series of getting punched in the gut. And eventually you’re going to decide not to pick up a book by that person again. (And that’s not counting the unsubtle preaching.)

We shouldn’t settle for it. Now big publishing, and soon big Hollywood, doesn’t have all the control. We should seek out and actively promote and reward those authors who write books that make sense. Books that have, yes, villains, but also heroes. Evil, sure, but also good.

Because we’re not — thank heavens — communists. We’re not all dressed in the same dingy clothes with the same regulation stains.

Someone — P. J. O’Rourke? — said communist countries were landscapes bleached of color. I knew this just from footage from abroad, not to mention my parents’ tour of the East shorty after I got married. (To her dying day, my mom could do a skip on command, impromptu, which we will call “So many turnips.”)

I just realized while writing this that as the left took over the entertainment establishment they did the exact same thing to it.

I call it grey goo, and a lot of it, but even books that are readable and have characters still smear everyone in grey because in their minds good just isn’t realistic.

Well, I’m here to tell you it is. People still run into burning buildings to save strangers. People still try to protect innocents. And let’s not forget some years ago, in some Muslim hell hole, when the populace was getting ready to stone a woman who had been divorced/unmarried four years and turned up pregnant, even there her ex-husband came out of the wood work and said the baby was obviously his. And when they told him that was impossible, he brought up the sura in the Koran that says pregnancy can take up to four years. And rode away happily with the re-wived woman and the kid he’d adopted in the womb.

Was that man perfect? I doubt it. The culture wouldn’t allow it. And of course, because you’ve read and watched all the bilge they feed us, you’re now thinking he had a nefarious plan.

Well, maybe he did. Of course. It’s always possible. But it’s just as possible he was a decent human being who didn’t want his ex stoned to death for a peccadillo (or perhaps even for being raped). Isn’t it? Well, of course it is. Because decent people exist even in cultures where everything militates against their being any decency. Humans are tricksy that way. They’re not all one thing.

And yes, yes, if you write, you should beware the temptation to make everyone dingy.

And if you “just” read you should demand entertainment that gives you heroes as well as villains. Because it’s not a coincidence that as this type of dingy “entertainment” grew and took over everything so did the consumption of psychiatric drugs.

Demand entertainment that has light and dark, not just grey.

Stand for nothing less. The sanity you save might be your own.

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Stranger at the Door (Family Law Book 9)

Life never seems to get less complicated for Lee. The Earth Claims Commission collapsed when North America, was driven from the heavens by Central. What else to do but repossess it if they weren’t going to pay the royalties due? That meant seeing to it’s governance. She never aspired to being a sovereign. With a little luck she could govern with a really light hand by appointing a pair of Voices. She had good examples in doing that in her ally Heather, Queen of the Moon.
Her quiet home was much less quiet after she gave shelter to her Badger friend Tish and her brother. At least the Badger Voice and Ambassador owed her a big favor for taking the teenagers in. Any year now she’d start collecting on those favors instead of paying them out.
What was to be a quiet day trip found her in the middle of a civil war, and if that wasn’t enough there were mysterious aliens quietly spying on her and her allies. Of course they had to DO something about that.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Profit & Freedom (Chronicles of the Fall Book 23)

The disruption of the attack on the 300, and then the invasion has left twin sisters unsupervised . . .

Noeme and Juna Jaeger, at the age of fifteen, might have put a toe over the line of strict legality to make sure they stayed safe . . . then they helped a couple of their friends . . .

And then . . . why not? Why not turn it into a business? Save some other kids, and make money doing it! What could possibly go wrong?

EDITED BY DAVID BADURINA: Pet Monsters: Ten Tales of Monsters and the Kids Who Befriend Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 78)

You were a weird kid once. So were they — right up until the monster showed up.

A boy brings a rotten sandwich back to life and discovers the truest friend he has ever had. A lonely girl pulls a crashed alien out of a cornfield. A grieving kid hides a fire-breathing salamander in his dead father’s office. And out past the porch light, something with too many tentacles is looking up at the same stars — and quietly noticing the marriage coming apart inside the house.

Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures that crash into ordinary lives, and the children brave enough to love them back. They are funny, they are frightening, and underneath every one of them runs the same current: what it costs to be an outcast, what it means to finally be understood, and how much it hurts to let go.

For readers raised on E.T., The Iron Giant, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and for anyone who still, on the right kind of night, half-hopes to find something waiting at the edge of the yard. In the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill: ten tales where childhood wonder shades, story by story, into the uncanny and the unforgettable.

Ten authors. Ten monsters. One anthology about the friends we lose, the people we become, and the small impossible miracle of being seen.

BY CHARLI COX: Fae Wars: Fire and Ice: Northwest Front Volume 2 (The Fae Wars Book 13)

Can a human magic user re-ignite the flames of resistance against the Fae who have conquered our world? When the missiles and tanks and guns have failed, lying in twisted, blackened ruins, can a teenager girl and her supernatural mentor turn the elves magic back against them?

Eighteen-year-old Ashleigh Greene has already paid a terrible price, losing her family in the war. Driven to starvation and hunted for killing an elven lord in self-defense, she flees into the forests of the Pacific Northwest. There legends walk the earth and she forges an unbreakable bond with Gunny, a powerful Sasquatch who swears a life debt to her. As ancient magic returns to the world, Ash awakens to a dangerous gift of her own, an elemental control of fire that can be a weapon, if she can only learn to use without hurting herself or her friends.

Joined by a found family of rebel soldiers, unconquerable civilians, giants, a sentient cougar, and orcs who have turned against their masters, Ash is drawn into a desperate fight that leads from hidden mountain camps to the occupied streets of Seattle and deep beneath the volcanic slopes of Mount Rainier. Together with her friend, Shelly, a former soldier who has her own battles to fight within the Resistance, she must confront a ruthless elven war mage and forces that could tear the land itself apart.

As fire and ice collide in the frozen wilderness, Ash must master her power and decide how far she will go to protect the only family she has left — before it consumes her and everyone she loves.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: RED GIANT: (Kardyshev-4)

A Kardyshev-1 culture can harness the energy sources of a single planet. A Kardyshev-2 culture can control the energy sources of an entire solar system. A Kardyshev-3 culture could harvest the energy of a whole galaxy. And a Kardyshev-4 culture…?
This is one of the questions facing Captain Meridian IkedaCagney and her crew of Vanguard explorers as they attempt to solve the mystery of the Nibelungen, an extraterrestrial species that roamed the Galaxy for thousands of years and then, suddenly, vanished without explanation. Did the Nibelungen actually become a transcendent Kardyshev-4 culture, or were they annihilated by some hostile alien force? If so, does this force still exist, and could it be a threat to the human race? And how does that fit in with the violent human cult that worships the Kardyshev-4 ideal?
These are questions that must be answered, and those answers might well be found in the vicinity of a Sun-like star that mysteriously jumped several billion years of stellar evolution to become a red giant virtually overnight. Those answers, however, will come at great cost, a cost far greater than Captain IkedaCagney and her crew could ever suspect…

FROM CLAIRE MERRICK: The Screaming Tree

The Screaming Tree divides the town of Verity, Tennessee, east from west. Its two knothole “Faces” gaze out like ancient lords over the half they claim as their own. As long as the spirits remain content, the town thrives, but everyone fears what might happen if their feud spills beyond the branches.

When 13-year-old Bea Durant and her father move into their new home, they are presented with the Rules for their side of town: Never paint the house anything but green. Hang a wind chime to be warned of foul moves. No matter how loud or sudden, never investigate the Screaming.

Bea never considered herself a rulebreaker. She has better things to do like make new friends and fit in at a new school. But a reckless decision on a stormy night draws the spirit from the opposite side of town to her doorstep. Specifically, into her bedroom. She’s left with no choice but to shelter the injured mage…and hope his mortal enemy doesn’t discover them. To protect her new home, Bea might have to break every Rule that has kept Verity safe for centuries.

EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER R. DINOTE: Forgotten Fronts Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 79)

There’s a rule in every fighter squadron: a story only counts if it’s at least ten percent true.

The eleven stories in Wyrd Warfare: Forgotten Fronts clear that bar and then some — they just happen to be the ten percent nobody wants to say out loud. A gunnery range that swallows the men who guard it. Crusaders staring down something older than their faith. Silver-loaded muskets in a Revolutionary forest. A Korean retreat where the cold isn’t the only thing hunting the column. From the blitz, to the Winter War, to a sky full of dragons over 1922 America, these are the battles history filed under “best forgotten.”

Edited by a retired Air Force colonel who’s heard every war story worth telling — and a few that shouldn’t be.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Wolf and the Ward

A wolf wanders the land. . . .

Charity had thought it dreadful, being sent like a package to a man who might refuse to take her on as a ward. But when a wolf comes to look her up and down in the woods, and the man she is sent to greets her, making her wonder if she remembers something that never happened, she finds that there are problems far worse than that in the duchy.

FROM J. P. JOHNSON: A Hint of Malice: Book One of the Lexington Saga

When legends walk among men, the first casualty is the world you thought you knew.

Ten years after civilization fell, Lexington, South Carolina is the closest thing to hope left in the American South. Hard eyed volunteers on horseback patrol the borders. Men and women who remember the starving times work the fields. Children go to school. It’s a hope, and a start, but in the new world information is the difference between living and dying.

The Mayor has a tool for this problem — the tough scouts of the 1st Cav. They’re already riding hard into Georgia, looking for a warlord, but what they find is something much worse and far older. The Fall did more than end civilization; it pulled back a veil, and on the other side, the gods are not dead. They never were; they simply learned to look like ordinary people.

Back in Lexington, three strangers walk through the gates: a storyteller with a gift for finding trouble, a girl who sees things she shouldn’t, and a small gray dog that is a great deal more than he appears. They’ve come looking for safety. What they’ve brought with them is a war that has been going on for generations.

A Hint of Malice is the first book in The Lexington Saga — where The Stand meets American Gods in the heat and ruin of the post-apocalyptic South

FROM SCOTT JONES: Justice Ends: A Thomas Cole Book

---

A young woman, drugged and assaulted, reaches out to Ex Army Ranger Thomas Cole seeking justice. In his hunt to find her an outcome she can live with, Tom uncovers a dark web of violence and corruption leading to a Compound isolated deep in the Tennessee woods, a compound whose members are too rich and powerful for law enforcement to touch. When another woman disappears, Tom knows he is the only hope of exposing the true purpose of the Compound, of tearing the cover off and exposing the evil to the world.

FROM DALE COZORT: New Galveston Book 1: Operation Croatoan

In February 1939, with World War II looming, the US Navy held a massive naval exercise in the Caribbean, involving almost fifty thousand sailors and marines. President Franklin Roosevelt personally attended.

In this alternate history novel, the US of 1939 disappears at the peak of the exercise, along with the rest of the New World. In its place is a New World still inhabited only by Indians.

While the US remnants try to make a new home for themselves, Nazis, Fascists and Japanese Imperialists scheme with Aztecs and other Indian powers to take over the resource-rich and now nearly defenseless New World.

Nazi Germany pours resources into it’s navy and into an advanced new generation of cargo planes. By summer 1941, the Nazis are ready to move. A mysterious “Operation Croatoan” is at the core of their schemes. Milo Gentry and a handful of other Americans race to figure out what the Axis powers are up to and stop them.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Lizard (Timelines Book 2)

Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.

Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel “Dad,” who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world’s invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion. If that wasn’t enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel “Dad”.

After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off. But Ari isn’t “anybody else”. And her cult of admirers across two timelines won’t take “nobody home” for an answer.

Fast-forward thirty years. Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away. And now she’s been asked to use her special “saintly” skills as demonstrated on her last “mission” to make first contact with whoever they are.

And that’s only the beginning.

Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week. Or six.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: THE LAST VAMPIRE: A Secret History Science-Fiction Gothic (Science Fiction Singles)

For centuries humanity feared monsters.

Vampires in the castles of Europe.
Hair-covered giants haunting the wilderness of the Americas.

The truth was far stranger.

Long before recorded history, two dying extraterrestrial civilizations crashed upon prehistoric Earth after a catastrophic interstellar war that extinguished nearly all intelligent life in the galaxy.

One species became the source of vampire mythology:
elegant nocturnal refugees who survived through secrecy, ritual, and influence.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays

All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.

Time Slips

What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?

To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America’s first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?

Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.

What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)

DONE WITH MIRRORS

From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.

Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.

Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.

From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.

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 to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: discreet.