Some of you are probably aware of the kerfuffle where Devon Eriksen was kicked out (on spurious grounds) from a contest he never entered because he said things the left does not like on X.

In the aftermath of this I became aware of how many of “our people” (defined as political positions to the right of Lenin) who are indie have no idea that a lot of writers/storytellers are on their side. There is the assumption, fostered by traditional publishing, that all writers and artists are “of course” left.

So people try to join leftist groups (which to be fair, are more numerous because people on the right aren’t very organized as a rule.) They try to keep their heads down and pretend to be what they’re not.

This is all wrong. We are the majority and it’s time to know we’re so, and we’re not alone. The preference falsification has to end. And readers have to know they can buy from writers and artists who don’t hate them.

I put up a challenge on Twitter called “Step out of the shadows” and promised to promote everyone not afraid to be seen associating with me (and Devon, by implication.)

So, here we are. Needless to say I haven’t read all these books, so look at samples, and exert the normal caution.

FROM CHRIS SCHNEE: Virtual Horizon (Thousand Tales Book 1)

The future’s getting better; the Game is here to help!

In 2036, college-bound Paul gets pushed into playing a video game called Thousand Tales. Its playful AI gamemaster, Ludo, wants a few favors from him and from his ambitious friend Linda. The reward? Immortality.

Ludo starts selling “uploading”, a process that puts a human mind permanently into the game world. In there you can shapeshift, fight monsters, cast spells, even fall in love. The “hero discount” Paul and Linda earn is tempting, but ends up separating them. One friend is left to play Thousand Tales on an ordinary video screen, while the other wakes up in its fantasy realm as one of the first full-time residents.

Ludo’s new recruit tries to turn Thousand Tales into a society that lets uploaded humans, AIs, and ordinary gamers work and play together. Meanwhile, there’s plenty to do in the real world: live on an ocean colony, train cyborg raccoons, and start a new space program.

Can Paul and Linda work together between the real and virtual worlds, to make sure no one vision of the future ruins the others?

“Virtual Horizon” is an upbeat novel of the future frontier. It’s part of the “LitRPG” or “GameLit” subgenre combining science fiction with the world of gaming. There’s much more to see in the Thousand Tales setting, and most of it can be read in any order, but this is the best starting point!

(Note to readers of “Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game”: This book is a massively rewritten and expanded story based on the core plotline, with a novel’s worth of new material.)

FROM MELISSA CAVE: Traitor Son: Book 1 of the Empire of the Stars

Do the promises of war ever survive the peace?

At the end of a brutal war, Remin of Andelin promised his knights that he would build them a good place, far from the carnage of war and the poisonous intrigues of the Empire. But the only thing more difficult than winning a war is securing the peace.

Welcome to the Andelin Valley, where the days are filled with the backbreaking labor of building a city and the nights bring monsters summoned in the waning days of the war. The Andelin devils dare even the sacred soil of the Empire, and it takes all of Remin’s military genius to keep his people alive. Yet even in the face of bandits, traitors, and the implacable hatred of the Emperor, the greatest danger to Remin might be his new wife.

Princess Ophele Agnephus. Daughter of the Stars, the Exile Princess, she is the daughter of the Divine Emperor who executed Remin’s family. Raised in secret and given in the place of her sister as a reward for Remin’s war victory, Ophele carries a secret that could topple the Empire: his family was innocent. But will she risk her life to reveal her family’s crimes?

A tale of love and redemption. As the summer bleeds on and the walls of their city rise, Remin finds himself drawn to Ophele, who shares so many of his dreams and sorrows. She could be everything: his love and his wife, the mother of his children, the foundation of a dynasty that will last forever. Or she could be the Emperor’s weapon, placed at his side to destroy everything he has left.

A marriage built in the ashes of betrayal. A land built on the ruins of a century of war. And a people determined to rise, with shattered trust and an unquenchable hope…if Ophele can only make them believe it is possible. Traitor Son is the story of a people broken by tragedy, a hero torn between his duty and his dreams, and a young woman who must find the courage to take her place at his side, before their own devils tear them apart.

Begin an unforgettable journey with Traitor Son, the first book of the Empire of the Stars. Perfect for fans of epic fantasy, knights and nobility, and tales of resilience and redemption.

FROM STEPHEN HUBBARD: A Conspiracy of Ravens (The Codex of Wretches & Kings Book 1)

Once and an age —

The precipice of war is never more than the width of a blade away. Now, when the legendary assassin known as the Black Rose has slaughtered Baron Dartris Gorsha and all who made up his house, then fled with the nobleman’s young daughter, three nations that knew tenuous peace prepare for the brutality of prolonged conflict.

Yet a new and mysterious danger has emerged. The Shrike arrives to offer mercy and vengeance in equal measure to all those with a role to play, bringing cryptic messages from his unnamed master. Underlying his threats is one simple command: Retrieve the daughter of Gorsha.

Three Ravens of Danot — Celnor, Derrigan, and Martyn — are called upon to protect the child, and they seek answers to troubling questions and motivations. Manipulated by their queen, feeling as no more than pawns in the history unfolding around them, they conspire to bring about what they believe is a necessary change to the balance of power.

The secrets of their own shadowed pasts serve to pull at their union, threatening to unmake their pact, and leading them to ask one simple question: Are there roads too entrenched in darkness to allow for redemption?

In a time of growing doom and dread, when long lost magic begins to find a new foothold, Wretches and Kings alike maneuver and scheme as the Codex is inscribed with the fell deeds and heroic sacrifice compelled by a conspiracy of Ravens.

FROM T. ALAN HONE AND JAMES BERNADIN: Secret Sky: The Young Universe.

The stars speak in a language of secrets, yet their stories cannot remain hidden forever.

Billions of years ago, on one of the first-ever Earths, a boy named Skylar will walk away from his home for the last time. Beset by dreams where he flies through the early universe as a sentient starship, he will never be safe if his secret gets out. His only chance to stay alive is to fall in with the same knights who destroyed his peasant village and live under the shadow of the king who sent them to exterminate Skylar’s people.

But powerful dreams have a way of shaping reality, and with each midnight flight across the cosmos, Skylar finds his world—and himself—changing. Magic is another thing which should only exist in dreams, yet Skylar has it—one more secret that needs keeping.

Against a waking life full of monsters, warriors, swords, sorcery, treasure, and ancient mysteries, Skylar has only one key for putting all the pieces together: the Secret Sky that haunts his sleeping mind.

FROM MELISSA OLTHOFF AND CASEY MOORES: Forlorn Hope (Blood and Armor Book 4)

After Nisti Khan’s return from her No Fail mission in Iran, she is celebrated as a savior of the young Kurdish Republic. However, their country has many enemies, and within weeks, they are on the brink of yet another war. When Syria invades, Nisti finds herself on the front lines of the most critical battle—defending the beating heart of their country, the capital city of Kirkuk.

After a judgement call goes wrong, Nisti finds herself banished from the battlefield and relegated to a staff job. To regain her place on the frontlines, she’ll have to prove herself once again.

A successful deep strike by the Second GOG Division should have ended the war, but the Syrian onslaught continues. As losses mount, Nisti must learn the source and take the battle to the enemy. But can she figure out who the real enemy is before her country falls?

FROM BECKY R. JONES: Academic Magic

Zoe O’Brien has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.

Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. Can Zoe master her new-found powers in time?

FROM HALDANE B. DOYLE: Our Vitreous Womb: Book 1-4

“Utopia is wherever you were born to belong.”

After thirty thousand years we’ve forgotten your age of machines.
On this resource-stripped planet our people are rising.
We Ostrals are both one and many.
A superorganism of superior organisms.
A hypersymbiont beyond mere technology.

The continent of Ostrala is pregnant with possibility.
Our vitreous womb swells with uncountable souls.
Suffer not our culled, that we may reach perfection.
And welcome the stranger (or parts thereof) so we may always grow.

FROM CHRISTIAN WARREN FREED: Dreams of Winter: A Military Space Opera (The Forgotten Gods Tales Book 1)

“Steven Erikson meets George Martin!”

3000 years have passed since the time of the gods. Humanity spreads across the universe, raising a mighty empire. But all is not well. Unrest simmers. Darkness threatens.

Inquisitor Tolde Breed has been a loyal agent of the Inquisition for years. A man with a haunted past, he roots out heresy wherever he finds it, but when the Inquisitor General sends him to planet Crimeat to investigate a mysterious prison break Tolde begins to believe his life’s work has been in vain. The ghosts of his past have returned, and they brought the winds of war with them.
Can Tolde stop the universe’s greatest evil from returning or is it already too late?
Dreams of Winter is the explosive first volume of the Forgotten Gods Tales and a must read for military science fiction fans everywhere. Buy your copy today and enter a universe of magic, treachery, and desperation.

FROM JOHN LOCKESON: The Transcendent Ethics of Liberty: A concise guide to the universal ethics of human freedom and dignity

Your liberty is no illusion.
It is no gift of government or society.
It emerges from the very fabric of reality itself.
Embrace that which is rightfully yours, a magnificent birthright of liberty.


Derived directly from observations of reality, a transcendent, universal ethical framework of liberty based on the primary truth of absolute ownership of the self, the self’s actions, and the products of those actions is presented.

This work integrates many philosophical components, some old and familiar and some new and surprising, weaving them into a coherent tapestry that builds a comprehensive deductive case supporting broad human liberty bounded by limits of justice as the supreme universal ethic of sapient entities everywhere.

FROM DAN MELSON: Measure Of Adulthood (The Politics of Empire Book 4)

Kusaan del. It means ‘divine finger’

The Empire of Humanity is locked in a war for survival with the Fractal Demons. Years on, the dice are still tumbling. Billions have died and planets have been destroyed. Meanwhile, an old loose end has resurfaced and forced Grace to confront a mistake from her teenage years – her son by a long-dead lover has lost his adulthood, and only Grace can save him from exile.

But the Fractal Demons initiate a new strategy, and are starting to turn the tide in their favor. Grace is unlucky enough to be assigned to deal with one of their first strikes under the new strategy, and she’s unable to prevent several million deaths.

But she’s learned enough to master her problems, both as the new mother of a two hundred year old son, and as one of those defending the masses of the Empire from assault by the demons. She has grown from her origins, and just because she seems to have a knack for attracting trouble doesn’t mean she can’t handle it. When the divine finger points at her, she steps up to deal with it.

More tomorrow night. And if you wish to send a book now, feel free. Step out of the shadows: bookpimping at outlook.com

I’ve been trying to explain how I feel with what’s happening in the country, and with what Doge is doing…

Beyond becoming addicted to the Doge site… which is sad and pathetic, but then you guys knew that. I mean, that I’m at severe risk of becoming addicted.

But there is a feeling behind all this, and I finally pinned it. It’s the feeling when the wall came down in Berlin.

I don’t think I can fully explain how amazing, wonderful, shocking and maybe a little scary it was to those of you born and raised after the fall of the wall. or even to those of you who were in elementary school at the end of the cold war.

For me, for my generation, particularly those of us who grew up in Europe (which includes any number of you guys who grew up in military bases) there was the overwhelming certainty at any moment the whole thing would go hot, and we’d have maybe a second to kiss our asses goodbye before being vaporized.

The idea/feel was not just that the countries behind the iron curtain were as powerful as the US (let’s not pretend Europe made any kind of contribution to this scariness) but also were secretly more powerful and better organized.

We knew they were more ruthless. We knew people died trying to climb the wall from East to west, because the communists would gun them down with no mercy: Men, women, children, babes in arms.

And then one day we woke up to images of the wall being torn down. Not by armies, not by professionals, but by members of the public who had had about enough. After all the rebellions that failed, after all the despair, common people on the street were just destroying this symbol of oppression with mallets, chisels, hammers, crow bars, and at the end of the process, bare hands.

And then they took their ladas and trabants, their piece of sh*t Eastern block cars, and they drove them as far as they could, which in many cases meant till they hit the sea in Portugal. then they abandoned to rot by the road side, and went off to be free.

And nothing happened. The nukes did not fly. The world did not end. (For that matter, the commies embedded in the institutions throughout the west didn’t change, either.)

Now I’m watching the impenetrable walls of the deep state broached and the stuff that’s coming out…. well….

It seems for decades, for perhaps all of my life, we’ve been financing the left. We, the American taxpayers.

For decades, it seemed like the left had all this money, and we assumed they were well-financed by the big figures of culture, by people like Soros, by evil dictators like Putin and Winnie the Xi. And we on the right, shut out of the cultural institutions and the well-paying gigs, had nothing to do and nowhere to go, so we grimly gritted our teeth and resigned ourselves to losing.

Only we didn’t. Despite the massive disparity, once social media became available, once blogs became a thing, even impaired, held down, we started to fight back. And we started to win.

And now here we are, and the illusion of the big perfectly financed enemy is coming apart before our eyes.

So we can sit here and run out the world’s stock of popcorn. or we can … go at the wall with mallets, with hammers, with our bare hands.

Look, each his own. My own fight is in the arts and culture. The illusion that all writers are leftist, that science fiction is inherently leftist still holds.

In the aftermath of Devon Eriksen being kicked out of a contest he hadn’t entered, because they found out he’s a vocal libertarian on X, (it didn’t go as they expected. Their other finalists dropped out in protest.) Since I’m pretty isolated and self-sufficient, and doing things backwards and sideways as I usually do, I didn’t notice till I read indie writers discussing this that many of them had joined the lefty indie writer organizations, and thought they were all alone.

That is so many levels of wrong. Of course, yes, there aren’t many organizations on the right, because the individualists, reliably fail to organize. But there are a ton of us to the right of Lenin. And we are not afraid. Or at least a lot of us are no longer afraid.

The mechanism that held us mute, the tradpub houses ability to blackmail anyone who spoke against the lefty pet causes, no longer operates. We grew wings and can fly solo.

So there is no reason to submit to the dying — and minority, without government cash — lefty culture.

Being me, I did something that’s probably backward and sideways, as usual: I dared other writers on twitter who aren’t ashamed to be seen with the freedom lovers, to come out of the shadows and send me their books to promote.

Which is why this blog is going to have a nightly promo post for at least a week, and it might be more. I have plans in the works for a dedicated site for the likes of us, with a query mechanism of “I like x, what should I read next?” That has been on the backburner because I can no longer (I was okay at it 40 years ago) program. But now Charlie is close enough to visit and talk to, maybe we can make it go. It’s worth a try. Even if it’s not going to be instant. So, you know, the mallet is on the way, but right now I have this nail-file.

That’s what I can do right now to give trouble to what The Saint (of the books) would call “the unrightenous.” Right now, it’s what occurs to me to start pulling out bits of wall. I’m sure other things will come to mind, as we go. After all, i can’t sit forever on the sofa, eating popcorn.

And you? What can you do? Is there a way you can start tearing down the wall of the left’s perceived dominance of culture — or anything else? Any other field that’s utterly controlled by the left. Signal to others they’re not alone. Help the people who don’t hate us and don’t want our country destroyed.

Where you are, is there anything you can do to signal to people to the right of Lenin that they’re not alone? The faster the rotten edifice collapses, the faster we can drive for freedom and start to recover.

I’m not you. I don’t know what you see or what you can do.

So– where you are, is there a mallet you can grab? A crowbar? An ice-pick? A nail file?

It’s time. Find a place to start hammering.

Don’t endanger yourself and others. For some of you, to keep your jobs, what you can do might be really small or really subtle. It’s still worth doing. Every piece that is scraped off the wall makes the rest easier to topple. Be creative. The promo posts are honestly win win, and yet the more people know they’re not alone, the more people know there are writers who don’t hate them, the faster the left will be denied even the power they retain.

And you see, we’re at a point a lot of little pushes might do it.

I know this wasn’t said by a good character, and yet it’s true: “Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.”

At this point the vaunted power of the left, their massive advantage are just that: a painted devil and not real.

Grab a mallet, grab a nail file, grab a plastic spoon, and start helping tear the monstrous wall down. Help set us free.

It’s time. Go.

The Special Edition Book Promo – It Begins!

Today’s edition of book promo and vignettes begins what will probably be a book promo a night week. There is a reason for this.

Some of you are probably aware of the kerfuffle where Devon Eriksen was kicked out (on spurious grounds) from a contest he never entered because he (being libertarian) is obviously a “fascist”. The truth is Devon is very free with his opinions on X and even though I don’t always agree with him (I don’t always agree with me a week later, either) he’s not even remotely fascistic, and is as far as an indie writing community goes a good neighbor and helpful.

In the aftermath, a lot of writers rallied around him, which is great, but I was reading a lot of the xeets and became aware of how isolated most indie authors to the right of Lenin were. The truth is, guys, that the aphorism is correct: the individualists fail to organize. Over and over and over again.

In a way, Indie is made for us, which is what I realized a mere five years after taking that path — look, I’m slow — because we can write whatever we want without being throttled by publishers (legitimately for once) worried about how strange our next book is, or whether it follows the current trends or the career path they envisioned for us.

But while we are more likely to jump with both feet into being individualistic and pursuing our own thing and thereby probably could sell more, we’re also really bad at forming groups and connections.

Look, Devon and I don’t need it that much — not really, though I’ll link both of us in the promo below because why not — Devon because he has a crack promo team, and I because I’ve been around enough most people have at least heard of me.

Oh, and the weird contest which I’m not even going to name, is not a thing really. They were barely a thing before, and I think this finished making their appeal even more… coff … selective.

However, the picture I got of write-side indie writers was that of dismal little hamsters hiding in the bigger, louder (they’re always gregarious okay?) groups of leftist indies, confused and not even figuring out how to make their books known without revealing their politics and being cancelled.

I’m sorry if that picture is insulting. It’s not meant to be. I spent most of my trad-pub career (until I was only being published by Baen) being a furtive hamster in a world of large, loud dinosaurs.

As with evolution, we know how that story ends. The hamsters won. (Well, tiny mammals anyway.) However it took an asteroid and a long, long time.

Fortunately for us, right now, there’s no reason it should take this long. Why? Because we don’t have to be where the dinos are. And I know synergistic promotion works. Years ago, I had friends who all echoed their releases. And that made a huge difference in sales.

So I posted on X asking anyone who wasn’t afraid to associate with the likes of us to send me a link to their book. As you can imagine, we got a few.

Since I’ve noticed more than about 10 books tend to get readers to glaze over and not buy, I’m going to keep it to 10 and do them in the evenings until they’re done… unless we get more.

Today’s is combined with the regular promo post, so you guys can have your vignettes.

TWO NOTES:

1- I’m not filtering these books as much as I do the ones on Sunday, where if I don’t like your face I reserve the right not to publicize you, if I don’t like your cover, I reserve the right not to publicize you, if your book strikes as wrong, I reserve the right not to publicize you.
In this case, I said the only condition was that you not be ashamed of associating with Devon and I and (of course) this blog. So I stand by that, and you know I’ll get some try-ons. That’s fine. THIS ONE TIME.

2- If you’re new to these promos, you know the people who show up here are also to the right of Lenin, or at least not afraid of being seen with us. Look them up, on X, and perhaps consider echoing their releases and bolstering them a bit. Whether you want to get cozy and form more of a community, it’s your call, not mine.

Okay, below is the regular heading/patter of the Sunday promo post. Note, that yes, I get a kickback from Amazon for these links. (It’s a lot of boring work to get them up, so I earn it. And it’s free for the writers.) And also that there’s an email address to send promo to in the future (if you’re new here.) There’s also a vignette challenge at the end.

Oh and no, I didn’t read all of these books. So, kindly exert the normal caution of dowloading a sample and reading before buying. Or not. It’s your choice.

It’s time to “give” money to people who DON’T hate us.

For the times, they are achanging….

Let’s go.

Book Promo (the normal weekly patter.)

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

FROM DEVON ERIKSEN: Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1

At the frozen edge of the solar system lies a hidden treasure which could spell their fortune or their destruction—but only if they survive each other first.

Marcus Warnoc has a little problem. His asteroid mining ship—his inheritance, his livelihood, and his home—has been hijacked by a pint-sized corporate heiress with enough blackmail material to sink him for good, a secret mission she won’t tell him about, and enough courage to get them both killed. She may have him dead to rights, but if he doesn’t turn the tables on this spoiled Martian snob, he’ll be dead, period. He’s not giving up without a fight.

He has a plan.

Miranda Foxgrove has the opportunity of a lifetime almost within her grasp if she can reach it. Her stolen spacecraft came with a stubborn, resourceful captain who refuses to cooperate—but he’s one of the few men alive who can snatch an unimaginable treasure from beneath the muzzles of countless railguns. And if this foulmouthed Belter thug doesn’t want to cooperate, she’ll find a way to force him. She’s come too far to give up now.

She has a plan.

They’re about to find out that a plan is a list of things that won’t happen.

Order Devon Eriksen’s Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 today!

FROM MARY CATELLI: Dragon Slayer

The dragon must die. It haunts the land and strikes with fire and death without warning.

Prince Baudouin knows the perils, and how other knights have perish. Still, he is confident that he can slay the dragon. All he has to do is forge through the burnt wasteland about its mountain, and slay it.

All.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Family Law

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM COLIN GLASSLEY: The Cure of All Disease (Mark DeSilva Adventure)

July 21, 2021 – World-wide pandemic is raging. Mark DeSilva is on a vacation, for the first time in more than a year, with a beautiful marine biologist who goes by the name Neon.

The vacation is over almost before it starts. Mark is given a new assignment: steal the laptop computer of a dead Chinese scientist. Soon Mark and Neon are on the run from Chinese Triads and Russian mercenaries; directed by one of the richest men on Earth.

The entire world is locked down but that isn’t stopping the criminals who are chasing after them. Does the laptop contain the cure for the pandemic? Or something far more sinister.

FROM J. M. ANJEWIERDEN: Mech Bunny

Humans won the war against the Blues, thanks in large part to the neural link they stole from the aliens. Few people can use it properly, though, and anyone with the right kind of brain gets conscripted immediately — even ordinary high school kids.
All Sophie wanted to do was be a dancer. She definitely hadn’t planned on piloting a sixty-foot ANGEL mech with only a cranky rabbit mechanic to talk to, or fighting the genetically engineered foxes and wolves that had turned on the humans once the aliens were gone.
She’s lost count of the battlefields she’s seen, but this next one is the worst yet. Ordered to defend a crucial forward operating base on a volcanic planet, forces are stretched thin, so she’ll have only infantry and artillery support, no other ANGELs.
One girl, one rabbit, and one giant robot up against creatures designed to be relentless soldiers.
Creatures who have mechs of their own.
Great.

FROM S. KIRK PIERZCHALA: Echoes Through Distant Glass: Beyond Cascadia: One

When cyber security defender Owen Dylan MacIntyre is forced from behind his computer screen to investigate a potential terror threat to the Pacific Northwest, he gets more than he bargains for when he crosses paths with the unpredictable and tragic figure of Tomás Chen-Diaz and the latter’s brother, the enigmatic Francisco.

A wealthy global plutocrat, Francisco is also a brilliant amateur biotech scientist with many powerful associates and a few dark family secrets—secrets he’s ready to kill over to keep hidden.

Drawn into Chen-Diaz’ web of international conspiracies, MacIntyre finds his skills tested to the limit as he’s trapped in a world where science and technology invade the most sacred realms of the human heart and soul…a world where he’ll confront some uncomfortable truths about himself…

…if he survives.

Book One of the Beyond Cascadia series, Echoes Through Distant Glass deftly weaves timeless themes of humanity and a range of relevant geo-political and bioethics issues into a memorable cyberpunk techno thriller drama. The vivid prose, haunting imagery and unforgettable characters will linger with the reader long after the thought-provoking and emotional conclusion.

FROM GREGORY MICHAEL: Chloe’s Kingdom: The Koin Vault Heist

Chloe Espinoza is a wild-haired petty thief aboard the Kingdom, a drifting city spaceship. Once rich but now poor, Chloe is determined to break free from the Honeycombs and return to her life in the Gardens. Only one problem: she hardly has enough koin for a burrito, making a lavish apartment seem as distant as the stars. All that might change, however, when Chloe is offered a heist that could make her unimaginably rich. But she can’t break into the impenetrable Koin Vault alone…

A young mastermind who can’t let go of her past.

A mathematical genius in desperate need of koin.

A privileged kid from the Gardens with a debt to pay.

A bartender who’s serving revenge.

A mischievous raccoon with a bottomless appetite.

A battered soul who’s been wronged by the council.

Gone are the days of stealing snacks. Chloe’s crew is aiming for the ultimate prize: the Koin Vault. Their plan? To rob the Treasury and bring down the corrupt council. But in a game where the stakes are jail or death, every move could be their last.

A thrilling Young Adult Science Fiction Heist novel set in the unforgiving void of outer space, perfect for fans of ‘Six of Crows’ by Leigh Bardugo and ‘Artemis’ by Andy Weir.

FROM ROB HOBART: The Sword of Amatsu (Empire of the Sun and Moon Book 1)

For four centuries, the Empire of the Sun and Moon has been torn apart by war as its samurai Clans fight for the empty throne of the Emperors. The Gray Wolf Clan is one of only six Clans remaining, but faces a deadly threat from the more powerful and ruthless Jade Dragon Clan. Yet the greatest threat to the Empire is not the bloody ambitions of its samurai. The shadowy followers of the Cult of the Mask, worshippers of foreign demons, burrow through the Empire’s society like worms in rotten meat, growing in power year by year. As battles rage and conspiracies fester, the fate of the Empire will turn on the actions of a handful of samurai. The young lord Ookami Akira, trained by monks to be a master of war but desperately ignorant of the Empire’s civilization, must learn to be the ruler of the Gray Wolf Clan or he and his people will perish. Kuroi Kaede, a naïve girl forced into an unwilling marriage to Akira, must master the courts if she is to survive. The lowly magistrate Kobayashi Mitsui is the only one in the Empire who recognizes the true scale of the threat from the Cult of the Mask. And the murderous wandering swordsman Kenji may hold the fate of all in his blood-stained hands…

FROM JARED N. MICHAUD: The Vale of Mysteries (The Epimyth)

“If They succeed in eradicating the deep myths, that act obliterates our identity and reduces us to nothing more than chattel.”

Nate Brightstar, a sojourner in the universe of Energematrice6, has already defeated an enemy the rest of the Aurora galaxy thought invincible. Neither that nor piercing the Vale of Mysteries can stop reality from dropping trouble on him-from either the Aurora galaxy or the troubled Milky Way.

It turns out, the battle against lies and false history may be harder than fighting physical enemies, especially as it becomes obvious that somebody powerful still has it out for him. Even more important, how can Nate come to terms with his identity when the present keeps slapping him in the face with what he used to be…or perhaps still is. Nate faces the most difficult question of his life:

“What reason could there be for one such as him?”

BECAUSE HE ONLY HAS PAPERBACK: He sent this link where you can read a sample.

FROM SARAH D’ALMEIDA (eh!): Death of a Musketeer (The Musketeer’s Mysteries Book 1)

When D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis discover the corpse of a beautiful woman who looks like the Queen of France, they vow to see that justice is done. They do not know that their investigation will widen from murder to intrigue to conspiracy, bring them the renewed enmity of Cardinal Richelieu and shake their fate in humanity. Through duels and doubts, they pursue the truth, even when their search brings them to the sphere of King Louis XIII himself and makes them confront secrets best forgotten.

THE REST OF YOU AREN’T FORGOTTEN! I’ll continue with promo posts tomorrow night, Tuesday night, and so on. (And for future ones I’m not giving space to Devon and I ;) ) Ten at a time! We’ll get there.

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: PURRING.

Reality is a horrible foe to fight. You can delay it for a bit, but it always wins.

Have you ever tried standing on one foot? I do it on the regular when I put my jeans or socks on. And it’s fine. However, if I try standing on a foot for more than two minutes or so… well, I can. It’s not a big deal really. Except every minute it gets a little harder, and eventually the other foot is going to come down on the floor.

The left has been standing on one foot since 1991, when the Soviet Union cracked wide open and was proven to be not just a paper tiger, but to have always been a rotten, miserable, impoverished kleptocracy no better and in some ways markedly worse than similar kleptocracies in South America and Africa.

Think about it. Their entire world view, their entire expectation of the future was predicated on the idea that eventually communism won because it was simply a superior system. Being the better system — a system that was better for everyone, even, ultimately, those who might think they’re hurt by its earliest imposition — justified everything done to bring it about. You know “the end justifies the means.”

In their case, they were both justified by the fact that communism’s win was inevitable and by the fact that it was so wonderful, so perfect.

If you are a kid — which these days (checks calendars) I define as 45 or younger — you probably aren’t aware of how wonderful the Soviet Union was supposed to be. Since the whole sewer cover was lifted when you were in your teens, you probably don’t remember all the argle bargle demanding that “capitalism” justify itself against a system that supposedly didn’t have unemployment, poverty or even boredom at your work, or in some views even sexual jealousy. It was supposed to be the perfect system, under which all your needs were met, and you were never frustrated or upset or even vaguely thwarted. “From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.”

You know that never worked. And you didn’t have college professors lecturing you with a superior air about how the command economy would of course — through no waste, no duplication of effort — bring this about.

I mean, if you’re young enough you probably don’t know what a pit of horrors the Soviet Union was, or you think they are all lies, or whatever. Or you are ready to shriek “that isn’t real communism”.

But the left as a whole — and even those who didn’t consider themselves communists considered themselves as socialists which (to quote from my 11th grade history book and also for a while the Portuguese constitution) was a society on the way to communism — had thought communism was inevitable, that ultimately we’d all be communist. And that this would be a good thing. Even those who insisted they were not communist, or who thought perhaps that Russia was not the best place to implement communism, or whatever were weirdly protective towards Russia and the USSR. (Partly because the “internationalism” of communism was always actually thinly disguised Russian nationalism.) In their heart of hearts they knew Russia was wonderful and made their point for them.

And then the dream collapsed. for about a year they seemed lost, and then they regrouped.

And yes, yes, part of this was hiding their communism behind a bunch of other worth causes, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, anti-racism. The clue that these are masks worn by traumatized, defrocked communists is that the solution for every possible problem is always “more communism” even when they don’t call it that. I mean, seriously, go read the New Green Deal. You don’t have to scrape that green very hard to see the communist red beneath.

But none of those — it turns out — would even have taken without the US government pouring massive amounts of money into them all over the world.

For a while it all seemed to work. We seemed to be besieged by all these crazy, divisive causes which all flourished, found adherents, and all really were ultimately communism.

Except you didn’t have to look very hard — and remember, I always look, because I’m naturally a depressive, and before I jump off that bridge I want to make sure it’s not my mind playing tricks and that everything is actually lost — to see none of it was actually working.

Take environmentalism, in its “antropogenic global warming” which was not only supported with massive amounts of money (some of it obtained by blackmailing companies) but also with a seamless wall of propaganda so impenetrable that science fiction writers probably unwittingly and just because it’s everywhere (I don’t know maybe I should look for their names in the USAID site) couldn’t write the future without claiming that you know, in a hundred years Florida would be under water. And yet…. and yet, they keep having to change their name like a poorly run Chinese restaurant. Global Warming became Climate Change which became Severe Weather Events which…. well, is dissolving before our very eyes, even before their money was yanked.

I mean, the man and woman on the street couldn’t give two farts in a hurricane for the climate bs, and instead were concerned with things like illegal aliens.

At some point in the far distant future, someone with a lot more data points than we have will construct a perfect thesis of how the left’s wheels came off.

Was it the very fact they poured mad money into the mass media to turn them into propaganda organs that in turn brought about the replacement of the corrupt market with innovative markets, facilitated by the internet?

Because let’s face it, even before the internet Rush had become a major success and a force to be reckoned with in the information market, using an outdated not to say quaint means of communication.

Perhaps what drove us to the internet in search of information, in the disturbing turmoil post 2000 election and 9/11 was that sense that our streams of information were corrupted? Perhaps humans sense and crave accurate information?

(I like to point out that indie books have enough drawbacks they’d never have made it if our publishing industry hadn’t been in the process of committing suicide by ignoring the customers by the time indie became possible.)

As alternative means of communication became available, like a person standing on one foot, the left had to devote more and more effort to keeping the status quo, to keeping everything still, frozen in time.

Dorothy Grant made a good point about fashion yesterday. I hadn’t noticed because I’m older than she is and the last time I was passionately interested in fashion was the mid eighties, before kids and trying to be a writer took all my time away. (Well, trying to have kids actually. The kids took a while.) But she’s right. I have clothes form the mid nineties (I have been finding boxes not unpacked since we moved from Manitou Springs) which except for the fact that due to thyroid follies I’m double the size I was then I could wear to the next con without anyone saying “Wow, that’s retro.” As a student of fashion through time (because I write historical) that just AIN’T NORMAL.

And the same is true in almost everything, except that movies and TV and literature have gotten more and more preachy.

Because the effort to keep the culture frozen in amber has driven away all creatives or silenced them. In fact, no one was allowed to stir the pot in any realm, and if you tried you’d find yourself cancelled.

Anyone creative enough to have startlingly new thoughts sooner or later stumbled onto the truth that what we were being sold was utterly inauthentic. (Though even I had no idea it was being financed on this scale.) And then they became dangerous. And had to be pushed out.

Which eventually, these last four years became openly totalitarian attempts at thought suppression and speech procession, culminating with the Biden Junta trying to stamp out “disinformation” which is an old communist term for that which isn’t false but which disrupts the left’s narrative.

It didn’t work. Perhaps nothing could.

And so here we are. Will there be steps backwards? There might be. But my guess, and if you guys remember I’ve been saying this since before the election, is that they can’t actually force the clock back anymore than they could keep us standing still.

Reality is a bitch. Your other foot will drop towards the floor.

And no matter how much you try to keep society frozen in amber circa 1987 or so, reality will keep moving on, enabled by tech, and exposing the lies of the past, revealing the tawdry nature of would-be tyrants, and the fact they have nothing any of us want, and that all their offerings are candy-coated poison.

In the end, for all their attempts to stop the future, all they can manage is to reveal themselves for the pre-historic beasts they are.

Frozen in amber.

As we watch the fireworks and the dizzying dismantling of the overgrown, twisted brambles of the deep state, a thought keeps coming up in all our groups and chats: Why hasn’t this happened before?

People have asked why Reagan didn’t do this, even…

Guys, this literally happened the earliest it could. The absolutely earliest it could.

Look, when FDR set the train rolling for the strangling of liberty and the ever-increasing state and power of the state over America — Did he think he’d keep that power forever? Was his plan never to die? Or did he actually think that an all intrusive, overarching government poking its nose into everything would bring about paradise? Who knows? Who cares? But it is a puzzle. Well, since he loved the Soviet Union maybe he really did think it would bring about paradise. — he did it by subsidizing friendly press, subsidizing artists and writers to write laudatory things about his progressive state, and in general by stopping the mouths of anyone who might have denounced the process with wads of cash. (Note I’ve gathered this from a lot of places, including biographies of artists and writers at the time. It was all task forces this and groups of development that, but ultimately it was propaganda, subsidized by the US government. For the most basic understanding of how bizarrely dirty FDR — progressive saint — was, read The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes.)

As we know that boondoggle, the flowing of government bribes to those that supported it has gone on. And I don’t think we’ve seen the half of it, yet. USAID was the easiest to get a lot of fraud in, and they kind of volunteered for it by defying orders. But I will bet you they’re not the worst. The outrageous waste and misuse of taxpayers money is going to keep getting discovered. For at least a year, maybe more. Maybe all four years, if we’re lucky and win 26.

It’s all through. We’ve wondered for years and years how come the left was overflowing with money for all its pet causes, able to spend millions, year after year, on movies that went nowhere; able to produce TV no one wanted to watch, able to have entire publishing companies publish books no one wanted to read; able to have magazines, and newspapers, and glossy, beautiful displays that sold less and less every year.

Meanwhile, the right was scrambling and scrounging, fighting for every sale, for every subscriber. Now, sure, that made us better at our jobs, because we were always looking for an edge, for the ability to get ahead. BUT still, it seemed so strange, particularly since 2000 when, with the internet, we had some visibility into how much they actually sold, how many people actually watched them, and then… Well, we assumed someone was financing them. Lefty billionaires, perhaps. Or perhaps foreign countries.

Now we know. We were paying for it, us. Even the infamous Tides Foundation, George Soros’ toy was being financed from our taxes, via USAID.

The thing is there was no way to know it until recently. Do you know why the left is so upset at Elon’s ‘kids’, the computer geniuses running DOGE’s searches on the corrupt and constipated bowels of our government? Because they have the tech — yes, AI assisted — for the first time in the last forever, to find the fraud and waste.

You see, the fraud and waste is threaded all through, with a few hostage-puppy legitimate charity and helping of the helpless salted through so you couldn’t touch the fraud without the entire captive press jumping in tandem like trained monkeys.

And do you really think Reagan could have looked into it while stopping the left’s game to give it all away to the Soviet Union? Do you?

He did an end run on the poisonous press by talking directly to the people on TV but that was the extent of his reach. The press still had full mind share on the press and entertainment. They could have stopped any attempts to turn off the money spigot.

And meanwhile, of course, we got Clinton, and GWB who couldn’t fend off an Enquirer attack, and then Obama whom the propaganda apparatus practically canonized.

…. Look, guys, it took an uptick of dissent. It took Rush Limbaugh, against all odds managing to become popular and widely heard. It took the internet’s growth starting in 2001. It took us scribblers desperately flinging low-paid words into various sites. It took blogs, and Facebook (I have the facebook jail with oak leaves cluster decoration so many times) and yes Twitter, and those of us willing to dance right up the suspension and banishment, and yeah, sometimes going too far.

It took the ridiculous presidency of whoever was running Joe Biden. It took their tone-deaf of every possible extreme left cause hatched in out-of-touch universities. It took their showing the American people not only didn’t they have our best interests at heart, but they hated us and wanted us to die.

And then it took us miraculously beating the fraud and electing Trump. All of us, including the Amish who came in at the last moment to save the day.

Now, at this moment, with distrust of government finally deservedly built up, with the AI tools ready, with Elon resenting every penny spent that doesn’t go to getting humans to Mars, with Trump furious at being cheated out of his legitimate win in 2020…

Here we are.

In this perfect storm for the deep state, this perfect moment in history.

This is happening the earliest it could happen.

It’s been a long time getting here, but now it’s happening. And it’s glorious.

We might still lose, of course, but I doubt it. The tide has turned. And in this perfect moment, we’re winning.

We have a chance — all we ever wanted was a chance — of restoring the republic.

Because this is the right time. We have the right tools.

Even us who are just killing false narratives, encouraging people in the trenches, making sense of it all.

Let’s get to work.

The Lesson of Robespierre – by Charlie Martin

It can be sourly amusing reading what liberals say. Lawrence Tribe is a perpetual source of amusement — this guy is a law professor? Seriously? — but it can be really sort of depressing reading what some conservatives say.
Too often, conservatives don’t think out what they’re saying, and so use fancy words without thinking out what they mean.
Now, one of my pet peeves is “treason”. It’s a tough one for a lot of people because it’s very specifically limited by the Constitution, for reasons James Madison laid out in Federalist Paper number 43:

“But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

I’ll resist petting this peeve at length because I already have last month and I don’t want it to get spoiled. There’s little worse than a spoiled peeve.
The Federalist Papers — and for that matter the Anti-Federalist papers — were doing was arguing what the limits on government power should be, and the Constitution was written not so much to say what the government can do, but what the government may not do.
With treason specifically, Madison was saying was that treason should be very limited because there were too many examples in English history of the Crown using “treason” for damn near anything, including a very conclusive form of divorce.
But that was hardly the only abuse of government power to which the Constitution, and even more so the Bill of Rights, was addressed. in fact the first eight amendments in the bill of Rights addressed specific ways that the Crown had abused its subjects.
One of those, sure enough, was arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. “Arrest them” comes up every so often whenever there’s someone daring to defy someone in power, but it seems to have gotten really popular recently because some Federal judges have been issuing some, shall we say questionable orders. (For an example of the most egregious of them, see this thread.)
And a whole lot of people have posted “arrest him.” But when I ask “on what charge?” they either come up with some vague thing about denying a presidential prerogative, or — my favorite, for some special interpretations of the word “favorite” is “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
That phrase has been bandied about quite a lot. Some people link it to Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War. I haven’t found any real specific quote, and I wonder if he would have bothered, since the Constitution provides explicitly that habeas corpus can be suspended. Article 1 Section 9 Clause 2:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

I’m pretty sure that the Civil War was a rebellion. Someone who is a better Civil War historian than I will undoubtedly be happy to correct me.
But the earliest reference to it that Grok and I found was

[W]hen Justice Robert H. Jackson used a variation of this expression in his dissenting opinion in the case of Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949). Justice Jackson wrote, “There is the danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

Something that may not be obvious there is that this was a dissenting opinion — not even a majority of the judges agreed.
This is closely related to Madison’s argument about treason: overly-expansive powers of arrest have been used throughout history against opponents of whatever party is currently in power.
There’s an example of this that occurs to me often: the history of Maximillian Robespierre, who seemed like a true friend of liberty at the start of the revolution, but dealing with kings and counter-revolutionaries saw Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and thousands of others, executed on the guillotine.
There’s a lesson here. The Lesson of Robespierre is simple: it they can do it for you, they can do it to you.
So now we see calls to arrest and presumably imprison people who act against what the Trump Administration is trying to do.
No matter how desirable things Trump and Elon Musk are doing may be — and I think they are very desirable — if we’re going to start arresting people simply for dissent, especially district court judges and the like, it’s a dangerous game we shouldn’t start.
The Founders had good reasons for limiting treason, for enshrining habeas corpus, and for the Bill of Rights. They were entirely too aware of what the Crown had been able to do to their subjects.
Eventually there will be a Democrat administration again. We need to remember that. And yeah, the Constitution is not a suicide pact — but that’s not a reason to murder it.

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Apparently having read The Ugly American JFK was so impressed by it, he started USAID to do good abroad and that way counter the efforts of the Soviet Union.

That sound you hear coming through the monitor is the sound of my hitting my head on the desk, really, really hard.

Note, I don’t have any proof of the theory I’m about to lay out. But at the same time knowing the people involved and the time involved I don’t think there is any way this didn’t go the way I deduce it went. In fact, it is almost inevitable.

So, when JFK funded USAID, I don’t think he intended as a slush fund for corruption.

I think he actually intended it as he said he did: as an agency that would do good abroad, and which would by showing how caring and respectful of other cultures they were, and well, giving them bunches of money.

Now please remember that while JFK was “anti-communist” for his time, that just meant he was against USSR type communism, but he was — EVERYONE IN POLITICS WAS AT THE TIME, including Republicans — convinced the victory of communism was inevitable, because planned economies were so much better and after all they had no poverty or unemployment or– excuse me, I need to pour mind cleaner into my ear. How could they not have realized that what they thought they knew about the USSR was just the cooked data of a totalitarian system. Sometimes I wonder what was going on in their heads.

Anyway given that, it is almost an inevitable step that the “causes” they were helping was what the USSR too would have viewed as needing to be helped.

In fact, I suspect — though I have no proof, but I wonder if some of you could get it? — that a lot of its early work amounted to “community organizing” for the leftists abroad. Guns and proto-revolutionary groups in South America given money. African groups fighting against “colonialism” and bringing in the Soviet Union. you know, that kind of thing.

Guys, if I am correct, not only did our tax money go to pay for people to burn our cities, but our parents and grandparents paid to subsidize the cause of international communism.

It makes one wonder how much less painful the cold war would have been if we hadn’t been financing it, doesn’t it?

(It also makes me wonder, because at this point I’m a suspicious b*tch if those two authors were incentivized to write that book about the ahem relative cultural sensitivity of the Soviets (coo-eee!) and how we needed this sort of thing, and how that book got hyper pushed to be so big. Of note, for something that was a smashing bestseller, I not only never read it, but it wasn’t even mentioned in my American Culture or American Literature classes abroad. In other words, was it a planted piece of propaganda to manipulate our Glitterati president? Maybe I’m too conspiracy minded, but having seen that kind of play in our day, I do wonder. Don’t you? Maybe one of you has read it and will tell me it’s a piece of transcendent prose, who knows?)

So when did we go from funding international communism to communism at home? I suspect we always funded some communism at home. Oh, sorry “progressive causes.” It is the nature of the beast that people who ran this were educated in the “best universities” where they drank deep of Marxist bullshit, so they’d see a crying need for it at home, in order to bring about the inevitable utopia a little sooner.

But my guess is when it became actively poisonous and turned against this country specifically was when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s the last time I remember seeing the left in as much disarray as the last three weeks They really had thought the Soviet Union was Wonnerful, you know, even if it wasn’t. What I mean is, even if it was less prosperous, they thought it was more just and its triumph was inevitable, and they’d get to be komissars, anyway. And then it fell and was revealed, as all communist nations, as an ugly, corrupt kleptocracy.

For a moment there, a year? two? It looked like the left would give up. Only they couldn’t. Too many years devoted to hating the West to admit they were wrong. Too much of their identities tied to their grand leftist plan which made them both “smarter” and “more caring” than their neighbors.

Since they were at the helm of USAID, I bet you they immediately turned to financing things like the green movement (watermelons all) and weaponized feminism, and racial division, and and– Basically all the things we now know they were funding and puppeteering.

Which is why communism didn’t die, but instead encysted itself in our intellectual institutions, our universities, our arts, our news.

I wonder how much will remain without it, and if we’ll finally see the de-communistification of the West which we should have seen when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s a hope, isn’t it?

And no, USAID is not the largest nor the greatest disbursement of our funds to the cause of leftist subversion and hatred of the West at home and abroad.

BUT it is the one I suspect has been fighting against us from day one of its implementation. No wonder the left is screaming like stuck pigs at the money flow being stopped.

Once more I wish to apologize to the young lady whose name I don’t even remember, who came to a Huns dinner at Pete’s and insisted that the left was mostly left for pay. I thought she was exaggerating. I was wrong.

Of course, I don’t know where this will end, but for now, for right now, it’s like watching the wall come down all over again. And I intend to be right here, and help bring it down. (Pass me the hammer, friend.)

At the same time we, all of us, need to turn our minds and hands to building over, building under and building around. Because you know d*mn well that these people have hidden the few worthy things they do — feeding the occasional child, or vaccinating against malaria, or what have you — amid flows of subversive and corrupt money.

Eric S. Raymond called it the Hostage Puppy strategy, in which you don’t dare cut the vast amounts of waste and fraud, because then you’ll hurt the little puppy they’re also providing for.

It’s not a valid strategy, besides being morally repugnant: the equivalent of what the Hamass does when they place terror tunnels and ammo depots underneath hospitals and kindergartens. But the puppies still need to be fed. And these evil people have strangled all the charities that used to do it.

So, there will be a great realignment and things will be taken care of, eventually, just in another shape. Meanwhile look after each other and those you can help.

And continue to break pieces off the wall of bullshit that has encased us all. At least in terms of explaining what’s actually going on for the public at large. The Doge guys can’t do it all.

Put your back into it. For the first time in my entire life victory is possible.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.

And how.

P.S. Website note from Holly the Assistant: Huns, we are quite aware that WPDE has been stupidly updating, and thank you for your efforts to inform us. There is not a darn thing the webmaster can do to fix commenting at this time: WPDE screwed up their code, and they are going to have to fix it. Sometimes it works on some browsers, sometimes it does not. Please possess your souls in patience, and we’ll look forward to seeing your insights when WPDE gets their code working again.

I have a post about the USAID funding/what it actually did right from the beginning percolating, which in turn might give some clue of what’s to come in the other agencies, but I need time and a clear mind to do it, and today isn’t it.

Mostly because I woke up late, and it’s already been a very strange day, so–

Instead let’s talk about assumptions and PTSD. In this case reading PTSD.

This morning, while sitting and waiting for something, I decided to browse Jane Austen fanfic on my kindle (Look, it’s calming, okay?) and ended up downloading something that is based on Persuasion, one of my favorites and rarely used for fanfic.

Anyway, I opened it and started reading the foreword, then returned it.

Why?

Well, because at one point the author says “I know it’s pure fantasy that a nobleman would marry a bi-racial woman from the colonies.”

At which point I knew what would follow. These, being literary fanfic are normally written by either women my age or college girls. The college girls tend to signal in all the “correct” ways.

I will never forget the one where Lizzy (It was a price and prejudice fan fic) was the one who protected and took care of this wonderful black couple who–

Or the one I actually read where Lizzy and Jane lose everything and are living with the underclass in a slum and I swear it took me several chapters to realize the author thought that everyone in the underclass was black. In England. in the 18th century. I have no words, but could those of you with young kids make sure they understand the world is not America and that even in America the belief that the poor are all black or that black people are — obviously — poor is…. what’s that word? Oh, yeah, racist, regardless of what their idiot teachers told them?

So I reacted. Was my reaction accurate?

I don’t know. I like to give books the benefit of the doubt. As someone who often gets stuck with gay characters (and is upping it to a bio-engineered hermaphrodite world) I’d like to think people will trust me not to go all weirdly fetishy and sexual on them (This book, I’m assured is “Weirdly wholesome” LOL) you’d think I’d give someone more grace on something that reads iffy.

I later was telling Dan that I’m not sure that 15 years ago this would have been enough reason to automatically wall the book, but the last sixteen years have beaten us over the head with racial everything and virtual signaling over racial everything, and I just couldn’t tolerate it.

Later I was talking to Dan about this acquired PTSD and realized there were other reasons for my reaction, reasons I didn’t even think about consciously, and which probably mean I will not reconsider, on a day when I feel more up to face the nonsense.

There is, for instance, historical ignorance.

Look, yeah, they viewed race as super important. What they didn’t do was view race the way we did it.

Depending on what people looked like, the fact that someone was half-another-race might be a non event, or no more consequential than if they were, say, half Portuguese or half French. And money could cover a multitude of sins.

Most of the time if a girl was, say, half Indian it would barely warrant a mention. Half Carib might, depending on her features and the size of her dowry. And yes, the notoriously profligate noblemen would absolutely marry them.

Now, yes, they were a rarity. (Not as much as they would be, say, in the middle ages, but rare. And would be talking about. And if they did anything even mildly notable, their enemies would call them bad racial names, but that’s par for the course.

Part of it is that there weren’t enough people of a different race in Europe to warrant a prejudice. It would be more likely that they would be prejudiced against an Irish or Scottish bride.

The fact that the author is imposing today’s racial ideas (starting with the term bi-racial) on the story tells me that I probably wouldn’t enjoy that.

I’m sick and tired of this. Sick that we can’t teach kids the current obsessions are fleeting and the current social distortions very much on the way of passing already, and that fiction is supposed to center on more substantial bits of the human condition.

I wish I didn’t have to examine assumptions. I wish the last few years hadn’t given me PTSD.

And while at it I’ll wish for a million dollars, which is as likely.

And now let me see if I can write a coherent post for tomorrow.

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

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Hidden World (Annotated): The science fiction classic

Sudden, brilliant towers of light emanate from the Earth at three different points on the Equator, at specific intervals in time! Dr. Kelsall has a theory, that they come from a world inside our own world, and he takes his three comrades to the South American jungle where he predicts the fourth light will appear. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared the men for the alien menace they were about to face!

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

FROM TIMOTHY WITCHAZEL: Noah and the Great Flood: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

A retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark in the style of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Verse.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Dragon Slayer

The dragon must die. It haunts the land and strikes with fire and death without warning.

Prince Baudouin knows the perils, and how other knights have perish. Still, he is confident that he can slay the dragon. All he has to do is forge through the burnt wasteland about its mountain, and slay it.

All.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi (Timelines Universe Book 5

I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Let Us Tell You Again (April Series Book 13)

The continuing story of April, Jeff, and Heather after they conspire to rebel against North America and their efforts to find friends and a safe haven in the stars. Continuing to close the time gap to the later Family Law series of books.
Heather and her peers impose a ban on armed ships beyond L1 in the Solar System and a prohibition for explorer ships going interstellar heavily armed. There are continuing stories of future characters still stuck on Earth.
Heather has a lot of help from her friends but it isn’t easy being the queen.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Broken Devices: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 3)

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past — the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.

Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

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: Structure