According To Hoyt

First, let me reassure you I am indeed MUCH better. My ears are still utterly stopped, so everything seems to be very far away, but that will either fix itself or I’ll get used to being deaf. I can now go several hours without cough syrup, and my wakeness periods are up to half an hour or more.

Now the big danger is my pushing too hard, as the things undone are bothering me. But for today I’m limiting myself to “washing clothes from trip” which might seem mild but isn’t, because while there we had resort to a laundromat, which …. you couldn’t choose your soap, and something is very itchy. So, two weeks of clothing for each of us, which is almost all my clothing.

Anyway, one of the scariest things about the trip to Portugal was talking to people and realizing they’re living in an alternate reality.

You know, all the things that the Junta has tried to sell, and push? From “We’re in a booming economy” to “Biden is a patriot who stepped down to save the nation” to “Trump is a criminal” to “The refugee crisis is the result of global warming” ALL OF IT is being bought wholesale in Europe.

Now as a caveat to this, actually two of them: My family is now very much what would be considered “laptop class”. I.e. they are all credentialed professionals of some description, who therefore pride themselves on being “well informed” a lot of which consists of following our MSM (NYT, CNN, etc) and the Portuguese translations thereof. And I was mostly associating with them, save for listening in when we were in public, as I pretty much do all the time out of habit and because I like to know what people “really” think.

However, as far as I can tell even if not uniform, Portugal — which probably means most of Europe — at least as far as its educated classes go, is taking the pap our MSM spews as the gospel truth. You literally can’t tell them the truth without their thinking you’re a complete lunatic. I.e. the reality on the ground here in the US seems to them like something out of the left field that we’re just saying for shock value.

Keep that in mind when you hear of all the European love for Kamala-rama-lama-ding-dong.

It is quite literally a case of sh*t in, sh*t out.

And weirdly I found my non political, laid back husband was the best counter to this. Mostly because he doesn’t immediately go to white hot, or start blurting out the truth in social occasions. Instead, he very calmly said “Yes, but” and presented counter evidence. Like when someone said that Trump had instigated a revolt when he legitimately lost the election, husband brought up the absolute unlikelihood of the turn around in results. He also pointed out that people we personally knew got kicked out of poll watching just before that turn around. Or point out that the “great job numbers” are routinely downgraded out of view. Or calmly explain in real life terms why EVs won’t work in our huge country. Or talk about “is it even needed” and glaze their eyes with math.

Weirdly, they both flocked to him, because I’m a “known radical” and took him seriously with his “Yes, but.”

Will they reset now he’s gone? Almost for sure. It’s the social pressure, the one source of acceptable news (many brands, but all from one perspective) and the fact that — bizarrely — they still have no political blogs, no indie book publishing, no…. well, no sources of counterculture that sprang up here in the last 20 years.

Once more, my look at their sf/f shelves in translation, reveals no Baen books, nothing that isn’t “Hugo and Nebula winner.” People acclaimed as giants of the field are barely known here. This too helps distort their view or reality.

Would we be like that if we hadn’t had the blogging revolution after 9/11? If we hadn’t had the ability to publish indie? If we didn’t have places like this to hang out in online?

I don’t know. And you don’t know either. I’d like to think we’re always a little more refractory than Europeans. After all, we’re the ones that got away, right?

But–

But I remember the seventies and the eighties, and how blurting out something that went against the accepted wisdom of the MSM was the equivalent of donning a propeller hat with a duck on top in the middle of a formal affair. Even if it was something you’d personally lived through.

So, come what may in two weeks and change, remember it could be worse. We could be stuck in a “reality” molded entirely by the fever dreams of the intelligentsia, a reality in which stating the truth brands not only as dangerous but as insane.

Let’s hear it for the craziest timeline. The one in which we can say “The king goes naked” and have people actually look and go “D*mn right. I too can see his willy.”

Because it could be much worse.

Slept 13 hours last night and I’m better. Meaning my brain is mostly working, but my body is still shutting down on the regular. Have vegged in front of a lot of stupid utube videos.

I do have posts to write. And books. But …. not yet up to it.

Don’t break anything. Don’t set fire to any large bodies of water. Do not invade any third world countries. If you take your guns on a water journey, remember to give them life vests. (Americans are lousy boaters.) Turn off the TV before so called journalists compell you to put a shoe through it with force. Or shoot it. (Remember, well brought up Americans do not go strapped in front of a TV that might assault them with stupidity at any moment.)

Okay, the above is the ramblings of a fevered brain, but a fevered brain housed in a body that has Miss Muse the kitteh on her knees. She’s very worried about mom kind of drifting off every five minutes. Signally this morning while drinking tea….

Hopefully tomorrow real post. Now returning to vegging.

Good news: I’m home.

Bad news: I managed somehow to contract the WORST cold I’ve had in…. oh, a decade or so. Let’s put it this way: I slept twelve hours, showered and had breakfast and I feel like I did a hard WEEK’s work.

It was probably a normal sized cold when I left — we got soaked a couple of times while out and looking at things, and everyone in Portugal was sniffling. — but traveling 28 hours, dragging bags, etc did it a whole lot of no good.

For the record, if any of you feels like trying “Take off and landing with double ear infections” 3 TIMES: don’t. No, seriously, don’t. There is that sound when your eardrum finally bursts which is like someone trying to suck a weasel through a straw. After that it hurts less, ut you’re at the very least semi-deaf. Which is where I am. (And no, not my first rodeo. Eh.)

I’m sorry. Resuming normal schedule will be delayed. The big program today is lying here and sleeping.

Hopefully better tomorrow.

By Holly the Assistant

So when I woke up this morning, I had a message sent at three am my time letting me know that as Sarah is in transit and certain EU airports provide insufficient working conditions to access the blog, please to let you all know that the meme and promo posts will be delayed by a day.

You are all now informed, and I hope your plans for autumn are going well!

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

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

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

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

BUT–

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

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

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

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

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

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

I only wish she was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then we build again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We build.

Sursum corda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Promo

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

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

Two souls collide in the middle of a deadly war.

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

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

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

That is, if they can survive.

FROM DALE COZORT: Wokuo Incursion

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

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

FROM MARY CATELLI: Madeleine and the Mists

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

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

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

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

Some things are not so easily evaded.

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

Even the dead have to make a living…

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

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

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

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf

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

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

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

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance

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

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

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact

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

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

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: credit

By Holly the Assistant

Yes, there’s a Presidential Election.

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

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

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

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

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

Wasn’t it yesterday when they were small?

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