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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the AI, but it’s not the AI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this is crazy cakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, it’s always the humans.

The diner was playing Christmas music, which seemed a little strange so early in December, but Peter Denniau was eating alone at the small booth near the corner table, and his thoughts kept drifting with carols. Sure, the shepherds had heard the angels on high, but had they believed them?

How many shepherds had heard? How many angels had fanned out to the countryside to proclaim the good news? Had an entire horde of shepherds descended on the nativity, or only a very few, wide-eyed and not fully believing they had come on ethereal strains that everyone else acted like they couldn’t hear?

None of this was making it easier for him to ignore the fact that a very pretty young woman was looking at him from a nearby table, her eyes a little wide with admiration, and her lips turning up just a little at the corners.

She was pale blond, and her eyes were a deep sort of amber, and her features were as perfectly symmetrical as they could be without making her look like a doll and hit the uncanny valley. More importantly, her eyes looked animated and intelligent. And she didn’t look like one of the many college students that infested Pete’s kitchen these days. Oh, sure, she looked young enough to still be in college, but there was something to her expression, something to the eyes, that gave the impression she’d lived a longer life and had thought about everything she’d experienced, too. A face that indicated she, as Peter was often accused of, thought too much.

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

Yes, I was attacked by a short story, which is getting written, but more importantly, today has been a day of computer issues. First my printer stopped existing. (No, I don’t get it either.) And then my keyboard, and then… I spent most of the day doing other stuff while Dan poked at the computer.

Right now everything works, but I’m considering sprinkling some blessed salt around the CPU just in case. Or letting Indy take off the cover and play with it again. Whichever.

Anyway, sorry for the long silence. Short story coming.

*A Story from the Schrodinger Universe. If you’ve read No Man’s Land, then yes– that is who you think it is. – SAH*

What Child Is This

Sarah A. Hoyt

They said all asteroid miners were running from something.  And how hard you were running determined how far off the asteroid cluster was located.

That Christmas morning Myra Moss felt like what she and John were trying to run from was the size of the universe and had followed them here, to the farthest possible asteroid miner colony, at the very edge of the known universe.

Which to be fair made perfect sense because what they were running from was death. And death had been stalking humans since before there were humans. Or since the garden. Whichever you believed in.

She’d left John asleep in the bed – looking thinner and more ashen than he had just last night at their determinedly not sad Christmas eve supper – and come here, to the front room, to drink her coffee and look at the false dawn rise rosily over the sea.

It had seemed such a fortuitous thing, three years ago, when they’d found this place: a recolonized, abandoned space station near a massive asteroid cluster.  The asteroid cluster abounded in the metals most prized on Earth, but also had enough chunks of ice to make the space station very viable.

No one knew where the space station had come from, to be honest. There was no record of it on any history that one could discover. The tentative idea – as far as the people living in the space station thought of it, and they were the only ones who cared – was that the space station had been built by a lost colony sent very far back in time, and then abandoned for reasons of their own. The darker idea was that the asteroids were what remained of the planet the colony had occupied. But that was unlikely, because there was no sun nearby, and the asteroids seemed to have accreted from disparate places, judging by their composition. Why they’d accreted was a matter of speculation. John said it was because the asteroid field sat in a wrinkle in the sheet of space time. And the space station was just over the ridge of the wrinkle. Convenient to spec out the asteroids and conduct short day-expeditions to it, without the need for Schrodinger drives.

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

*Yes, I am working on a short story. Now shush. Yes, some of these are repeats from yesterday. But some AREN’T. – SAH*

FOR CYBER MONDAY, BOOKS FOR 99c!

FROM C. CHANCY: A Net of Dawn and Bones

Blood rituals, black magic, and broken masquerades. Names to run away from really fast. And maybe the end of the world….
Welcome to Intrepid, North Carolina. Where autumn brings leaf season, tourists, and bloody sacrifice.
Twenty years have passed since the Dark Day brought creatures of horror onto the evening news. Now vampires run nightclubs, alchemists deal potions on the street corners, and werewolf gangs lay claim to shady alleys. The honest cops of Intrepid enforce human laws on supernatural evil, and pray. Because the turn of the leaves brings Halloween, tourists… and the return of a serial killer who’s plagued Intrepid for over two decades.
Yet the night holds darker secrets than even the best detectives have unearthed. Somewhere in Intrepid, a demonic sorcerer plans to bring Hell on earth. And the Demongate is almost complete.
In the midst of a stakeout gone wrong, two mysterious wanderers drop into Detective Church’s life. Aidan, who moves like flames and holds secrets in his shadows… and Myrrh, a holy warrior born of ancient Alexandria. Enchantress. Heretic. Hell-raider.
Welcome to Intrepid.
Evil’s in for a hell of a night….

FROM C. CHANCY: Tell No Tales

Some nights it just doesn’t pay to rise from the grave….Corbin wants to uncover the truth behind her death at a demon’s hands. But her memories have been shattered by the grave, and even with footloose Sighted mechanic Devon Fortunato helping her search for answers, a restless ghost is up against the darkest spells and lies of the living. If they can’t unravel who sabotaged the Cunning Folk circle’s spellcast defenses, the child Corbin meant to protect will suffer a fate worse than death. Corbin’s notes hold clues, but the broken circle would rather die than admit the truth….

FROM C. CHANCY: Oni the Lonely

A grieving mountain cove doctor. A pair of wayward oni. A curse borne on the black wings of crows.

The Rivertown Shopping Village has seen a lot of strange proprietors. An oni painter on the run from a bad breakup is a new one. Maple Leaf Studio opened with blazing color, but will a haunting end Kyosai Momoji’s dream before it begins?

At the south end of Rivertown, Rain McKee delivers soap and perfume with a hint of mountain blessings, picking up her life in the wake of her grandparents’ deaths. Deaths that may have been from a firstborn curse….

Kyosai’s a firstborn, and oni attract trouble like lightning strikes. If either of them want to survive, they’ll have to face haunts, monsters, and a curse so ancient no living mortal knows its name.

The Appalachians are old; the evils lurking there, older still….

(If you want ancient folklore, modern magic, and a love story that prioritizes friendship first, this is the slow burn for you!)

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Bite Sized (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 1)

Meg Turner has been a vampire for twenty years. Her favorite food is rapists. Which is how she met Andi Donahue, her new best friend/ girl Friday.

And then the nightmares start. And the bodies start showing up–bled out and raped. Just like Meg was. They don’t have a whole lot of time to stop the killer before he strikes again, and only one way to stop the killer.

But how can Andi help Meg stop a killer she can’t even see?

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Theophany

Ten years ago the Savients took over Niban, forcing the independent inhabitants into poverty and despair. Bass White saw the careless cruelty of the Savients kill his mother and his father. When a resistance cell is discovered in his city bloc, the Savients seek to make everyone pay.

With his wife Amie, Bass races into the caverns to escape the Savients’ brutal enforcers: the Atrasai. The couple barely make it to the limits of known territory outside their underground city, however, before the Atrasai catch up with them. It would take a miracle to save them…

…or a combat medic robot.

Join Bass and Amie in this sci-fi story of healing, hope, and wonder. After a decade of fear and pain, even a little light can bring out the best in man and machine. But will the best be enough to heal?

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 TIMOTHY WITCHAZEL: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

From author and poet Timothy V. Witchazel comes the story of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho in alliterative verse. Tracing the story of the Israelites from the parting of the Red Sea to the fall of the walls of Jericho, the story is retold in the style of Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and other Anglo-Saxon poems.

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

From author and poet Timothy V. Witchazel comes a retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark in the alliterative verse, the style of poetry used in Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and other Anglo-Saxon works.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

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 NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion of God (Timelines Book 1)

John Wolff has been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Again.
He’s already saved the love of his life from an early death – thirty years after she died.
Now, a beautiful young woman, who is clearly his daughter, has appeared from the timeline branch where that same love of his life survived and married his counterpart.
She says they need his help fighting off invaders from the far future. Who, by the way, are looking for him. Why? Because they want the starship drive he and a friend invented, the precursor to their time machine. Problem is, in her timeline, it hasn’t been invented yet.
What man can resist a cry for help from his own daughter?
Particularly when the invaders think she’s a saint. Or possibly, a devil wearing saint’s clothing. And they’re looking for her, too.
Thus begins the Timelines Saga, and the story of the Lion of God.

FROM JAY MAYNARD: Reflections in Crystal (The Crystal Therapy Chronicles Book 1)

Magic fixes people the world cannot touch.

Alex Sullivan isn’t crazy — just angry. Angry enough to get arrested. Angry enough to be given a strange choice: prison, or an experimental magical program at a private facility in rural Missouri.

They claim to fix broken people not with medicine or therapy, but with silence, service, and a skintight suit of latex.

Inside the suit, Alex is cut off from the world — unable to speak, eat, or even cry in the ordinary way. Inside the crystal, time flows differently. There, guided by someone who seems to know him better than he knows himself, Alex must face his deepest wounds… and either heal, or shatter.

But this is no simple treatment. Alex finds himself on a journey into a hidden world where redemption is earned, the broken are made whole, and some choose never to leave the suit again.

Previously published as Foundational Laminate.

“One of the rare novels I hope becomes reality—a hard look at how to turn the antisocial into good neighbors.”
— Karl K. Gallagher, author of The Fall of the Censor and Torchship

UPDATE, BECAUSE THE WRITER IS AN IDIOT AND FORGOT SHE’D DONE THIS:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Christmas In the Stars: A collection of Christmas Short Stories

This is a collection of four Christmas short stories.
It starts with a star-explorer stranded in unknown coordinates listening very hard for sleigh bells. Then there are two deserters of a doomed planetary war, in a forsaken planet, trying to do the right thing to secure peace and good will, even if one of them happens to be dead. And did you know there was a small, sweet robot at the nativity? Also, sometimes, all you need for a Merry Christmas is a cat.
This is a short collection, but it’s heartwarming and cozy, and the sort of thing to read on a snowy afternoon, by your fireplace, with a cup of eggnog nearby.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: A Few Good Men (Darkship Thieves Book 3)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we declare the revolution!

He spent 14 years in solitary. Now he’ll ignite a revolution.
Born a prince among Earth’s fifty tyrants, Lucius Keeva emerges from imprisonment with a fractured mind and a deadly purpose. When assassins hunt him, fate delivers him to the USAians—secret keepers of America’s forgotten beliefs.

For 500 years, this underground faith has preserved the Constitution while awaiting their prophesied leader. In Luce’s madness, they recognize their messiah.

Now the son of tyranny becomes liberty’s champion. As the USAians rise from the shadows, their weapons of war finally unleashed, a broken mind and a fallen prince prove the perfect weapon against an unbreakable regime.

One madman. One ancient faith. One last chance to restore the republic from legend.

A FEW GOOD MEN —where belief becomes the ultimate revolutionary tactic.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY BAEN BOOKS

FROM ELISE HYATT (SARAH A. HOYT): Dipped, Stripped and Dead (Daring Finds Book 1)

DEAD MAN’S REFINISH

Some people find antiques. Dyce Dare finds trouble.

Ever tried fishing a Victorian sideboard out of a dumpster only to hook a dead body instead? Welcome to Dyce Dare’s life, where nothing goes according to plan—and never has.

At six, she wanted to be a ballerina (until gravity repeatedly suggested otherwise). At ten, she dreamed of lion taming (until Fluffy the cat staged a mutiny). Now at twenty-nine, she’s just trying to keep her furniture refinishing business afloat so she can upgrade her son’s diet from “pancakes” to “anything else, please.”

But when her latest dumpster dive yields a half-melted corpse instead of salvageable furniture, Dyce reluctantly adds “amateur detective” to her lengthy resume of career failures. Because nothing says “responsible single mom” like poking around a murder investigation, right?

Between dodging danger, dealing with her quirky neighbors, and trying not to embarrass herself in front of a certain handsome police officer, Dyce is about to discover that her talent for refinishing furniture might just extend to refinishing crime scenes.

Dipped Stripped And Dead – Sometimes the best way to clean up your life is to solve a murder.

(Warning: May contain splinters, sarcasm, and one very determined single mom who definitely didn’t plan on any of this.)