The end of war should have been joyful, but Shannon’s husband, Albert, returned from the trenches a grim-faced humourless shadow of himself. She shouldered his sorrow along with her other burdens and got along as best she could.

But when her old pony died the desolation was almost too much to bear. She had nobody left to lean on and she felt as if the next strong wind would blow her away.

The men went to market as usual, returning late and cold. They gently herded her out to the barn where a little brown pony whickered a welcome…

©️jj 2019

“So what was it like, in the Specials? I mean I’ve done military, but that has to be different.”
Vitos hesitated imperceptibly, food partway to his mouth, just long enough for Charis to wonder if she had been wise to have asked. Then, as he continued to eat he was watching her with his disconcerting, penetrating green eyes.
“I can’t compare it to regular military,” he said when he had finished the mouthful. “I have never done that.”
“Well, it doesn’t mean you can’t say what it was like, surely? I was just thinking it would at least have a bit in common with regular military.”
“You mean like obeying orders and doing dangerous things?” He sounded sarcastic. But Vitos never did sarcasm. Charis gave a shrug.
“Kind of thing. I guess.”
Vitos didn’t say more right away and continued eating. Charis wondered if she had pushed too much on a sore spot.
“It is very hard,” he said, just as she was convinced he was not going to answer, “to describe something to someone who has not got the same – or similar – terms of reference.” He gave her a slight smile. “Believe you me I know, I’ve been on the receiving end of that often enough.”
“Would you be willing to try? It’s alright if you don’t want to, I can see why you might not. It must be difficult to talk about it.”
He considered a moment then gave a small nod.
“What do you want to know?”
“I was on a military stop-over once. There was this – this compound of Specials. Someone told me they were killing each other. I mean, that they were being allowed to. Which made no sense. Was it really like that? Or was I being laughed at?”
The green eyes seemed to weigh what she was asking, then they dropped away from her gaze as if he couldn’t bear to look at her.
“Yes.”
“You mean ‘yes’ I was being laughed at or…?” She let it hang.
“Yes. The Specials kill each other. It’s part of how we were made to bond into units. Then the survivors were beaten down and formed up depending on how they behaved. Usually it was done with by the time you got anyone through training, but sometimes – something might flare up. Someone pushing for something, or someone others thought to be a weak link. But it was most always fought out one on one. We had to be careful. If it looked like turning too general we’d be stopped.”
He broke off and carried on eating. Perhaps he had seen noticed her reaction, although she had tried to hide it. Tried, because she wanted to know. So she asked more, to show she did.
“How – how could they stop it?”
“We were all on the Lattice with no way to shut it off. You can flood someone with so much data they can’t do anything, get paralysed – literally, physically. Or you can just drop the link and put everyone on a countdown. Amazing how fast that will work.”
“A countdown?”
“Drop off the Lattice and you have a count triggered. It hits zero and all the stuff they pack into your scalp port will fry out in your brain and kill you. Not very quickly, because it is not very big. But it will kill you.”
Charis was silent. Robbed of words.
Vitos watched her, his green eyes assessing. Then he said: “Maybe it’s not it’s so difficult for me to talk about as difficult for others to hear.”

From Trust A Few a Fortune's Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook and the first volume in the Haruspex trilogy.

He expected the great oak door to open to his hand, but the woman in the carved chair was something beyond his experience. She was beauty personified, delicately drawn in pastel hues – save for  eyes of obsidian blackness.

Her smile smote his heart like a blade of the finest Toledo steel and he reeled.

“Sir Edmund Coldheart, Dragonslayer Royal. At your service.”

She drew him to her with one slender white hand.

“My lord,” she breathed.

And he knew he had found his heart’s desire.

His infatuation was a sorrow to the slender dragon queen, but she ate him anyway.

©️jj 2019

Challenge Accepted - Seventeen stories about people who rise above anything that tries to stop them, even their own limitations.

A blind spaceship pilot. 
Cops and maintenance personnel in wheelchairs.
Taking on bad guys with only one leg or no arms.
It’s not what you are that makes you something special. It’s who you choose to be.
With stories by Stephanie Barr, Micha Burnett, Jennifer Busick, Adam David Collings, Steve Curry, Scott G. Gibson, Joyce Hertzoff, Jane Jago, Clarence Jennelle, Jeanette O’Hagan, Layla Pinkett, Jen Ponce, Connor Sassmannshausen, Lynne Stringer, E. M. Swift-Hook, Margret Treiber, Andy Zach.
An anthology of stories with disabled main characters kicking butt, like they do in real life. 

All proceeds to go to the Special Olympics.

“Not pirates,” a third voice said. “We’re more like explorers—space explorers—out to conquer new territory for China much like your ancestors did our neighbors a few centuries back.”
All three laughed at this, leaving Renaud sputtering. “Are you actually telling me that this act of piracy is sanctioned by the Chinese government?”
There was a pause. “Why should some international company have a stranglehold on the growth of replacement organs? Why them and not us?”
“Didn’t they develop them?” Weston asked and was smacked again for his trouble.
“It’s too much power for one company to have,” the brute retorted. “And, if they can’t preserve control over it like we would definitely do, they deserve to lose it.”
There were a few more minutes of uncomfortable silence. She would have to adjust her flight in nine minutes or they would be committed to a long elliptical orbit that would use up all their resources, including oxygen, unless she killed most of these men. She wasn’t set up for a several day mission.
Something pinged . . . twice. Sin was so clever with her signal—that also meant she was back in the cockpit. The other seven men were still in the original room. That could even the odds. She slipped the toe of one boot under a flap of what looked like thermal blanket riveted to the floor and pressed a button, then pulled her foot back. She heard shouting from a distance, some of it quite vehement, and then the clang of multiple doors closing and locking. Now it was just the three of them on the bridge.
There were some grunts and the sound of hands grabbing hand holds and slapping metal, perhaps in frustration. “How did you do that? Open that door back up immediately!”
“What door?” she asked, feigning ignorance. She was always amazed how many people presumed that being blind meant she wasn’t very bright.
“The door where my men are trapped. The door to the cockpit.”
“You’ve been watching me this whole time. Have my hands moved?”
Something—likely a gloved hand, smacked across her face. Hard. Now she tasted blood as well. “I’m getting tired of your attitude. That door didn’t close itself.”
“Maybe they triggered the meteoroid alarm accidentally. That seals off all the internal compartments in case of leak.”
“Is that true?”
Weston’s voice was nasal. She wondered if they’d broken his nose. “Yes. Most ships have those. Or we could have been holed and it happened automatically.”
“You mean, my men might be locked in a leaking compartment?”
“It’s possible,” Weston said.
“How do we know?”
Kayla smiled. “Listen for screaming.”

An extract from ‘None So Blind’ by Stephaine Barr one of stories in Challenge Accepted which she has brought through from the first idea to final publication as an anthology. 

A Bite of... Stephanie Barr

Q1: Is it important to include all shades of belief and sexual orientation in a book?

Depending on the size of your epic, it’s not always practical to include everyone across the board. Nor do I think every shade of belief needs to be there, but I’m a scientist, so that flavors my thinking. If you have a cast of five key players, no one says you have to have one of them gay or one of them straight for that matter. If you have a cast of dozens, leaving out folks becomes more problematic, because representation matters when building worlds. Leaving out (or demonizing) religions (while including others that are recognizable)

But it’s a difficult conundrum. I’m not qualified to write the black experience or the indigenous experience. There will be aspects I just won’t get and will likely flub it if I try by overtrying while missing key aspects of it I never even knew about. BUT, I do think it’s important to include people of different races, creeds, conditions, sexual orientations, etc, because otherwise you argue worlds that don’t include them and that’s particularly frightening. It’s like you erase them from the future and I don’t want anyone excluded. That was, in fact, the notion that drove this book. Including disabled persons in future worlds where they were important players, where they weren’t tokens or objects of pity, but capable, intelligent, useful parts of the world they inhabited.

Just like they are now. 

Q2: Are you ticklish? If so where?

I am, but only above the waist. My feet are not ticklish, and, be warned, I’m totally kick-ass at tickling so you’d better not try tickling me unless you’re invulnerable. My two children (still at home), don’t have a chance, but they love to be tickled for some reason.

Q3: Have you ever written somebody you love into a book?

Yes. Dante da Silva, from Tarot Queen, is really close to what I could see my (now ex-) husband as in similar circumstances. Generally careless and capable but also with the capacity of devotion if he found the right one. I turned out not to be the one, but he seems to have found it since.

My son is also the model for Hans Kado, who is high-functioning (in some ways) autistic in several stories in Legacy and who has a cameo in my story “None So Blind” in this anthology, Challenge Accepted. My son is totally non-verbal but many of his tendencies (as I observed them) I included in the short stories. Kado totally charms me, too, though I don’t know how someone else would react. 

Although Stephanie Barr is a slave to three children and a slew of cats, she actually leads a double life as a part-time novelist and full-time rocket scientist. People everywhere have learned to watch out for fear of becoming part of her stories. Beware! You might be next! Kado and Lola who have bit parts in “None So Blind” can also be found in her solo anthology, Legacy.

Men, she privately thought, were little more than a necessary evil and had it been up to her spinsterhood would have been her lot. But heiresses are not permitted that luxury.

They married her to an amiable idiot whose father was almost as rich as her own Papa.

She had been married five childless years, when her coach was held up on the Heath. The highwayman took her priceless pearls and rather a lot of liberties with her person.

In later years her father was to wonder how his idiot son-in-law had fathered a child of such intelligence.

©️jj 2019

On the Throne? is a little book of contemplation from Jane Jago, offering life in limericks and incidental verse. It is out today in both eBook and tree book.

Themes include…

ON GETTING OLD

You are old so you shouldn’t do that
You should only like knitting. And cats.
It shouldn’t be you
With a brand-new tattoo
Making love on an old yoga mat

ON LIFE

A beauty both gentle and soft
Was going to marry a toff
He wanted to spank her
She called him a wanker
And now the engagement is off

ON NURSERY RHYMES

Freda and Bill went up the hill
To the shop at the end of the street
They bought syrup for chills
Viagra pills
And corn pads for Freda’s sore feet

On the Throne? is a worthy and hilarious addition to anyone's throne room courtesy of Jane Jago,

The old terrier lay by the fire while Carrie baked. She talked to him gently.

“They say the men are coming home, Brewster. Do you think that means Danny too?”

Brewster thumped his stump of a tail and Carrie laughed. She finished her chores and bent to pat the little dog’s head.

“We been faithful ain’t we boy.”

As she straightened her back Brewster lifted his muzzle and gave a small bark. He hustled to the door whining and wagging.

Carrie turned her head and Danny stood in the doorway.

“Smells like home,” he said and held out his arms.

©️jj 2019

No matter if you travel ever so far away
Beyond the furthest shore,
Or on to what strange places your steps may one day stray
In ever seeking more.
No matter how many worlds you seize, for greed and gains,
On which your flags unfurl.
Always still, so deep within your mind, your home remains
A sacred, precious pearl.

E.M. Swift-Hook

“Did you really kill a dragon, Gran’ma?”
Hepsy had to hide a smile and scooped her youngest grandson into a hug. It was the end of his fifth birthday party and he had been running around waving the wooden sword his grandfather had made for him, pretending to kill imaginary monsters in the vegetable patch. Now the family sat at table eating a simple birthday meal. Hepsy and her husband, Poll, their middle son and his wife and five grandchildren ranging from mid-teens to the birthday boy.
“Who’s been telling you tales like that?” she asked.
“Was Da. He said you killed a dragon, you and Gran’da. Is it true?”
Something in his tone made her realise it was not just a question wanting a story. She released her grandson and caught her son’s eye. He swallowed the mouthful he was chewing and sat back in his chair.
“Word is there’s a dragon back on High Top. Been taking cows from Vasserdale and burned a farm to the ground. Shal willing, it won’t fly this way.”
“Dragons don’t just turn up places,” Poll said. “They have to be hatched and that takes a lot of magic. It means they will have a master.”
“Or a mistress,” Hepsy put in. “Is there any word of a dragon being seen on Prank’s Peak or Scale Height?”
Her son shrugged.
“Those places are the other side of the mountains. We don’t get word from there often. Was a minstrel up from Durmouth though. Seems there’s war over the Marches again. Hobs and trolls.”
“When I’m grown up I’m going to fight hobs and trolls.”
Hepsy mussed her grandson’s soft hair.
“That’s just what your da said at your age, and now look at him, the finest carpenter in Wyvernvale.”

After the family had gone, Hepsy went into her still room where she made potions and poultices, pickles and jams and pulled out the chest from beneath her work counter, from where she pushed it away over thirty years before. Opening the lid she took out the two pieces of her staff and fitted them together, murmuring some words as she did so.
Then she went out and stood in their small garden, shielding her eyes from the low sun to look towards the mountains. High Top could be seen piercing the sky with its needle spire of rock. What she could not see from below though was the steep path that wound up to the plateau from which the steeple of stone began. Nor could she see the cave mouth that led to the lair. But memory told her they were there. Memory and loss.
A sound made her turn.
“You gave me a promise you’d not be using that anymore,” Hepsy said, as Poll came out of the house, her gaze rested on the sword he held in one hand, it’s blade shimmering with a blue light so the runes etched into it stood out. Then she gave a little sigh. “But then I gave you a promise I’d not be using this.” She hefted the staff and small sparks shimmered like dust motes in the air around it. “Looks like we both done broke that vow. But the big question is, what should we be doing?”
“We knew it would happen again,” Poll said, his voice heavy with sorrow. He slid the sword home into the loop on his belt and the blue light faded. Hepsy noticed the buckle was three notches up from the mark showing where he used to wear it. It was not all that had changed since he last took up that sword. His hair then had been thick and black, now it left the top of his head uncovered and was thinning and grey. But then her hair had once been the colour of a wheatfield before the harvest and now was nearly as white as the melting snows.
“We knew,” she agreed. “But I’d not thought t’would be in our lifetime. I thought we’d won the right to have our peace. We’re too old to do it all again. Not now.”
Poll put his arm around her and held her close.
“If not us – then who? The children? The grandchildren?”
Now that was a thought too terrible to dwell upon and Hepsy shook her head. “No. But it’s a dreadful long walk up to High Top and my back and your knee…”
“My knee will bear my weight long enough for what we have to do,” he said gently. “Besides, we’ll take horses this time. Hue owes me for last winter still, he’ll let us have two of his hill ponies.”
Which was a comforting thought because it really was a parlous long way and a terrible steep climb up the mountains. She shivered slightly at the memory and Poll hugged her.
“Less of that, woman. You pack what we need and I’ll go see Hue. We can set out tomorrow with first light. We’ll have to try to find the others and that won’t be easy.”
Hepsy nodded and he released her, his gnarled hands gripping her, work-worn fingers for a moment as he did so.
“They might be dead,” she said. “Do you think we can do it without them?”
Poll drew in a deep breath and looked out towards the mountains, his gaze homing where hers had, to the needle of stone above High Top. “I don’t know, love. I think we need four of us to unlock the seals, but… Well, let’s put out that fire when we can see if it’s burning.”
He was right. Of course. Which left just one question in Hepsy’s burdened heart.
“What do we tell the children?”
For a moment she wondered if he had heard her. She hadn’t spoken loudly and his hearing was no longer so perfect. But then he looked down at her and smiled sadly.
“I think we should tell them nothing,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.”

E.M. Swift-Hook

Dave was conman pure and simple. But he had the advantages of a public school accent, and one of those pink-skinned faces whereon all the features seem to be clustered bang in the middle. 

He happily ran the biggest scam of all for many years, growing pinker, and sleeker with every passing day.

Nobody ever found out precisely who, of all the people he cheated, had sufficient wealth and power for retribution, all that became known was the outcome.

The photograph of him tied naked to a chair in the window of London’s most famous department store went viral….

©️jj 2019