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Cressida’s Betrayal Teaser Tuesday

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A Steam and Spells Steampunk Adventure

 

Empire of the Sky, Book 2

Steampunk Romance

Date Published: March 1, 2024

Publisher: Changeling Press LLC

 

Things are going well for Cressida. Egged on by Marjorie, the spirit who
has taken shelter in her mind, Jacob proposes marriage as they flee the moon
and its goblin king. However bigger things are at stake, and their mission
to save all of humanity is jeopardized by mistrust and magical chicanery.
Sexual energy flares as the danger to the empire overflows in an orgy of
lust and violence. Can Jacob and Cressida’s love survive?

EXCERPT

Copyright ©2024 Mikala Ash

 

December 1865 — Earthbound

Making love in the absence of gravity is a pleasure experienced by few. In
this regard my beloved fiancé Jacob and I, and of course Marjorie,
made full use of the three-day journey from the moon. Whenever the mood to
clicket like a pair of foxes took us — as it often did — we’d strap
ourselves into our cocoon — the Lunarians’ term for the soft woollen
bag designed to keep slumbering space travellers from drifting about — and
had at it with unbridled enthusiasm.

We were not the only ones. The dozen or so “marionettes” — as
Jacob termed the human bodies possessed by the spirits of goblins — also
took every opportunity to experience the joy of sex. In their natural form,
the small leathery-winged creatures, which resembled the ugly statues of
gargoyles, were denied by their nervous systems the ability to derive
pleasure from copulation. For them, the act of coitus was simply a
procreational chore, and so the ecstasy of sexual intercourse that the human
body provided was to them as addictive as laudanum is to opium eaters.

Thus, the mid-section of the ship presented a scene straight from a
nightmare. Cocoons bolted to the metal wall jostled their neighbours as they
twisted and bucked like angry caterpillars. The contortions were accompanied
by a discordant symphony of grunts, groans, and ultimate cries of climactic
release.

I blush to recall that Jacob and I were no different. I was in seventh
heaven with his cock relentlessly sliding, piston-like, in and out of my
accommodating quim, causing my heart to gallop and my breathing to quicken
into ragged gasps. I wasn’t alone, of course. Marjorie was enjoying it
as well, albeit deep inside my head.

Oh, his cock is so very hard, she bellowed.

She didn’t have to tell me that. I could feel every inch of his rigid
shaft stretch my tight fleshly sheath. Having a ghost possess me had added a
new dimension to the constant monologue people conduct with themselves in
their heads. Marjorie knew my thoughts before I could even express them to
myself, and she had access to all my memories as well. The most amazing fact
of her residency in my mind was that she could “feel” everything
I did, from stubbing my toe to the ecstasy of sexual climax, and everything
in-between.

Marjorie could also massage my body from the inside, as it were,
stimulating my nipples and nub, and creating the sensations that Jacob would
make with lips, tongue, fingers, and cock. She was thoroughly enjoying her
demise, making liberal use of this ability, and wasn’t a passive
member of our unconventional ménage which united the living and the
dead.

I’m not dead, she would protest. Just misplaced, and very grateful I
found you.

Murdered while she was a virgin, Marjorie’s spirit had, for some
unknown reason, been irresistibly drawn to me, and had possessed my body to
alert Jacob and I that her corpse had been stolen from her grave.
Marjorie’s body was now possessed by a goblin who named herself
Esther. One of our goals once on Earth was to return Marjorie to her
rightful home. We were confident that I could perform the swap, as I had
successfully done the same for Jacob in the chamber of the dead on the
moon.

That Esther was writhing in ecstasy in the cocoon next to us, being
ploughed enthusiastically by her so-called husband Warrick, both angered and
intrigued her. He’s fucking her now, she said bitterly. I wonder what
his cock feels like.

“Ugh!” I groaned, as much in disgust on her behalf as from the
jolt of Jacob’s thrust. A half dozen followed, and my rising
excitement was reflected in the increasing cadence of my whimpers and
moans.

Jacob paused, his body tensed, but not from imminent climax.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Something’s changed. I’ll have a look.”

Now that we were not wholly engaged in pleasure, I noticed that the
previously muffled grunts and groans were no longer stifled, but clear as a
bell. I lifted Jacob’s arm so I could see out of our woollen shell.
The agitated caterpillars, not content to remain in their cocoons, had
erupted like butterflies from their chrysalides. With no gravity to keep
them to the floor they twisted and tumbled through the air until the space
became a mass of undulating human flesh. Jacob and I remained inside our
woollen bag. The thought of intimacy with stolen bodies repelled us.

I shuddered at the memory of fucking the king of the Lunarians, Mon Ilson,
and his concubine Gloria, but that had been in the cause of buying time and
favour till our escape. I had only suffered the act by imagining I was
making love to Jacob and Marjorie.

My memory of that awkward situation was suddenly interrupted by our cocoon
being ripped open, and before I could react, Jacob and I were separated by
gentle but insistent hands. In an instant Esther was kissing Jacob full on
the mouth.

About the Author

Aussie Mikala Ash used to be a mild-mannered training & development
consultant by day, and a wild sci-fi and paranormal adventure writer by
night. Now she is a brazen full-time writer and nature photographer who is
concentrating on having among other things, “… bags, and bags
of fun!” Mikala can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.

 

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Publisher on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok:
@changelingpress

 

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The Torch: Rising Darkness Blitz

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Young Adult – Sci-Fi / Fantasy

Date Published: September 18, 2022

 

 

“He wanted more power, and more control. When I was with him, that
seemed to be his main goal.”

“What other power was there?”

“Oh, more than you could ever know.”

 

 

About the Author

Bertrand Coruscare’s first novel, Rising Darkness, is the beginning of the
epic “The Torch series.” Lover of the mysterious, the heroic, and
the refined, he fills his days with dark stories, warm drinks, and a touch
of sarcasm.

Bertrand resides in the Pacific Northwest, where he is pursuing a degree in
English. He often wanders the ancient forests of imagination, guided by
ambition, that azure flame.

 

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Ella’s War Blitz

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Historical Fiction

 

 

It’s 1943 on the American home front, and Ella’s pent-up, common-law
husband finally decides to leave their farm and enlist. Ella must either
depart their seafaring town in coastal Delaware to pursue other dreams
inland or try to save their farm. Their grade-school son, Reese, won’t
budge, and Ella sees that farmers have a patriotic duty to stay on the
land.

The bay and ocean waters before them have been preyed upon by German
U-boats, and their village has become a refuge for survivors. When an
officer from a surrendered German submarine is sent to her as part of POW
farm labor, can Ella embrace the help in order to survive? And what happens
when Dieter becomes more than a hand to her, amidst prying eyes and under
her beloved but conflicted son’s watch? How will she choose when her
explosive husband returns from Europe wounded from infantry duty against the
Germans?

In ELLA’S WAR, we travel a journey amongst women and men whose lives are
deeply altered by the circumstances of WWII. What heroic or questionable
choices must they make to be true to themselves and come through the great
conflict?

 About the Author

Rusty Allen

Rusty studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and has been a
full-time freelance writer for most of his career. He owns The Writers
Studio, a marketing/copywriting practice located just outside of
Philadelphia. He led the Advanced Novel Writing Group at the Writers
Room/Writers Corner, a writers co-op in Doylestown, Bucks County,
Pennsylvania, and is a member of the Rebel Writers, a highly select novelist
critique group that was highlighted in Writer’s Digest in the article
“Plotting a Novel Group”.

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Passages to Eternity Blitz

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Philosophic meditations in poetic form on the meaning of eternity for 72
famous persons

 

Poetry

Date Published: January 15, 2024

 

 

As a philosopher once surmised: talent hits a target no one else can hit.
Genius, he insisted, hits a target no one else can see.
The greatest artists
and thinkers are the greatest seers. They do not imagine … only and
merely. They study the facts, they think the facts, they feel the facts,
until the facts, the acts of faith, the articles of invention, dissolve in
the naked light of the hitherto unseen, until fact, faith, and invention
fall away like Halloween masks, like swaddling clothes; and then, leaving
behind the tricks and the treats, they teach us what to hallow: the
nakedness of a newborn joy, perpetually born anew, a joy that can never die,
because it never quite knows, but never fails to enjoy, how early it already
is, and how young it was always going to be.

All thinking, carried far enough, ends in paradox: trying to think the
unthinkable
. All feeling, carried far enough, ends in paradox: trying to
feel the unfeelable
. But one can feel the unthinkable, and think the
unfeelable. To do so is to think with one’s feelings and to feel with one’s
thoughts. Then, and only then, is it possible to hit a target that no one
else can see. To experience deeply (profoundly and creatively) is to think
with your feelings and to feel with your thoughts. And there’s a first and
last to every thought, to every feeling. To think the first, to feel the
first, as if it were the last, and to do so intensely is to know
nothingness, to experience death. Yes, this is paradox. To think the last,
to feel the last, as if it were the first, and to do so intensely is to
experience life, a life that never ends, precisely because – like a
box without sides – it is without beginnings and without ends. Yes,
this is paradox too.

This book continues the conspiracy of significance, the dialectic of
nowhere and now here, that began with The History of Eternity. Read this
sequel, Passages to Eternity, and follow, if you will, the destiny of this
paradox as it unfolds in the lives of 72 historic individuals, including
Rilke, Peirce, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Wordsworth, Ibsen, Santayana, Wilde,
St. Teresa, Melville, Whitman, Beethoven, Godel, Michelangelo, Leibniz,
Thucydides, Ovid, Empedocles, Mann, Plato, Borges, St. James, Baudelaire,
Bradley, Arendt, Auden, Maistre, T.S. Eliot, Democritus, Bruegel, Unamuno,
Flaubert, Girard, Calvino, Holderlin, William James, Tacitus, Jaspers, St.
Paul, Pater, Anaximander, Solzhenitsyn, Nicholas of Cusa, Picasso, Joyce,
Berlioz, Marcus Aurelius, Tolstoy, Rose, Kant, Tennessee Williams, Amos,
Crane, Toynbee, Wharton, Hegel, Cavafy, Schmitt, Celan, Shankara,
Heisenberg, Gibbon, Luther, Frost, Anaxagoras, Nabokov, Adorno, Conrad,
Naipaul, Euripides, Ramanuja and many others.

About the Author

Mr. James E. Winder

Mr. James E. Winder was born on June 16, 1953, in Athens, Tennessee, and
graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1975 with a B.A. in
philosophy and literature. He earned an M.A. in philosophy from Purdue
University in 1980.

James Winder spent the lion’s share of his career as a mid-level
manager and intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency (NSA),
where he retired in 2013 after 30 years of service. At NSA, Mr.
Winder’s most noteworthy assignment was in 1991-1992, when he served
as Assistant Director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board (PFIAB). During that time, he co-authored a report for President
George H.W. Bush on intelligence lessons learned during the first Gulf War
and provided extensive research and documentation on a wide range of other
matters of great interest to the PFIAB board members. In a special
commendation, then Acting PFIAB Chairman, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, cited Mr.
Winder for his “expert advice to the President of the United
States” and for his “extremely incisive and timely contributions
on some very complex issues.”

During three decades at NSA, Mr. Winder produced three classified,
book-length studies, most notably including a comprehensive report on an
important topic, which won NSA’s annual Cryptologic Literature Award.
In addition, he wrote a wide variety of other in-depth reports on Soviet
intelligence, terrorism, and technical threats to U.S.
telecommunications.

Mr. Winder is also the author of The History of Eternity, a series of
philosophic meditations in poetic form, which is, according to Mr. Winder,
the cryptic story of his life and the lives of many others. There is –
in the history of philosophy and literature – no other work that is
akin to it in nature and scope.

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Moose Ridge Virtual Book Tour

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Moose Ridge, Book 1 – Ending to Beginning

 

Inspirational Fiction / Women’s Fiction

Date Published: 08-02-2021

Publisher: Champagne Book Group

 

 

Faced with hardship and heartbreak, Jazmine finds solace and hope amidst
the hallowed halls of Harvard. Raised in a world of privilege that swiftly
crumbled beneath her feet, she emerged from the ashes as a foster child,
forever marked by the scars of her past. But fate has a way of weaving
unexpected blessings into the tapestry of our lives.

Embarking on a new chapter alongside Michael, a promising medical student,
Jazmine is finally poised to seize the idyllic future she has fought so hard
for. Leaving behind the familiar streets of Boston and New York, she
ventures into uncharted territory – the vast, untamed landscapes of Wyoming
– where Michael will complete his rigorous neurosurgical residency.
It’s a profound turning point, the culmination of Jazmine’s
unwavering dedication and boundless determination. For once, the universe
aligns with her dreams, assuring her that this time will be different.

But just as life teeters on the precipice of fulfillment, an unforeseen
letter shatters Jazmine’s newfound happiness, thrusting her into a
whirlwind of uncertainty. The fates conspire to test her strength once more,
as she grapples with overwhelming choices and unstoppable forces that
threaten to unravel all of her dreams.

“MOOSE RIDGE: ENDING TO BEGINNING” is a poignant tale of
resilience and the indomitable spirit of the human heart. It is a story that
will transport you from the towering spires of Harvard to the rugged plains
of Wyoming, and ultimately deep into the depths of emotion. Join Jazmine on
a transformative journey, as she learns that the true measure of triumph
lies not in the fairytale endings we crave, but in the unexpected beginnings
that arise from the ashes of our shattered dreams. 

Moose Ridge tablet

EXCERPT

He gives a sort of snort and turns to me. “Are you forgetting something?”

“I don’t think so. You said we needed to wait until the stallion is awake and eating. You can open the gates, and we can start back. Can’t we?”

“Are you forgetting we’re low on fuel?”

“Not at all. You said it was fine since it never used the gas. We’re okay, right?”

“Not quite. Yes, you never used the gasoline, but we’re thirty miles from anyone who might have diesel and at least forty miles from a fuel station.”

“Okay, what’s the problem?”

“The tank with the diesel has less than an eighth. I doubt we’d get ten miles with this rough terrain. The engine might be fine, but we have no fuel to get anywhere. The diesel in the other is mixed with gasoline so it’s useless.”

“Wait…you mean we’re stuck out here?” I almost scream. This can’t be. “There’s nowhere to get gas?”

“Except we don’t need gas, we need diesel. We have plenty of gas. Twelve gallons of the stuff, wasn’t it?” He must think his smirk is cute.

“Hold it. I’ve got my cell. I’ll call someone and have them bring us diesel.”

“That would be great.”

Is he snickering? With a glare his way, I select the phone app. 

“You might want to check for a connection before you bother dialing,” he says with obvious sarcasm.

I check, and there’s nothing. Not even one bar. “There’s no connection! How can this be?”

“Might be because the closest cell tower is, oh, I don’t know, forty miles from here.” Again, with his snicker. He sits watching the horses like there’s nothing to worry about.

“You’re not concerned we’re in the middle of nowhere with no phone connection and no gas?”

“Again, we have plenty of gas.” He sits back and pulls his hat down over his eyes. Why is he so smug?

“Fine, no diesel! Happy now?” I huff. “What are you going to do?” I demand.

“Well, I could walk to the nearest ranch and hope they’re home and have diesel. That could take several hours.”

“You mean leave me here alone in this wilderness?” I shake my head vehemently. “Not on your life, buster.”

“You go then. Take the trail back to the road. Hang a right and follow it until you reach a ranch. Can’t be much over thirty miles. I’d stay on the road and go soon, because we’re losing daylight.” His hat is still covering his eyes.

“Are you crazy?” I’m on the edge of panic when I get an idea. “You can ride a horse to the ranch and they can drive you back.” I know there’s always a solution. You must remain calm and consider your options—like they teach so well at Harvard.

“One of those horses?” He’s pointing to the corral.

“Yes, they appear sturdy enough. They run wild all the time. I bet they’re in excellent shape.”

“I’m sure they are. For wild horses—emphasis on wild. As in, they’ve never been ridden. They’ve never even seen a saddle or a bridle, let alone worn them, which matters little since we have neither. Believe me, no one is riding one of those horses tonight.”

With his comedy routine complete, we revert to sitting in silence. Two can play the silent treatment game. After a while, Jason gets out and opens both gates. Several of the horses are quick moving to the other corral. He hurries back to the truck.

“Shut the door!” I tell him. “You’re letting in the cold air.”

“Wow, for someone who caused all this, you sure are bossy.”

I can’t believe he said that. “You’re saying this is my fault?”

“Um, yeah. You put in the gasoline.”

“And who let me take a truck low on gas…I mean diesel?” How can he blame this on me?

“The one who knew he had half a tank of diesel.”

“Right, half a tank. In a truck getting ten miles per gallon. Not even enough for a hundred miles when we’re close to a hundred fifty miles from home.” The audacity of him accusing me.

“Yes, a hundred miles’ worth, and we’re forty miles from the fuel station. We could make it twice, but someone put gasoline in the tank, so now it’s worthless except for starting forest fires.”

“You mean the extra tank you never mentioned, or that the truck needed diesel, I might add. No, sir, this is not my fault. It’s all on you.” This ends the conversation.

“I’m sorry, I thought they covered reading at Harvard.” Seems he didn’t get the hint. “It says it on the flap you opened to get to the cap, beside the cap you removed to pump the fuel, and believe it or not, even on the cap itself. We should write Ford and let them know about their lack of explicit markings.”

“Great, you agree, it wasn’t my fault. Now we’re getting somewhere.” I’m glad he’s coming to his senses. “Now, how are you getting us out of here?” When I glance over, he’s snickering—again—which gets louder, and soon, he’s in borderline hysterics. “You find this funny?”

 

About the Author

Craig Hastings

Born in Muncie, IN, Craig is as typical middle-America as they come. He was
young when his parents divorced and his grandmother came to live with him,
his mother, and two sisters. Seeing his grandmother’s faith in God on
a regular basis led him to accept and know everything is okay, God’s
in charge.

Craig served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and followed this as a DoD
contractor where he had multiple tours overseas and around the U.S. While
there were events in his life that tested his faith in God, nothing compared
to when his first son was born with major medical issues. As a
twenty-one-year-old father with a young devastated wife, his faith had never
been tested more. After enduring several surgeries, some considered
experimental, his son passed away at six months and two weeks. But even in
his brief life, he had a tremendous impact on Craig and others.

Since then, God has blessed Craig with two more sons and has been a
constant guidance in his life. Craig’s time in the military and as a
contractor afterward included over 20 years overseas, where he was part of
local mission churches. On their last return to the states, God led him and
his wife to Oklahoma, where he teaches Bible studies and serves in a local
church.

The memory of what God did to help him through his parent’s divorce,
his son’s illness and death, and many other events in his life, has
led him to want to share what impact God had and has with him.

Nowhere are we promised a life without tragedies, setbacks, problems, or
devastating events we have no control over, but God’s word does
promise, ‘It’s okay, God’s in charge.’

 

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