Brigands Be Done

I am officially done with all 62,000 words and something like 250 pages of my porny re-write of Brigands of the Moon. It's been uploaded and it should go live tomorrow.

Those last five chapters with the lamest battles ever were the worst to porn up but I think after hacking out 9/10ths of the original battle scenes and adding in my own crap I've solved the problem. I had fully intended on finishing it and uploading it last weekend but it was like 150 degrees and the last thing I wanted to do in that kind of heat was to write about nekkid sweaty people touching each other. Ew.

The cover has been slightly re-done, mostly just shifting the title around to balance it out a little better. I searched for a better image but most old science fiction pulp covers don't have much in the way of couples maybe almost making out so it was either stay with the weird giant nekkid space people or have a straight adventure cover. I'd rewritten it from straight adventure (with an awkward, sappy romance) to smut so I needed the cover to reflect that. I guess.

Here's my original from way back when it was meant to be a serial. No difference in the images but the new cover isn't all bottom-heavy like this one. The yellow titles visually weigh it down--I could've probably gotten away with the main title on the new cover being yellow since it was moved to the top, but I was too lazy to look up how to make outline block text in GIMP.

So there.

Back to writing Racy Rocket Adventures. I've got some Space Marines and the Moon Pope sitting around all impatient for something to do. Hope I can remember what it was I had planned for them.

Woops.

I also fixed the table of contents for the Spicy Science Stories Collection. For some reason the link to "Some Ill Planet Reigns" linked to "Too much to Handle" instead, which wasn't the worst mistake I could have made but it was way too stupid to leave in

Coming up: Two more Captain Futures and another crapload of wtf.

Better Tasting and Good For You

Spicy Science Stories Collection is now live as are the new covers on all the old titles, or at least they'd better be. The stories in the collection are the same as the previously-published shorts but with the formatting cleaned up and a shmancy cover.

Now back to the soul-sucking nightmare that is Brigands of the Moon which is looking like it'll be about 250 Kindle pages when it's all said and done, about a third of which is my own input. The next time I think I want to porn up a public domain novel the original had better only be about 40 pages total, goddammit.

EDIT: While procrastinating on Brigands I made this NOOK button thingy for my book list.

Hacked Apart

Nearly done crapping up Brigands of the Moon. I've got a couple more chapters, then I can make a new cover and hopefully I'll be done with it this weekend so I can get back to the Space Marines and their strange quest for the missing Moon Pope.

The worst of Brigands was whittling things down to a more manageable size, things like distilling a three-page fight scene down to a half a page and completely taking out the same exact goddamn fight scene but told from a different person's perspective and at least two pages longer. I'm all like, fuck that shit, I can't make this funny twice. I'm having a hard enough time making it funny one time.

If I've learned anything from this exercise it's how to pork up a decent 30-page story to make a snoozy four-part epic. Jiminy fucking crickets.

Just uploaded the Spicy Science Stories Collection, complete with a fancy new cover design which then made all the rest of the Spicy Science Stories look like ass what with their lame pixilated bullshit fonts and everything.

I'm thinking of doing a print version of this one using Amazon's CreateSpace but I haven't bothered to click on the link to see the specs yet. I want altered illustrations and fake ads and a fancy table of contents. We'll see. 

Here's the inspiration for the design. Of course it's a magazine series I don't have any issues of. I've been too lazy to look for that one on eBay but I'm kind of intrigued by a 720 page magazine. That's closer to a Sears catalog than a pulp mag. Obviously paper shortages weren't yet in effect in 1943.

Just for shiggles, here's one super crappy old cover and the new version whose floating doodads and such could use some tweaking but I'm going to say it's done. I have no idea what's up with the title banner for the one on the left. I think I liked the Startling Stories font for about a week, then persisted in using it to keep the covers consistent even though I hated its stinking guts by then. Really, it was like I thought I wasn't allowed to change a goddamn cover midway through a series.

The older ones were done in a lame graphics program on a very old Windows laptop since I hadn't figured out how to load my three bazillion fonts in Linux at the time. Really, what's the point of having cool fonts if you can't use them? Once I found out how to do that the new covers were easily fixed up in GIMP, which I should've been using in the first place since the old graphics program had some serious issues with scaling a pasted image like the title and making it look bad.

The Spicy Science Stories series all looks like this now, or it will once all the new uploaded covers go live, and since some covers only had one version saved the conversion was a little clumsy. Others I still had the image saved one step before I started throwing up text all over it.

My new blog banner was also done in GIMP one afternoon a couple weeks ago when I was pretending to work on Brigands of the Moon. For some reason it blurs a little in the mobile version of the blog, like the resolution goes squirrely, but if I reduce the image size so it looks good on mobile it doesn't center at all on the web version. I default to the web version so the hell with mobile.

The original image came from the Letters section of Fantastic Story, Summer 1950. Fantastic Story reprinted older fiction from Wonder Stories magazine when it was sold to Beacon Publications and renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories. This particular illustration has a goofy 1940s SF feel to it so I had to appropriate it for my own nefarious uses, though I really should've done hand-lettered text. Shame I have no idea where my old lettering manuals are and I can only find the box of nibs for my lettering pen but no fucking pen.

Next up: Two new Captain Future synopses and some impressions of the first chunk of Triplanetary, the first book of the Lensman epic by E.E. Smith.

Fan-Freakin'-Tastic

Halfway through part 2 of my ruination of Brigands of the Moon. I thought if I went out of town for a week I'd get all the editing done but all I managed was the first 23 out of 47 pages. Ehhh.

Since I haven't yet read anything in this Fantastic Story I can't decide if this guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together. He does somehow look pretty incompetent at whatever it is he's up to which is why I used him as a Spicy Science Stories cover version of Dr. Miles Long.

Judging by those out-of-control nipples it must be awful cold on that spaceship. Perhaps that guy's jerry-rigging the heating system.

Science fiction fans must be plenty willing to sell nylons to make a little extra cash to buy more science fiction. Or hamsters.

The new wonder animal! Delightful! Disposable! Buy 'em by the bag!

This mysterious ad must be aimed at victims of industrial accidents who want to work for "Uncle Sam." Maybe this faceless creeper will come to your house personally for "Examinations." "I Want You," he wheezes through his face-hole.

New Story Uploaded

I just uploaded the sixth and final installment in the Spicy Science Stories series "Some Ill Planet Reigns." Cover is the corrected one found here.

Available for download at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The threesome from "Three On An Asteroid" just took over the damn thing since they can't seem to keep their hands (or mouths or junk) off each other. Usually I have an idea what I want to happen in a story but I don't do an outline or make detailed notes because I kinda let the characters do what they want. There may be a particular thing I want the scenes to have but everything else is written as it happens. If the characters really click then there's no controlling them.

Filthy fictional space people! No wonder Colonel Lingus is so damn cranky all the time.

Hard Rocket

Finished with Spicy Science Stories no. 6, "Some Ill Planet Reigns" and I'll be giving it one last once-over before I upload it. I'm certain I'll find more typos and syntax errors when I read through the preview because I always do, goddammit.

I'm also going with Racy Rocket Adventures as the umbrella title of the new erotic space opera series. I won't be completely dropping the crew of the USS Mike Hunt since they inhabit the same universe as this new set of stories so they'll turn up in a story or two. Still have to work on some names for the main characters and decide on a logo for the covers.

I changed a blog font a couple days ago and suddenly everything defaulted to Comic Sans. I suspect that's a cruel joke perpetuated by the code monkeys working for Blogger. Some rummaging around in the HTML and everything seems to be straight for now though Comic Sans still pops up for a few seconds if your connection is slow. If I can find it hiding in the code I'll yank it out by its tiny little balls and stomp on it for a while. The good thing is that the HTML rummaging makes the blog's mobile version look more like the desktop one, as if anyone ever cared.

Hack, Hack, Hack Away

Spicy Science Story no. 6 "Some Ill Planet Reigns" is working up to be the filthiest of the lot somehow. I think it's because when fictional characters have good chemistry with each other they run away with your plot and do bad, bad things to it. Thus is the case with the triad from "Three On An Asteroid," Corporal Buck Nekkid and Ensigns Gemma Moorcock and I.P. Freely. They've gone at it like rabbits to the point that I'll have to turn the hose on them just to get back to my actual plot, the exploration of some weird planet or other which was originally where the real kinky stuff was meant to happen but to other crew members with ummm, something else.

I dunno what the deal is. Even though they're fun to write, like Dr. Miles Long and batshit-crazy Dr. Luscious O'Quim, Buck Nekkid's kind of a tool and not even a likeable tool so I have no idea how they've managed to take over the story. 

Spankings all around, then.

Now on to non-filthy stuff... Captain Future, Quest Beyond the Stars (Radio Archives link is working again). I bought this one because I thought the cover was cool, my other favorites being the one for The Seven Space Stones and Magic Moon, neither of which I've found an affordable copy of yet. This is the first one where the cover image has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual story plot. No monster men capture Joan since she's barely mentioned and there aren't even any monster men, Grag doesn't get busted up by monster men, and Captain Future doesn't wear this weird anti-grav floaty contraption to threaten monster men with his proton pistol. Dammit, I've really wanted to find out what the fuckity-fuck is going on ever since I saw the cover last year but that ain't gonna happen unless I reanimate the corpse of Earle Bergey and ask him what the hell he was doing when he painted it. 

I can do that, right? No? Lovecraft was lying? Balls.

Back to the novel. Otho doesn't mention the girl who died saving his life in The Lost World of Time, even though he was so pissed off he killed two people so he should've mentioned her at least once. Capt. Future decides to save the people of Mercury by taking off for a few months to the center of the universe because for some reason he thinks the way to save their planet is to go like a billion light-years away on a wild goose chase otherwise these Mercurians would all have to live on other planets. Seems nobody thinks there's enough room to spread them out on all the other planets in the system, their moons and all the asteroids which have breathable atmospheres. Really, Mercury isn't that big so it's not like these refugees will suck up all your air and eat all your food, you jerkass people. 

He also doesn't mention to anyone he's going, not even solar system President Carthew. Did he tell his good friend Planet Police Marshal Ezra Gurney? Nope. He'd just tell him it's too risky. Did he tell his imaginary girlfriend Joan Randall? Hell no, the pod people took Danger!Joan back and gave Curt a replacement Cardboard!Joan who doesn't do anything more than gush over Capt. Future. Danger!Joan would've called him a big red-headed idiot and gone with him because it sounded like a fun adventure.

Anyhow, he eventually reaches the birthplace of the universe and finds a machine that makes stuff out of nothing, supposedly by rearranging atoms to make matter or something so after preventing a war between two planets who both want this fantastical doodad so they can use it to kill each other he copies the machine to take back to help the people of Mercury since it can make the minerals they need to support their atmosphere generators. Like it somehow isn't a horrible idea to hand over a contraption that can literally whip up out of nothing all the weapons or riches or crack you'd ever want.

To continue, this crapola leads to the next novel, Outlaws of the Moon. Curt and his Futuremen have been away for six months saving Mercury so he's been declared dead and a mining company is digging up the moon looking for his secret moon base so they can steal all Captain Future's cool moon stuff. They find a hitherto unknown cache of radium that Future didn't want anyone to know about so it could be used when the system ran out, but the evil mine owner tells everyone Future has been hoarding it, which technically he has.

Isn't saving shit for later the raison d'être of a hoarder's very existence? "I'm saving that rotten meat for later!" screams the crazy lady on at least two-thirds of all the episodes of Hoarders. On the other third they're screaming that they're saving all those cats for later.

Whatever. Captain Future turns up to tell the President of the solar system he's not dead (and Joan gets her second weak-ass kiss) so they can stop digging up the moon but the mine owner convinces one of his lackeys that he'll be cut out of the radium profits unless he kills the President and frames Captain Future for it. Yup, it all comes down to assassination for radium profits so that means a radium monopoly for Capt. Future to bust up. I should start calling this series Captain Anti-Trust. 

Grag also calls the mine owner a "lying four-flusher" which if you didn't already know this was written in the early 1940s you certainly do now.

So Curt and the Futuremen are on the run from the law, blah blah blah, they sneak back to the moon and find Moon Men who've been hiding underground all this time and Curt and the guys never noticed. He clears his name yadda yadda yadda. The End.

The cover has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot, just the last couple pages after everything is tied up in a neat bow. Curt decides to go back home for a nice long rest, not bothering to say goodbye to Joan who goes on an expedition with Grag and Otho while goofing off from their job of relocating all the Moon Men to one of the moons of Jupiter. You know, one of those places that didn't want any of those filthy Mercurian refugees. They wind up trapped in a diving bell on the bottom of the ocean and he has to rescue them from Jovian sea people. I particularly love the expression on his face. It's the same one someone stoned out of their gourd has when they're concentrating really hard on appearing normal.

Weirdly, in the next novel that I just started, The Comet Kings, he suddenly loves Cardboard!Joan. You really gotta worry about these home schooled guys. Two kisses that barely add up to first base and suddenly he's in love. Jeez. Again, I have no idea when this happened since any time she's around he barely speaks to her except to argue and when he's sitting around with no monopolies to break up he doesn't call her up to go on another half-assed date. Two wimpy kisses do not equal any sort of expression of, well, anything. In The Comet Kings he rushes up to hug her, which he's never done, but he can't because she's electrified and he gets all morose about it. Y'know, like that hug he should've given her months ago when she turned up with the Futuremen that time he was stranded in another dimension but all he did was give her that pathetic light kiss, like he was afraid to get her girl cooties or something.

I'll end this with the very first description of synthetic rubbery man Otho from the unpublished original two chapters of the first Captain Future novel "The Horror on Jupiter," which was rewritten as Captain Future and the Space Emperor.

 

I'll also offer this comment about Simon Wright, otherwise known as the Brain, who raised Curt with the nekkid rubbery Otho and Grag the spanking robot. It may help to explain the romantically confused Captain Future.

 

Now back to writing some truly filthy comedy space porno. Heh-heh-heh.

New and Barely Improved Cover

Here's the new cover for Spicy Science Stories no. 6. Yaaay, now I can finish writing the goddamn thing and be done with this series.

The old cover was pretty much crap and this one has slightly less crap on it. At least there aren't any unnecessary Benday dots, though the pixilation on the background guy bothers the hell out of me.

Let's see, interrupted threesome, scary thing, badly-placed title bar with lame Shakespearean reference nobody cares about. Check, check, and check.

I've got some ideas for how I'll lay out the collected Spicy Science Stories for CreateSpace. If I'm going to bother doing a print version I may as well do an entire interior layout similar to 1940s pulps and play with the illustrations and throw in some old advertising parodies and letters and stuff. Don't tell me you never bought Wacky Packages and read old Mad Magazines as a kid and got way too into the fake ads.

If I can get the computer with my Adobe Suites running I can use InDesign for it, otherwise I'll have to download some open-source thing like Scribus. If I'm gonna crap it up I should crap it up big-time professional style.

When I'm done with Spicy Science Stories I've got two other planned erotica series (serieses?) that should run concurrent with each other, one the new space opera Something Rocket Whatever (title pending) and the other a cheesy one with 1940s co-eds who run afoul of tentacled things and swamp monsters and whatever else that runs loose in the woods near the college.

She Dood It

Finally figured out what to do with Truly Wetsnatch and her space crabs and that completely changes my idea for the cover of Spicy Space Stories No.6. I also hadn't intended on giving Ensign Wetsnatch any part in this story other than a mention but she got in there anyway, the skank. The original cover was scrapped, of course, but I was only going to find similar images instead of flushing the entire thing down the crapper.

The 67-452G Atomic Space Crapper, of course.

Hacking Away at Part 6

Hacking away because yes, I am a hack.

Cover to part 6 scrapped due to general lousiness. Feh. Despite that, the plot is chugging along nicely, though I wish I'd started earlier in the weekend so I could spend today editing it instead of wasting a day and a half on a primo sucky cover. I've lazily only gotten about 5 of the planed 25 pages done so boo hiss.

New character, the eternally disgusted-by-life Dr. Will B. Hard, an atmospheric expert newly arrived onboard for the expedition to unexplored planet 956-UX. He'll be part of one group with some other crew members I haven't decided on yet. Probably not important who they are since he won't be interacting with them.

Also exploring the planet, or more specifically exploring each other, are the threesome from "Three on an Asteroid." They're fun to write for no reason I can think of and I guarantee they won't get anything scientific accomplished whatsoever. 

I've figured out what to do with Colonel Lingus but not Truly Wetsnatch. I'm pretty sure an amusing plot twist will pop into my head while I'm at work and I'll be choking on coffee. No point in explaining this to my employer because she would not be amused in the least by my moonlighting as a porno writer. 

shrugs

Yeah, whatever dude. 

 

In other news nobody cares about, I've discovered the Comet has acceleration and brake pedals which I find hilarious. It was described a great deal in Captain Future, Star Trail to Glory but I only just now found this diagram. I should totally steal this idea since I'd already written in "All Aboard!" that Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman prefers flying ships with a manual transmission but I didn't have any idea that was a serious thing in old-timey SF.

Looks like Captain Future flies an automatic, which in 1941 would've branded him a total girly-man.

Next space opera to read when I'm done with the Captain Future series will be Edward E. "Doc" Smith's epic The Skylark of Space which is supposed to be, like, so totally crammed with super-science. I found the first book free on Gutenberg so let's see how that works out. Seems like I had part of his Lensman series downloaded but I must've dreamed it or it leaked out of my Kindle into the aether of space.

I've considered reading some of the Buck Rogers strips and Flash Gordon but I don't have any patience with reading comics on the bus. Flash Gordon also doesn't wear pants so I'd just be sniggering at the poor guy, like one does whenever grown men scamper around in their Underoos.

Spicy Science Stories no. 6 Cover Preview

I think I've got the elements and the general layout of this cover right, just not the exact images. The girl doesn't look happy enough and I'm really hating on that low-rez control panel thingy. I'm also not sure why I picked an exaggerated Benday dots background for the viewscreen.

Fuck it, lets scrap the whole thing. Happier nudie chick and new control panel. Lose the Benday dots. The grope-y plant can stay as well as the guy who's not certain whether what he's seeing is exciting in a good way or a bad way. I could probably even ditch the window and control panel altogether.

Cursing at LibreOffice while it almost downloads and then doesn't, and wondering where my wifi hotspot went for about two hours isn't helping me like this one at all. Besides having  a despised cover, it's also the last story in the series and I don't have a good ending. Like, what do I finally do about Ensign Truly Wetsnatch's sentient space crabs? How do I resolve Colonel Lingus's emotional dilemma? Crap crap crappity crap. Writing porn shouldn't be this hard.

Hard. Heh. Maybe that's the problem. Nobody's hard.

So long as we're hating on stuff why don't we focus that hate on the Scrappy Doo of the Captain Future series, Johnny Kirk. This annoying brat stowed away on Future's ship at the beginning of Magician of Mars and Curt doesn't seem to be able to comprehend that if he simply locked the fucking doors he wouldn't have had to to deal with this smug little monster. Really.

One day Curt's going to park the Comet in New York because the president of the solar system can't solve his own problems, then when he goes back out to the lot it'll be stripped clean and sitting on cinder blocks, all because he never locks the damn thing. Or somebody'll take it joyriding and he'll find it parked sideways in an alley, the hull covered in that lame graffiti only suburban white kids do.

Thankfully Johnny Kirk's only in one episode so maybe Grag crushes his skull at the end like he used to do at the beginning of the series. I miss the skull crushing.

Live Collection

I'm on an ant-murdering rampage. I've been spraying them and mashing them one by one and now the kitchen window is piled an inch deep in cinnamon to keep new ones out. They've been stubbornly crawling up three stories just to be disappointed in my cooking and there are fewer ants outside than are in my kitchen at this moment.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide whether to do a dual boot of Linux and Windows or Linux only and Virtual Box on the newish notebook. For those who don't give a Jovian rat's ass about that here's some non-nerd news:

Spicy Science Stories Quickies Collection is now live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

"Yaaay," you say sarcastically, giving me the mega-stinkeye. "Now go write something better."

Bah.

I just noticed B&N doesn't allow web addresses in their Meet the Author blurb so I'll have to change all those. Why didn't I notice that a month ago? I was probably napping.

Quickies Collection

First collection just uploaded, all previously published stuff. If you already bought the three stories separately there's no difference in this other than some formatting changes and a fancy new cover.

Now I see I should've bumped the line "Quickies Collection" down a couple notches. My only excuse was that "3 Complete Stories" was originally a lot higher and the font was a few points bigger at one point. I wanted to stick "Reissue" on there somewhere like on the Amazing Stories cover but there wasn't a good place for it.

Here's the inspiration for the cover. I'm getting pretty tired of the gold and red of the Spicy Science Stories series and am looking forward to something a little more off-kilter like this monochromatic one. I was trying to make the stories in the series relate to each other with a similar title font and color scheme but I got tired of it by the third one. I've got some ideas for the next series covers.

Something Rocket Whatever is gonna rule! Maybe!

Corrected Cover Upload

New cover upload, though it isn't that much different than the original except for the change in the bottom banner, which I wouldn't have had to slap on there if I could've found some decent laboratory equipment to hide the figures' non-existent legs. That red text block also could've been smaller.

The two blocks busy it up a bit, though a lot of old pulp mags also have way too much going on with all the story titles and stuff exploding and screaming ladies.

I probably won't be able to correct the Nook version until tomorrow night since it takes B&N a couple days longer to publish than Amazon.

I've had entirely too much coffee this morning and should be picking away at some other project.

11:45 am  Ahhh, nutsack, I just found three typos in the story text I missed when I had read through it, like, a bazillion times yesterday. They're minor but to me each one is a vast bowl of pus. New upload of that once the cover goes live.

April 12, 2016  All versions, cover and text, now uploaded, corrected and beaten vigorously with a stick until they screamed for mercy.

New Story Now Live

The fifth in the Spicy Science Stories series (try saying that three times fast) Too Much to Handle is now live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Looking at the cover I see again I totally failed to put "scienfornication" anywhere on it or in the text like I'd planned. The bottom banner should read "A Thrilling New Scienfornication Story" instead of the lackluster "A Thrilling Story of Science Gone Wrong." So, meh. I also inexplicably left out the "Buy Dirty Books For Victory" banner I wasted a whole ten minutes making. I haven't decided whether to fix the first problem yet, or more correctly, I've decided to fix it but I can't be bothered to pull up Gimp and re-upload the cover image.

Anyhow, this entry finishes up the Landica Station arc, though I doubt it's actually an arc if you only have two stories so let's just say it's a straight line between two fixed points instead. Furthermore, isn't "Landica" a pretty name?  Name something fancy after it, like a country club or a golf course or your new baby, then Google it. Heh.

Because I continue to be a terrible person I'm giving you something else to snigger at, this cover which could double as the sales catalog for an interstellar marital aid store, probably called something like The Pleasure Planet.

Coincidentally, the Pleasure Planet is the next stop in Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones, though it's only a huge casino on an asteroid that's been pushed out beyond the jurisdiction of the Planet Police by means of giant rockets, rather than an intergalactic whorehouse which sounds more like a half-remembered episode of Lexx.

 

The Pleasure Planet looks like the kind of place where a guy could stare all day at a table-mounted disco ball while stuffing himself at the all-you-can-eat Junior Mints bar.

Ahh, I see Dr. Yueh comes clear across the galaxy just for the Pleasure Planet's Junior Mints.

Because I amuse easily, here's a bit more on Otho, the jerkass artificial rubbery guy. If you look at the covers he's featured on you'll notice he's always behind something. Why? Because he's NEKKID. He's usually described as wearing only a belt, which holds his proton pistol so he can kill people. Lots and lots of people.

So on Captain Future's first date with Joan Randall he brings along a jerkass artificial rubbery nekkid guy. Even Miss Manners would say you should wait until at least the second date before suggesting a threesome.

I'll see myself out.

Update and a Preview

Back in business with my favorite IBM notebook, though what I thought was a hard drive issue turns out to be a dying backlight in the screen. It would randomly black out and I'd force a shutdown, unplug it in disgust, then work on something else. I hadn't really been using this particular one since the middle of last year because I've been too chintzy to buy another hard drive since I'd already replaced this one about a year ago.

Last weekend I had the screen at just the right angle to where I could see a faint screen image so I did a search on the ThinkPad forums and found the issue as well as a temporary workaround. I've disabled a couple settings and though it still boots up pinkish it no longer permanently shuts the screen down so I can continue to write amusing awfulness with it until I get a replacement LCD screen on eBay. It's a cheap fix, less than $20, and looks easy to do, once you get the plastic screen bezel out without cracking it, which I'm pretty sure I'll do but I can conveniently scrounge another one of those on eBay as well.

Oddly, the issue I was having last week with LibreOffice's disappearing spell check and thesaurus has inexplicably fixed itself.  Dunno what's up with that but so long as it works until I can upgrade Xubuntu I'm happy. Happy-ish. Not angry anyway.

I was going to leave what's on the screen visible in the photo but it's the mega-lousy original start to the beginning of the story. Now it starts only partially lousy.

The laptop that suddenly died a couple weeks ago hasn't revived itself no matter how many times I hold down the power button like the internets say to do so rather than a polyfuse resetting itself it looks like it's the power supply doodad. Since it's an Asus and I'm not familiar with the innards of those I'm grabbing yet another ThinkPad notebook on eBay, though one just a couple years old instead of over a decade so I'll have something that will run my Adobe suites since Linux doesn't play well at all with InDesign. The hard drive of the Asus will go into one of those case dealies and will function as storage, or at least it will until I drop it and kill it.

Here's the preview cover of Too Much to Handle. I've been writing this particular story for entirely too long, starting it last Thursday then getting stuck and spending the rest of my weekend angrily knitting because I had my hilarious (to me) ending but I didn't feel like writing the bits in the middle. I was pretty bored with the storyline a week ago but I'm insanely thrilled with how it came out yesterday during the final draft. Dr. Luscious O'Quim is especially batshit crazy this time around.

This particular cover took about four hours of crippling cut-and-paste with a mouse and fiddling and fumbling and cursing before I was reasonably happy with it. It also uses images from at least six different pulp covers and some half-assed lightning. Dr. O'Quim alone took two separate images. I also found another handful of retro mid-century fonts free for commercial use and the cover is gradually transitioning in style over to what I'll use for the Spicy Science Stories collection. Something Rocket Whatever will have a different style cover, maybe with a dorky rocket logo like the old Super Science Stories pulp mag.

I'm completely certain this'll get adult flagged even though she's got on something vaguely resembling a neon bikini underneath all that crap lightning.

I'm totally hating on the cover to All Aboard! right now but I can't be bothered to do anything about it.

Quickie no.3, All Aboard!

Here's the slightly altered cover I went with, which didn't help matters one whit. I fought with the plot, the characters and the porn, despite my thinking writing Quickies would help when I was drowning in a writing rut.  Ha.

I left it alone for a couple days because the laptop had died, then slouched on the sofa with the IBM and banged out a plot only very slightly what I had intended when I wrote myself into a corner with the title already posted at the end of Zero G-Spot.  It went in a rather unexpectedly, ummm, wet direction.

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Quickie no. 3

"All Aboard!" has finally been uploaded and should go live on Amazon early tomorrow.  I wound up having to edit it on the Kindle after fighting with three different laptops, one being completely dead now.

I'll have the links here when I update the post once the Nook version goes live-- they tend to take around 72 hours no matter what.  Amazon now takes maybe 4-5 hours for each story I've published.

Updated Quickie no. 2

I didn't feel like Quickie no. 2 "Zero G-Spot" was strong enough so I did a rewrite and just now uploaded the new manuscript. It usually only takes Amazon a few hours to post any changes so the corrected version should go live sometime before 5:00 pm EST.

I could've said the hell with it and left it but I didn't want a snoozy load of crap with a great cover floating around out there with my name on it, even for 99¢. It was porny, yes, but just not porny enough.

Update:  New version is now live!

New Scienfornication Story Preview

The word "scienfornication" is a play on Amazing Stories' awesome "Scientifiction" logo ("scientifiction" was the term used before "science fiction"). Why not? There's science. There's fornication. No reason why I shouldn't cram both words together into an ungodly portmanteau.

I remembered to put "scienfornication" on the cover of The Empress of Orgazma, then forgot to put it on any of the others. Go me!

Here's a preview of the cover of Quickie no. 3: All Aboard! which should go live by the 21st.

"A Thrilling New Scienfornication Story."  Yeah, this cover's totally getting flagged as "adult" despite having her naughty bits covered by text and whatnot, though her whatnots aren't completely hidden.

Science!