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.

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.

Captain Sensible

I've now got a copy of my favorite Captain Future cover/magazine in my filthy, sweaty hands and I'm thrilled that it has an embarrassing full-page ad for some dubious health product on the back. I'd have been disappointed if it didn't.

I love that it's called "Pyro." I'm pretty sure that means it burns like fuck when you pour it in your mouth, but back in the olden days if a treatment didn't hurt when you used it or burn your eyes when you smelled it that meant it wasn't working. I wouldn't have been surprised if the doctors back then offered to give you a Hurtz Donut when you came to the office.

Remember, if Pyro doesn't save your teeth you get your money back which you can use to buy false teeth by mail from one of the convenient ads inside.

Now, this has always bugged me about pulps, this sloppy cover flapping around. They're always lined up on the top edge but the bottom usually wraps around the pages. I know I'd be trimming the stupid thing when I got it home from the newsstand like way back in 1941 because I'm weird like that. Seems like I've got one some obsessive teenager trimmed up all nice back in the day but I'll be damned if I can find it. Maybe I considered buying it instead of actually buying it.

To recap, this issue is the one where the Futuremen joined the circus and the plot was totally batshit crazy. Curt goes on a lame date with Joan and Otho, the guys think Captain Future is dead and bury somebody else, there's all kinds of goofy disguises, Curt builds a transmitter out of leaves or something, and they go to the Pleasure Planet which disappointingly is only a casino where nobody wins anything. This was one of the few original novels that wasn't reprinted as a paperback in the 60s, though it didn't make any sense to leave out the best one with Ul Quorn and reprint the yawn-enducing Magician of Mars. I haven't read the third Ul Quorn story, The Solar Invasion, yet but the consensus seems to be that Manly Wade Wellman did a mondo sucky job at it.

Anyhow, here's this awesome drawing of circus Curt in a cage full of wild Venusian swamp tigers which, honestly, looks like what happens when I come home from work but it's just the one cat.

Even though nobody asked, Otho's still nekkid.

Hacking Away

EDIT: 7-13-2016. After reading the last couple parts of the original Brigands of the Moon I realized just how tedious this damn thing is, so I decided to take down part 1 of my porn mashup version and condense the next three installments into one chunk, then republish the whole thing as one 100-150 page novel. I can fix the cover I've been hating on and be done with this fool's exercise so I can get back to the Space Marines and the Moon Pope.

Part 1 of my horrifically filthy mashup Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan is now live. 

I keep wanting to yell at the couple on the cover to open their damn mouths when they kiss but that ain't gonna happen. Really, it looks like a goddamn Captain Future novel. Besides that, I'm not very happy at how bottom-heavy and unbalanced the cover is--I probably should've put the secondary title up at top right instead of the tiny Victory banner or lightened up the bottom half so it was the same value as the faded-out couple. I might just leave it as is and complain about it endlessly until I finish the second installment.

Part 1 wound up being 49 pages in LibreOffice, compared to 17 for my longest story The Unmentionable Unknown so I was forced to keep it in its serialized format because I've read no one wants to buy a 200 page porn novel. I expect each of the four parts to be around 40-50 pages, whatever that translates to in a Kindle, like 65-75 pages. I could've chopped out most of it but I was enjoying the plot a bit too much and the erotic elements just plopped easily into it without much of a struggle. Yeah, this serial just gave it up like that. Slut.

Anyhow, here's a synopsis-type thingy.

Mutiny and brigandage stalk the Space-ship Planetara as she speeds to the Moon to pick up a fabulously rich cache of radium-ore! But while danger looms, the passengers and crew are found with their pants down—literally. Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan purports to be the true story of what really went on behinds the scenes of this notorious mutiny, in the words of the Planetara's third officer.

“I'll introduce myself. My name, Gregg Haljan. My age, twenty-five years. My original narrative of the mutiny and brigandage of the Planetara, the one suitable for family viewing, was broadcast with a fair success but my publishers have suggested that I record the true story, the one more suited for late-night reading with a scantily-clad friend of your choosing––the secret confessions whose sordid details have been scrawled upon washroom walls, whispered by naughty schoolboys, and whose scenes have been recreated, photographed and sold by enterprising salesmen of the back alley sort. It is my wish that these confessions be told properly and any erroneous details corrected––especially those concerning length and girth.”

Startling!

Oh yeah, here's another one I bought because I liked the cover, Startling Stories May 1950. Where do I start in all the what-the-fuckery going on here? Come to think of it, there's also some serious what-the-fuckery going on inside too and I haven't even looked at the ads.

Dang it, is it freezing cold out there on the launch pad or is it pleasantly balmy? You certainly can't tell by what the couple's wearing since she's barely dressed and he's got on mittens. Mittens, on a grown man. I keep looking for the little string that keeps him from losing them but it must be up his sleeves.

Of course there's a weirdly toy-like rocket crash with guys on parachutes flinging themselves out the airlock right into the rocket's flaming exhaust. I would've bought it for that even if it didn't have the Captain Future story "Children of the Sun" which I already had in a paperback reprint of all the Startling Stories short Futures. I guess 1950 was the point when they finally gave up writing honking big space opera novels for pulp mags because people were laughing at them. In the space of a couple of years they went from 100 page novels to 20 page stories.

But the paperback reprint doesn't have the illustrations which meant I would've missed out on this weird flaming nekkid freakout. 

Really, I haven't got the foggiest what's going on here since I'm reading Captain Future stories in order and I've still got a handful to go before I get to this one. The only thing I can say for certain is that Curt is inexplicably nekkid and equally inexplicably on fire. There's also a flaming nekkid woman at the top which I'll assume isn't Joan Randall.

See, this is what happens when you go camping and take brownies from hippies.

It's upset Simon so much that it's wrecked his ability to fly upright. And no, this isn't the first time some layout monkey put the Brain's drawing in upside down. I mean really, you should know nobody ever puts their deely-bobbers on under their mouth.

Just to balance things out, here's another nekkid woman, though she's in a completely different story I also haven't read.

Behold, Racy Rocket Adventures!

I think I finally got Comic Sans exterminated from my blog fonts, dammit.

My newest scienfornication story "The Unmentionable Unknown" is now live on Amazon. Check the new preview thingy in the above image. For some reason it'll only let me do left justification and that empty space to the right is going to bug the living crap out of me.

It's a good deal longer than my longest story "Science With Benefits," maybe 30 pages total. It also has something resembling a real space opera plot that'll be part of the series' story arc with tons of world-building and suchlike. See, it'll be like real SF but with porno. So, so much porno.

I mean erotica, just so it sounds all classy.

Also, I know I said way back here that I wasn't going to use Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman but he wound up in the story anyway, even though he wasn't as dumb as what I needed for the plot. I was originally going to have one big stupid hero who wasn't exactly sure how girls worked, then later I thought it would be better to have different heroes in each story. Spurt's character was already laid out in "All Aboard!" so rather than use a new guy for the first scienfornication tale I recruited him. He seemed to have enjoyed himself and made some women happy along the way.

The second story will have the Space Marines, in case you were wondering. My previously mentioned Ming the Merciless kinda bad guy is set up for the third story. That's what I'm saving the spanking robots for.

Unlike all the others, this series will be exclusive to Amazon--I'm trying out the KDP Select program to see where that gets me.

For anyone who cares, here's the plot synopsis:

For the past six Earth Standard months an inexplicable crime was being perpetrated on travelers daring to venture off the Solar System's busy spaceways. Ships taking a less-traveled route through the asteroid belt would later be found adrift in space, all passengers and crew onboard found in a coma-like sleep with their unmentionables dematerialized off their bodies. Valuables were ignored; it seemed the culprit was only after underpants, skidmarked or clean. What's Solar System President Dirk Gamahuche to do?

To the rescue comes Colonel Burt “Spurt” Jizzman, a former Space Brigade test pilot now working for System Gov as a special agent. Blond, space-tanned and handsome, with a cocksure swagger and a dazzling smile made for a recruiting poster, anyone meeting him either wound up in bed with him or wanted to punch him. Sometimes both.

Colonel Jizzman had never gone undercover before and assumed it must have something to do with bedsheets, perhaps as a perk of being a special agent, and his first encounter with Space Police Constable M'adteats didn't do anything to change that wrongheaded notion. Spurt had tried his sexiest smile, flexed his muscles and strapped his atom-pistol holster to his thigh so it pulled his spacesuit across his crotch just right but nothing seemed to work. He found her disinterest to be completely incomprehensible; most women would've at least undone their tops long before now.

Despite that, he had decided this Constable M'adteats had to be hot for him since she had rare flame-colored eyes and everyone in the System knew Jovian women with flame-colored eyes were sexually dominant and completely insatiable, even if they'd never actually met one. Colonel Jizzman didn't care if Constable M'adteats was dominant or not, he just wanted a crack at a real flame-eyed Jovian.

Will Colonel Jizzman and Constable M'adteats stop this panty thief or will there be too many distractions?

The Unmentionable Unknown is the first installment in the new retro erotic space opera series Racy Rocket Adventures. Expect raunchy Stateroom scenes, kinky alien group activities, panty fetishism and solitary vices. 

New Series!

Presenting the cover of the first entry in my new series Racy Rocket Adventures. I'm going with a suggestive rocket theme for all the stories, like none of the original covers were ever suggestive.

Most of the action in this series will center on the Solar System. Lots of insane world building went on over the weekend, new characters named and turned loose, places vaguely mentioned in the previous series fleshed out. Heh, flesh. Anyhow, this smutty space opera adventure has planets, people, propulsion and poking. Lots and lots of poking.

Test pilot Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman from the story "All Aboard!" will return in "The Unmentionable Unknown" doing a lot of what you'd expect someone named "Jizzman" to do, mainly sticking his junk in anything that sits still long enough. He's another character who's fun to write because he's such a jackass. Not a major tool like Buck Nekkid but completely clueless and full of himself.   

I just need to wrap up the last two scenes and hammer out the linking bit at the end that leads to the next story and it'll go live in approximately three Earth Standard days.

And holy imps of Mars, my blog post font keeps defaulting to Comic Sans  when my connection is slow despite it being something completely fucking different. Dammit.

Mmmm, Pulpy

Not only did 1940s pulps try to sell you false teeth, eyeglasses and trusses by mail, they also made you poop. Observe Betty and Sally gleefully discussing bowel movements or lack thereof. Once Betty has an Ex-Lax or three she's so excited to finally take a dump she's inadvertently revealed herself to be a freaking Toon. 

 

Besides that troubling scene, Startling Stories, January 1940 also has Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, his space opera take on the Three Musketeers, and it has the beginnings of the world he filled out later in the Captain Future novels. I kept wondering why he kept referring to people as "planeteers" thinking maybe it had something to do with pioneers out in the frontier of space but since Captain Future obviously wasn't living on an asteroid in a log cabin plowing his land claim with a robot it didn't make any sense. Musketeers, duh.

  

On to Captain Future, The Comet Kings, whose cover has diddly-squat to do with the plot. I was hoping for some awesome giant bats but I'm disappointed yet again. Joan's creepy eyes show she's right on the verge of revealing that she's a Toon once she's popped a couple Ex-Lax. 

Anyway, someone or something has been snatching ships out of space and nobody can figure out who or why. The Planet Police also doesn't seem to know they should tell everyone not to fly through that part of space so they don't disappear but considering their past incompetence I'm not surprised. Of course Marshal Ezra Gurney and top agent Joan Randall investigate and go missing like everyone else. Because why the fuck not.

It's a wonder the whole solar system hasn't been stolen and sold for scrap.

Because the Planet Police are little more than interplanetary Keystone Kops they're forced to call in Captain Future. He figures out that anyone flying near Halley's Comet disappears so he goes to investigate and is sucked right into the comet. There he finds immortal glowy electrical people, everyone who'd gone missing imprisoned, and some evil race that electrified the Halley's Comet people against their wills for some reason I'm not remembering but isn't at all important for this synopsis. 

Once he finds Joan, who's now an immortal glowy electrical woman he can't touch, Curt gets all grabby and is immediately electrocuted. This should've been comedy fodder but it's played straight with, like, "hungry arms" that can't hold the woman he loves and all. 

Eww. I think I liked them better as a bickering non-couple, frankly.

Joan says there's no way to defeat the glowy electrical people and Curt should get electrified just like she has so they can live there forever which is a way more creative way to trap a guy than getting knocked up. Anyhow, he converts to electricity to fight the bad guys, which would've been hilarious if later they found out Curt was AC and Joan was DC and they were stuck with each other until the end of time, but I'm not writing this so we have to play the cards we're dealt.

The amusing part is that he's agreed to become an electrical glowy thing like her but he works his ass off to figure out how to undo it in a couple of days. He also makes an empty promise to Joan at the end that there's an asteroid with a garden they can live on...one day. Like, when he's defeated all the criminals and broken up all the monopolies in the solar system. So, never. Sorry Joan.

  

I like the Worlds of Tomorrow articles in this magazine which a lot of the pdf downloads don't bother with even though they add a lot to the world building in this series. This particular issue has a map of the Earth after 2027 when volcanic activity went nutso, new mountain ranges formed and earthquakes abounded. Looking at this map I'd advise everyone to sell that waterfront property in Florida right now. I also see digging the Chunnel was a complete waste of time since you'll be able to just walk over to France once the ground stops heaving.

  

The Captain Future pdf downloads also leave out the articles on the Futuremen from that issue, which is a shame because they have a lot of backstory on the characters and some are short adventures, mostly involving young Curt Newton making an ass of himself. This particular one has him turning 18 and leaving the moon for the first time, trying to break up a monopoly on Pluto and getting his clock cleaned. The guy should've visited a Jovian whorehouse instead and gotten his clock cleaned in a completely different way.

  

A couple days ago I found a zip file on the Capitaine Flam site that has all the Futuremen articles so you can read the whole thing without me having to photograph magazine pages. I'd somehow managed to miss it in all the non-English files.

I'll end this post with the tasty back cover of The Comet Kings whose horrific case of athlete's foot seems to have spread to the paper itself.

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.

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.

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.

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!

What's Next?

I'll be posting about each story and collection as they're released with the occasional cover preview and whatever odd thing comes to mind when I'm scrounging around in pulp mags for ideas.  I also have some thoughts about the second series I'm still flip-flopping on a name for.  Something Something Rockets. Rocket Something. Mumble mutter rocket mutter.

makes whooshing rocket noise

I should've started a writing blog months ago but I already have two other blogs in another name and I didn't think I had the time to ignore one more blog because I could spend that time ignoring vacuuming and the dishes in the sink.  If I leave the dishes in the sink long enough they'll eventually evolve into a life form that can run the vacuum.  That's the way science works, right?  Right?!?

Spicy Science Stories

These are the first four full stories and two Quickies in this series. I have the outlines for two more full stories and another Quickie, then these will be published together as a collection sometime in April.

No. 1: Quantum Jacking. I have no idea where this story came from. It could've easily popped into my head at work fully formed when I hadn't had enough coffee and was vulnerable to such nonsense. I'm completely certain I had a fever when I made the cover since my blur tool was twice as many pixels wide as it should've been and I'm reasonably sure I know how to make realistic smoke now.

Looky! Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

No. 2: Circuits of Lust. This one doesn't appear on all Amazon searches because of the 1950s nudie woman cover image so it's been flagged as "adult," as though the others I've put in the Erotica category are somehow not adult.

She does love her mining droids and she's very very adult about it.

Amazon and/or Barnes and Noble.

No. 3: The Empress of Orgazma. This was originally thunk up a couple of years ago.  The main character was either going to be a diplomat or a starship captain with creative ways of diplomacy. I think I started out with the idea that they'd travel to weird planets and this guy would bang aliens so treaties would be signed, but I ran out of aliens after the third planet. Oh, and tentacles!

Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

No. 4: Science With Benefits. This one is my favorite so far. It has a Battletits champion, gangsters, a batshit-crazy lady mad scientist and a cover that mostly appropriates old-timey detective magazines.

Amazon & Barnes and Noble.

Quickie no. 1: Three On An Asteroid. I realized I was spending two weeks per story fighting with plots and not doing anything else so I came up with "Quickies" which are maybe a third the length of the others. They let me play with minor characters and there's less plot but just as much porno as in the longer stories, I mean erotica.  Oh, what the hell, it's fucking porno.

Amazon y Barnes & Noble.
 

Quickie No. 2: Zero G-Spot. Here's another one that doesn't show up on some searches because of the 1950s woman on the cover I unfortunately removed the clothes from. She was barely wearing anything anyway but the character in the story wouldn't have been wearing filmy stuff under her uniform.

Amazon.  Barnes and Noble.