It's Alive!

 



Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan is now live on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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.” 

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.

Brigands Be Damned

I had planned on finishing up the exhausting Brigands of the Moon this afternoon but it kicked my ass and I wound up building a lap desk instead. My laptop fan is now steadily blowing varnish fumes at me and I can taste colors, so there's that.

The main roadblock I had to blast through vis-à-vis Brigands was the last chunk of the original. When you have something like 30 pages (five chapters) of just battles, and not even exciting battles, it's nearly impossible to find places to jam in sex scenes, especially when I don't care anymore.

What I meant to say was, especially when all the characters are on the Moon wearing pressurized space suits. I think I finally figured out how to correct the lame battle dilemma by having the battles go on in the background while the hero is busy and a mite oblivious to them. Maneuvering him and his lady friend indoors and making it so they're not needed for battling Martian radium-thieves was the last monolithic obstacle I had to tip over but by the time I'd done that I had no brain cells left to tie up the loose ends. Well, that and the varnish fumes.

I did comedically crash a space ship into the Moon, though. 

The crux of the nub of the thing is I'm sick of these fucking Martian brigands though I am impressed the author completely refused to call them pirates despite their leader wearing a big stupid plumed hat and tall boots. Very un-Martian I thought.

Plumes, for fuck's sake. At least he didn't have a parrot.

I made a valiant stab at E.E. Smith's Triplanetary and got really annoyed by it, though now I'm seeing a lot of commentary from longtime fans that both Triplanetary and First Lensman should be read last or perhaps not at all since Triplanetary was a standalone story from the 30s that had some stuff added to it when it was republished in 1948 to make it a prequel to the Lensmen series. First Lensman was written in 1950 to bridge Triplanetary and Galactic Patrol.

Note: I found the two-volume Science Fiction Book Club hardback editions of the whole Lensman series on Amazon dirt cheap, less than a couple bucks per volume. Some eBay sellers seem to think these are worth 50 bucks. Ha.

So, I'll be starting on Galactic Patrol tomorrow on the damn bus on the way to my stupid job but since it had a huge influence on Babylon 5 it'll make me way happier than that first half of Triplanetary did. Coincidentally, I've been threatening to rewatch Babylon 5 from the beginning (again) but I still have a couple seasons of Lexx sitting on my coffee table mocking me. And yeah, I could've long since watched Lexx already but Brigands of the Moon has moved into my apartment and is eating all my food and not paying rent, much like a sucky unemployed boyfriend.

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.

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.”

Slightly New and Most Likely Not Improved

I'm working on a new project, a longish erotic scienfornication novel mashup. You take something whose copyright hasn't been renewed and is in the public domain, then rewrite it adding in whatever extra crap you like--zombies, robots, ninjas, Jane Austen, etc. 

Mine unfortunately has a complete lack of zombies, robots, ninjas and Jane Austen, but it does have space pirates, a couple of excessively aroused Martians, and a Moon treasure.

I dug through Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf and found a Ray Cummings serial published in Astounding Stories around 1930. It's a horribly clunky thing, with stilted, wooden dialogue and overstuffed descriptions that only prove the author was paid by the word. It's not one of his best works and it's so crammed with extraneous description and excessively tedious dialogue it's a painful chore to read. I've compressed some 8-page chapters into a page and a half without losing any information, if that tells you anything. No wonder the copyright ran out years ago.

It also has one of those dumb love-at-first-sight plotlines and a hero who tells his love interest in their very first conversation that she doesn't have to be a man to do great things--she can give birth to sons who will. His sons. He's hardly spoken to the woman and he's already trying to knock her up.

BARF.

Yeah, this story was just asking for it. Begging for it, even. You bad, bad story.

Free Book Promotion

Free Book Promotion for Racy Rocket Adventures "Security Level 2" runs for five days from June 13, 2016 to June 17, 2016.

Download it and add it to all the other free stuff cluttering up your Kindle.

New Smut

Behold the horribly juvenile cover to my new short, "Security Level 2" which goes more into the smutty details of Colonel Spurt Jizzman's encounter with a security officer right before his meeting with Solar System President Gamahuche in "The Unmentionable Unknown." I'd kept it short in the original story for comedic timing, mostly because I thought it was hilarious that Spurt kept the President waiting just so he could bang some girl he'd just met. Last week I decided to extend it way longer than it really had any right to be and voila! a new short.

Anything shorter than ten pages seems to have a totally sucky preview with just the cover and title page. The link is live but since there'll be a free download of this story my sucky preview won't make any difference. I thought I could make it permanently free but that no longer seems to be the case, or maybe that was never the case. 

Whatever.

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. 

Procrastination!

Currently fighting with a chase scene and a pathetic excuse for a gun battle, then "The Unmentionable Unknown" can be uploaded, or at least that's the huge fib I'm telling myself. I also think I have to shoehorn in a tiny bit more porn but I could probably be very wrong about that. These characters should put probably their damn pants back on and go home.

And now for a word from our sponsor! I haven't quite seen the hell of having a stuffy nose portrayed so accurately in an ad before. Startling Stories, January 1940.

On to yet another Captain Future, Planets in Peril. When I first saw this one I thought that was Joan on the cover and she'd been mistakenly portrayed as a blond or maybe she wanted to change her look but that's actually Shiri, a scientist who's come through dimensions from a dying universe with her brother asking for help. Everybody on their world is apparently platinum blond so they make a big deal out of redheaded Captain Future and decide he's got to come back with them to save their world. Joan, of course doesn't want him to go without her. "Do you think I'd let you go off without me to a universe where all the women are platinum blondes?" Nice try. Curt says it's too dangerous and leaves her behind anyway, even after actually showing some sort of half-assed affection for her at the beginning. Sadly, this only involves tossing her up in the air and no making out.

Anyway, the platinum peoples' last big-deal scientist Kaffir was also a redhead and they think their citizens will be stupid enough to believe he's come back from being in suspended animation for like a million years if they drag Future back with them. Because science. See, if they don't get help the Cold Ones will sterilize the population so their race dies out and since it's 1942 we can't have a whole planet of lily-white honkies going extinct. Who are the Cold Ones? They're a mutant race that looks like living skeletons.

A nice return to skull-crushing in this novel, with exposed brains that look like cartilage when their skulls get stomped on.

Mmmm, pulped cartilage brain. Decent story, especially in comparison to the next novel which is a total Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

I'm just going to say up front that I hate this cover. The ship is sinking into lava, people are barely escaping with their lives, Joan is screaming like she's being carried away by Leatherface, and Captain Future is totally all Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. He also looks about 15 years older than he should. WTF Curt? Saving the Solar System wearing you out?

I'm sorry to say the cover isn't the only thing wonky about The Face of the Deep. The plot will make you wish you'd never heard of Captain Future and it's not even an amusingly convoluted stupid-fun plot like The Seven Space Stones. Oh god the plot. I didn't think I'd be begging for a space monopoly.

The Planet Police have a cruise ship that's been converted to transfer prisoners to the big prison on Pluto's moon Cerebus. This is the same prison moon where a bunch of prisoners Captain Future put away escaped from like it was nothing in one of the first books, maybe Captain Future and the Space Emperor, and in The Magician of Mars where Ul Quorn and his band of white-collar felons somehow smuggled weapons in and massacred all the guards. 

Instead of putting these dangerous prisoners into suspended animation or having more guards or a better locking system on this ship they're only using a handful of guards and they've called in Joan Randall as a guard since there's some sort of problem somewhere else in the system that uses up all the competent officers. Captain Future gets all het up about it and demands that she stay home because it's dangerous and she's his woman and all and she tells him off since doing cop stuff (no matter how incompetently) is her job. Grag offers to drag her off and hold her until the ship leaves and this inexplicable line turns up:

Treat women rough? Was Grag offering to spank her? He hasn't mentioned spanking Curt in a while so perhaps he's itching to put his metal hands on some bare human bottom.

Whatever. Curt and the Futuremen decide to go along on the prison ship because he has a bad feeling something's going to happen, which it does otherwise we'd only have a lame travelogue of all the prisons they pick up bad guys from and three pages later they'd reach Cerebus. The rest of the magazine would be false teeth by mail ads.

OK, the bad guys escape, kill the ship's captain and a bunch of guards, lock up everybody they didn't kill and they head out of the Solar System to Alpha Centauri but they hit an unknown planet on the way and wind up in a lava bed which melts the ship leaving no way to get back home.

Whatayado, Captain? You build a new ship big enough for like a hundred escaped convicts. Really, they build a new ship. From scratch. They mine ore, build an atomic smelter and smelt shit, and build a new fucking space ship from dirt and rocks. There's really no way I can envision this without picturing some sort of Gilligan's Island kinda contraption. I would've believed building a transmitter but not a whole fucking space ship. Oh yeah, they also have to make tools first so they can mine the ore and build the fucking smelter and whatever.

Eventually one of the convicts realizes there's only one woman on the whole entire planet (for some reason there are no lady convicts) and he offers to give her something to hang her towels on. Curt doesn't like this and beats the guy up a couple times. I think he also offers to beat up the engineer who evacuates from the ship with a case of prunes instead of tools. This guy is so prune obsessed I swear he must be based on some guy whose miserable prune-filled guts Edmond Hamilton hated worse than life itself.

Blah blah blah something keeps eating the convicts during the night, cubic caterpillars help them mine ore, they make steel, build a ship and fly away, oh god you just have to read it for yourself. The best part are the letters in a later Captain Future magazine where readers are practically having a stroke over the plot, and Sgt. Saturn, the drunken crank who answers the letters column in Captain Future and Startling Stories, amuses himself by abusing anyone who writes in.

Here's one where the reader seems to be happy with The Face of the Deep except for the apparent existence of Joan Randall so Sgt. Saturn decides to take a potshot at Captain Future instead. "...there isn't enough love interest in Curt Newton's life to excite Mahatma Gandhi..." Wow, somebody call the burn unit. This is from the guy's own magazine for crap's sake.

One thing the readers forgot to shriek about is where is Curt's atomic-powered ring? This is the first magazine where it isn't mentioned. He uses it to identify himself in the early novels since in the future apparently nobody has photos of anyone nor can anyone remember what their big hero looks like, he can hypnotize people with it, and occasionally he takes it apart and makes some atomic-powered doodad out of it. In The Face of the Deep he certainly could've used an atomic-powered doodad at the end instead of dismantling Simon's brain case.

I think I might've preferred reading a hundred pages of false teeth ads.

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.

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.