Blast Off!

I got distracted from writing scienfornication stories while doing research, which unfortunately happens more than it should. First was the Lensman series which was a little more "ehh" than I expected, then I found the first seven Tom Corbett juvenile novels on Gutenberg (and bought some originals on eBay). From there I slipped into watching the Rocky Jones series on YouTube, listening to the Tom Corbett radio show and digging up what little there is of the kinescoped TV series. Once I'm done with the last of those there's the Space Patrol TV and radio series to suck away what little of my porn-writing brain is left.

Dammit. But I have gotten some more goofy 1950s space slang and outlined two more plots. I just need to sit down and write the goddamn things.

I got way more into this show than I expected and I think listening to the radio show at work while the boss was out is what did it. Nobody at work wants to hear the inappropriate organ music so it's been a furtive, secretive exercise.

See, this is how all old-timey radio was done, back in the day.

The TV series was shuffled around all four networks from 1950-55, the radio show (using the same actors) was on for the first half of 1952 and the books were originally published from 1952-56. There was also a comic strip and comic book series I'm not even going near since I have enough goddamn magazines around here already.

The Tom Corbett book series made the characters a little more gee-whiz boy genius cadets than the vaguely 30-ish adults on the TV show. They've made Tom Corbett a super-duper spaceship commander-in-training, Venusian Astro (a colonial rather than an alien) can rebuild any rocket engine blindfolded and they've filed the points off jerk-with-a-heart-of-jerk Roger Manning making him more of a sarcastic Eddie Haskell who's a whiz at astronavigation.

I'm just pretending the guys on TV are the same ones in the books but a few years later--a little crankier, slacker and more likely to paste somebody.

"Aren't you men a little old to be cadets?" Really, how many years did these guys get left back anyway?

Seems the Solar Guard doesn't pay very well since it looks like Commander Arkwright has to sell shoes on the side.

But I guess somebody has to pay for that rocketship the cadets shot with a torpedo.

Twice.

"He did it."

What color do you think these spacesuits are? For some reason I was picturing a gross yellowish beige, like an old rubber glove.

Nope, a gross shade of pink. I guess they were out of yellowish beige.
TV and Radio Mirror October 1952.

And since I like to find a little what-the-fuckery in every old magazine I buy, here's some boxing kitties.

Fun With Ads

I've got a couple early Captain Futures lying around from before I was doing plot synopses but I believe right now I'll just goof off with the ads rather than bother with any detailed articles.

Captain Future, Spring 1940, Calling Captain Future. Cover has Curt having a First Time Tentacles moment with a star man while shooting his proton pistol at another star man. He and Joan accidentally woke these things up from suspended animation where they'd been for maybe hundreds of years while their ship was stuck in the Sargasso Sea of Space with piles of other wreckage. He'll meet these star men one more time in Star Trail to Glory when he gets stuck in the Sargasso Sea again.

Edit: I literally just now noticed the star men were stark raving nekkid.

I'm a little disappointed in the back cover. There really should be a crusty life-sized foot or a huge diagram on how trusses work instead of an ad for Shakespeare's plays. This was only the second issue of Captain Future magazine so I guess they hadn't gotten the swing of things yet.

As though feeling my disappointment they do manage a cringe-worthy Ex-Lax ad. The younger guy is totally bragging that Ex-Lax isn't anywhere near powerful enough for his big, manly bowels. "I need a laxative with a wallop," he tells Jim with pride. Later, he thrills the office with his toilet-clogging abilities.

To make things more fun, here's an exciting Eveready battery ad. Besides this sinister baby-eating lake, others I've seen have had car accidents in the dark, guys lost in the deep woods and Nazi spies who need to signal planes from a mountain top.

I might have made one of those up.

Captain Future, Fall 1940, The Triumph of Captain Future. This story has a bad guy called the Lifelord who sells an overpriced elixir that brings youth so long as you keep taking the stuff, and some other things happen that I can't be bothered to look up. We're just here for the ads so move along.

Jackpot! A full page false teeth by mail ad! It's also almost the same ad found in Quest Beyond the Stars but in a disturbing duotone. This ad was what decided me on getting this particular magazine.

To further confuse the issue of just who the audience was for a magazine that is usually described as juvenile, here's some old guy trying to convince other old guys to sign up to push some sort of uber-special veeblefetzer without telling what it is or how you're supposed to sell it. He was so vague about it I was almost convinced it was a Rosicrucians ad.

Next up: That hateful Captain Future, The Solar Invasion, which sucked so hard I'm having trouble even getting to where I can make fun of it. I'm pretty certain the story gave me mild brain damage and the sheer awfulness of the illustrations made me weep for humanity. The back cover has a goddamn battery ad with some lame guy getting lost in the woods in the most boring way possible and I'm not holding out hope for an amusing laxative ad inside.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There She Goes Again

Bored, bored, bored. Bored enough to make more inane derogatory comments about everyone's favorite artificial jerkass Futureman Otho.

Here he is, nekkid as the day he came out of a test tube and already he's blasting a hole in somebody. But sometimes he wears clothes.

...except when he doesn't. Everyone should be thankful he's carrying Brain Guy in front of him. The Brain is somehow looking completely horrified even though he doesn't have a face to speak of.

He can occasionally be seen scampering around in a skintight leotard, which is only barely less awful than being nekkid. The odd choice of loafers over say, knee-high space boots leaves something to be desired.

This attractive ensemble from The Comet Kings is reminiscent of that weird neighbor whose yard the police just dug up with a backhoe looking for human remains.

Still no explanation of what purpose the strange antenna array serves. It was mentioned in the first two or three novels but nothing since. The first few magazines in the series had biographies of each of the characters but I'm missing the one with Otho's bio so I'm sure there's some backstory there that was never brought up in the novels. That leaves me no choice but to make stupid shit up. Really, I'm forced to do this.

Let's see, maybe Otho uses his antenna doohickey to suck energy out of the air to survive and occasionally uses it to dry underpants on. We're not certain exactly whose underpants they are, just rest assured that they are in fact underpants.

Happy? I'm not.

I just recently polished off two more Captain Future stories, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time, both of which were severely disappointing. Here I was looking forward to more Ul Quorn if only because if Captain Future didn't have an arch enemy he'd have to go back to breaking up space monopolies and we really don't want to have to read any more of that.

If you want to read just one Capt. Future I'd go for The Seven Space Stones just for the sheer amount of wacko plot crammed into one little 95-or-so-page novel. In order to capture bad guy Ul Quorn, Curt Newton and his Futuremen put on disguises, join the circus and follow him around trying to catch him committing a crime; the guys think Curt's dead and bury an impostor then plot sweet, sweet revenge; Curt builds a transmitter out of I dunno dirt and leaves or something; Curt and Ul Quorn cheat at atomic space roulette on the Pleasure Planet so they can win one of the Space Stones, etc. etc. etc. It's cheesy as fuck but it's a good kind of cheesy, like nacho cheese Doritos with Velveeta melted on top and a side order of that cheese dip you bought at the 7-11 at 2 am when you had the munchies but completely forgot about once you got home.

On the other hand, Ul Quorn's return in Magician of Mars was the most anticlimactic sleeping pill I've ever had the misfortune to swallow. Cheesy? Hell no. It was about as un-cheesy as something without cheese on it, like a fireplace log or a Siamese cat. There was none of the chin-stroking, "Well played, Captain Future," like arch enemies are supposed to quip when they'd really rather not be bothered killing or capturing one another. It's as though the editor handed author Hamilton the plot and he just started banging his head on the typewriter and said that was good enough.

Ul Quorn inexplicably gathers up a group of the most pathetic henchmen I've ever seen this side of a Donald Duck comic. They're all criminals who had been put in prison by Captain Future so they're all pretty pissed off, but rather than being murderers and dope smugglers Quorn's got a mine owner from whatever novel that was about the mining monopoly, and the evil rocket manufacturer from Star Trail to Glory which was about a rocket manufacturer destroying his competition and creating a monopoly. It's as though Ul Quorn only broke white-collar felons out of prison and wound up with the future equivalent of Bernie Madoff and the guys who ran Enron.

These low-rent henchmen also die like flies. Hell, even Scrappy-Doo, I mean Johnny Kirk kills one.

Really, the only thing worth mentioning in Magician of Mars is Captain Future finally kisses Joan Randall and it's an indifferent kiss, the sort a nephew would give the elderly aunt who controls his inheritance. "He lightly kissed her." Wow, get a room guys. He was stranded on a strange planet (again) like a million miles from the solar system and in another dimension when Ul Quorn leaves him floating in space. You'd think he'd be way more excited than a "light kiss" when the Futuremen find him. He also doesn't bother to say goodbye to her when he takes off for the moon again, the big jackass.

You'd think this lust-filled scene never happened by the way he behaves in The Lost World of Time. Curt's on the moon, bored, and does he even think about going to Earth to hang out with this woman he finally kissed even if it was pretty lame? Nope. He plays rocketball with his friends then goes off on some random adventure a guy he's never seen before tells him about. He does think about her for one sentence, but that was only to say he was glad she was home safe and I guess not in the Comet getting in the way of guys doing guy stuff.

Anyhow, the Futuremen go back in time a million years to save an ancient civilization nobody's ever heard of and while Curt's there he...dun-dun-dun...kisses some other girl. It's like he just now figured out what to do with women and he's gone all horndog with it. Joan isn't mentioned again, not even as a guilty feeling or his being glad that this other chick is a million years in the past so the two women would never accidentally meet or whatever it is buttheaded guys think.

Oh, and jerkass Otho is less of a jerkass than usual and meets a girl who gets killed saving his life because nobody wants to read about artificial jerky guys getting it on with primitive dinosaur-herding alien women. You know this will mean wall-to-wall jerkassedness in the next novel, right? Hopefully Otho's brand of morose jerkassedness doesn't involve emo crap like poetry.

Scientifiction, pt. 2

Here I go picking on Otho the rubbery artificial Futureman again, though if he wasn't such a colossal jerkass I'd leave him alone. He's horrible to Grag the robot and they both argue constantly over who's more human despite both being made in a lab by Capt. Future's dad, What's-his-name Newton. It's worse than Data and Lore, except Otho doesn't kill entire colonies for the hell of it.

Here's a badly reproduced illustration from Adventure House's facsimile edition of Captain Future, Star Trail to Glory and we see Otho has been captured by somebody's robot henchmen. Belt? Check! Loafers? Of course! Pants? Hell, no!

I thought he was wearing a kicky pair of cuffed socks but those are manacles. I am disappoint.

To make things so, so much worse there's this rather disturbing exchange which explains way too much about the Captain.

That's also not the first time he'd ever reminisced about being spanked by a robot. Notice the typo where they left out the word "embarrassed" right before "silence."

Spanking robots. I am so stealing that.

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!