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.

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.

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.

Cover Close-Up

This is one of my favorite covers, one that I bought specifically because of the amusing rocket crash. You can't really tell what exactly is going on because of the low-quality cover printing but with a little digital image enhancement we can now see the fine details of the rocket and its cargo. What was in it?

Turtles.

Scientifiction, Away!

I've been getting a few too many ideas for my upcoming smutty space opera series Something Rocket Whatever (real name pending), one being a Ming the Merciless bad guy I thought up a month or so ago but I hadn't gotten any further than thinking he'd be fun to write. I've decided he needs a robot army, some useless henchmen and a big dumb hero to foil his evil plans. Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman from the Quickie "All Aboard!" was meant to be the big dumb hero until he flatly stated he didn't want to be that guy because it would mean he didn't know how girls worked, then he flipped me off, got drunk and tried to ride a Bru-mu'tkl. Stupid fictional spaceman.

Anyhow, the two loudmouthed Space Marines from the USS Priapus barely mentioned in "Science With Benefits" will return, complete with stupid porny names, and there'll be a little bit of overlap with the USS Mike Hunt in a story or two. I kinda want to see Olgotha the Terrible and ex space copper Tony Queef again, along with racketeer Dick B. Swellen but they may wind up in another series.

I polished off Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones yesterday and I won't wreck the ending by mocking every plot twist, like the part where he was stranded on an asteroid and built a transmitter out of gravel and space grubs or something, so you'll just have to read it for yourself. You can download a free pdf copy at the Internet Archive but it won't have the two non-Capt. Future short stories each issue normally has. The epub versions are also missing those but there are a few paper reprints of a limited number of issues of the magazine that have everything, just not reproduced very well. 

The only place I've found downloads for every issue of Captain Future Magazine, as well as the Startling Stories magazines that picked up the series after the original magazine folded during WWII, is Radio Archives. They don't have the illustrations, extra short stories, letters or the special features that tell you things about the Futuremen you were probably better off not knowing, but you can read them on the bus without leaving crumbs of pulp paper on the seat. They also appear to be OCR scans that have insanely weird typos, almost as though the person who made them just ran the resulting text through spellcheck and didn't actually read them one last time before uploading. Amusingly, OCR substituted "anal" for "and" in Triumph of Captain Future. "A door opened, anal she stepped hesitantly into a lighted room."

Anal She Stepped. It's like the name of a really crap indie band.

The original magazine was ostensibly aimed at the younger crowd and while this explains the simplistic plots, Marty Stu main character and all the fightin' and killin' this doesn't explain the ads. Oh blasted imps of Saturn, the ads. I have yet to find a single kid-aimed ad in these damnable things beyond the blurb begging everyone to join the Futuremen club, unless they really thought there was a teen market for Mr. Boston's Rocking Chair Blended Whiskey. There aren't even any ads for Grit, X-Ray Specs or live squirrel monkeys by mail. I'm taking this personally because I totally need an X-Ray Specs-wearing squirrel monkey right now to deliver this stack of Grit I stupidly signed up for.

Take this issue of Capt. Future, for instance. Quest Beyond the Stars, Winter 1942, whatever number that is. I'm too lazy to drag it out of the plastic bag again to check. I haven't read this one yet since I'm going through them in order and I still have Star Trail to Glory, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time to read first. 

You see on the cover Joan has gotten captured again for fuck's sake, though this time it might just be a desperate bid for Captain Future's attention since that faint looks straight-up fake.

On page 9, right after the ubiquitous Charles Atlas 97-pound weakling ad, we find this disturbing entry, and no, it isn't the only false teeth by mail ad in here. There are two more small ones and another for that gunk you stick them in with.

You get to test-drive these bad boys for 60 days so if you need to impress the new in-laws at your daughter's wedding you can borrow a set of store teeth like they came from a dental library.

I'm thinking one of the worst jobs on the planet would've been opening the boxes of returned teeth. I'm imagining a dank mailroom smelling like halitosis and sadness.

"don't Worry about Rupture." I'm not, really. I'm way more concerned about your capitalization skills or lack thereof.

There isn't a picture of this air-cushioned contraption so I'm picturing some ungodly inflatable trouser thing like from the Monty Python Trim Jeans Theatre skit. Maybe you hook it up to a vacuum cleaner or an air compressor (compressor not included), then try and hide it under your voluminous 1940s slacks. Oh, the misunderstandings when your Brooks Appliance has a sudden decompression when you take that special lady out to dinner. I doubt a simple "scuse me" will suffice.

Blast jets, Futuremen!

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?!?