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.

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.

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.

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. 

New Series!

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

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

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

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

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

Mmmm, Pulpy

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

 

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

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

New 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.