Ugh.

I've been putting off dealing with this particular awful, awful Captain Future and distracting myself with Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (book, TV and radio shows) plus publishing a few non-erotica needlework patterns. I could've skipped it altogether but I've got a couple too many zingers aimed right at its black little heart.

The Solar Invasion, Startling Stories Fall 1946. This is the only one written by Manly Wade Wellman who although he's a pretty good writer otherwise he didn't really have much of a grasp of the Captain Future character. It looked as though he'd read The Magician of Mars and maybe the first Cap Future novel (or an early style sheet) where Curt was an unbearable  two-dimensional swashbuckling douche, poured himself a couple bourbons, sat down at his typewriter and just rolled with it.

The plot doesn't matter in this colossal mountain of suck, at least not to me. Inter-dimensional aliens kind of led by Ul Quorn steal the Moon and, I dunno, turn it into a jungle. I don't remember why, only that Ul Quorn was wasted as a character and sort of drops into the background while these aliens shove the Moon into their dimension like they collect moons or they lost theirs in a poker game or something. Maybe they want the monopoly on moons.

This annoys Captain Future because that's where all his cool Moon stuff is so he goes running to the System President. For some reason President Carthew has either been reanimated after having his skull crushed in by evil mine owner out to get the monopoly on radium (Outlaws of the Moon) or the story takes place in an earlier time, back when Curt was a jerky, muscle-bound vigilante scientist bent on strong-arming some kind of peace in the solar system. Curt doesn't run into his office and scream that Carthew should be dead because he saw his brains splattered all over the rug so I guess it's Option 2.

Here's that muscle-bound douche on the 1960s paperback reprint of The Solar Invasion, as envisioned by Frank Frazetta. Fun fact: I hate Frank Frazetta.

Ugh. That isn't the Man of Tomorrow promised by Captain Future magazine; that's the guy who'd give the Man of Tomorrow an atomic wedgie and shove his head down the toilet. Edmond Hamilton had stopped describing Curt as "big" and had switched to "rangy" by the third novel making him more a space cowboy than some weirdo who got super-strength by wrestling robots.

Maybe Joan should start dressing like a robot. What with all the spanking and wrestling Grag has gotten way more action with Curt than his own almost girlfriend.

Ahhh, can it, ya big jerkass.

Simon also seems to be inexplicably impressed by pretty girls, something he's never done before. If he liked any humans other than Curt Newton he would have had his brain stuck in another body instead of a transparent box. His whole reason for that was so he wouldn't have to deal with some stupid body wasting energy he could be using to think about science stuff.

Stop lying, Simon. Women just annoy you. You only tolerate Joan because Curt almost sort of maybe likes her.

Ha-ha! Caught you in your web of lies, you brainy bastard!

Here's Curt stuck with Joan and N'rala on the jungle-ized Moon and not looking happy about it. He's probably annoyed that Frank Frazetta is hiding in the bushes painting this very scene and making a complete crapfest of it.

N'rala isn't written at all well, definitely not the sexy pistol-packin' femme fatale from The Seven Space Stones. She's even described as Ul Quorn's slave which tells me Wellman didn't read Space Stones otherwise he would've seen she was an opportunist who was happy to screw around with Ul Quorn so long as he had some sort of power. The first chance she got she was rubbing up against Captain Future as Plan B in case Ul Quorn failed in his little project to take over the solar system. Really, she's no fun at all in this novel and even more wasted than Ul Quorn.

Mondo gripe-a-roony: Otho's pet meteor mimic Oog--instead of randomly turning into whatever is around for camouflage or things that Otho or Curt think really hard about, he thinks about what he could turn into. He also shifts into smaller versions of people, which he's never done. The first scene in the story he's a tiny Joan for no fucking reason, and later when he's abandoned somewhere I don't care about he turns into a tiny Otho to take a bad guy's atom pistol out of the holster, then he climbs into the holster and mimics the pistol so he can get a ride on the guy's spaceship. All he's ever done in the previous novels is waddle around like a fucking Shmoo and randomly turn into stuff. Once Otho was being held prisoner and thought really hard about an atomic bomb to convince Oog to turn into one. Otho then used him to threaten the guards--until he thought of calling Grag a tin can and Oog suddenly became a tin can.

I'm pretty sure I forgot something in the weeks since I read this thing. Whatever. It's done. My brain hurts.

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.

Red Sun of Different

I forgot the best part of Red Sun of Danger where Marshal Gurney lectures Joan for still being involved with Captain Future since, like, forever.

Hey, he's got the monopoly on being different from the rest of us! I guess that's what happens when a guy's been spanked by a robot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Grr.

I just lost a chunk of work because one of my laptops suddenly crapped out on me. You know, you type up that perfect turn of phrase, the wittiest line of your sad, sad writing career, then the screen goes black and all the little lights go dead and you say words sailors haven't even heard of. I'll be kicking myself for the rest of the day to try and rewrite those two lost paragraphs I've imagined were much better than they probably were in reality. 

Two stinking paragraphs.  TWO.

So I put away the shiny new-ish Windows piece of poopy and dusted off the elderly IBM loaded with Linux, which I should've been using anyway because there's something just not right about the newer one's keyboard. Like, it sounds cheap and the L key never seems to work for some reason when I type fast and the keys are too flat and oh my god I can't stand it. 

Of course my fancy graphics programs are on the poopy new one so I still have to use it.  Fuck a duck sideways.

Couple hours later... Christ on a bike. It's dead as some doo-doos, most likely due to a power supply issue rather than a deceased hard drive because none of the little lights are on.  I've replaced half a dozen hard drives and things with dead hard drives usually boot up even if they only click and whirr at me.  I at least was able to backup everything before it died for good.

So, yay for me having to use an old version of LibreOffice with no spellcheck or thesaurus which were both on there the last time I used this elderly laptop.

Some Sort of Intro

I didn't start out writing retro space smut.  No sir.  I'd tried various genres nobody bought or that I got bored with after the second paragraph, but somewhere in the back of my mind about two years ago a story about a space captain with creative ways of diplomacy appeared.  And festered.  And dug around and made a nest.  That festering, nesting tumor would eventually become my third published erotica story "The Empress of Orgazma" but I had to kick it around and abuse it for a few months before I even typed up anything that resembled notes.  Up to then it was only a stupid story I amused myself with at work when things got dull, and made myself choke with suppressed laughter when I knew it was hopeless to try and explain the expression on my face to my boss.  

Recently I dug out some emails when I was mid-process in my plot to ruin modern erotic sci-fi.  I apparently wrote the outlines (such as they were) for the first three stories while I had a nasty cold during the Xmas holidays.  Fever wouldn't explain this distressing paragraph which I sent to an actual human because it was sent nearly a week before I left town.

"Today at work I was mentally writing my space porn epic and because I'm a terrible person I decided it needed a guy with an artificial ass.  I already have a guy who wanks into the quantum drive (dunno what that is but it sounds science-y), a woman who has a fetish for mining robots, experimental sentient vegetables and a poor diplomat who's forced to fuck some godawful alien queen so she'll sign a treaty."

And this odd bit  a couple days later: 

"I'll have to think up an embarrassing name to put in honkin' big letters.  I'm leaning towards a fake pulp mag umbrella title with each story having its own even dumber title.  Saucy Space Adventures: Sentient Tits From Mars." 

Disappointingly I haven't written a story with sentient tits from any planet. Battletits, yes, but no sentient tits. I'll get to the artificial ass eventually.