Captive of Gor chapter 5

And now we're on Alt-Earth. As in Strawchick just wakes up there. Does this transition seem strange to you? Because I'm getting freaking whiplash.

Hey, Strawchick, what's it look like here on Gor?

...In the distance, away from the forest, I could see a yellowish thicket, it, too, of trees, but not green, but bright and yellow...In the distance, near the yellowish thicket, I saw a small, yellowish animal moving, delicately. It was far off and I could not see it well.

...so, like a dehydrated man's urine, then. I gotcha.

The spaceship has crashlanded, and apparently it flung Strawchick several hundred feet, stripped her of her chains, got her out of the stasis tube, and deposited her on the grass without her getting one scratch. Gor's got some pretty good roll bars in their spaceships is all I can say.

 And then we get to the next example of Author Just Does Not Get It:

On Earth I had not feared men. I had despised them. I had held them in contempt. They were so eager to please, so manipulable, so pliant, so meaningless, weak and docile. But these men, those in black tunics, and those who had been instrumental in my capture, I had learned to fear. They were the first men I had learned to fear. They would not be the last.

Time for a quickie education in your psyche, boys and girls. You project how you feel into other people's heads. And I do not mean you make them think thoughts. I mean that you decide what they are thinking. You are afraid of someone, so you decide that they KNOW you are afraid and they are making you feel that way on purpose. You feel you are weak. You assume everyone else thinks you are weak. I mean, it's so blatently obvious to you!

In this book, CONSTANTLY, John Norman projects his own emotional attitude into women. Because he feels manipulated, pliant, meaningless, ect, in the presence of women, he projects the cause into the women he writes. Strawchick knows she's doing this to men, and when she's robbed of that power she is the one unmanned. Which, boys and girls, is bullshit of the first caliber AND why this series fails at its own goal.

You cannot control how someone else feels. You can manipulate them into doing things, but the ultimate choice is theirs. If a dude wants to rape you? It's not your fault. He'd do it if you're in a tank top or a turtleneck. Same thing with the roles reversed. The entire Gor series is the author fucking screaming STOP MAKING ME FEEL THIS WAY at the top of his lungs, when it's his own psyche he's fighting with and not the women. And most chicks in my experiance are not walking across a quad luxuriating in making men pant. They're thinking about how not to fail their final, and that's all.

Moving on.

Strawchick explores the ship, steals food from an animal that scares the shit out of her, that sounds about as scary as a stray dog, and then leaves. She watches another spaceship, complete with bug-alien, destroy the first one. I know kind of why, but we're just going to forget about it and pretend the spaceships never happened. Norman had to explain how Alt-Earth is here, and Spaceship was the scrabble tile he pulled out of the bag that day. Moving on.

Everything that is anything attacks Strawchick. She describes fighting with a toothy vine that sounds an awful lot like a snake to me, either implying that vines have teeth or Strawchick failed the "Identifying poisonous things" part of girlscout training. And then the moons come out, and on this planet where everything that is anything has tried to eat her, she curls up in the grass and falls asleep. In the grass. That is probably out to murder her too.

I can't help but think about that scene in Hunger Games where Katness tied herself into a tree before she slept, and...

...you know? You know? You know? Wouldn't it be fucking awesome if the bug-aliens had screwed up and kidnapped Katness Everdeen instead of Strawchikc here? Katness Everdeen on Gor. Think about it. There would be arrows and there would be much shouting and many dead slavers in front of the Cornucopia, and she would probably find Alt-Peeta and Alt-Gale and manage to unbarbarianize them by getting a sponsor and Haymich to send her soap, and there would be much posing by said muscled un-barbarians and many plates of food porn, Cinna would produce awesome costumes out of white dancing silks that would be totally modest and yet make all the other dancing silks in red look fucking stupid in comparison and then everyone would be like, "Dance, bound slut" and Katness would be all "What the fuck is this shit?" before she drops a nest of Tracker Jackers in the middle of the slave camp and watches the halucinations and the face-melting begin, Beetee would help her set up a trap involving white and red silk and nightlock berries, she and Rue would eat a Tarn together and in the end, she'd overturn the whole Gorian regime with a rose and one single arrow to the heart.

She would make Tarl Cabbot kneel on a muttation-skin rug while Alt-Peeta helps her fake a pregnancy. It would be awesome.

Somebody do this. Please, somebody do this. The universe is incomplete without Gor/Hunger Games fanfic. We must rectify this. Now.

Oh, yeah. The chapter ended. With Strawchick asleep in the murder grass. Because she is not Katness and this is not Hunger Games and therefore not awesome in the slightest.

TOMORROW: A half-naked, lost Earth woman wanders around on a planet most famous for enslaving lost, half-naked Earth women. And this one is an idiot. Wanna guess what happens next?

Book Bitch: Mission Earth 1

Guys! GUYS! GUYS! This is a thing! Look at it. LOOK AT IT! PEGASUS VS. CHIMERA. HOW CAN THIS BE A THING? This is simultaneously the most terrible and WONDERFUL thing I have ever seen! And the suck part is, I will be working the night that it shows (is a saturday. I will always be working) BUT I WILL FIND A WAY TO WATCH IT ANYWAY. OH. MY. GOD. This is going to be blogged. This is SO totally going to be blogged. OH MY GOD.

Right. Where were we?

...oh. Right. Mission Earth. 

So as I said earlier, I've read the second Mission Earth book, and two things became IMMEDIATELY apparent:

1. Hubbard did not edit as carefully in '85 as he did in 84.

2. HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT. IT SUCKS.

I have been cutting Hubbard a lot of slack, both for being a dying lonely old man (read one of his unofficial biographies. Is sad) for being a product of the pulp era of sci fi and for being a product of the fifties. I am not cutting that slack for him any more. I still haven't figured out what the FUCK is up with the gay guys (unless it's just blatant homophobia) but women? His attitude towards women goes WAY past virgin/whore complex. WAY past. As in there is not one, NOT ONE female name that doesn't make me want to hurt something. THERE IS A WHORE IN THE SECOND BOOK NAMED HARLOTTA. HARLOTTA.

RON NEEDS TO STOP NAMING THINGS.

But we're doing the first book. What happens?

Soltan Gris (Who is L. Ron Hubbard. OH MY GOD is he totally LRH. IN EVERY POSSIBLE VIABLE WAY) having gone three days without eating or drinking (DO THEY NOT HAVE PUBLIC WATER FOUNTAINS HERE?) halucinates:

1. Satan, who interrogates him on the things he does not know he does not know, and no, I did not just fucking repeat myself.

2. the crew of the space shuttle they dissappeared way back in the first chapter, and

3. Jet-boy's tug boat.

I would elaborate, but the plot thread this event kicks off goes fucking nowhere. Jet, being Space Elvis, figures out that Soltan hasn't eaten in three days and sends up a case of Perrier and cinnimon rolls. Oh, sorry. "Sparklewater". Soltan eats. The reason why Soltan has not eaten is Soltan has no money. The reason why Soltan has no money is Soltan tried to cheat Jet out of his cash and lost all of his paychecks for the next year, because somehow this is a thing.

Soltan decides to apply evil evil psychology to his problem and does the kind of bullshit connect the dots reasoning that makes dream analysis give me a headache. The devil is a father figure and the space shuttle crew are phallic symbols, and HELLO STRAWMAN, I guess you're hanging around for a while. For the record, I do think that Jungian dream analysis has SOME merit because our brains are smarter than we are, but it's more "the tornado represents your fear of loss of control because tornado" and less "THIS IS THE UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF A PENIS."

Also, given the number of gay guys and Perfectly Platonic Man Love (TM!) there is in this series, I think that Hubbard was really religious that Freud got there first.

Anyway, Soltan decides that the meaning of his halucination is not his stomach saying FEED ME SEYMORE STUPID, but rather his subconsious telling him to go interrogate Jet's last crew, because they know what Soltan doesn't know he doesn't know.

Next Chapter: Soltan decides to go blackmail somebody into helping him. See, he watched a man murder a woman and took many many pictures on the off chance he could use that info.

By the rules of narration, this guy is the protagonist of the book. WHY? PLEASE GOD, WHY. Realize that at this very moment we could be following Jet around Voltan. We could be listening to his lady love tell him not to trust that dasterdly evil Soltan, we could see the plot through his eyes, THERE WOULD BE SO MUCH LESS TELLING.

Sigh. Blackmail murder guy gives Soltan what he asks for: counterfit money and poisoned food, so that Soltan can bribe Jet's old buddies into telling him what he needs to know that he doesn't know that he doesn't know (Thank you Ron, for making me type like an invalid).

He also picks up a girl. The way you'd pick up a squash from the grocery store. Poisoned food, counterfit cash, and a prison camp whore. And this sequence of events contains these wonderful gems:

A lot of riffraff will do anything for a female.

 "There are a lot of men involved. She could get pretty used up."

It dawned on me that I had been swindled. This was one of those non-compliant, won't types the customers reject.

In the roster office, the half naked yellow man clerk (emphasis mine--CW) spent a long time going over the records. 

Let me un-Ron that language up there: He went to pick up a whore for a gang-bang and got a rape victim instead. Also? That bolded part? Yo, Ron?

THAT'S RACIST

Why am I harping on this stuff? Because it's not part of the plot. It's not something the plot needs. It's little side stuff Hubbard threw in there because he needed to pad the book. Most authors reach for fight scenes, intrigue, romance, humor, Hunger Games usually reached for food, Sunshine, my favorite book in the whole world, reached for Stuff That Goes On In Restaurants That Also Involve Baking.

Hubbard reaches for racism, sexism and homophobia.

Could it be a portrayal of how nasty those behaviors are? No. First, because there is not one. single. positive. female character. in this book. Or in the next book. There isn't one positive portrayal of someone who isn't blatantly white. IN A NOVEL WHERE THE PROTAGONIST AND THE ANTAGONIST ARE BOTH ALIENS, THE HERO IS A WHITE CAUCASIAN SUPERMAN. And so far none of the gay guys have been anything other than pitiful victims, or just plain gross. And lesbians haven't existed yet, but I hear that changes much later in the series and it's not a change for the better.

It's the same garbage that makes Twilight so repellant. It's not the god awful plot, the sparkling (in Twilight's case) the adjenda of either book. It's the casual dismissal of real issues of substance. And it's fucking damning in Mission Earth, not because it's written by the founder of a major religion, but because of the nature of sci-fi.

Science Fiction is written in the spirit of "This is where we are going". That's why technology figures so predominantly. We're taking where we are, right now, and projecting it into the unknown future as far as we can see, and in doing so we're placing our hopes and fears for the future there, too. That's why IMHO sci-fi right now is very dismal. We've lost hope in our future, lost the optimism we had in the seventies and eighties.

There's nothing forward-looking about this book. It's a stagnant, drippy, self-fulfilling fantasy dressed up in a space helmet just because. The deeper you go, the worse it gets. It's the ugly parts of humanity shown bare, with no hope or solution offered beyond a half-hearted attempt at Space Jesus that Hubbard wished he could have been. The message of this book is not "Solve humanity's problems". It's "Gather at the feet of the redeemer."

Which is probably what Hubbard intended all along. Too bad he couldn't pull it off worth a damn.

So what happens when Soltan bribes Jet's best buddies?

"When Heller gets word of what has happened to us, he will kill you with his bare hands. Run like mad and maybe it will save your life!"

Do they show up again? Given that they have poisoned food and haven't appeared in book two? Probably not.

Next three chapters: Soltan gets lost on his way back to Jet's tug boat! For three weeks! AND NOBODY NOTICES! AND IT TAKES UP THREE CHAPTERS. You know what?

BOOK FUCKING REVIEWED.

TOMORROW: We get our vicarious revenge. Sort of. It's complicated.

Book Bitch: Mission Earth IS STILL HERE

We are FINALLY at the halfway mark people. Two weeks of bitching at three chapters a go and we're only JUST NOW making it to the halfway mark.

"Bristling with excitement" my fat ass.

So what is on the deck for today?

*reads ahead*

Oh god. This part.

Okay, before we go much further, let me recap what's going on. I haven't done one of these in a couple of days. *deep breath*

Earth doesn't exist, but it is critical to the Voltarian invasion campaign anyway. Jettero Heller is Space Elvis, and the only person who can help Earth be Rescued From Ourselves. Soltan Gris is our narrator and he fails at EVERYTHING, and Hubbard has so far managed to be racist AND mysogynist AT THE SAME TIME. Also, Jettero's girlfriend looks like this:

And acts like this:

So what happens next?!?

Well, remember when Soltan tried to cheat Jettero out of all his money, and got cheated himself? OF COURSE NOT. IN NO OTHER BOOK WOULD THIS BE A THING. But it is a thing in this book. Soltan Gris, our narrator, now has no money. He decides to scam Murder Guard out of money, because the Murder Guard smuggled the Countess Krak into Jet's new tug boat/space ship.

And then Hubbard does something that would make the unfunny cut kitty cry.

Murder Guard has to explain how the got the Countess out, see. And his story starts with the words "there was this transvestite."

See, in the Voltarian worlds, anybody sexually deviant is disposed of. The trucks that transport them are called "garbage trawlers" and on this particular one was somebody who looked a lot like the Countess. Only it's a he. His name is Tweek. He is saved ONLY so the Countess and Jet can christen his new tug boat. Which I think they are doing right now.

Way to treat other human beings with dignity, Ron.

To make the story short (too late) Soltan fails at aquiring money. He can't get any from Murder Guard, from the driver who did work for Jettero, or from his own employer. And because he doesn't even have money to buy food or water (apparently no one on Voltair heard of water fountains) he halucinates a turkish dancing girl bringing him food.

Because an alien from another galexy would do that.

Oh, but Soltan has been trained in the evil art of psychology. This is what he attributes his great success in the CIA to. Psychology.

HELLO STRAWMAN! WE HAVE FOUND YOU AT LAST. It only took you THREE HUNDRED AND TWO FUCKING PAGES to show up. 

And then...oh you have got to be fucking kidding me. TWICE? In THREE CHAPTERS? CAN YOU PLEASE KNOCK THIS SHIT OFF RON? No? Please? No, we're really doing this?

*sigh*

Soltan realizes once he's on Earth with Space Elvis, he'll have no way to get information from Voltar. How does he solve this? He finds two gay guys in the CIA. Two guys named "Too-Too" and "Oh, dear". Oh, wait. These are nicknames. What wonderful, dignified names has Ron provided for Soltan's two latest victims?

Twolah and Odur. ODUR. As in ODOR. As in stinky. Does this get worse?

Oh, yes. It gets worse. The two are going to travel two and from Earth. And when one is in transit, the other one is supposed to seduce the old gay guy from wayyyyyyyyy back in the beginning. The Councilman we all forgot about. And then they are supposed to switch places. And if they don't do it, Soltan will kill their mothers. See, he has used psychology to deduce this important fact: men love their mothers. They agree. Scene over!

You know what bugs me about this? You know Twilight? Gay people don't exist in Twilight. They are never brought up. They are never mentioned. Because it is not okay to be gay in the Mormon church and Stephenie Meyer would rather not deal with it. there is another Church where it is not okay to be gay either, and while we're not naming it everybody reading this should know exactly which one it is. And it does not get any better from here on out, folks.

It also doesn't get any more amusing. That's our three chapters, and I need to go to bed. You guys take care.

State of the CW

So. Mission Earth flogging WILL continue tomorrow (oh god) but we need to take a break for a moment and discuss the boring stuff. Or whatever.

First up: God, you guys are awesome. The response to Starbleached has been better than I expected. Not hugely wonderful OMG I CANNOT BELEIVE THIS I have hope now awesome, but I know that, as of right now? Half of my regular readers have a copy. That is kick ass. Please tell me how you feel about it. Also? The books sold, not the books bought during the freebie peroid, the books I have actually gotten money for, account for, like, a third of that. And if you do not have a copy, go get one. I plan on continuing that story, I am SO INCREDIBLY PROUD of that story, please please please please PLEASE let me share the awesomeness of that story with you.

Okay. Next up: Blue Ghosts is the next lil book in line. This is an Exiles story. What is Exiles? The Exiles are Faerie creatures trapped on Earth. Yes, kids. Paranormal romance involving Faeries and ghosts and the Lexington, one of the coolest locations in Corpus Christi. Casey Winter and Marco Creed investigate a ghost. Who may not be a ghost. It's complicated. And it's due out in October! It picks up where Silver Bullet left off.

Also, November/December (depending on wheither or not I take a months break from this self-imposed publishing schedule) will also pick up from where a Silver Bullet story left off. As in, minutes after it ended.  And because I know that very few of you have read Silver Bullet, much as it pains me to do it, Silver Bullet is free on Smashwords until October 13th. Code is GX35X
  
As for how I'm doing...I am not doing good. 

I am hugely, monumentally, cataclysmically depressed. Which is not good when you have a history of S/I issues. I am dealing, my friends. I am dealing. But it is hard. This month (as mentioned in the Mission Earth flog where I kind of got personal issues all over our happy fun times) does not make it easy. But the hardest part has been accepting something really, really hard.

I'm not writing this part now because I want to flail and moan and cry. I'm writing it because I believe that it needs to be written. Because it's a part of a story that hasn't ended yet. But I want this to be here, where everybody can see it, so that in a year, or two or ten, when this is over, I can point over here and say, this is where I was going, this is where I ended up.

I'm putting a cut here, because once again I'm about to get personal stuff all over the fun place.So once more, here's the unfunny cut kitty:

If you don't want to get sad and depressed, ignore the cut and watch the kitty.

Book Bitch: Mission Earth 1 chapter 4-5

The problem with reading a book this old, with this history (namely, being written by a man whose publisher worshiped him as an oracle of Universal Truth) means I can't tell if my issues are differing writing styles, lack of an editor, or just Hubbard himself. Example? Example:

The officer's club was a brilliant blare of light and sound. It was a high roofed series of buildings--dining rooms, bars, accomodations for single officers and an enclosed sports arena. It was built to house around forty thousand. It stood in an inset valley, backed by towering mountain peaks. 

In other words, pronoun abuse abounds in this book. And it gets annoying. Fast. Now, I am far from perfect, ( far, far from perfect) but I kind of like to think that "It, It, It" and "He, He, He" are kind of obviously annoying. It ain't poetry, is what I'm saying.

So to recap, LRH is like, totally writing SATIRE you guys, Soltan Gris is an agent of the Cooperative Intelligance Apparatus, which is totally the CIA, Lombar Hisst belongs six billion miles away from any kind of secret agency, there is a crisis involving Earth, which totally doesn't exist, a bunch of Fleet Officers get kidnapped for some reason, and robot censors bleep out words because you couldn't say "fuck" back in 1985.  Moving on.

Anyway, we're in Chapter three. Now, when we last left our heroes LRH's Self Inserts cardboard villian cut outs  bad guys, they were going to kidnap that (bleep) (bleep) (bleep) Jettero Heller! Whom we haven't met yet. But we are about to, and OH MY GOD, kids, you are not ready for this. You are so far from being ready for this.

Lombar Hisst and the Death Battalion (Dibs on the band name) sneak into a sports arena, where a game of bullet ball is in progress. It's dodge ball with painted, hard and painful balls. Soltan Gris waxes eloquent about something that is, well, not exactly worth eloquence, and then finishes with this:

I never cared for bullet ball myself, even if they would ever let me play.

There's three players on the field, and the nearest impresses the shit out of the crowd and Soltan Gris. So naturally, this is Jettero Heller. And in his introduction he:

-Proves to be majestically handsome in every imaginable way
-Proves to be the best at sports, or at least at Spaceballs.
-Proves to be honorable in every possible way by first providing a nearly-defeated opponant with ammo, then by throwing the game obviously and on purpose when it's REALLY obvious he just won the game. As in, if this were a battlefield his opponant just knelt for a beheading and Jettero just fell on his own sword instead.
-Is INSANELY popular with the ladies
 -Proves his utter goodness by having both Soltan and Lombar hate him immediately.

In short, he is Better Than You.  Yes, my loving blog-readers, having accidentally given us his subconsious as a narrator, Hubbard has just presented us with a true, honest-to-god, newly minted Gary Stu of his own beautiful creation.

Soltan realizes that he is shit out of luck, because he's basically kidnapping the military version of Elvis, but it's too late now. Lombar rushes on into Chapter Five.

One of their spies brings Jettero into the room, and naturally this top notch spy fucks up both his walk and his uniform, and Jettero correctly interpretes this as a kidnapping attempt and explodes into action. And we come to my biggest pet peeve with Hubbard's writing style: his fucking one-sentence action paragraphs.

 Heller gave no advance warning. He didn't stop and stare or look down at the envelope he held...he didn't even change his smile.

He exploded!

So quick I couldn't follow it, both of Heller's feet were in the air and striking!

The bogus orderly hit the pavement like a shot down plane.

Heller leaped at him, ready to seize the imposter.

I swear to fucking God I can forgive an awful lot from the guy, including the misogyny and Plot-That-Will-Not-Move, but I get to these "paragraphs and I want to fucking kill something. That is ONE perfectly servicible paragraph butchered to pad the page-count of something that is already a fucking brick. The Third Little Pig could build his house out of the Mission Earth series, and the Big Bad Wolf would be repelled out of utter boredom.

So Jettero puts up the good fight, sentence by paragraph-less fucking sentence, and Lombar finally knocks him out cold. He is whisked off to Spiteos, their uber-ugly dark dungeon where no one will ever find him, and Lombar, berating his underling for not taking care of something said underling still has no fucking clue about, they go off to find "the original report". Unfortunately Operation Snow White their search for the report turns up nothing. And finally Soltan asks, very meekly, what the bleeding bloody fuck all this was about. And Lombar explains:

"They'll read that report!...Two years ago I told you to be alert and to block and change every report the Patrol Service turned in on Blito-P3. Earth, you idiot, Earth!  ...you let one get through! You have threatened our timetable! To hell with theirs!"

And Soltan realizes that his boss is right, and promptly shits himself. Our hero, the narrator is not. 

Tomorrow: We find out WTF all this is about. Sort of.

(And Starbleached is still free until 9/9. Coupon Code is ST83W . /obligatory self promotion)

My life is just not that interesting

Last month I said that I would update this thing every day. and I have, excepting weekends when I just want to die (why did I say I would post book stuff on the first? HAVE I MADE IT CLEAR HOW SCARED I AM OF THE FIRST YET???!?!) and in doing so I have come to the following realization.

I? Am not an interesting person.

HOPEFULLY my books are interesting. But I know that if they are, it is because I have taken all my not interesting stuff and shoveled it all into things that don't exist. The other part of my not being interesting is...well...I don't go out much.

Why don't I go out much?

I live in South Texas. In a small town. And my options are: Go out with friends (who do not read) and get drunk at techno club; go out with friends-who-do-not-read and get drunk at a bar listening to god awful country music; get drunk at work (My boss would totally allow this as long as I am not actively on the clock OR on call); stay home and read sci-fi book that is six times more awesome than anything in the little theater right now; or go on adventure involving aliens and space ships and medical missions and Space Needles and fairies and ghosts and romance something that bears a more than passing resemblance to Jareth the Goblin King AKA write something.

Which is not a very interesting thing to write about.

So yes. On the surface I am boring.

That said, book cover artwork is mostly done. I think I just need to let it cool off a little, do basic resizing for the artwork ratios, and then it'll start appearing in Places. Also why I am boring: you can make cool stuff or you can have a cool time, but doing both at once requires somebody doubly awesome.

Brand new Week!

Whee! Or...not so much, as this is Labor Day Week, Guys and Girls, and if you work retail, or restaurants, or any other industry that depends on large numbers of people having many days off, Labor day is less "Whee" and more "HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE COMING HERE???"

We already have reservations for Saturday. I. Am. Frightened.

In happier news, I have started Cover Art for the Sci-Fi Novel of Mystery. It is going so well I think I can promise to release the cover as well as the title and sample on the First. Which will be Labor Day Saturday.

Have I mentioned yet, that I bought whiskey today? I bought whiskey. Because this is Labor Day week and I am tired of giving my boss money back just because I want a whiskey sour. I should not drink quite as much as I have been (thank you, oh boss who hands me things with booze in them and says "finish that") but about the ninteenth time someone looks at the lovely goodness of Eggs Benedict WITH hollindaise sauce I made myself and says "Can I have some ketchup?" you realize, my dear and lovely blog-readers, you realize that there is not enough booze in the world.

BUT! Saturday is the first! And you shall get a taste of the Sci Fi Novel of Mystery! Which you lovely blog readers may have for free! REMEMBER THIS. IT IS THE PLAN.

Labor. Day. Weekend. Why did I think this first was going to be anything other than OH MY FUCKING HELL THERE ARE PEOPLE? There will be fancy doughnuts. There will be armies of fancy doughnuts. They shall dance through my dreams like soldiers. Square ones. With powdered sugar on them. Which I shall fry and fry and fry until--

BOOKS! Right. And I am confident in promising that the book itself WILL be live by weekend after next. Not only that, but you will get a sample of the next one after that, a continuation of one of the stories in Silver Bullet...

The liquor store is scared of this week. The fucking liquor store.

Be here on Saturday. Look at the Sci Fi Book of Mystery in all its mysterious goodness and shiny shiny artwork, and leave me comments. Not necessarily on the book. Just remind me that there is life after Labor Day.

P.S. No less than three purry incursions. I surrender. I will throw her out of the house before Mother and Stepfather return, but I know when to bow to the inevitable.

Movie Bitch: Chronicles of Riddick

I've been sitting on this one for a while...but...

           Flashback. It’s 2000, the internet is still shiny enough for AOL to be a ISP option and not an allergic reaction, MP3 is what you get when you throw phone keys and scrabble tiles together into the same bag, and a movie called Pitch Black has just hit theaters. And it’s, you know, a pretty okay movie. I didn’t see it in the theaters and I don’t know anybody who did, but I did eventually see…half of it.

So “okay” I mean not actively broken. When I can’t sit through or read through all of whatever it is, that’s usually a bad sign. By combining what I remember of it with what I read on IMDB and Wikipedia, I know I probably would have been disappointed because I got attached to the kick ass girl captain, and…well…she didn’t make it.

 But one thing I remember was Vin Diesel. Not because he did a good job in Pitch Black—though he did—but because after that movie he was everywhere. The Fast and the Furious came out the next year and you could not walk into anything resembling a theater without seeing his face and hearing his deep, rich voice come over the speakers. Then he did xXx, and while that’s the laziest title I’ve seen in a while apparently it was a rousing box office success.

Anyway, Hollywood never being one to miss a chance to ruin a pretty good thing, they eventually decided to make The Chronicles of Riddick. Which I had to watch recently.

This is my therapy.

Dear Julia Roberts

You're a good actress. Admittedly you do one role. Cute. Akward. Giggly. America's Sweetheart--okay, in that one movie you were actually her sister, but there is no way in hell anyone thought they were talking about Catherine Zeta-Jones when they started pitching that movie, you know? But to get back to my point...you're a good actress. Good. And you have to know how to pick scripts that display your abilities to their fullest. Like, you know, America's Sweethearts. (I refuse to see Eat, Pray, Love. I know it's probably a good movie, but watching a rich white woman act in a movie about a rich white woman who talked her publisher into paying for her world tour isn't my idea of a good hour spent, ya know?)

So I have one question: HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MENTAL???



Jesus. I have to go take a shower now. Back in five.

Okay, let's start with the endurable stuff: It's costume porn, the sets are awesome, and the CGI castle doesn't make me want to rupture something from the wincing. Which I did thirty seconds in, when I heard someone say the words blah blah blah in a fantasy movie. One that isn't Shrek related. Although this is less kissing cousins to Shrek and more that one guy who lives up in the mountains with his mother and his sister (They're the same bloody person)

...

(How about the shop, then?) /hot fuzz quote

Anyway, I get that Shrek and it's offshoots are popular, having modern in-jokes in fantasy material is equally popular, but you know what? There's a demographic you're supposed to be courting, given that this is competing with another, identical movie. And I hate Kirsten Stewart. I hate sitting through Twilight Movies (GODDAMN YOU LIONSGATE FOR PUTTING HUNGER GAMES TRAILER IN FRONT OF BREAKING DAWN you will suffer for this I promise you) (Yes I know I can watch it on Youtube)(I already have) (I'm still going to see it on the big screen) (I am that obsessed) and watching KStew stumble through her horrible dialogue. Snow White and the Huntsman is now officially on my Please God Don't Let it Suck prayer list. Because it looked that awesome. (Probably because she didn't talk)

I get that studio executives somewhere heard that a Snow White movie was being made, and they decided the best thing they could do is make a competing Snow White movie so that people intending to see KStew would go see this one (let's be honest here. I can smell the slapped together desperation through my laptop) and get a big name actress to give it some form of legitimacy. But lemme let you in on a little secret: The villian? Should not get top billing in the picture. Because I do not care yet. Well, unless your goal was to make me want the  villain dead, because if that's the case they've done a pretty good job. This means that 1. there was nobody famous in the right age range for Snow White, who was desperate enough to take the role. 2. they had to make do with what they could get.

But there's a huge difference between "make do with what we can get" and "HEY! JULIA ROBERTS!"

I will probably wind up seeing SWatH because it looks awesome. This? Does not look awesome. This is a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that contains a fucking midget joke. It contains Tony Montana references (AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME) and everything else sucking combined could not begin to compare with how much you suck in this trailer, Julia.

I haven't seen the movie yet. I don't intend to go see the movie yet, because I'm REALLY tired of Hollywood dressing up fresh steaming turds with the Brother's Grimm and us fantasy fans having to make do.

Why are are you in this, Julia? Seriously. I was warned. Don't watch this. It's horrible. I watched it. And I'm going, hey, it's not so bad. Cliched, a little overly polished--and then you open your mouth and I go "huh?" My jaw dropped. The evil nega-fan within me stared in horror and then began rocking in the corner. I had to check my laptop to make sure it hadn't begun to bleed out the USB ports.

Were you blackmailed? Please tell me you were blackmailed. And then tell the world what it was, because whatever it was it can't possibly be as bad as having to see you in this movie. I know you have kids now (I think) and that you'd like to make movies your kids can watch. Please see the above part where I mentioned this has a midget joke in it. Probably more than one. (And let's not even mention the Snow white, S'no way joke. Seriously. If we never mention this again I can probably block it out forever). I know that using little people as the butt of the joke is kind of the latest modern fad, but blackface was pretty popular for a while there, too.

And aging beauty jokes? Seriously? Julia, you might have a couple lines that you would call wrinkles, but not only will no one else on the planet ever notice them, a little botox will buff that right out (oh god, there's going to be a botox joke in this, isn't there? I know it. I just fucking know it. I'm going to come back in six months and write in, yep, there was a botox joke). And Julia, I hate to break it to you, but there is no way in FUCK you'd ever need a corset. E.V.E.R. Let alone need to have it be wrenched together.

I am hoping desperately this is a terrible hoax, and that you were blackmailed into participation in this terrible hoax, and that I never have to see that thing again.

I'm going to go wash my blog out with holy water now.

F**king bugs.

So one thing we always had as kids were praying mantis. es. (Plural form of mantis?) I mean...there is not a cooler bug in the universe. They look like cats designed by aliens, act like cats (ever watched one clean itself?) and eat other bugs that we human things generally don't like. And the other day we found one. "We" being my brother's awesome if slightly ADD girlfriend. And then I found another one. We've never had more than one mantis at a time, so I figured hey, why not, you know? And as having two we-eat-everything-we-see-moving kind of creatures in the same container usually results in one eating the other, we separated them. Number one is as every mantis ought to be. See bug. Eat bug. But the other one... He just kind of ... sat there.

See, the fun of owning a mantis is care and feeding. Emphasis on "feeding". Yes. I am a mean and cold-hearted bitch. But it is cool. And when the mantis won't eat...you get kind of bored. And when you have two mantis...es...is...s...(seriously. Why have autocorrect if it won't spit out the damn word?) And you're bored, you decide to put them together to see what they'll do.

My brother's slightly ADD girlfriend? Put them together about ten minutes ago. As for what they'd do with each other...well...

...yeah.

In Which A Dedicated Pro-Lifer Jumps Ship.

So today I found out that Mississippi state House, on Nov. 8th, is voting on a bill that would grant “personhood” to human embryos. And I realized that despite years and years of education in Why Abortion is Bad and When Life Starts and a gazillion other things my good Christian parents have educated me about, despite being a dedicated Christian (with kinks) and a Republican (technically) I really don't like this. Having this pass and set precedent for other states would be a really bad thing for me. You know, because I'm one of those “woman” things with ovaries and a uterus.

And no. I’m not saying this because limitations on birth control, which is what this group is advocating, would limit my happy fun sexy times. I don’t have happy fun sexy times. I have not had sex. Ever. And I don’t plan on having sex in the immediate future, partially because me having a baby right now would be a really bad thing. Even if I were on birth control I probably wouldn’t be having sex, because I have some really good evidence that the pill doesn’t always work.

Me.

Yep. I’m a pill baby, folks. Not only that, but Mom was on the pill because her doctor told her it’d be a really BAD idea for her to ever get pregnant again. She’d lost two babies before she had me, and when she did get pregnant with me, the first time she went in for a checkup the doctor could feel my head.

And you know, maybe it’s me shoving my head up my own ass here, but that tells me that God really wanted me here. Enough to bypass every safety mechanism my parents put in place because Mom having babies was Not A Good Thing according to everyone. And this leads me to why this bill pisses me off.

Point the First: I am poor. Anyone I marry is likely to be poor. Therefore, if within the next ten years or so I decide to get married, it probably will not be “right” for me to have a baby. Note that I am considering this in the relm of “marry” because, religious leanings aside, given how often birth control has failed in my family if you want to get in my pants you’d better fucking be ready to marry me before you cross the finish line, so to speak,  because I cannot afford to have a baby if and when I get married right now, let alone if I’m on my own. In fact, every other consideration off the table, under every conceivable set of probable circumstances shows me that I probably will not ever be able to afford a baby and provide the level of care and life the child would need.


With "good of the child" as my primary concern, it's a bad idea for me to have kids. So who the hell are you to take this decision away from me? To tell me that if I want to have a relationship with someone I’d better have a baby plan in place first? I’m already paranoid about having a kid, in or out of wedlock, before I’m ready to raise and care for that kid. And I want to have a kid! I just know me having babies right now is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea. This is a decision I’ve made carefully and soberly, and to have somebody tell me “tough luck” and take the few, unreliable tools I DO have for managing my future away from me is not fair. If I can’t afford a fucking CAR, sir, I can’t afford a baby. And you’re telling me that I also can’t afford to have a relationship, MARRIED OR NOT, because I can’t even have birth control?

And hey? Pro-life people? Did you see that place above where I said “Even if I’m on the pill, I probably wouldn’t have sex”? Does it not occur to you that some people use hormonal birth control for something OTHER than not making babies? That maybe us women people need to be able to function and not be incapacitated with cramps? Or deal with the anemia that comes with excessively heavy periods? That being able to predict when the monthly gift deposits itself on our door might be a good thing? Oh, and you know the mood swings that come with? Do you want to combine brittle emotional states with chronic depression? You want to know what a fucking funhouse it is to have S/I issues and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that once a month I get to hold on to my sanity by the skin of my teeth? Because I sure as fuck didn't, and I got to anyway.

You want to control crime? Make sure you don’t have poor families with sixteen mouths to feed. Make sure women don’t have to fucking sterilize themselves to ensure that “woopsie daisy, there’s a baby” doesn’t get in the way of feeding their other children. Make sure that the family a person has is the family they can afford to feed. Want to prevent abortions? See above.

And that brings me to Point number two. This is aimed at the religious people. The people who want to do God’s will in life, who think that preventing abortions is it.

Who the BLAZING BLUE FUCK do you think you are? How DARE you shove your head so far up your own ass that you think anyone can abort something God wants to have happen? Do you see that part above me? The part where I said I’m a pill baby? Do you think that one single person God wants in this world hasn’t been born? Do you think we really have that much power? Really? You really want to think that human beings have more power than God?

Do you think God is so weak that a surgeon with a scalpel and a vacuum can undo something he wants done? Is your God so powerless that he can’t secure the birth of every child he desires?

Judge not, lest you be judged, sir. And you’re judging. You’ve decided that every teenager who gets pregnant is a careless sex fiend. You’ve decided that every career woman who decides to go on the pill is a feminazi ice bitch. Every poor person who visits planned parenthood is someone getting an abortion, and every woman who gets an abortion is a whore.

In your world, there are no rape victims.

In your world, biology is perfect.

In your world, everyone can scrape together the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to bring a single healthy baby into the world.

You don’t see the pain.

You don’t see the desperation.

You have the compassion of a jar of mayonnaise.

You know that part in the bible? Splinter in your friend’s eye? BIG FUCKING LOG in yours? Abortion is a splinter. Abortion is a matter between the individual WOMAN faced with that choice and God. So is birth control. So is everything else in a WOMAN’S life. May I emphasize that again? If I decide that I am neither financially nor emotionally nor physically stable enough to have a baby it should be my fucking choice. You cannot tell me what I am capable of. It is my body, and I’d rather become a nun than bring a child into the world when I cannot provide a stable, healthy home for it. Children, marriage and sex are decisions that are between ME and GOD, and not some rich politician who probably spends twice my monthly rent on BOOZE, or gas, or electricity for his air conditioning, who doesn’t see things from my perspective, who has never seen things from my perspective, who, if he did see me, would see me as a waitress and would ogle my boobs and cut my tip in half if I protested.

In short, sir:

And yes, that’s me judging too. And I’ll apologize to both you and God for it when I’m less pissed off.

C.S. Lewis, the great theologian and fantasy writer, said two things in passing that apply here. The first was in his biography, where he discusses the massive amount of pediastry that happened in his prep school (aka boys screwing other boys). He said that he never felt it his place to judge because he never experienced that particular temptation. Then, in The Horse and his Boy, there is a place where Aslan tells a character why it was necessary for him to scar the character across the back: the girl needed to know what she had carelessly done to her faithful servant. When the girl, now humble, asks what happened to the servant, Aslan replies that that is not the girl’s story. We each may only know our own stories.

You might believe that birth, not abortion is the morally right choice. This is great. I believe that too. But, and this is the key, you will never have to make that choice. I will. You will never have to decide between buying food and buying diapers. Between having a romantic life and having stability. And constricting my freedom just so that you  can sleep at night is not and cannot be God’s will. And to think that you have any control over God’s will, in a positive or negative sense?

Look up megalomania in the dictionary. I think you’ll see your picture right next to it.

Tipping on the credit change

Okay, so I haven’t posted in a while. This is due to my having nothing of either a positive or negative nature to report—seriously, what do you talk about when every day is the same, and same=tons of work for pretty decent money?—and having an internet connection that sucks so bad logging into Blogger takes about fifteen minutes and a TON of refreshes, let alone actually getting to the posting part of the dashboard. I’m switching carriers next week, I swear to GOD.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What do I want to talk about?

Tips. And how they can sometimes annoy me.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind getting not-tipped. It’s a scum-sucking, selfish thing to do, not to tip your waitress, let alone your barista (coffee gals don’t get tipped as much as waitresses. So when I am in coffee-mode I am not as "FUCK YOU KILL IT WITH FIRE" about tables that don't tip as I am when I'm a waitress. Just an FYI) but I don’t mind. I don’t even mind small tips. A tip is a tip.

What do I mind? Well, I’m gonna assume that all of you have, at one point or another, paid for food with a credit card. And you’ve seen a nice little place on the white slip for you to write your tip in, so that the waitress can take it in the back and adjust it and you don’t have to screw around with cash. Some people leave cash and ignore it. Some people put a nice tip in there, some people put a small tip in there, some people just write the original total into the slot, which is really really stupid because I COULD interpret that as leaving a 100% tip—I’m smarter than that, but I could if I wanted to—and all of the above do not bother me.

Not even when I can’t read the tip because your handwriting sucks.

What bothers me are the people who tip on the credit change.

This is when you get your credit receipt, and instead of writing a nice, round number, like $1.00, or the obvious 15%, you write a tip that, combined with your total, adds up to a round number. You stick me with your credit card’s spare change.

Example: on a 29.17 bill, they tip 5.83. The new total is 34.00 even and I have to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with eighty three cents in change. I do not mind if you have paid in cash and decide to leave your change in the tip jar, because I don’t like carrying change around either. But credit card bills are imaginary money. You are not getting any spare change out of my register. There is no reason to give me change. You have a little slip of white paper on which you are to either write a tip, or not write a tip. Today I sold a guy a cup of coffee. Cost 3.25 (hey, the boss does the pricing) and he decided to pay with a credit card. I did not expect a tip, because it’s a three dollar cup of coffee and he already tipped me on the other six cups of coffee he bought for his party. He writes .75 in the slot. I didn’t even bother processing it because I didn’t want his fucking imaginary spare change.

“But CW!” you say. “Surely, he was just being considerate. He tipped you!  He was trying to give you money! What’s wrong with being given money?”

True, but remember what I said: This is not real spare change. This is not that handful of pennies and dimes that you don’t want to stick in your pocket. This is any amount of money he wants to write in the total, from 0 to $100. So let me ask you this: Why couldn’t I have the other quarter? And if I couldn’t have the quarter, why do I have to take the seventy-five cents? Why couldn’t he just, like, not tip? Why do I have to deal with an uneven number?

Because he wanted to see $4.00 on the bottom of the card, and not 3.25 or 4.25. No. He wanted to see that nice, even 4.00. Wasn’t about giving me a tip at all. It was about making his life look neat and orderly, and so what if the barista doesn’t want another three quarters sloshing around on the bottom of her purse, or to have to make yet another trip to a Coin Star to get folding money out of her tip jar? He’s got a neat total at the bottom of his credit receipt, and that’s all that matters.

Tipping the change tells me you are a considerate person who wants to tip, and who also doesn’t want to carry six tons of change in your pockets. Tipping the change plus an extra dollar makes you my BFF and I will probably give you a free refill when the boss is not looking, and sometimes even when the boss is looking because we throw out a heck of a lot of coffee. Tipping on the credit change tells me you are an obsessive compulsive asshole who wants to look like a decent person who tips, but who can’t bother giving me a whole fucking dollar because then the total on that piece of white paper would bother you.  So thank you. Thank you for making my tip jar all about you.

There is no reason to not use round numbers on a credit check, unless you want to tip a full 15%. In which case I am still annoyed at having to lug change around, but I understand it. But if it is obvious you only gave me that fifteen cents so that your check will be a nice, even 67.00, you know what I’m going to do? I’m not processing the goddamned fifteen cents.

Yes. I know it’s self sabotage. Yes. I know it’s petty. Yes. I know I am throwing money that you willingly gave me away because I’m irritated over spare change. But you know what? Credit-change tippers are also the people who run me ragged wanting their beers “dressed” and their salad done with no-fat lactose free blue cheese dressing (seriously), and the meat cooked rare plus plus (Medium rare just not good enough for you?)  and the fish cooked with no seasonings, just oil, we like to taste the fish (Oh, hey. Let me quote our cook/owner: FUCK YOU.) (Seriously. That’s like asking the artist to leave all the paint off the canvas because you want to look at the fabric. If you want plain fish, save our time, save yours, go eat at a restaurant where they’re not going to charge you twenty bucks for the privilege.) They’re the ones who complain about the dish being tasteless (Again: FUCK YOU. THAT’S WHAT YOU ASKED FOR) after they ate every bite of it. They are the ones who look over the menu, see what we have, and then ask for a triple-shot no foam no-fat venti mocha latte (WE ARE NOT FUCKING STARBUCKS) but could I please leave room for cream? (Seriously.) And you know what? One of them is going to be so fucking OCD, they’re going to go down their credit bill with a red pen and check every single one of the totals, and they are going to see that I did not charge them for that fucking fifteen fucking cent tip, and they are going to twitch.

And they can’t do a goddamn thing about it.

And for the rest of you kind, considerate people: Tip, or don’t tip. Give us your tired (coins) your poor (pennies) your huddled masses (of real money) yearning (to be in my pocket). But if you have a credit slip, and you have to write something in it, put in your percentage, or a nice, round number. Don’t give me your imaginary spare change. I really, really don’t want it, and it makes you look like an obsessive-compulsive ass.

And if you really are that OCD, you can let me know. Mental illness isn’t fun, and I feel sympathy for you. I still won’t process your change, but I won’t call you an asshole either. And you could probably talk me into putting chocolate in your latte.