Ewww.

Me, reading the news: "The next big thing: the digital skinjob."

fallenpegasus: "Is that like a digital handjob? I guess all handjobs are digital, aren't they?"

"Write Anything. Feel free to write badly."

I just can't seem to get the energy to write today. I should have it. So much and so little happened this week that it's hard to know where to begin. I should write: I've written 15,000 words into Polestar. I have more material. I'm tempted to rename it Stella Polaris now, as a play on Stella Solaris, although apparently there was a Stella Polaris in the 1920s, an Italian cruise liner, which would make sense, since the first act of Polestar happens on a cruise liner, wherein our heroine makes, uh, contact, with a hard-bitten cop, a rather religious and uptight woman who secretly craves being perverse, a studious young college student with a dog (get your mind out of the gutter), a neurotic older woman and her youthful daughter who crushes hard on Mava.

But I can't. One of the cures for that blockage is to just write whatever you want.

Lessee. This week, on a bus ride home, I was battered by a gaggle of high school girls who felt that everything they had to say, they had to say it loud and if nobody else liked it that was tough. The driver told them to shut up and they told him they could say whatever they want. I'm amazed he didn't call the Metro sherrifs. They also smelled bad: some kind of spicy smell, like sandalwood gone horribly rancid.

Today, Omaha sent me on a journey throughout the city to locate some Modern Organic Product shampoo. The one place I know to get it is in West Seattle, and the woman who runs the place told me that MOP is the worst distributor in the world: they change bottle sizes seemingly at random, they never announce product changes or lineups, they don't have quarterly inventory updates. They seem to survive strictly by being good enough that people ask for them by name. That's no way to run a business.

I wrote a quick little program, mp3tom4b, to convert my Japanese language classes to the iPod audiobook format. It's taken over four hours to run the conversion on my little laptop. Poor machine has been warmer than usual all day.

And I had an interesting conversation with one of my fans who complained, "Your lesbians have sex too much." She, being one, apparently felt my stories were unrealistic, since she'd like to have sex as often and as wonderfully as, say, Misuko & Linia, but so far such romance had eluded her. I reassured her that I only wrote about the ones that had sex; writing about the ones who didn't would be a little pointless for erotica, ne? Someday, she'll meet her Princess Erotic.

Oh, and remember the writer of Nyssa's Guardian? Yeah, Gaby Reese. She's got a new one. (Actually, she's got two, but I passed on, what was it, A Dominant for Deela or something like that?) More in the next post.

Bad Smut the People pay for.

I've been going through Ellora's Cave and the other on-line "romantica" sites and reading their previews and, oh gods, if this is what people are willing to pay for, I despair.

"Tilly Greene" (Venus Publishing) makes every beginning writer's mistake in the book: an "Elvin princess" who starts out her memoirs as if she were a valley girl who has only ever read California chick lit, and a cowboy romance novel that starts out with a ton of exposition about the ranch because, y'know, Brokeback Mountain (the movie, not the book) had all these beautiful vistas that just put you in the mood, y'know, and so, like, y'know, that's how she wanted to write and give you that sense, so, like, y'know, that's how the book starts, right? (If you've read Proulx's original novella, you know that she's much more interested in the characters than she is in the background, just like the movie.)

"Toni Mellieur" seems to believe that putting vampires on space stations and making them talk like they were in a 1970s disco film is somehow new or interesting.

And if that weren't enough, there's one more. The writer of Nyssa's Guardian has a new book, A Centaur for Libby. She's getting better but she still has a long way to go. Sentence #1: "Dark-haired [ding] Libby Daniels, public defender extraordinaire [ding], champion of the hopeless [ding] and overall queen of lost causes [ding], squirmed uncomfortably in her deep leather chair." The scene progresses as Libby confesses to her therapist her dreams of having sex with a centaur-- and here, as a furry writer, I'm deeply disappointed that Ms. Reese lacks the courage to give our centaur horsecock, but instead it's big but human-shaped. Yawn. Not that Libby gets her hands on it. After this scene, there is scene two, and the first two sentences are: "Humas beings were not a myth, nor was their fantasy world known as Earth. this was the conclusion reached by Markos the Centaur shortly after appearing from thin air in the middle of a strange forest of high, steel towers, points sharp as arrows."

Yeah, well. Markos is a greek god in all sorts of physical ways. Unfortunately, Ms. Reese has a limited imagination and when he finally gets Libby alone in a room, she's overwhelmed by his dominant, stallionesque charisma and he starts ordering her around like he just walked out of a Gor novel, violating the character development Reese had done for him up to that moment.

Bleah.