LughIldanach: Blog

Earlier this week, I visited the small, private, Coast Guard Heritage Museum on Cape Cod. Definitely worth visiting, for content, if you're in the area. As my guided tour group ended, another started. I glanced at it, to find my eyes captivated by one woman.

She was tall and very slender, in sprayed-on jeans, moderate heeled boots, and stayed in a practical rain jacket. Her hair was abundant, perhaps a dark gray, and curly. Eye makeup was vivid, artistic, yet restrained; her face glowed with intelligence. She might have been a model in her twenties and now was in management, in her forties or fifties.

I was in instant lust. At the moment, and since then, I've had flashforwards of repeated mental images of glorious, somewhat kinky, sex. But I haven't figured out how to translate it to a story.

Also, I have flashbacks to another woman of my past, also tall and very slim, but who thought of herself as ugly and chose attire to make it worse. When her unflattering clothes came off, she had a very nice figure. At the time, I could see some quick improvements to hair and makeup, and a potential for cosmetic surgery on her chin. We did have a nice relationships for a few months, ending when I attempted (failed) to have a reconciliation with my estranged wife. Still, there's a lot of do-over potential. The woman in the museum gives me even more idea of what the Version 2 Carol could look like.
Adding to this, I

It's hard to complain when one's muse seems to be taking generous quantities of amphetamines. Maybe it's her taking medical-quality drugs that I've been rolling out, and will continue to roll out, mostly humorous and sexy medical tales. I have enough longer stories in progress that I thought it useful to put a status report here, which I will periodically update.

The medical tales are getting lots of readers, and generally good reviews. I'm afraid that I was irritable with one reader who complained that the medical jargon was boring. If there's no jargon, it wouldn't be realistic in a research or teaching hospital, and these are largely true stories. The jargon issue, however, brings up a constant challenge that applies to science fiction as well: how much should be explained? In the most recent, "In Dubious Battle", I was explicit about explaining in the main story, not putting the explanation into a character speech. Still, the medical tales are, more than anything else, fun for me.

A much longer, science-fictionish work in progress is "Wounded Warriors of the Sexual Revolution", in my "Le Marquis" series of the "Sexual Revolutionaries" universe. I could finish it with three or four chapters, but am debating whether to roll a new version. Some of this comes from things I learned in searching the medical literature, and finding some personally challenging medical/plot elements.

"Loving the Pyramid" also draws on some complex science, this one in psychology and psychiatry as well as sexual social science. It is based on true events, and has some role in my personal psychotherapy. I'm personally very proud of it. There are 4-6 chapters to go. For whatever reason, it has been getting low scores. Maybe I will do better with a sequel once this has set the context.

"The Godgranddaughter's Lover" is rolling along and doing much better. I should observe that this is something of a parallel track to "Loving the Pyramid". It deals with building a society based on [responsible] power, with some leadership from organized crime. In contrast, "Loving the Pyramid" has leadership with much more altruism.

My alternate history, "Ask Not..." has to go on for quite a number of chapters, simply due to the complexity. It will deal with an alternate 1963. I may need to go back and do some edits to the completed "Tomorrow is Another Day", an alternate 1962, simply to clean up some needed background for the 1963 story.

I'll be completing "Road Warrior..." soon. Frankly, I haven't touched it for a while because it needs to end with a personal do-over that has some tear-jerker properties.

While one of my stories doesn't yet have enough votes to show, I'm greatly amused with a score of 6.66.

Rather to my surprise, I got a 1 on a new story, "Touching My Heart, Part I". Other votes were high.

The 1 vote is supposed to be for a totally unacceptable story. I find that it's generally trollish, delivered at the very beginning of a multi-chapter story, and usually from someone without the courage to email me or comment in public. Now, the story may not interest you. You may want harder sex. But is the story unreadable, which I tend to think is the purpose of the 1?

In fairness, I recently considered it for one story. After the first chapter, I contacted the author by email, and explained that some of the ways another language were used made no sense. I happen to have some familiarity with that language and culture.

The author replied, explaining that why some of the foreign language made no sense is that it didn't -- it was random text run through Google Translate, to give a "flavor". I offered to provide some alternate text, but there was no interest. A subsequent chapter was just as unreadable.

I seriously considered a 1, but I had said what I needed to the author. The story already had low scores. A 1, I thought, would simply be discouraging to someone that had made an effort. If future stories are this bad, I might reconsider. My purpose, though, is to be constructive, and informative to the community.

I've done a major edit of "Wounded Warriors of the Sexual Revolution", cleaning up some plot points -- the science is improved although there's some alternate medicine -- and some overall editorial improvements. There will be a few additional chapters, but some of the longer-term healing will be in a sequel.

Even the first time through, I thought this was a decent story, but it's gotten low scores. If you had done so, I'd ask that you reconsider after the changes.

It's my intention to enable voting with Chapter 2, but I had trouble enabling that in the submission. I'm going to play around with where I enable, but it's dubious to me that someone reasonably can do a 1 or 10 on a single chapter.

Voting is now enabled.