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I really learned how to write here at Stories On Line.
The more you do something, the better you get at it, and then there is 'real reality' and how that kicks into this mess is a VERY long story indeed.
Sometimes you have to have a very unusual outlook on life in order to 'figure the angles' and since I just happen to flat out SUCK with Money, but I am VERY GOOD with technology, what you have been reading is a chunk of 'what I have been doing this year' and it was trying to put this odd idea together.
Now, when this took off, I'd just 'zinged one' past the entire United States Intelligence community and I flat out figured that the United States of America owes me one. After all, if you graduated from high school in 1967, were unmarried, healthy and male, thy higher ups wanted you to go fight a war that the Sec of Defense has admitted he knew was lost in 1964. I graduated and went to Detroit (where I was originally from, fyi) and got a job and was in an auto accident and just decided that it was late July and I had an urge to see some friends of mine before they left in for the Army in August and next day after I got home, they raided a blind pig and that was the last I saw of the Detroit I had grown up in. 1969, whole new country and the whole 'Fucking Long Hairs!' and all that bit with 'you should obey them, they know more than you do!' authority structure stuff we stuff everyone's heads full of about how 'important it is to go to school' and get educated and all that so you can get a good job when you grow up.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; dropouts. QED. You do NOT need to go to college to be a success.
Wayne State University with it's inner city campus and very cool architecture was where I wanted to go and I did. Three burglaries and three murdered friends of mine and off to California I went. You really do make friends for life when you're that age going through that kind of stuff that was happening in 1970. Jim Janis and Jimmy, Beatles breaking up, Kent State, Winter Soldier, Viet Nam, (it was two words in those days) and you wonder WTF was that all about? Oh, they just decided to kill you so they could make a profit on the deal. The Military Industrial Complex made a killing on killing three million people and that was not what I was brought up to believe America stood for.
Being an American has always been an odd thing as far as history goes. We had famous battles upon this continent, yet the most famous and 'actually historically significant world wide' was one in which only Americans were killed.
We invented modern industrial warfare and have achieved the highest killing rate ever achieved in life taking, at least as far as 'lives per hour' statics go one night in Tokyo and this military powerhouse that the United States depended upon to 'keep it free' consumed enormous amounts of money to keep up to date.
What 'The Qubit Comedy & Drama Hour' represents is an odd reality that is not our own. In a Quantum Universe you have this theory about Multiverses, where 'everything happens' and just how you select which reality becomes real is part of 'how you play Detroit' in a very real sense.
'Time Travel is Impossible' is a tongue in cheek phrase that the whole show states is a fact. I think most of you reading this will agree with that statement as being true, or 'more or less true under normal circumstances' and so the idea of a group of time traveling aliens dropping in on a group of black people in a run down bar in Detroit Michigan is just so far off the charts flat out impossible you just KNOW that I'm having you all on, right? (Nod your head, 'Your not under alien control are you?' Oops, that was supposed to be 'shake your head', Take 2!)
First off, what you are looking at is a weapons system designed to break off the Religious Right's control of the Republican Party. I'm using laughter against them as a psychological warfare tactic.
And attempting to attract a world wide viewing audience at the same time. Not going to happen, so I just decided to chuck this whole thing out on the net and let whomever wants to have a whack at writing stories set into the World Game One: Detroit 2015! Universe after it's set up.
What happens inside the first five weeks is 'Jessica daddy outs himself as a time traveler' and 'Jessica Meets New Friends!' and 'Adults freak out!' and there is Jessica with her two gal pals, two 'pet rabbits' (and they pick up the nicknames 'rabbits' because they have very prominent buck teeth,) and they have to be looked out for constantly. They are hayseeds from out of the past and if this thing had actually gone on, they'd have probably been some super sharp skinny ass white students from the University of Georgia who'd have been prepped very well as to 'what words they would have used' and 'what they would have thought about stuff' and 'what their everyday lives would have been like' and I'm sure some Southern reenactors would have been willing to show those boys what the Southern soldiers carried and shot and how 'living on campaign' was done back in the day.
Some of this stuff that was prepared for this 'had this ever gotten that far in real life' World Game has to do with stuff like logistics, designs, contests, performers being willing to play the Time Traveler's Ball and financials concerning the actual salvage operation of an American city by six hundred thousand contestants from every country in the world.
I design systems I suppose you could describe what I am best at in life, but I am not good with 'money' as we know it today. So I designed a system which actually would have been able to actually be used to produce a 'World Game' and that is what the second 'five weeks' of "Jack's World" would have been dealing with. How do you 'smuggle in' an entirely different economic system so you can actually HAVE a World Game? We all know 'time travel is impossible' so obviously you're not going to buy into time traveling aliens, even if they are somewhat disguised as old refrigerators, or Paris Hilton Clones, right?
TV Land isn't real. The Internet is real.
How TV Land effects our own reality you only have to understand that I live where BJ Hunnicutt was from.
Anyone who was a fan of the show MASH can figure that one out because it's culturally relevant to you. Deliberately setting out to have a TV show kicked off the air? Does not compute unless you look at How Much Money 13 hours of prime time on Saturday night costs. If we can get the heave ho and go straight to Net, there goes all of our major costs, right?
'The Zombie Show That Can't Be Killed' is created with network lawyers saying we can't get out of our contract to buy the air time and the Republican 'Value Voters' all up in arms and the bigots lined up right behind them, all the while Terri 'Spin!' Steele (who I'd hoped to sign Paris Hilton to play, for REAL!) and Agent Triple X of the Time Patrol (also played by Ms. Hilton) goes to 'as raunchy as possible' humor (without going X rated) to get the show kicked off the air and NOTHING WORKS! The show gets into 'free speech' and 'anti religious' cannot actually be said to apply as there is not one single mention of belief systems at all been aired.
I really don't need the stress of this, so letting go of this doesn't matter at all after the fifteenth of this month deadline that is coming up, well, walking away seems to be the wise thing to do. Nobody has the balls to say anything at all here in America against the people who run this nation, and the fact that this little odd piece of probably Anti American Propaganda should ever be allowed to air? Are you seriously out of your fucking mind?
"Why do you ask that? I'm an American, there is no 'right mind' to be in here anymore, so I'm afraid you have the advantage on me there, sir. I gather your adjusted to your nation's enchantment with high technology, correct?"
I am not a Christian. Just thought you should know that. I'm not a Moslem, either, and the particular off shoot I follow of Zen has no other practitioners so besides not being any of those, I'm also not a Democrat or Republican, and I don't believe in the Almighty Dollar either, so obviously I'm not from around here.
Speaking of which, I suppose I should get the Pitching Paris Hilton manuscript cleaned up a bit and put it up for sale on eBay or whatever it is. Amazon? Okay, I'm only in this for the money, you see?
Now, how 'Un-American' is that?
Considering that this is 'my real reality' these days, I must confess that the horticultural experiments I subject myself to actually have become my meds these days!
I'd also like to thank Dr. Timothy Leary and Doctor Albert Hoffman for assistance in decorating my own internal mind-scape that created this insanity and Dr. Tom Leher for furnishing my impressionable young mind with such songs as 'The Old Dope Peddler' and 'The Vatican Rag' with materials which distorted it into being able to produce HRH The Lucky Lucy herself, and you can't say that 'The Lucky' is not a title well earned, eh? You don't generally get to be the Empress of Eight Universes by just being immortal, you know?
Since the story lines that are all starting out from 'The Old Reality Bar & Grill' seems to getting a lot of 'Politically Correct' votes from my use of the N-Word inside the first episode of 'The Old Reality Bar & Grill' is seen as some kind of racist BS, I thought I'd put up my thoughts here about the 'word white people aren't allowed to say' and just say that it's not racist on my part. Every single black person kind of 'already knows' that any white person saying the word 'nigger' has to be a racist mo-fo and then we come to Mr. John Lennon's song titled 'Women is the Niggers of the World' and Mr. Joseph Conrad's story called "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (1897).
Odd world isn't it? I have friends of mine who are black, who I'd never say the word 'nigger' to, but what I am trying to talk about here is THE ATTITUDE that the N-Word always seems to result in: Anyone who has a white hide has to automatically BE a racist if they use it in print.
Now, I'm a Mick and a mackerel snatcher and a lot of other things too, but none of those words have the power to incite or to inflict hurt on someone in the year of our lord, 2014, sometimes referred to as 'CE' or 'Current Era' which takes the entire 'Christ is where we start telling time from' calender and somehow makes it okay to use 'current' instead of 'Christian' and now I'm going to have all of the Religious Right on my ass, too. Since I really don't care much about what your own opinions are towards my own private thoughts are, but since I'm a writer, I'm actually sharing my own world view of what I happen to think of the social reality we all live in here inside of America, and also the whole role of racism as a means to keep 'the niggers down' (and thank you Mr. Newman for the song "Keeping the Niggers Down" about Mr. Lester Maddox, from Georgia, I believe,) and since we are all basically 'niggers' on this planet, my use of black dialogues and racially derogatory words is not allowed due to the fact that I have been born with a lack of melamine in my epidural color reflective index.
You have automatically judged me a racist without considering the fact that I just blew up your entire reality in a few thousand words. Obviously I have to BE a racist to be white and use the N-word plainly and bluntly as a shock element in the opening story of the whole series of events that will be taking place inside the five TV shows that are all part of the Qubit Comedy and Drama Hour.
Get over yourselves people, a white guy out in California who has spent most all of this year putting together a TV and Movie pitch about time traveling aliens and Russian security forces safeguarding a pagan rock star named Masha Scream who would be starring in the actual movie 'The Fountains of Belle Isle' that Russian World Studios would be bankrolling? And which SEEMS to be a made for TV movie with lots of nudity in it that LOOKS like it's being bankrolled by Paris Hilton, who has been asked to act in the damn series doing two roles, that of 'Secret Agent X-2' and her identical twin, 'Secret Agent Triple X of the Time Patrol!' and yes, when you have actual materials being sent to the White House of the United States of America that use the 'N-Word' in them? Obviously this guy is a monster of some type and should be ignored as much as possible otherwise he might embarrass the country or something like that. The 'Barry and Mickey' sketches that form another part of the whole Qubit Comedy and Drama Hour and which close out every week's show.
The low ratings on the score are actually your own mental filters automatically kick in and prevent you from actually looking directly at what you are seeing.
A bit close to home, in some way you can see, but in another way you cannot see at all. The N-Word simply shorted out that entire story. There has been no actual sex in the story, but the story tags with three different races lead you to expect that there will be sometimes in the future. Two Confederate soldiers lost in Kansas freeze to death one winter and wind up in the custody of a very bright black girl and her two friends. Jessica is fourteen years old, and by the laws of the State of Michigan she has to attend school until she is sixteen years of age. She's had three offers of full scholarships to Harvard, Stanford and MIT, has never gotten less than an A+ in any class in her life, attends Cass Technical High School and the reason she doesn't take advantage of that is because she loves her dad and he loves her. NOT SEXUALLY, but just ... if you have to have that explained to yourself here, I can't talk to you.
This is the lowest score any of my stories has ever gotten, and part of that is the lack of editing. I'll resubmit it in a week or so, but for the next few days, you'll be getting 'story treatments' about three different sit coms, then you'll be getting the comedy story treatments for the other two shows and the movie scenes being shot, as well as the ads for this series and how the series was to be structured. It's a 'real deal' TV pitch, and I'll actually post 'Pitching Paris Hilton' as an eBook inside this story line, plus the movie script treatment for 'The Fountains of Belle Isle' out on the net. In other words, just so everyone's on the same page here, I'm hooking you on the free stuff, and then turning into your local dealer, simply because I have a market corner on this little literary ecological niche, and I'm saying even knowing that you've just been suckered into 'playing Detroit' here with me (and financially rewarding me, too, by the way,) and I'm going to be handing out pretty much four or five weeks worth of 'air time' details on an actual television show which is never going to be produced here in America pretty much sets the dial on 'puree' and you minds are about to be fucked with big time from the world view of future time traveling aliens. As a literary high wire act, having an Irish tall tale of all tall tales, it's setting the bar pretty high. I'm going to let loose on your minds several characters the likes of which you've never seen, and the fact that you'll be able to actually understand each characters point of view and morality and what it considers honest and ethical behavior by its own species standards.
Jake is a character, so is Jack the Cat, United States Army, as is 'Major, Royal Marines, SAS, UK and Boris the Dancing Bear, private close in security for a rock star he's been on the road with way too long by who is a 'resigned to save his superiors face' and who was a Major in the Russian Federation Spetsnez forces and a legend, just as Jack the Cat is inside the small world of demolitions experts inside the Special Forces of the United States Army. Mr. Earl will show up inside the Unit for a couple of weeks and be gone and reappear inside television commercials being shown that hype the movie that is shown being produced right on TV every week. The fact that these two groups are being used as background scenery being shot while three stars in the Movie are foreground running lines in the foreground as extras on the production and that money coming in from being extra's is what is keeping the production Unit Jack has been attached to in production, as his reenlistment papers got snafu'ed and he's now technically a civilian, who winds up getting voted 'Luckiest Man In TWO Armies!' thanks to this 'buy everyone a fifth of Vodka in the EM club along with cab fare home' corporate credit card 'Boris Vodka-Detroit!' brand vodka campaign that the series test markets.
This is a 'grand piano falling through a glass ceiling' kind of mental effect achieved simply by my using a word each and every one of you knows is 'bad' and so you all went out and voted the story down, which is cool. I lived in Detroit, grew up until I was 13 on the NW side, which was pretty lily white, lived there for a month in July of 67 and left two nights before the riot. I went to Wayne State University and had three robberies and three friends shot to death and pulled the plug on living there and went out to California as my allergies didn't bother me out here and so my life has been lived far away from that area. The Muse stopped by in January and the bitch has been on my ass pretty much for eight months now and so this little 'Game' here is the product of about thirty pages of typing a day. Editing? What's that? Pretty much a total mind warp going to be coming at you and I thought you should be warned about what is going to be happening here, just so you'll have some idea of what's about to happen.
What you have here is probably the only work of art of its type that will ever be done. It's an attempt to stand outside of our own times and take a look at it and try and figure out where we are actually at as human beings and where we are heading. The awful clone joke about 'Everyone just LOVES Paris Hiltons!' is not just an unusual groaner, but is going to turn into some seriously mind altering insane court cases being bandied about in the stories. "Unit Pixie 3" being a 'personage' as an animated character suing her prototype for rights to DNA? What kind of none sense court case is that? We do have the ability to actually clone Ms. Hilton, do we not? And whatever her take on this is, isn't the exact same thing something that also applies to everyone else on this planet? Einstein's brain is floating in a glass bottle somewhere on a lab shelf, and I should think it would be reasonably simple to clone the professor, wouldn't you? So why should we, as a race, species, whatever you want to call 'being human' these PC correct days, clone him? Obviously his is a superior brain, correct? So why shouldn't Ms. Hilton's body type be useful as a template from which to build identical images of her? Since 'brewing up a body' should not be outside the boundaries of more advances in sciences than out present day, wouldn't 'modern medicine' of the future not be able to produce a fully adult body for organ harvesting? Lose a limb, pop the old body double out of the storage locker and saw off a chunk and put it inside your own carcass and get on with your life, right? The thing is never conceived, thus it falls into a legal limbo, and since it lives in isolation from all sensation, it has no 'mind' if you potter around with signals long enough, you'll be sure to be able to duplicate and chart all of the nervous system firings so that animation by computers directing household mechanisms would provide you with actual human being looking servants that would in fact be no more than biological machines.
And either you got lead around by your 'automatically seeing this as a derogatory word white people aren't allowed to say' where a honkey Mick wanna be writer decided to slip you a stacked deck by which to take a look at our reality with or your thinking I'm a bigot or you're a bigot and the idea of a black kid who's at about the puberty stage of the game snuggling up with a couple of white kids and all that tweaks you squick buttons? Honey chile, after I get done with Jessica's Rabbits, your whole world is going to be so mentally fucked with that you'll be able to accept the idea of Jessica's World in stride.
Nobody is ever going to see any of this television show simply because I can't get this stuff in front of anyone's eyes. Simple as that, really. Total communications shut down between the 'important people' and those they hire flack catchers to brush off. When it's your own government that has perfected this technique to an art form, and you have The Minister of Graft & Corruption's understudy being played by 'Detroit Tim' (Tim Allen, Boxing Cat productions will not accept scripts from people who are not agents, so obviously he is not going to be playing the role of Detroit Tim, QED, RIP, FUBAR,TS,etc.) and yes, kind of an odd reality we live in these days and why I am not too fond of life on this planet and somewhat jaded about this species chances of survival.
So throwing a curve ball at you to swing at and miss? I EARNED that 3.42!
I suppose the next piece in the show should be the Tim Allen shaggy elephant story, right? Okay, attached to this next is the next twenty minutes of the Qubit Comedy and Drama Hour, which is told in a letter to Detroit's Mayor that never got sent simply because he's never going to get to read it because it's not important enough.
If you're going to do a high wire act, involving real human beings, you might as well have realistic people in your story to lend it some credibility, right? So next up, we have Bill Maher, or maybe Bill Murray, playing the Minister of Vice and teaching Detroit Tim (to be announced later, but scripted for Mr. Tim Allen right now) how to bribe public officials with rubber checks and how to accept the mayor's congrats for being the designated Fall Guy and thanks for the money Mr. Allen! and there on the table at the press conference is five million bucks in real US currency and it's part of a sting operation and all the politicians who have been bribed are doing interviews about accepting a million bucks apiece to appear as themselves in the 'broad cast on national TV' next spot up in the Comedy and Drama Hour which follows Episode One of The Old Reality Bar and Grill, Dec 25, 2015 show opener.
The fact that the Qubit Comedy and Drama Hour is ninety minutes long in V 1.5 and after three weeks goes to V 1.0 and for the last three weeks it's V 0.5 kind of creates an odd format. You think that's odd, there are no 'real sponsors of this show' simply because nobody in their right minds would dare to touch it. It's loaded with naked people, sex jokes, insiders humor and smacks the view right in the face with way outside the narrow minds that don't understand that this is an actual attack on a lot of things here in America I don't like. For example, I don't like the hold religion has on our national politics, and I certainly don't approve of us leading the entire world in people incarcerated. I'm not anti drug, I'm pro sex, and I simply don't care what color you are, when you have a cast of characters this strange, you're all pretty much zebras as far as I'm concerned and now we're back to this whole racial stuff again, aren't we?
This is the one hundredth and fiftieth year since the Civil War and the issue of 'giving aid to the enemy' simply does not apply here. Since the soldiers believe they are involved in some kind of strange actors studio that is a cover for their covert mission and they KNOW that this whole 'Jack the Cat' character and the sitcom "Jack's Place" is never going to be actually aired, they are kind of shocked to find it on TV and watching themselves in the future certainly is not something you see every day, or as a matter of fact, actually answering questions from ninety days in the future takes a bit of thinking about, too, doesn't it?
Having 'the cat out of the bag' right up front with the opening being an eight or nine minute long scene in an old run down bar where aliens drop by and after you've already read 'First Contact' (which you'll note is story line from six months in the future from the Old Reality Bar and Grill, Dec 25, 2014, yes?)and actually having enough material in hand to get this series up to the fifth week's episodes, well, that's one hell of a lot of writing, kids, and really fucks up your keyboard.
So. A story about time traveling aliens who are hooked on a game called 'Detroit 2015' eh? And Jessica's got to figure out the game.
Hypervelostic weapon systems, time machines, stories of 'what happen to the kids out of the past in Detroit in 2015?' and 'are you fucking kidding me?' disbelief on the part of the power structure being woven into the story lines in a very realistic way in which you can understand the motives of all the various levels of government which have to deal with this odd situation in which a 'kind of pickannie' retro styled girl and her side kicks get to throw THE house party of all time. And when you can have the first lady of the United States talking trash with Sally Hemmings and her and Jessica getting the scoop about what Tom Jefferson actually DID with her that made her return to the States and become a slave again? That one there is all reaction shots while the volume of Sally's sound track dies down under the party noises going on and yes, I'm pretty sure that someone will mine that little nodule for a story sometime in the future.
How does real reality change? Ideas. That's the thing that can actually change our reality. The idea that I used the N-Word shuts down a lot of thinking and so now that we've gotten that one out of the way, can I use 'Hey, nigger, what's up?' as a line of dialogue between two black people who know each other meeting on the street or do I need to clear this with the NAACP? And do I have to get clearances on the Barry and Mickey telephone calls between the time traveler that is a Paris Hilton Clone and the First Lady of the United States who is coaching her in the fine points of what's not nice to say in public and what kinds of situations make that line of dialogue okay and how only humans of certain skin color can use it and she can the alien can't and that simply is all there is to that whole deal, pretty much, wouldn't you say?
So yes, I'm pretty much out to mentally screw with your minds and you've been warned up front.
And once the material for the Qubit Hour is aired, I will probably be able to keep up my side of the bargain and publish a couple of eBooks out of this deal. Make a few bucks, you know? Hyping the products and not having to worry about sucking up to someone with big bucks who feels that their money gives them the right to dictate changes in the script, or no deal. Okay, no deal.
This new scoring system is pretty neat. It allows a writer to take a look at how many people voted and there is a one to ten bar graphic. So far, nobody has voted 'two' on this story. Two one's, two 3's,7's and 10's. Four votes for 8 and 9, and one vote each for 4,5 and 6.
Let's see if I can cut and paste?
Well, that was an failure, so ...
Strange group of scores, but hey, strange story. Two people hated it, two thought it was amazing, clustered in the middle are three people who thought it was average and ... weird ...
Not my best story here, obviously, but I thought I would have a shot at posting it because Mark is based on someone I knew who died this summer. If you knew the guy, you'll probably recognize him from the description, and he was a genuinely nice human being who did stuff like that all the time. It's just sad that he was technically 'solvent' to the point where he didn't qualify for medical assistance and so they did not catch the cancer in time. Catch 22: We live in America, we are not going to treat anyone who isn't poor or well off enough to afford medical insurance and Mark fell between the cracks and so he's dead now.
You have no idea of how much I hate the health care industry. No idea at all.
So. Now we are in a shut down due to a group of people who don't like people getting treated. The costs of health care are out of control, but 12 billion dollars in profits buys whatever the hell it wants, right?
Whose right about Obamacare? I don't know.
I do know that the rest of the world is going to take a look at this and see a country where a small group of people were able to threaten financial ruin to the entire world's economy if they did not get their way, and I think that this is not going to play at all well overseas where they every other industrialized country has Universal Health Care.
Every Other Industrial Country Has Universal Health Care.
So. We are in this position now where a small group of people were able to shut down the government, and that threatens bond holders getting their dividends, and This Is NOT GOOD!
You either go broke here because you got sick or you can do something about it next time you vote. If you think it is only the poor who can't afford health insurance that go broke, think again. Number one cause of bankruptcy here in America is people who have insurance who get sick and can't work for a while. Lose their house, car, whole ball of wax comes unglued and down the drain their lives go. It used to be you couldn't get hired with a preexisting condition. I know a guy who was a VP of a major electronics company out here that got leukemia and recovered from it, but as far as being insurable goes? And there went his career, down the tubes.
Oh well.
It doesn't matter all that much, does it? You don't know either of those people.
But I'd guess you either do know someone something like that happened to, or you will.
Is Obamacare the best idea in the world? No, but it was something that could get passed. There are much better plans out there in the world, but will we adapt them here in America?
Pigs will fly first.
Matter of fact, in my book, every single CEO of every single health insurance company is a pig, and they all fly either first class or in private jets.
"We have the finest medical care in the world" is a lie if you can't afford it. What we actually have is a group of very wealthy people being bought and this country is going down the tubes because of them.
And my friend went into the ground because of them, too.
So yeah, I have an ax to grind here.
We can do better.
Or else!
Pitching A Novel:
I started posting here at SOL when I got hooked on T.R.E.S. by Ms Friday.
I'd been using short sex stories to learn how to write dialogue and had a half a dozen or so in the trunk. Instead of shelling out whatever it is to get a premier membership, I posted enough stories to qualify. All of those stories were basically written for the trunk, but being as money was tight at the time, cheap way to get to read the rest of the story, right?
Suddenly I had fans. Weird, huh?
I got so I could write dialogue and this big huge six hundred some page novel got written. Then something else happened in my life that used up five years and once you move away from a project, it loses all it's sizzle and just sits there, gathering mass. Pretty soon it's so massive you simply do not want to futz with the thing any more as there are a hundred pages or so that have to be fixed and ... well, it's a dead in the water project.
Thing is, it's a really good book.
Most publishing companies have big huge slush piles of unsolicited manuscripts and in ten months or so, someone will get back to you.
Having a six hundred page novel where a heck of a lot of the plot lines are sex driven, and yeah, strange how humans have this big huge motive that drives their actions, but simply is not talked about. Parts of the book that need work are in the first two sections (mostly) and a chunk in the third could use some work too. That is a lot of fixing, but the last half of the book is .. well, damn great.
But how often have you read a science fiction novel with lots of sex in it? Phillip Jose Farmer, yowza, how did he get some of his work published? Well, he didn't start with Flesh as a first book. By the time he wrote that, his name was out there on a few dozen books, so his publisher was willing to take a bit of a risk. A first time out of the box unpublished writer? Rots o Ruck, fella!
Writing and asking 'Would you be willing to take a look at a book that needs lots of editing?' is obviously not the way to go. Writing and asking, 'Would you consider a very long door stop of a novel with a sex driven plot?' is also not likely to fire up enthusiasm among editors when they are picking stuff out of the slush pile. They're looking for maybe a hundred and thirty to a hundred and seven five page book, not six hundred plus pages.
So I wrote a 'would you consider a novel with a sex driven plot by an unpublished writer' and sent them "The Mar Chine Ambassador: A Steak and A Blow Job" to save the editor having to plow through hundreds of pages to figure out if I can write or not.
Kind of regret not submitting that story to a sci fi magazine. Most bizarre and surreal plot line I've ever come up with: Someone with absolute power. Can't be hurt. Instantly transported from place to place. Governments pick up his expense account and all they want to do is keep him happy. Ability to walk through solid objects. Can't be touched if he doesn't want to be touched. And the only thing that keeps all that power from corrupting the guy is that he's never in one place for more than a couple of hours. Doesn't sleep, have to use the john, can ignite his own thumb to fire up a cigarette and that's a lot of power, no? Only he get jerked from scene to scene, and what can you do if you're only in town for a couple of hours and then you're zipped away instantly to another place?
Cramming a plot line into something as surrealistic as that story is a pretty good trick. Eleven pages and there is this whole sci fi epic, only the omnipotent Ambassador who got selected to represent the (Peace Corp? Foreign Aid Program? Invasion of the Body Snatchers?) Aliens doesn't have any choice in it at all. He doesn't sleep. It's just two hour slices of reality and the reality channel changes and instantly it's a whole new set of characters to be dealt with.
So: If you were a science fiction writer and got a submission of that story would you open it just to find out what the hell the gimmick in the title is all about?
I figure I have absolutely not the slightest chance in hell of selling the novel this way, but it beats the hell out of having to find an agent and audition your work for them, so they can send it around and get it rejected just as easily as you can!
But as a marketing tool, you have to admit that it's so strange that just out of idle curiosity that an editor is more apt to read an eleven page short story with 'Blow Job' as part of its title than a six hundred plus page door stopped that takes off rather slowly.
Wish me luck!
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