Foreword

Author’s Foreword (not ‘forward’, that word means something else!):

(TL, DR: This is a sequel to an old story that I didn’t write. Ergo, it has to fit everything we know from the original. Now, go skip to “Chapter 1”. -ZM)

The story “Basketball Terror” is pretty old as modern sex-stories go. I saw it on Usenet or one of the bulletin boards back in the 1980s, when the author(s?) were still working on it. Naturally, I had enough computer crashes back then that my copy is long gone.

I do have a newer version from the late 90’s that still has some serious story-telling issues. Whoever wrote it clearly didn’t have a proofreader. One of the characters changes names back and forth, the girls change various attributes as the story progresses. Blue eyes become green, long black hair becomes curly, and Sandra and Melanie swap bodies. It also had, from my point of view, a terrible ending.

ASSTR.org was a writer’s publishing site originally set up to save things posted on Usenet. ASSTR meant “Alt.Sex.Stories.Text Repository”, and it saved and shared everything the website’s administrator was able to collect from the usenet newsgroups Alt.Sex.Stories and Alt.Sex.Stories.Moderated (usually abbreviated to ASS and ASSM, of course). ASSTR had a newer version that was posted on back in 2001 by Ted E. Bear who listed the author as “anonymous”. Most of the body-morphing issues had been fixed, but it still had the same terrible ending. I think I can do better...

I started working on this back in the ‘90s, but I wasn’t up to writing a whole story back then. I’m better now, but my proofreaders still give me a lot of help. This wouldn’t be anywhere near as good a story if I didn’t have them on my back, pointing out all the silly little things I didn’t notice.

Update 2021: ASSTR was failing for a long time; anyone could see that the server(s?) had problems. I wasn’t the only one trying to download whatever I could before it died. One of my friends, The Thinking Horndog of “Swarm Cycle” and “The Pact” fame and a professional database herder, got a mostly-complete scrape of the site’s “Authors” folder a few months before it went down for good. His scrape may not have stories that are newer than that, but it had everything up to that date.

Except for stories that had been deleted on purpose, of course. Jack Lipton, Rachel, and Silly Artie are three good authors I know of who had previously taken their work down for their own reasons. There were probably many others. If you didn’t know about their works before they were taken down, you’ll never get a chance to read them now.

Searching that ASSTR scrape for files with “Basketball” in the title brought up a story “Basketball Team” which starts out “The following in a collaboration of Parker and myself (Paladin).” That’s the level of writing, it has ‘in’ instead of ‘is’. There’s a typo in the VERY FIRST SENTENCE. Anyway, we know that second name. Paladin is the guy who gave us “The Pig”, “Party Animal” and other BDSM classics. It turns out to be the same story that Ted E. Bear passed around on the Internet as “Basketball Terror” from “anonymous”.

So, now we know who wrote it. Why was it so badly written, though, when Paladin’s other stories were so much better? Maybe this was his first attempt, back when he was 13 and before he learned all about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Not to mention plot and continuity, right? That’s my working theory, at least. Any attempt at a sequel has to account for that writing level in the original, too. Me, I’m blaming one of the characters in the story.