Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin

EDITORIAL UPDATE AS OF 3/23/13 AT 11:51PM: IF YOU'RE READING THIS POST, YOU SHOULD READ MY MOST RECENT POST, "YOU KNOW." JUST SO, UM, YOU KNOW. WHICH YOU WILL IF YOU READ THAT POST.

It's up! Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin is now for sale for $9.95 on the TG Comics website. It's my second story to be illustrated and published there, but the first to be a Premium. In fact, it's the first premium illustrated story to be put up for sale on that website. I'm excited and a little scared to see how it will be received. If it doesn't do well for Femur - the webmaster, publisher and all around guru at TG Comics - it may close a door for other authors. I hope that doesn't happen.

TG Comics is virtually unique on the Internet, and that is a damn hard thing to do. I don't think the average visitor to the site really gets how much time, effort and money Femur spends on the site. The process of getting my story published there has given me a glimpse behind that curtain.

I think everybody knows the site is Femur's love song to the genre. I don't think everybody gets the depth of that commitment. The TG fiction community owes him a huge Thank You. Like Mindy Rich with Fictionmania (for stories), or Mako and Ray with the now defunct "Siren Song" website (for video), Femur's TG Comics website is the gold standard for sequential and illustrated TG fiction. I could not be more proud to have my work for sale there.

On a less profound, more whimsical note, can you see now why I am so coy about titles? If I had told people that ABS stood for Alien Body Suit, the content and direction of the story would have been too obvious, to the point of being a spoiler. Clearly the sequels - ABS:IM and ABS:WLW - are stories in the Alien Body Suit trilogy. (As a side note, it's "body suit" and not "bodysuit" due specifically to how the device is first seen / precieved in the story. You can read that part of the story for free in the preview that's up at TG Comics.) Those titles are guess-able if you know my writing well enough. Even so, I don't like to show my cards until I lay down my hand. Like the plot of those sequels ... well, read and see.

But start by reading Alien Body Suit: Under Her Skin. The test readers all loved it. I think you will too.

A Brand New Bag

I just read Morpheus' latest story, "Inexplicable," over at Fictionmania. It took a little effort to get into, but was a great read once I did.

What struck me most about it is that unlike many TG authors, he doesn't lean on sex as a plot crutch. In TG, you can't ever really get away from the sex 100%, but the quality writers always seem to be more about the characters and the situations than they are about the X rated stuff.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think that we might be on the cusp of a change in the genre. Up until now, there has been a lot of focus on sex. More and more, I see the best talents in TG writing either walking away from it as unsatisfying, or writing less for the audience and more to please themselves on a less base level. I think we might be approaching the same moment Science Fiction writing reached in the mid 20th century, where a Rubicon is crossed, leaving our pulp past behind us. On the other shore is a bright future where the craft of writing and the quality of the story are more important than the necessity of including erotic content.

I think the audience is both listening and ready.