Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 71

Captive of Gor chapter Seven

At least it's not Gor.
 (Don't forget, boys and girls, to pick up a copy of Blue Ghosts on either Smashwords or Amazon. You can get a free copy off Smashwords using this coupon: TX75M)

So while Strawchick is pulling Targo/Torgo's little red slave wagon for him, she reminisces about Torgo's life. Because we all need to know the slaver's life story. The important part is, he's bought a whole bunch of raw girl, which I guess is a little like raw hamburger with more wriggle. He's going to get his cargo trained, and...hold on, feminist meltdown in progress:

A slave, of course, in one sense, has no caste. In being enslaved, she is robbed of caste, as well as of her name. She belongs to her master in all respects, as an animal. He may call her what he wishes, and do with her what he pleases.

Remember, in this book this is a positive thing. Human beings reduced to an animal state. One of the blogs I read regularly, because I like train wrecks and sometimes the day isn't complete without a little murder urge, is a blog called Bad Breeders, in which parents frequently reduce their children to an animal state. This should tell you how fucking inexcusable this attitude is. And it's a positive here because submission is the natural state of  women and far be it from us to allow such petty concerns as physical safety and emotional well-being to get in the way of the Natural Way Of Things. Hey, John?

Moving on.

The point of this passage is supposed to be that Targo got hit by raders and lost some of his girls, thus making Strawchick a windfall of epic proportions. Except...

We get another one of those "Gee I am worthless" passages. In which we are told how the slave girls are displayed on an ankle chain with the least lovely girl first and the most attractive/expensive girls last. Strawchick is displayed fourth. She is not special. She got abducted from earth, psychologically tortured by the space-slavers, was allowed to run free for days and days, was even chased by a space ship, but she is in no way special boys and girls. Stop trying to make her look that way.

I hope whoever this girl is based on got out of college in one piece and is now a million miles away, happy, successful and completely clueless about her literary double.

My point is, she's not worth that much. Less windfall and more "Well, we got room on our shelves and it ain't rotten, so we'll see what we can do with it."

Also? The raider that robbed Torgo? Is named Rask. Remember this.

Torgo finds some kind of market, replaces most of the stuff he lost in the raid, buys a couple space-oxen because girls can't pull wagons for shit, and...uh...this is highlighted in this book:

The camisk is a rectangle of cloth, with a hole cut for the head, rather like a poncho. The edges are commonly folded and stitched to prevent raveling.

Five people thought that was memoriable enough to underline in gold. Somebody please tell me why.

...three pages later, we're still on the camisk. Oh, we get this paragraph:

I wondered why Targo permitted us camisks. I think there were probably two reasons. The first is that the camisk, in its way, is an incredibly attractive garment. It displays the girl, beautifully, provocatively. Moreover, it proclaims her slave, and begs to be torn away by the hand of a master. Men thrill to see a girl in a camisk.

Hey, kids? Fun thought exparament. Let's replace the word "Camisk" with the word burqua. Now we're playing in Norman's ballpark, aren't we? And oh, fuck, guys. Up there, when I said that Strawchick was pulling Torgo's little red wagon? I was kidding. Only it turns out I wasn't:

The two wagons he bought were merchant wagons, with red rain canvas.

Slavers ride around in little red wagons. Radio Fliers. Oh, my gosh. They  ride in the wagons. They take a break. Strawchick eats a slab of meat provocatively and goes on and on and on about how Elinor Brinton would never have done this, no one will ever recognise the great, elegant Elinor Brinton in this lowly slave girl, and let me remind you late-comers that this is STRAWCHICK HERSELF, worshiping her past via third person perspective. Gag me.

And then right when we're begging for Rask the Tarnsman to show up with his raider troop again, one of the other slave girls, Lara, decides to dress up in Strawchick's old clothes and re-enact Strawchick's capture by Torgo. Having been shown the error of her ways, Strawchick decides to try to make it up to one of the other girls, Ute, by combing her hair.

Moving on?

No. Now we get the description of the other girls, and how Strawchick is terrified every time she has to kneel on the grass and say "Buy me, Master" in Gorean. And then...oh, fuck, guys. Here's a great big wall o'text on Norman's philosophy.

(Gorean Men) tend, on the whole, to be large, strong, virile, confident, uncompromising, powerful men. Yet the major differences between them and the men of Earth are not those of size or strength, but rather those of character and psychology...They live...in a world in which female slavery is acknowledged, recognized and celebrated. They are accustomed to seeing beautiful women in bondage, their limbs and beauty well revealed by slave garb, their necks locked in collars. And there is nothing, of course, which so enflames the virility of a man as the sight of a slave girl, let alone the thought of taking her in his arms.

So in other words, this is a world where half the population are not people. They are kleenex for the other half to blow their unmentionables on, and then throw away. Because there are two major, MAJOR problems with this system that Norman does not address. Ever.

People get old, and if your only value as a person is streingth, beauty and ability and you get old? You are SOL on the scrapheap of life, 'cause ain't nobody on this world of psychopathic neanderthals capable of caring for somebody altruistically.

Second problem? Hey, you seen any kids around here? Where are all the Kids? No kids? Well thank fucking God for that. Any child raised in this society would be massively broken. We're talking like, end stage Universe 25 level brokenness. This is not a psychologically healthy enviroment for puppies, let alone small children.

It is their culture. They have never surrendered their manhood. They have never seen fit to relinquish their natural biological sovereignty. The Gorean culture does not deny nature but accepts it, acclaims it, relishes it, and enhances it.

Bull fucking shit, Norman. This is not manhood. This is sociopathic exploitation. It is a bleeding miracle nobody has gone Ted Bundy in this place. Being able to beat somebody unconsious before you rape them--that's what you mean by "biological sovereignty" right?--should never ever ever be the defining trait of a society. Just as stealing, murder, or any other antisocial behavior should be deemed "okay". And I think the key here is that the relationships explored in this fucking book? Are all sexual and romantic. Never once, never fucking once, is a child brought up. There are no children. There are no families. Nobody is reproducing in these books. Children, after all, put a stop to the happy fun times. It requires you to take on responsabilities beyond murder-rape-grunt-kill, to submit your own urges to then needs of the child. Human development requires the imput of both a mother and a father figure. Yes, you can raise healthy children without either mom or dad, but the healthiest model is two parents who put their child's well being first. And that's not something you can have with a fucking slave-based society.

The men might be happy, but the genetic line here is doomed. And that's the whole purpose in women-as-second-class citizens, right? You're protecting their reproductive organs...or more specifically, you're protecting your ability to reproduce your own genetic line. It's barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. You leave out the preggers part, and you've not only reduced the girls to their outer genetalia, but you've ended your own genetic line.

My point with this rant? Eventually the fun times with slave girls have to stop and become Responsable Times With Baby, otherwise the perfect Gorean society? Becomes a dead one.

But hey, that probably explains why the aliens are kidnapping Earth people. They're hoping to get some unbroken genes into the system before Gor itself collapses. Too bad Gor breaks every single person it gets ahold of within a couple months...

And then they encounter a free woman.

Yes, that evil thing that defies everything that is Gor! A woman who is not a slave. Oh, noes! What could this creature look like?

The woman sat regally on the curule chair, wrapped in resplendent, many-colored silks. Her raiment might have cost more than any three or four of us together were worth. She was, moreover, veiled.

I was wrong, kids. This is the burqua.

And then Strawchick, being forced to kneel before this wonderful, free woman, understands what her position and wealth did back on Earth! It created unfair social divisions! HOW TERRIBLE!


WHY IS THIS CHAPTER NOT DONE YET???

And now Strawchick is realizing she would rather be owned by a manly manly Gorian man than a woman in a veil.

We have this interlude:

Goreans believe, or many of them do, that each woman carries a slave within themselves, but that the slave in some is more desperate for her release than in others...They take her by the arms and command her to look into their eyes; then, if she is ready, so soon, in her eyes, frightened and tear-filled, they can see the slave longing for her collar, begging for it.

Right. If a man takes you in his arms and shouts at you and you look back submissive and scared, it's because you want to be a slave.

It's not because you're scared, you're about to be hurt and you don't want to  either. No. It's because you want to be a slave.

Oh, but who is the free woman?

 “The Lady Rena of Lydius,” said Targo, “of the Builders.”

Ah, an important strong female who needs bow to no man. Wanna bet what happens to her? Any takers?

Out of the darkness came two men, warriors. Between them, face-stripped, was a woman, stumbling. Her arms, over her resplendent robes, were bound to her sides with a broad leather strap. She was thrown to the feet of Targo.

And with the lovely Rena bound, gaged, naked and branded in the back of Torgo's little red wagons, the chapter finally ends. FINALLY.

BLUE GHOSTS IS LIVE!

We're live on Smashwords!

Still waiting for Amazon.com to finish processing, should be live there about 6am or thereabouts

But we made it! WE! ARE! LIVE!

And DAMN that cover looks good. Doesn't that look good? In fact...



Gotta love Will Smith

(PS expect Gor sometime midafternoon tomorrow. My brother is here and I am a lil drunk and I do not have the heart for Strawchick stupid tonight)

Captive of Gor, Chapter 6

The opening paragraph of this chapter is pretty fitting:

I awoke in the morning, near dawn. It was very cold, and gray and damp. I was terribly hungry. My body was stiff, and ached. I wept. I sucked dew from the long grass. I was alone. My clothes were wet. I was miserable. I was alone. I was alone. I was frightened. I was hungry. I wept.

Why is this apt? It is exactly how I feel reviewing this book tonight. I am tired, I am buzzed from working the floor at the J-word tonight (WAITRESSING SUCKS FYI) I desperately want a drink and cannot have one, and holy fuck does this book suck. Why am I doing this again?

Because I want to. Right.

 For the next six pages or so, we...okay, what the fuck is it with male writers and Disney Princesses? Seriously, I thought this was supposed to be BDSM nastiness well seasoned with non-con, but so far we've had Strawchick be chased and wake up in a field to this:

That's Gor, boys and girls. That's how it's presented in the book. Oh, you don't believe me?

When the sun was overhead I found some more berries and, this time, I ate my fill. Not far away, in another outcropping of rock, I found another pool of trapped rain water. It was a large pool, and I drank as much as I wanted. And I washed my face... It seemed to me not impossible that I might be able to live on this world. It was beautiful. I ran for a little way, my hair flying behind me, laughing...I had not done that since I had been a little girl.

Tell me that does not just reek of an incoming "I Want" number and much flocking of the birdies around her dainty little wrists.  And she is lonely, my lovely blog-readers. So very very lonely. She could live on this world but she is so bleeding lonely, and while I cannot believe I'm bringing this out so early in the game:

Thank you, Pooh-bear.

And then she sees random people.

Now, let's have another game of Space/fantasy Opera Trivia. You are a young woman, professional model, who has been abducted and branded by intersteller slavers before being dropped off when their ship crashlands. You have escaped obvious restraints somehow. You have been alone for less than twenty fucking hours, do not give me that look, Strawchick. I know better than that. And now you come across two men, a wagon, and about twenty butt-naked girls being restrained by something you can only describe as a "harness", who appear to be pulling the goddamned wagon. DO YOU:

1. Turn around and go back to your space-berry patch

2. Turn around and RUN back to your space-berry patch

3. Shout "STOP! STOP!" from the side of the road, then scream your name in English while flailing like a moron.

4. DO ANY SINGLE THING OTHER THAN NUMBER THREE WHILE RUNNING BACK TO THE AFOREMENTIONED SPACE-BERRY PATCH

What does Strawchick do?

“I’m Elinor Brinton,” I told the men who had come to meet me. “I live in New York City. I’m lost.”

Ellie, dear, at this point I would not only cheerfully assist in restraining you, I would make my only compensation for dragging you to the space-slave auction block be your immediate sterilization because SWEET BLUE BABY JESUS you are too stupid to fucking breed. You reproduce and the entire universe loses IQ points.

One of her ...do I really have to pretend they rescued her? REALLY, book? I REALLY have to? Fine. Her...sigh...."rescuers" lead her over to the slave chain while she prattles on about how glad she is to be rescued. Meanwhile the naked girls at the wagon look on apprehensively. I am choosing to interprete this as WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT? repeated about twenty times. Also, one of the slavers' names is Targo.

Targo. We are one letter away from him being this:

There is no way out of Gor. It will be dark soon. There is no way out of Gor. And now I get to imagine a Katness/Torgo/Tarl Cabot three way and it can only end badly for two of them.

So Torgo..sorry. Targo spends the next few minutes trying to get this windfall of a hot blond to shut the fuck up, and Strawchick spends the same amount of time thinking that if she speaks LOUDLY and SLOWLY these strangers from another world will magically understand English. HAS SHE NOT TRAVELED TO OTHER COUNTRIES BEFORE?

Strawchick looks around at her rescuers and realizes that these are simple barbarians, and so she'll be able to buy her way back to Earth! Sterilization, John! A full on hysterectomy! That's all I ask! I will hold her down for you, just please ensure this broad never breeds!

And oh, we must be introduced to the theme to the next hundred pages or so:

On Earth I had never met a woman, personally, whom I had regarded as my superior in beauty. Here, incomprehensibly, but obviously, there were at least eleven. I was puzzled how there could be so many in this one small place. I was shaken. But, I told myself, I am more than their equal in intelligence, and in riches, and in taste, and sophistication. They were doubtless simple barbarians. I felt pity for them. I hated them! I hated them!...The haughty bitches! I was superior to them all!

I'd add a lobotomy to that wish-list of mine, but for Strawchick that'll be a lateral move. So after monologuing about how much better Strawchick is than the other slave girls--because she is rich and beautiful and rich and rich and I think John Norman has issues with moneyed women, don't you?--she gets stripped down, and they find the brand on her thigh. So long, freedom! What? You didn't think that had any meaning at all, Strawchick?

So they hold her down and whip her. And this chapter isn't over yet. Why isn't this chapter over yet? We've done the prerequisite shift from Disney Princess to Bondage Fiend, can we move on please? Please? No?

Fuck.

And then she kisses Torgo's feet. And fuck it, if I have to read this book much more this guy is fucking Torgo. Torgo puts her into the harness with the other girls and makes her pull the wagon. At the same time, she notices that--gasp!--they've all been branded too. And this happens:

I was dismayed. If someone saw us, as we were, they might think that I was no different from the others, that I was the same as they!

No, Strawchick. They are not the same as you. They've got two braincells to share between them.

 Also...why are they making the girls pull the wagon? This is a legitimate question. An animal would be better at it, and...uh, it's not good excercise. This is more likely to break the innocent little flowers than it is keep them in the sexy-sexy, you know? Bad use of slave labor, gents. Bad form.

And then...oh, my fucking God. Really?

But I was Elinor Brinton, of Park Avenue, of Earth! She had been rich, beautiful, smartly attired, tasteful, sophisticated; she had been well educated and traveled; she had been decisive, confident; she had carried her wealth and her beauty with élan; and she had deserved her position in society; it had been rightfully hers, for she had been a gifted, high-order, superbly intelligent individual, an altogether superior person! She deserved everything that she had had! Whatever she had had she should have had, for she was that kind of person! That was the kind of person she was!

I got that back at the beginning of the book, sweetheart. And bullshit on the highly intelligent part. You literally ran into their arms. And then...you really have to be kidding me.

I would not be permitted to shirk. 

I had always had my way before...

Here I did not have my way. 

Here I would not be permitted to shirk...I would be expected, I realized, to my fury, for the first time, to do my share.

Yeah, because everybody knows women don't really work. Waitresses? They're just there to fill shoes. Not like anybody's cracking the whip over them. Modeling can't be hard work. All you need to do is file your nails. No woman has ever had to work hard to get through college, to succeed, to be something other than a male's arm-jewelry. Lil tip, John-boy? Just because a woman's success isn't immediatly benefiting you, does not mean her success is either easy or a non-thing.

End of chapter. Thank you god. Goodnight all.

...and the counter just clicked over to zero. BOOK RELEASE COMES SOON. I am not excited yet, but I am looking forward to it. BOOK COMES OUT ON MONDAY, KIDS! MONDAY! MONDAY!

YAY!

And the "OH F**K" Meter hits defcon one...

I just realized something.

See that counter, there? It's set to tick down to zero on Monday. Midnight on Monday. Midnight, October first.

As in this thing? Will have to start going through the smashwords/amazon processing masher sometime well before midnight on Sunday, 'cause it takes about six hours for Amazon to finish processing Things and I now know that Amazon is all you (wonderful, awesome) people care about. Except for you. And you know who you are. And I love you to little bitty pieces.

ANYWAY! Problem here? THIS IS THE WEEKEND. And I am a waitress. And weekends? ARE CRAZY. And I promised family I would do the family thing during my free time. I WILL MAKE THIS DEADLINE MY FRIENDS. I PROMISE.

In other news...I MADE MY GOAL FOR THIS MONTH re:BOOK SALES. Admittedly it was a small goal BUT IT WAS A GOAL AND IT WAS MADE. BY YOU GUYS! YOU WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL GUYS! You are why I am going to work my ass off this weekend to get Self Imposed Deadline met and past met.

This month? If I make the goal this month? (It is not the tattoo goal. The tattoo goal is 100 copies of one title sold in one day, and I am 100% sure that my hide is safe from ever getting shot by a tattoo gun. October's goal is significantly smaller.) we will have to do A Thing to celebrate. I do not know what this goal will be, but it will be A Thing. Ideas for how you'd like me to celebrate Goal Reaching? These would be helpful. I'll also provide wallpapers of artworks.

Now I have to go finish final proofreading and formatting before I have to go work. BECAUSE WORK IS AN IMPORTANT THING TOO.

And OMG PEOPLE! OMG! I just found out! Something that could potentially be awesome! Remember Chloe the "kitten"?

We took her to the vet because she's been drooling a lot. Turns out, she's got gum disease and is not a kitten. Just a very very small, year old cat.

And she might be pregnant. THERE MAY BE KITTENS IN OUR FUTURE! YAY! MY KITTEN CRAVING MAY FINALLY BE SATED! and yeah, finding homes and fixings and other things lie in the future as well and there may not be kittens at all BUT THERE MIGHT BE! I will keep you posted.

KITTENS! YAY!

Captive of Gor chapter 5

And now we're on Alt-Earth. As in Strawchick just wakes up there. Does this transition seem strange to you? Because I'm getting freaking whiplash.

Hey, Strawchick, what's it look like here on Gor?

...In the distance, away from the forest, I could see a yellowish thicket, it, too, of trees, but not green, but bright and yellow...In the distance, near the yellowish thicket, I saw a small, yellowish animal moving, delicately. It was far off and I could not see it well.

...so, like a dehydrated man's urine, then. I gotcha.

The spaceship has crashlanded, and apparently it flung Strawchick several hundred feet, stripped her of her chains, got her out of the stasis tube, and deposited her on the grass without her getting one scratch. Gor's got some pretty good roll bars in their spaceships is all I can say.

 And then we get to the next example of Author Just Does Not Get It:

On Earth I had not feared men. I had despised them. I had held them in contempt. They were so eager to please, so manipulable, so pliant, so meaningless, weak and docile. But these men, those in black tunics, and those who had been instrumental in my capture, I had learned to fear. They were the first men I had learned to fear. They would not be the last.

Time for a quickie education in your psyche, boys and girls. You project how you feel into other people's heads. And I do not mean you make them think thoughts. I mean that you decide what they are thinking. You are afraid of someone, so you decide that they KNOW you are afraid and they are making you feel that way on purpose. You feel you are weak. You assume everyone else thinks you are weak. I mean, it's so blatently obvious to you!

In this book, CONSTANTLY, John Norman projects his own emotional attitude into women. Because he feels manipulated, pliant, meaningless, ect, in the presence of women, he projects the cause into the women he writes. Strawchick knows she's doing this to men, and when she's robbed of that power she is the one unmanned. Which, boys and girls, is bullshit of the first caliber AND why this series fails at its own goal.

You cannot control how someone else feels. You can manipulate them into doing things, but the ultimate choice is theirs. If a dude wants to rape you? It's not your fault. He'd do it if you're in a tank top or a turtleneck. Same thing with the roles reversed. The entire Gor series is the author fucking screaming STOP MAKING ME FEEL THIS WAY at the top of his lungs, when it's his own psyche he's fighting with and not the women. And most chicks in my experiance are not walking across a quad luxuriating in making men pant. They're thinking about how not to fail their final, and that's all.

Moving on.

Strawchick explores the ship, steals food from an animal that scares the shit out of her, that sounds about as scary as a stray dog, and then leaves. She watches another spaceship, complete with bug-alien, destroy the first one. I know kind of why, but we're just going to forget about it and pretend the spaceships never happened. Norman had to explain how Alt-Earth is here, and Spaceship was the scrabble tile he pulled out of the bag that day. Moving on.

Everything that is anything attacks Strawchick. She describes fighting with a toothy vine that sounds an awful lot like a snake to me, either implying that vines have teeth or Strawchick failed the "Identifying poisonous things" part of girlscout training. And then the moons come out, and on this planet where everything that is anything has tried to eat her, she curls up in the grass and falls asleep. In the grass. That is probably out to murder her too.

I can't help but think about that scene in Hunger Games where Katness tied herself into a tree before she slept, and...

...you know? You know? You know? Wouldn't it be fucking awesome if the bug-aliens had screwed up and kidnapped Katness Everdeen instead of Strawchikc here? Katness Everdeen on Gor. Think about it. There would be arrows and there would be much shouting and many dead slavers in front of the Cornucopia, and she would probably find Alt-Peeta and Alt-Gale and manage to unbarbarianize them by getting a sponsor and Haymich to send her soap, and there would be much posing by said muscled un-barbarians and many plates of food porn, Cinna would produce awesome costumes out of white dancing silks that would be totally modest and yet make all the other dancing silks in red look fucking stupid in comparison and then everyone would be like, "Dance, bound slut" and Katness would be all "What the fuck is this shit?" before she drops a nest of Tracker Jackers in the middle of the slave camp and watches the halucinations and the face-melting begin, Beetee would help her set up a trap involving white and red silk and nightlock berries, she and Rue would eat a Tarn together and in the end, she'd overturn the whole Gorian regime with a rose and one single arrow to the heart.

She would make Tarl Cabbot kneel on a muttation-skin rug while Alt-Peeta helps her fake a pregnancy. It would be awesome.



Somebody do this. Please, somebody do this. The universe is incomplete without Gor/Hunger Games fanfic. We must rectify this. Now.

Oh, yeah. The chapter ended. With Strawchick asleep in the murder grass. Because she is not Katness and this is not Hunger Games and therefore not awesome in the slightest.

TOMORROW: A half-naked, lost Earth woman wanders around on a planet most famous for enslaving lost, half-naked Earth women. And this one is an idiot. Wanna guess what happens next?

Captive of Gor chapter 4

In which absolutely nothing happens. It is time, boys and girls, for EXPOSITION. We are about to find out what's going on. Because KIDNAPPING isn't clear enough at this point.

So Strawchick is taken into a clearing where men are loading other drugged girls onto a UFO. Because Elinor Brinton is SO VERY NOT SPECIAL she gets the drug-free kidnapping treatment. You know. Because when we're reading about girls kidnapped and sold into slavery on alt-Earth we want the alt-earth stuff to start five chapters in. Why am I reading this again?

...because I wanted to. Right.

The dude removes the collar Elinor was given. Why? Fuck if I know. Why was she given one in the first place? Again, how the fuck should I know. At this point it's just psychological torture porn. She attempts to bribe her way out, they laugh--

--wait a second. Remember that part in chapter one?

Yet on this world I am a fifteen-gold piece girl, more lovely than many, yet far excelled by many whose stunning beauty I can only envy.

Yeah. That part. If she's worth so little on the slave block, and she's handing over oodles and oodles of gold and diamonds...why not take her up on the offer? I'm pretty sure they've made their quota, and I'm pretty sure they could find her again if they need to squeeze more cash out of her. "Pay us or we'll sell you into alien slavery" is a pretty good blackmail tactic when you can back it up with your space ship. If she talks about aliens she's just another space-brained blond. Nobody's going to listen to her...and again, you can back the threat up with a space ship. And maybe earth-cash ain't worth much but as far as I can tell, gold on alt-Earth is still fucking gold. She's a fucking millionare, boys, and she could probably hook you up with a couple nice slaves a month via fake jobs for less experianced models. The girls dissapear, hey, it's NYC baby. AND you've just made your case for women being horrible, horrible creatures who should be locked up and punished, sexily.

Anyway, they laugh, take her money anyway, and she fights them with the knife she's still got in her purse.

Again: WORST. SLAVERS. EVER.

They disarm her, which I need to point out would not be necessary if they'd drugged her in the first place, then try to fix the damage they she has done to her face by resisting and making them hit her, which also wouldn't be necessary IF THEY HAD DRUGGED HER IN THE FIRST PLACE, then elaborately showed her how they tracked her with their space ship. Bug in the purse. Which I pretty much guessed.

Again. Awful lot of technology there when they could have just DRUGGED THE IDIOT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Yeah. These guys and this chick totally deserve each other.

Oh, hey, I think these sentences are too long. Do you think these sentences are too long? Let's let John Norman show us how it's done:

“The light,” I said, “it couldn’t catch me.” 

“You think it was simply your misfortune, a mere coincidence, that you stumbled into our camp?” he asked.

 I nodded, miserably.

 He laughed. 

I looked at him, with horror.

 “The light,” he said. “You ran always to avoid it.”

 I moaned. 

“You were herded here,” he said.

 I cried out with misery.

Like we didn't figure that one out six fucking pages ago. One paragraph, John, that's all I'm asking.

So the dude, whose sole job is apparently to get Strawchick used to being a slave, gently urges her up into the spaceship, instead of IDK hauling her up by her hair OR DRUGGING HER (WHY IS SHE NOT DRUGGED LIKE THE OTHERS?) and then...John Norman does something that's actually kind of cool:

I saw the sun’s rim at the edge of my world, rising, touching it. In the east there was dawn. It was the first dawn I had ever seen. It was not that I had not stayed up all night, even many times. It was only that I had never watched a sunrise.

This perplexes me, and not in a bad way. Why is her first dawn on Earth also her last? This has some kind of umph to it, like rebirth or something else metaphysical. Like an inkling that this experience (being sold into slavery) is the start of her new, true life. Which is oh, so very ick, but let's not go messin' with the zen thing, man (/Jeff Bridges FTW) While the first sentence can go die on a piling (what touched what? Earth touched the sun, sun touched the earth? Elvis touched Miranda? What?) but the concept here is actually kind of awesome.

Does it go anywhere? No. Instead we get Strawchick's description of the slave holding area, where she is dragged kicking and screaming which, may I needlessly point out for the nine billionth time, would be a whole lot easier IF THEY HAD DRUGGED HER FIRST. They lock her in for the voyage, give her air, and we get today's contender for MOST OBVIOUS STATEMENT EVER:

The rich, clever, vain, insolent, proud Elinor Brinton, it was clear, had not escaped.

It took you two pages to described being locked into a vacuum-sealed tube. No shit, Sherlock.

TOMORROW: Alt-Earth, aka GOR, the world of a thousand raging hormones without soap.  Be there. Bring gas masks.

Humility

one day we will invent an emotion that we cannot express via lol-cat. This is when the universe will end. 


I think the thing I keep coming back to with writing is, well, how very much I suck at it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Last thing you guys want to hear me say, last thing I should say three days before I self pub another book. But...well, it's true. It totally is. Today was the best damn day I've had on Amazon so far...and it was, by the rules of the road, pretty goddamn pathetic, if you hold it up to anybody else's standards.

In my head, down deep inside, I do think I'm a good writer. Maybe not the best, maybe not professional best-seller material. But I do think I'm good. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing at all. But the evidence I see? Stack of rejection letters eight miles long, The Incident last April (I still cry over that) the, um, less than steller way The Great Publishing Experiment has gone (You guys are great, you guys are awesome, I heart you guys forever and I expected nothing more than what you've given) and I kind of realize that what my heart says? Is not what the reality is.

I think the thing that made me decide to self publish was realizing that the big boys didn't want me anyway, and never would. Ever. That's...amazingly freeing, knowing that you've got absolutely nothing to lose. And that's the dead honest truth. I do have nothing to lose by self-publishing. I am a non-entity, a cypher. A sucky writer. However much I trash Hubbard and the Gor novels they are writing gods compared to what I put out. And before you say "HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT, CW!" I want to point out one small, not incidental fact:

They are published. I am not. And this is never, ever, ever, ever EVER going to change.

I read things that tell me I've thrown everything away by self-publishing my stuff, and oh God does it hurt. It makes me want to scream or cry or throw things or do all of that all at once, together...right up until I realize that in the long run it never really mattered. It doesn't matter how clean I keep my career. I never had a career to keep clean in the first place. Which means I can try whatever I want, fail however hard it is I'm going to fail. I had nothing to lose. It was never going to be a reality, so why not knuckle down and start doing the heavy lifting? It's just as effective as giving up, and what was I going to do with that writing time anyway? Play Minecraft? (Not that Minecraft isn't cool. I Just need something to do after a creeper explosion blasts through into Lava and I not only die, I lose my diamond armor, sword, enchanted pickaxe and full stack of Emeralds. Why do creepers explode? Because FUCK YOU, that's why!)

And I denigrate the Self-Publishing Experiment, but in reality? What I wanted to see was not how many copies of Book X or Book Y I could sell right off the bat. I wanted to see if I could grow an audience. Build something that will make selling my "real" work (AKA full sized novels) worth it. And I am seeing growth. I am seeing something that could turn into something else, something really, really cool. Do I have any idea what the hell I'm doing? Fuck no. But one thing I do know is, next month is gonna tell me how much of a prayer I do have. If it does really well, I'll know it's time to start getting excited. If it does what pretty much everything else has done...eh, we're having fun anyway, right? And the point of this is not to make six million dollars and sell six million copies and get the movie deal and the TV interviews and the soundtrack of my dreams. It's to get to nerd out with you guys over how awesome that story is that incidentally also is mine (But we'll forget about that part).

So you know what, guys? I could be wrong. Maybe I don't suck. Maybe you guys aren't just here because I rip into bad authors. Maybe I can write on, say, a Twilight quality level. Maybe you wonderful, crazy, insane people actually like reading the things that I write.

So I'll make you a deal.

I succeed? And let's define success as I sell 100 copies of one book, in one day. Meaning 100 of you buy, for real money, a copy of a single book. Like, 100 Starbleached or 100 Silver Bullet copies in one twenty-four hour period. I do this? I will get a tattoo.

Given what I've seen? I think my skin is safe, forever. (not that i don't love you guys. I do. I totally do. I just...think I kind of know you lot pretty damn well) But you can prove me wrong. Go ahead, kids. I dare you.

100 books=CW gets a tattoo.

Captive of Gor chapter 2-3

So when we last left this "delightful" book, Norman had introduced us to his Strawchick puppet, who looks about as much like a woman as this:

looks like an actual man. She's rich, spoiled, a student at a university who gets good grades because she has lady bits instead of a brain (Hey, that's what the book says) and last night, somebody snuck into her bedroom and branded her. Yes. She's about to be kidnapped and taken to alt-earth as a slave.

Ready to see the plot go off the rails?

Okay, my biggest problem with Mission Earth, other than it being L. Ron Hubbard at the wheel, were the one-sentence action paragraphs. Apparently this was a pulp thing, not a Hubbard thing. Otherwise LRH and Norman got together every saturday for drinkies, because DAMN:

I rose to my hands and knees on the rug and looked at myself in the mirror.

I screamed. 

I was going mad!

 I threw my hands to my head, and shook my head.

 I locked my fingers in the band at my throat, trying to tear it from my neck. It had been placed on me while I was unconscious! About my throat, snugly, there was a graceful, gleaming band of steel.

 Reproduced exactly as written. As published, folks.

Also? If a dude sneaks into my bedroom while I am unconsious for the second time in twelve fucking hours, and locks a fucking collar around my neck? I am not thinking graceful. I am thinking blowtorch. I am thinking Barrett fifty cal.

Strawchick explores her collar for a moment, then realizes, DUH, the guy who branded her and locked a collar around her neck MIGHT STILL BE IN THE BUILDING! OH. EMM. GEE. We might want to do something about this!

To her credit, she tries. And to their credit, the space slavers have done everything they can short of tying her up to make sure she can't get help. Her phones are cut, her handgun is now a melted down lump, and when someone shows up claiming to be the cops, Strawchick wisely decides that getting the fuck out of her apartment might be smarter than answering the door, because she sure as fuck didn't call them. She ties a bunch of bedsheets together and goes out her bedroom window.

She climbs down, and it is almost exciting...right up until the slavers in the apartment below her (how did they get there?) catch her, drug her, and drag her back into her bedroom. They tie her to the bed, drug her and talk to her.

“You aren’t the cold, inert little thing you pretend to be, are you, bound slut,” he said. “I wonder what you will be like, when you are accommodated to your new condition.”

Yeah. No. "Accommodated to your new condition"=SUFFERING FROM STOCKHOLM SYNDROME.

Guys, this kind of attitude is why this shit happened, and why it took the girl in question years to report the son of a bitch for kidnapping her and keeping her locked under his bed for seven years. THIS. IS. NOT. OKAY.

Moving on.

The drugs wear off after a couple hours, and Strawchick realizes...hey! She's alone! Still tied to the bed, but alone! The slavers have left her alone and unguarded with drugs that don't last. 

And she remembers there is a knife under her pillow.

She is out of there, ladies and gentlemen, running fast as her little girlish legs will allow, which is pretty fucking fast. And then this happens:

Did he know that there was a mark on my thigh? Did he sense that? Did that mark make me somehow subtly different than I had been? Did it, somehow, set me apart from other women on this world? Could I no longer drive men away? And if I could no longer drive them away, what did that mean? What had that small mark done to me?

It's a functional, effective and accurate rape analogy. From John. fucking. Norman. Victims of sexual assault do feel marked. Many people don't talk about what happened to them because they don't want to go into the details. I remember reading There Will Be Dragons, by John Ringo, and in one of the more OH, JOHN RINGO, NO! passages, that I really appreciate now, a rape victim comments that the worst part of her flashback dreams is, sometimes she orgasms. I remember thinking that was weird at the time. Now I think how devistating that would be, to spend all your time thinking "Maybe I did really want it. Maybe I did deserve it." You spend all your time questioning yourself, over every little thing, while your brain is waiting behind you ready to mousetrap you with memory. This, right here, is actually pretty damn good.

Of course, you know he's going to fuck it up:

I felt suddenly helpless, and somehow, suddenly, for the first time in my life, vulnerably and radically female.

Female=violated. Nice one, John.

See, the thing here? Is not that she has been hurt. It's that she's returning to her natural state. She's becoming what she was supposed to be all along. A rape victim. Kleenex for men.

Back to the book.

Let's imagine for a second that you are a space slaver. Do you:

1. Pull up beside your future captive in a van, drag her into it, drug her and take her to your space ship for holding?

2. Ask your prey out on a date, drug her drink, stuff her into your trunk and take her to your space ship for holding?

3. Sneak into your prey's bedroom at night, give her the best fucking painkillers in the history of things, brand her, draw on her mirror, leave, come back and discover her fainted on the ground, put a collar on her and leave, come back disguised as the police AND GO TO THE OTHER APARTMENT because you know she's climbing down a bedsheet ladder, tie her up, drug her again, leave, return to find her missing, FOLLOW HER THROUGH THE CITY, let her check into a random motel, sneak into her motel room so you can write on her mirror again, leave, come back and CHASE HER WITH A GODDAMNED SPACE SHIP until she reaches your landing strip, at which point you spend about thirty minutes talking with her before you FINALLY stick her in a stasis tube?

4. DO ANY FUCKING THING ON THE PLANET OTHER THAN NUMBER THREE???

Jesus. Jesus Jesus Jesus. This makes no sense. At all. 

She gets in her Maserati (Fuck you, Strawchick) and goes driving off...only to realize that she is being followed. OH NOES! The slavers have found her again. And she drives away from the police station in our first offical moment of TSTL. Yes, the other guys were disguised as cops. They probably did not rent an entire fucking police station. She has a collar and drugs in her system and a burn on her thigh. There is ample evidence that Something Bad Has Happened To Her. She SHOULD go in and report it, proving that this is a girl with a BRAIN. If John wants his story to continue, the cops should tell her "tough shit, here's a form" and then go on with their lives. Because sometimes they do that. Not all the time, but sometimes.

But he doesn't. 

She evades her perusers and goes to a backwoods motel for sleep and dinner. And we get more characterization fail:

In the bathroom I examined the mark on my thigh. It infuriated me. But, as I regarded it, in fury, I could not help but be taken by its cursive, graceful insolence. I clenched my fists. The arrogance, that it had been placed on my body! The arrogance, the arrogance! It marked me. But beautifully. I regarded myself in the mirror. I regarded the mark. There was no doubt about it. That mark, somehow, insolently, whether I wished it or not, incredibly enhanced my beauty. I was furious. 

Also, incomprehensibly I found that I was curious about the touch of a man. I had never much cared for men. I put the thought angrily from me. I was Elinor Brinton!

Looking back on my notes for this passage, I wrote "Rape is beautiful, and the rape brand has incredible mind-control powers". I don't get this. I really don't comprehend the mindset that says "IF I SHOW THEM WHAT THEY DON'T WANT, THEY WILL WANT IT LATER." First, it shows HUGE lack of understanding re: victims of violent crime, and it shows an even bigger misunderstanding about what rape and crimes like it are all about. It's like somebody thinks they can control your mind by forcing their bullshit down your throat. That once you experiance it you'll actively want it, and because you're saying you don't want it now, you have to be forced to take it. I don't even feel offended by this shit, really. Just kind of sad and incomprehending, that anybody could be that utterly fucking stupid.

So after fantasizing about being raped (naturally) Strawchick Elinor discovers more lipstick on her mirror, in that oh-so-mysterious brand, and goes running out of the motel.

And the bad guys? Chase. her. with. their. space. ship. And catch her, so it's effective, but...They chase her. With a space ship.

After she went out of her way to tell you at the beginning, she ain't that hot folks. WOW.

And the best part? Can I spoil the best part for you? In chapter four? This truck pulls up? And they start unloading girls out of its trunk. So EVERYBODY ELSE got drugged unconsious before they were kidnapped, but not Elinor. Strawchick is speshul, boys and girls.

Jesus. Worst. Slavers. Ever.

Commenting on this blog...

I've turned anonymous commenting on for a lil while. Because since when were Captchas a bleeding IQ test? We'll see how it goes. IF YOU GUYS WILL USE IT (HINT HINT HINT) and we don't get a spam overload we'll keep it around.

If it turns into an absolute flustercluck we'll put things back the way they were before.

Also-also? just for the pure bitchery of it? Dear person who is SPAMMING THE FUCK OUT OF MY BLOG REFERRAL LINKS? Please knock that shit off. I'd like to be proud of my exceptionally good days, not pissed off because you can't play fair. I don't spam. Neither should you.

Captive of Gor chapter one

Oh, my God, guys, I have wanted to get to this for a WHILE.

But first, a little background. John Norman is a professior of philosophy at a real college in New York City, today. His real name is the first thing you see in his Wiki article, so you can run right over right now and maybe even sign up for one of his classes! And his principal focus of study? Morality.

Yes, folks. This is not a fun book--I mean, it is a fun book, but not the way Norman intended it. This is an issue book. As explained here, an issue book is a book built around an Idea, rather than an Idea being inserted into a story. Everything is subserviant to the Idea in an Issue book, so unless you are a fan-fucking-tastic writer, this usually turns into a mess.

And Norman isn't going for something light like the cause of communism or the end of the world here, boys and girls. He's going straight to the heart of society. Morality. Ethics. He's going to solve all our soil erosion problems. How?

BY PUTTING WOMEN IN THEIR PLACE.

Yes, children! The cause of all this trouble in our world is women. Women are doing it. Women have too much to do. Too much freedom. Too much...too much everything. Yes. Our society will only be happy when women accept their correct place.

This is the premise of the whole series. Subservience to men is good and right, and women will be happy if they just give up and go back to the kitchen.

The problem? These books fail at proving their own point so hard there are cracks in the pavement. But enough from me! Let's get right to this.

Our heroine is a "woman" named Elinor Brinton, and I put woman in quotes there because she's less woman and more, well, stuffed bra. We will call her Strawchick, because that's basically all she is. A strawman John Norman built to showcase how evil-murder-evil-evil the free woman is. And she's so far removed from flesh-and-blood reality that she's not a threat to me. Norman demeans her right off the bat:

Yet on this world I am a fifteen-gold piece girl, more lovely than many, yet far excelled by many whose stunning beauty I can only envy.

By the way? That's one of the cleaner sentences in this book. It's gonna be brutal. Anyhoo, when you introduce a character it's usually a bad idea to grind her negative traits into the ground. Sadly for us, Strawchick has no positive traits.

Ellie goes to college, where she takes advantage of the magical powers of vagina, ladies and gents, manipulating all her male college prof--

...yeah. Remember when I said that John Norman is a real college professor? In a real college somewhere in this country? Right now? I am praying to God that this story is not revenge fic. I am praying, but I do not think these prayers will be answered.

Anyhoo, Strawchick gets good grades through all of college because she has a va-jay-jay. Aww, you think I'm kidding?

My intelligence, it seems to me, was good, but even when my work seemed to me inferior, it was rated highly, as, indeed, was that of my sorority sisters. Our parents were wealthy and substantial grants to the schools and colleges were often made following our graduations. Also, I had never found men, and many of my instructors were such, hard to please.

It turns out that the only bad grade Strawchick ever gets in college is in French, because her female instructor is a woman. And holy shit, I don't think I've ever seen a book swivel around and shoot itself in the face so damn fast before. I mean, even Mission Earth waited until the last hundred pages or so to kill itself.

What? You don't see it?

Well, the book is about how women are the evil ones. Women are the ones whose submission is required to bring society to a safe and even keel. But...well, it looks like the men are the problem here. Elinor gets a passing grade in the same class when the teacher is a man. Yes, it could be because she just retook the class, which is what you normally do when you fail, but the book specifically says it is sex related. Boy=girl pass, girl=girl fail.

Way to destroy your own argument, John.

Moving on. Strawchick describes more of her life. Then we get this paragraph:

I do not know when I was noticed. It may have been on a street in New York, on a sidewalk in London, at a cafe in Paris. It may have been while sun-bathing on the Riviera. It may even have been on the campus of my college. Somewhere. Unknown to me, I was noted, and would be acquired.

Two things on the bolded part, kids. First off...random period FTW. Second...Jesus christ that is so very, very rapey.

She decribes more of her life. Her rich, beautiful life. Her rich beautiful life with her father who treat both her and her mother like property (implying that this is why Elinor is the way she is. WOW. That's like, twice in as many pages! John, I thought you wanted to prove women were bad.) and her mother, who straight up fucking poisoned Elinor's pet dog. And I cannot tell you how unbelievably random this is:

I recall my mother entertaining in our home. This she often did. I recall my father once mentioning to me that she was his most valuable asset. He had meant this to be a compliment. I recall that she was beautiful. She poisoned a poodle I had once had.

Literally: My mom was pretty. She poisoned a poodle. HOW DO THESE THOUGHTS FOLLOW EACH OTHER?

 Then Daddy dies and Elinor gets money and...yeah, I finally hate her. I don't hate her for being manipulative, I don't hate her for being a rich white beautiful model in New York, who is successful without having to work at it. But this?

Whether my fortune on a given day was something over a half million dollars or something over three quarters of a million dollars did not much interest me.

Fuck you, Strawchick. Fuck you.

And then we finally get to the actual story.

Strawchick wakes up in bed, having dismissed her maid (Who Norman takes care to point out is "colored". Thank you, seventies era racism) and cook for the day, and contemplates being a model while writhing in satin sheets.

I once had satin sheets. They were shiny, and they felt very nice the first night. And maybe the second night. By the third? I went back to cotton. Satin is nice to wear when it is 60F (50, if there are sleeves) and you are getting back out of it in an hour. Sweat, heat, and wrinkles make it very uncomfortable. It looks good in a porn movie, but it doesn't work on a normal bed. Feather comforters? Yes, please.

So she's writhing in fantasy bed, not real bed,  and we get a loooooooong erotic description of her waking process, a looooooooooooooooooong erotic description of her getting into the shower, a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG erotic description of her soaping herself up, and then...

This happens. This is my favorite passage in the WHOLE FUCKING BOOK, kids. It is reproduced exactly as written. Check it:

There was now a mark on my thigh. It was high on the thigh. The mark itself was about an inch and a half high. It was a graceful, cursive mark. In its way lovely. I knew it could not have been the result of a natural wound. It was in its way perfect, rather deep and clean. It was a deliberately, and precisely inflicted mark.

There was a MARK on my THIGH
               It was HIGH on the THIGH
The mark was about an inch and a half HIGH.

Way to get your Dr. Seuss on, John. I mean, seriously. LOOK AT THAT PARAGRAPH AND TELL ME YOU COULD NOT C&P IT INTO A CHILDREN'S BOOK! This is the fucking Hop on Pop of the BDSM world. This is supposed to be a dangerous erotic book about abuse and suffering and slavery and the sexy-sexy is introduced with all the literay pizzazz of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. 

Look, I know I'm supposed to be going on about PLOT fail here, but...*looks at the paragraph* I WANTED TO CRY! AND NOW WHY SHOULD I CRY? THE MARK, IT WENT ALL THE WAY UP TO THE SKY! Jesus Christ, take three seconds to make sure your description of burn-rape and torture doesn't rhyme like Green Eggs and Ham.

No shit, guys? If SOMEBODY can find a Dr Seuss illustration that'll match those three sentences, or can DRAW a Dr. Seuss-ish thing with that rhyme in it? Free art poster, your choice. It'll make my fucking day. Please do it. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do it. It will go on my wall forever.

Ahem. SO anyhoo, Strawchick FREAKS THE FUCK OUT and I don't blame her, because in her sleep somebody came in and attacked her perfect thigh (...*sporfle*) with a branding iron. She RUNS out into her bedroom and:

There, again I gasped, and again the room seemed to reel about me. On the mirror, which I had not noticed before, there was another mark. It had been drawn in my most scarlet lipstick on the surface of the mirror. It was more than a foot high, but it was the same mark that I wore on my thigh, that same graceful, cursive mark.

Yeah. There goes the happy fluffy writer fail. Now we're on to plot fail, boys and girls, and it's not nearly as delightful as the Thigh High rhyme.

See, this is where my Suspension of Disbelief dies. I believe that aliens from Alt-Earth would kidnap a random rich chick for fun and sell her into slavery to get their rocks off. It's the basic premise of the series, and if I can't buy that I might as well throw in the towel and stop reading now. What I don't buy is the sadism inherit in fucking with the future slave like this.

First, it lets her know you're still chasing her, the downside of which will become VERY clear in the next few chapters. Second...Norman is not trying to present us with a scared woman. He's trying to present us with an alternate lifestyle. And this? This right here? Indicates a sadistic fuckwit. Our first encounter with his alternate reality is a sadistic fuckwit. This does not sell us on his alt-earth bastion of female slavery. For these dudes, this should be no different than catching a wild horse. Fucking with her like this? The drawing, the secret branding and collaring? Giving her time to run? That's sadism. If Norman wants to present his ideas as normal, natural and right, Sadism and Hatred should be Kryptonite in his book (hah).

The other thing that bothers me? How Strawchick describes the mark as beautiful. Consistantly. It's a lovely mark. It's graceful. She's got no idea what the fuck it means, but it's in cursive.

Do me a favor? The most beautiful written language I know of is Arabic. Make a branding iron with some of the prettier letters, jam it on your thigh, and then describe this wound to me, will you? Is beautiful a word you'd use?  Or would you say something more like:

HOLY FUCK SOMEBODY BRANDED ME AND IT HURTS GET IT OFF GETITOFFGETITOFF SOMEBODY GET ME THE ALOE AND GAUZE AND JESUS I HAVE BEEN BURNED HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think it'd be more that second one there. I get what Norman wants to do with this book. I really do. I don't agree with it, but I get it. But the problem here is...nobody human would react this way. I don't care if you're burned with the most beautiful shape in the whole fucking universe, you're not going to see your own goddamned burn scar as pretty until after it's healed, and after your brain has accepted that it's here to stay. I mean...her modeling career is pretty much over, she's got about an inch and a half square of burned skin demanding medical attention, and oh, yeah, SOMEBODY CAME INTO HER BEDROOM AT NIGHT AND BRANDED HER WHILE SHE WAS SLEEPING AND SHE DID NOT EVEN WAKE UP.

Write your story about a slave accepting her lot in life. I'm mildly kinked in that direction already. I'd probably dig it a little bit. But for the love of all things good and right and holy, don't insult my intelligance by having her coo over her fresh burn scar first thing in the morning.

Sigh.

So what does our heroine do? In a book that is about proving the weakness of women and our need to be dominated by a strong male maley man? After discovering that she has been home invaded and burned and hurt and all? Do you think you can guess?

...and if this is a surprise, I disown you as my readers. Come back tomorrow, in which we find out why our heroine is just too stupid to live!