Fitness Goddess

Jackie Warner and my girlfriend share similar dimensions.

If you’ve been paying attention to my Twitter feed and Facebook statuses, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been trying to go to the gym more, and have been whining about it pretty constantly. I’ve learned a little something about relationships in the process and want to share it with my lovely readers.

My girlfriend is fond of saying, “you’re skinny, not healthy” which is probably the most accurate assessment of what’s going on with me. Having a Buddhist’s mind for only eating out of necessity and petite Asian genes galore, I have always been skinny. But Nikki is right. Just because I look like I’m healthy doesn’t mean I actually am. I have my weekly trip to Wendy’s. Up until a few months ago I was smoking 3-4 cigarettes a day, which I know isn’t a massively unhealthy amount, but I can’t imagine smoking any amount is a good thing. All of this probably wouldn’t have even been noticeable if I wasn’t dating a fitness goddess. When you’re living with someone who runs 5 miles a day and lives at the gym, you tend to start wondering why she’s never out of breath and a couple flights of stairs kicks your ass.

Another source of epiphany on my lack of fitness is football. I’m in week three now of a coed-flag football league and I’m doing just terrible. It’s a no contact league and somehow I’m always sore after the games (mostly from falling down a lot). This is probably where my Asian genes work against me. Ever hear of an Asian football player? Me neither.

I share similar dimensions with Mulan...or maybe the dragon.

I’ll admit my privilege in this though. I don’t have to work at all to look like I do. I sleep 10 hours a day. I play a lot of video games. My quads (learned what they were called from Nikki, it's the top of your legs) are used almost entirely to support my laptop for writing. I subsist on a diet of Wendy’s, ramen, and breakfast cereal because I don’t really know how to cook. Yet, even with all that, I’ve hovered around 100 lbs since 8^th grade (don’t worry, I’m short enough for that to be well within normal - BMI 20.5). If you think that all sounds fantastic, let me ask you this:  could you put a baseball uniform on and easily infiltrate a Little League team? If your answer was anything along the lines of, “Of course not, I have boobs and hips” you’ve got me beat, because I’m positive I could pull of an Amanda Bynes type switcheroo for the LittleLeague World Series except I’m hopelessly unathletic. The point being, I’m not trying to build the body I have into the body I want. All the exercise I’m doing is only going to change the composition of the same shape I’ve always had; I’m literally exercising to lose my nerd’s lack of stamina. This is probably a strange concept for a lot of women, exercising for functionality rather than appearance, which is kind of a shame, isn’t it? More on that later.

So now I’m trying to go to the gym, which is kind of not what you think. We have a tiny fitness center in our apartment complex that nobody really uses, except for me now apparently. My girlfriend uses the massive athletic complex gym at UCF for real athletes and, while she’s offered to come with me to the free fitness center in our complex, I always tell her I’d rather she didn’t. It’s impossible to go to the gym the 1 hour a day I can tolerate (I get so freaking bored), when the person who is supposed to be your gym buddy could stay there for three hours quite happily. More than that, I’m fairly certain I use most exercise machines wrong the first time, realize there’s no way I’m supposed to bonk my head that many times, and then have to look at the vague silhouette diagrams on the sides to see what I should have been doing. I definitely still have this "please oh please oh please don’t embarrass yourself in front of Nikki" thing that has persisted since I met her. Despite the fact that she could probably really help me in this, being the multi-sport athlete and personal trainer she is, I still really want her to think I’m cool even though I’m really obviously not. This is when I realized my fitness idol and hero was actually my girlfriend. She exercises to be a better athlete and ends up with the amazing body she has because it is functional for what she does. When I realized I was doing very badly in my own sport, I figured out fitness wasn’t something that functioned only for looks, which I already have and exercise wouldn’t change, but should help me do the things I want to do physically. Ladies, look at your own fitness routine and ask yourself, is it helping you do what you want to do? Does it make you more functional or are you doing it in hopes of changing your appearance?

Oh! Yep, I was on it backward.

So the question becomes, how does a couch potato date a fitness goddess? Actually, strike that, I don’t like couch potato. Revised:  how does a bedroom bunny date a fitness goddess? All my exercise usually comes in the bedroom, so this is far more accurate anyway. To this point, she has tried to help me be a better person and I’ve convinced her an occasional trip to In-n-Out won’t kill her girl abs. This is one of those surprisingly complex relationship questions most people probably don’t even consider. A differential in fitness and health goals can really strain a relationship. I mean, she is up at 6 AM every day for jogging, and I’m rolling into bed most nights around 2 AM not to be awoken until noon, which means there are whole chunks of the day where one of us is awake while the other is asleep. My sister says this is completely normal, especially since she’s had her son, but I have the lesbian urge to merge here. I’d pretty much wrap myself around Nikki 24/7 if I could figure out how to manage that without it being socially awkward. I think the answer is incremental change and unconditional acceptance of benign traits. Let me explain that since it sounds all jargony.

In any long term relationship, you’re going to find there are things that don’t match up that can be changed and things that don’t match up that don’t matter. The skill set to develop here is to figure out the difference. When you’re with someone special, you’re going to have this urge to want to be a better person for them, and they’ll have this whole other set of interests and ideas than you, which can end up enriching you as a person if you’re open to trying. You’re not changing to suit them, you’re trying what they like and seeing if it might also be something you like but have never considered. Positive changes in your life can come from other people’s desires for your best interests. Take the smoking thing, if Nikki hadn’t pressured me, I’d probably still be doing it—incremental change. There are other traits though that are basic to happiness and aren’t really harming the other person, but just might not be what the other person would like for themselves. My sleeping in doesn’t hurt anyone. I’m a freelance writer. I can have the sleep schedule I want so long as I’m productive with my waking hours. It doesn’t really hurt me for Nikki to get up at 6 AM since I’m a dead to the world type sleeper, and it doesn’t really hurt her for me to wake up at 11:30 or noon. So we just accept those idiosyncrasies as part of the lovely tapestry that is the other person even though it doesn’t match our own personal preferences. If it doesn’t hurt you or make you unhappy, let it go.

I don’t expect the complaining about going to the gym will leave my Twitter feed anytime soon even as I’m getting into better shape, but hopefully I’ll stop falling down so much during games.

Another Cop-Out Post

I'm not going to make a habit of this...probably. It's just, two good friends from the twitterverse have two new postings of me on their websites at the exact same time, and I feel like I can use this opportunity to shirk my duties as a blogger (didn't think I was going to be that honest, didja?). Seriously though, people. Do want countless new and interesting blog posts or do you want more books, because I can probably do both, but that'll really kill the time I spend playing Xbox and tormenting my cats with a laser pointer. Do you have any idea how not tan I've become since moving to Florida and quitting promo work? I used to be able to stand outside for days on end, in heels, without getting sunburned or sore feet, and now I can't even remember the last time I wore shoes that weren't flip flops. Where was I going with all this...? Oh, right, trying to justify flaking on my blogging duties...again.

So the thing about that is, I did an interview with Amelia for her website Trashy Treasures and I thought it went really well. Amelia James is also an author in her own right in addition to being a delightfully naughty kindred spirit, so you should pop over to the sections on her website where her books are and check those out as well. Her interview with me about "The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head" can be found here:  http://trashystreasures.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/author-interview-cassandra-duffy/

If that was all I had for you this week, I'd say you would be justified in calling me completely lazy. As it stands, I have more, so you should probably downgrade that to mostly lazy. Another lovely kindred spirit of naughtiness and authoring, Blue Sleighty, launched her website My Secret Obsessions for books, and a bunch of my titles found their way onto the list along with a bunch of other really great stuff. It's nice to find myself in some seriously impressive company. Again, aside from just checking out my stuff, which you should, you should also peek at Blue's writing since we are such similar sapphic critters. She's a follower of this blog, so it should be a matter of a couple clicks to finding your way to her blog, and she's far more dedicated to posting than I am. Take a look at her beautifully compiled list here:  http://www.mysecretobsession.com/My%20Secret%20Obsession%20-%20eBooks.htm

Last time I did this shirking thing, I posted a bunch of tumblr-esque photos of boobs I liked, and someone pointed out that I really like boobs. This is true. I do. But it was more a matter of just trying to give something back to my readers since I wasn't going to be giving a real blog post. Seriously though, the vaguely lesbian side storyline, Amber Heard, and boobs were about the only things that kept me watching the Playboy Club for the three episodes I made it through before it got canceled, but I'll skip the gratuitous posting of great boob pictures here since I don't want to seem single-minded.

Instead, I'm posting pictures of female abs, since I like those too...seriously, next week, I'll do a real post. Enjoy the interview, the website, and the abs!

I also really like these kinds of shorts. They're super comfy.

Gwen Stefani has really nice abs, and she's an OC girl too!

Jilian Michaels has really nice abs, and she likes girls, which is always a good combo.

I had this exact Gabby Reece poster on my wall growing up. Took my parents forever to figure out I didn't remotely care about beach volleyball.

And this is what I wished I looked like, but never actually will.

Did everyone notice one of the breasts pictures from last time got yanked by blogger? I wonder if they'll find any of these offensive too. "That is entirely too much navel!"

Modular Dating

So I have some relationship advice columns that ran on my more normalized job for a dating website that I thought I'd repost here from time to time if I thought they were particularly helpful and/or popular since the advice might be good for people in relationships too and a buying a subscription to a dating website just to read my column might seem strange to your partner.

I'm sure my advice works for men, but I doubt many read my blog.

 Modular Dating

Dinner and a movie is a tried and true dating trope because it actually plays on a concept that I’ve been apparently practicing for years (and I just now labeled it, which goes to show how procrastinatory I can be about labels). Modular dating is the simple concept of having individual, wholly functional units of entertainment strung together to allow for continuation or discontinuation of a date with the least amount of fuss or awkwardness. If this all sounds highly technical, don’t worry, I’m a relationship expert, I spent a lot of time in my lab mixing chemicals in a lab coat to make sure it all works before I brought this to you.

We’ve all been a situation where a date was going so well that we wanted it to continue, but, at the end of the listed things set out at the start of the date, we kind of ran out of ideas and the date ended early and awkwardly because we just didn’t have anything else on the schedule, and you’re usually having a hard time thinking straight around the people on those kinds of dates, so thinking of something new wasn’t going to happen. Or, and this is probably more common, you were on an obscenely bad date and you just wanted out, but you’d listed X, Y, and Z as the things you were going to do at the outset of the date, and you both end up trudging through all those activities, even though neither of you want to, simply because that was the schedule and nobody wants to be rude. There’s a fix:  modular dating.

Regardless of who is planning the date, and as lesbians we have a lot more leeway with this than straight girls who are still at least somewhat required to defer to the guy as not to threaten his masculinity (ugh), both people can have a secret treasure trove of fun activities that can easily be transitioned to if a date is going well. If you’re the primary planner of the date, I would recommend at least four, with the last few getting increasingly close to your home if things end up going very well with the final stop being your bed/hot tub/front porch. The key is to only let her know about the first two or three ideas at the outset. This way, if the date is going badly, you can bail after the proscribed schedule without hurting anyone’s feelings. If things are going well and you suddenly pull out these great ideas of further fun activities, she’ll think you’re a bundle of impetuousness and fun when in fact it was all careful planning.

Confused yet?

 Let’s look at an example of what I mean…

Angela and Lisa are on their third date, but haven’t had sex yet. The first few dates went well, and they’re getting increasingly close. Angela plans a date that involves an early dinner at a sushi place (good for conversation) and then mini-golf since Lisa was on her college golf team (fun physical activity with lots of opportunity for contact). Now, if these two activities go well, and Angela has ever reason to believe they will, she planned two secret activities to follow if Lisa is interested in continuing the date. The third one is checking out Angela’s favorite independent bookstore, which has a coffee bar and a fantastic poetry section, as a quiet, intimate activity and is a scant few miles from Angela’s apartment. After the bookstore, depending on how things have gone, there are three options:  continue to the fourth activity, end the date, or head back to Angela’s place. Let’s say it went well enough to not end the date yet, but not well enough to start comparing appendectomy scars just yet. At that point, Angela could suggest the fourth activity, which is getting gelato at a stand she knows about and then walking by the waterfront to watch the sunset (obviously the most romantic of the plans should go last). At the outset of the date, Lisa didn’t necessarily have to know there was a third or fourth plan involved. If she had other plans for that night, they could have skipped the bookstore and walk without anyone feeling like they were canceling. But, because they were having such a great time and as a Romance writer I like writing about happy couples falling in love and having lots of sex, we’ll pretend like they needed the third and fourth activity to deepen their connection, which ultimately put the conclusion of the date at Angela’s apartment.

This is obviously the fifth step if everything goes well!

The key to planning good modular dates is thoughtfulness. The activities should be varied, tailored to the specific lady you’re dating, and require very little in the way of commuting since nothing kills the mood like a two hour car ride to an amusement park that turns out to be completelynot worth it. In the example above, Angela tailored the date to Lisa’s interests (golf), showed off aspects of herself (the bookstore), had a wide variety of activities (sitting/eating/talking, walking, reading, competition, and romance) so the date wasn’t just one note, and each element was not predicated on the one before it, making them all easily removable. This last part is important for if you’ve misread something. Let’s say mini-golf was a hit, and Angela had every reason to think it would be, but Lisa expressed absolutely no interest in the bookstore, then it would be a simple matter of moving on to the waterfront walk and gelato rather than simply ending the date for want of something to do. And this is one of the really nice features of planning modular dating—flexibility.

See how important flexibility is in all forms?

Now, you might be thinking, “Cassandra, you’re so scientifically gifted and have such nice teeth, but what if I’m not that good at thinking of activities?” Firstly, thank you, I can’t possibly be complimented enough on my teeth, and secondly, make good use of the internet. A simple Google search of “stuff to do in…” and then insert your location will bring up page after page of things people have tried and will usually include a corresponding Yelp rating (a review site where independent users can describe their experiences) to let you know if it’s worth the time. The internet is a powerful tool and will not only tell you what there is to do, but will also tell you how fun it is and will draw you a map to get you from one part of the date to the next without so much as a hiccup. There is far more going on around you than you probably realize. The added benefit to doing this is that there’s more going on than she’s probably aware of either so you’ll end up looking hooked up and on scene when you take her somewhere she’s never heard of and you both have a great time.

Modular dating can help lengthen out the good dates, cut short the bad ones, and will never leave you wondering what to do next. Be considerate, be creative, and be internet savvy in your planning.

The LFL and Feminism

The Lingerie Football League:

A Feminist's Quagmire

I don't even know what this is called, but I know I can't do it.

I've actually been struggling for quite awhile with this question. I have several friend who play in the Lingerie Football League (ladies I met without knowing it was their sport). I won't mention who exactly, but you might be able to piece it together from my Facebook friend list. I'm also a feminist, so there's a pretty obvious conflict here for me. But I'm ALSO a lesbian into athletic women (see my girlfriend's abs for confirmation) so there are biological concerns as well. It's a whole mess and one I haven't really figured out an answer for yet.

For those of you who may not know what the LFL is, it's not entirely what it sounds like. When my friends did finally tell me where they were playing lingerie football, I was kind of horrified until I actually saw them play. And then I was horrified that they didn't have nearly enough padding for how hard everyone was hitting each other. There is a very small...loud...actually kind of large part of me that wishes they were given full uniforms so people would take the athleticism of it all more seriously. For a toughness factor, these girls have roller derby beat by a country mile, but when it comes to respectability, they're still lagging behind because it started out as a strange wet dream for really pathetic guys.

I can't be the only one who sees how the uniforms are fairly similar in size and composition.

Then something odd happened:  people started watching for the football. The models who couldn't run, throw, or hit vanished and women with far sturdier bodies (translate--thicker) and real athletic ability took their place. This isn't to say there weren't real athletes in the early days, they were just so ridiculously good by comparison that they obliterated the lingerie models every play. The uniforms still disgust me though.

You don't get abs like that without being an athlete; trust me, I've tried.

As a feminist, there are elements here to be proud of, but also a lot of gross stuff. It's televised women's athletics, which is good! But it's televised on MTV2, which is bad. It's women playing a professional contact sport for real money that was once only allowed to men, which is great! But they're basically only wearing underwear while they're doing it, which is bad. Right now, the women who are playing are real athletes who take real hits and receive real injuries and bruises from it all in front of a cheering crowd, which is good! But the stadiums also tend to be really empty most of the time, which is bad considering men's high school football sells out more often than the LFL does. The women of the LFL have realistic bodies (5'7" 148 lbs and heavier kind of normal), which is good! But they also sell game-worn "uniforms" on the LFL website, which makes my skin crawl it's so disgusting. I love my friends who play and I love that they're playing football, real professional football in front of crowds of people who paid to be there to see them play, and I'm so fucking proud when I see #1 make a really vicious tackle that would make most men cry. The supportive fan and lover of women's athletics really wants to like the LFL, but the feminist in me is screaming the entire time, "They shouldn't have to wear lingerie to be watched!"

How did anyone even tell them apart without uniforms?

One of the angles I've taken on this, and it's helped rationalize it a lot, came from the ancient Greeks. The original Olympics, which were men only, were participated in while entirely naked and often lubed with olive oil. I'm not going to get into the whole homoerotic side of this and the affinity the ancient Greeks had for all things man-love, but I am aware it exists. The point was, the greatest athletes of their era refused clothing for athletic competition at one point in human history, and it couldn't have been about turning women into sexual objects or pieces of meat, because those naked athletes were all men. When I look at the LFL uniforms and think of them more as gladiator armor designed to show off the marvel of the athletic form, which was the goal of the lack of uniforms in the games in ancient Greece and Rome (again, all men), it becomes slightly more tolerable as long as I ignore the real intent.

This didn't match my preconceived notions either.

Taking the feminism angle out entirely, there are some other, more pedantic, problems for me. When my LFL friends ask me why I don't go out for a team (there is one in LA when I lived in SoCal and there are a few in Florida so it's not like access is an issue), I always came up with a laundry list of excuses:  I'm small, I'm slow, I'm a baby about pain, I smoked up until very recently (so I can't really use that one anymore), etc. And most of those excuses were valid reasons, but my real conflict was...I don't want to wear the lingerie in front of people. I hate myself for having to admit this, but one of my major conflicts was the completely anti-feminist hangup of thinking people would think I didn't have a good enough body to be wearing something that skimpy. As enlightened and advanced as I try to be, I still have those hangups about how I look, and as brave as I like to think I am, these women who are clearly participating in a male-dominated fantasy, are braver than me when it comes to a positive body image. That kind of sucks to have to admit; I mean, I couldn't imagine how much worse my nose would be if it got broken playing tackle football or how my top would be largely ceremonial since I don't really have boobs enough to fill out most bikini tops. It's strange to find out exactly how far we really are from enlightened when something like this brings up all the ways we're just like everyone else in our shallow fears.

Maybe I'm just weird, but this looks like a lot of fun.

My wish would be that the more traditional tackle football leagues for women would gain more support and get the television contracts they deserve. Or, if the LFL does have to be the face of women's football, that it'd take more of a roller derby angle to it where the women get to modify their own uniforms as they see fit and have a more active hand in how the league is run. In the meantime, I'll just have to be conflicted about it all.

One on One Interview

I'm going to have a total cop-out blog post this week! (I feel like if I put the exclamation point on the end there, you'll feel excited about the impending cop-out...but now I'm wondering if I've spoiled that by telling you. Damn!) I did a one on one interview with Sally from Bibrary Bookslut and I thought I'd repost the link here so you can read for yourself how it went. I had a lot of fun, and I'm so thankful she had me.

Here's the link to the interview:  http://bibrary.blogspot.com/2011/09/interviewcassandra-duffy-author-of.html

...and here are some pictures of boobs I like, just so you don't feel completely ripped off by this cop-out weekly blog post. (Yes, I know, what I'm doing is basically tumblr, but I'm not signing up with a whole other website for one post about an interview and boobs)

That is a kitty between boobs from Cats 'n Racks blog

Christina Hendricks from Mad Men has some amazing boobs.

This is apparently called "butt cleavage" and being a skinny white girl, it's yet another type of cleavage I don't have.

Those are boobs advertising gambling.

Those are not actually Hillary Clinton's boobs.

Those are Bianca Beauchamp's boobs (friend on Twitter) doing the rare upside down cleavage thing.

...and finally, this is a Blue Footed Booby doing a little dance for you. See you next week!

The Gunfigher and The Gear-Head Chapter 1

My favorite cover to date!

I'm going to do something kind of unprecedented here, and I'm going to skip the preachy blog about sex advice, relationship tips, and feminist rhetoric. I know what you're thinking, and no, I don't have that crazy bird flu from the Contagion movie; I'm just feeling less opinionated and more giving right now.

I will say this briefly though--the reaction to this book thus far has been amazing! And, if you really need sex positive talk, relationship advice, and feminist brouhaha, this book has all of it in fiction form, which makes it much more fun to read. Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Short flights cut shorter.

“Coming up on the teeth of the line now,” Ramen’s voice buzzed through the static-riddled intercom.

The dirigible thrummed and breathed like a living thing through the hot air being pumped constantly from the boiler into the zeppelin cylinder and beating with the thumping of turbines of the engines providing the forward thrust; both created an unimaginable din, preventing direct communication without the intercom between her and the automaton running the major systems. Along the underside, between the ribs of the armor plates, ran a walkway the entire length of the airship from the boiler in the back to the primary weapon in the front. Gieo scampered down the narrow walkway, using the handrails to keep upright as the airship swayed and jolted in its flight path.

Tamping her leather top hat down on the four, purple braids at the four corners of her head, she lowered her green-tinted goggles over her eyes. The hat didn’t fit right, leaving her with three options as she saw it:  find a new hat, fix a chinstrap, or wear her hair in the four thick braids. It was an easy decision as far as she was concerned. Sliding down the ladder into the ball-turret on the nose of the great, sturgeon-shaped airship, her riding boots hissed against the copper piping.

“Go serpentine, Ramen,” she shouted into the intercom cup next to the base of the ladder.

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the automaton’s voice crackled back.

The immense gears of the airship’s bat-like wings engaged with a squeaking, rumbling cacophony. Gieo strapped herself into the reclined seat of the ball-turret, affixing the leather belts across her chest, clipped into the metal tongs on the lapels of her tailed tuxedo jacket, holding tight against the brown, leather corset she wore beneath. As the chair lowered down into the Plexiglas turret, she hooked the rubber hose from the air-hydraulic feed into the leather and chain choker she wore, pumping fresh air up around her head to cool her and aid in breathing.

With the wings flapping in machinated patterns, the great airship took on a wide swing to its flight, shooting back and forth in as athletic of zigzags as a fifty-meter long blimp could manage. Gieo spun the handles on the weapon system’s hydraulic feeds, sending steam power into the four guns positioned in a box around her. The desert floor, thousands of feet below, rolled back and forth beneath her, held at bay only by the glass ball she sat in.

“Leveling the outcropping at the precise center of our undulations,” Ramen’s voice crackled through the com speaker in the ball-turret.

“Have the smoke-screen loaded and ready.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“Disengaging now.” Gieo pulled the pins on the ball-turret’s gyroscope arm. The entire turret, with her inside, dropped down off the bottom of the armored airship, dangling by a ten meter, articulated metal arm and a dozen hydraulic tubes and hoses. She slipped her feet into the leather straps of the turret and took control of the swaying arm. All around her the hisses of steam and clanking of gears let her know the gyroscopes were functioning as intended.

Puffs of white smoke from the ground erupted out of an underbrush canopy nestled between the furthest most rocks of the outcropping. Shells whistled up toward the zeppelin, followed by explosions, and the clanking of flack bouncing off the airship’s armor.

Gieo leveled the gyroscopes to steady her gun platform even as the airship swayed in evasive maneuvers. She brought the targeting reticule of a large, copper hoop with four smaller hoops arranged in the center to indicate the four guns, on the outcropping, and pushed the two trigger handles forward.

“I see your teeth,” she growled, “now take a look at mine!”

The four guns around her erupted in steam-powered blasts, sending shells of explosive material down onto the antiaircraft battery four at a time. The shells exploded across the rocky surface in showers of white, magnesium fire. She saw a few of the scattering Slark trying to escape the kill zone, and she zeroed in on them to put the fire right across their path. She got some, more than some, several even, before a direct hit caught her dirigible on the port side, knocking free one of the wings with a shriek of metal and a resounding thump.

“Son-of-a…” Gieo kicked free the emergency hold on the main spring of the arm’s gyroscope, pulling the entire swinging arm of the ball-turret back into the body of the blimp. The swaying of the ship was replaced by a long, descending spiral, as the wounded blimp fluttered toward the ground with a torn cylinder and only one functional wing. Gieo unhooked herself from the ball-turret and scrambled back up the ladder into the main body of the ship. “Launch the smoke-screen,” she shouted into the intercom.

“On the way,” Ramen replied.

Four quick pops were followed by four loud explosions as the outer plates on the boilers blew off and the water content dumped onto the stoking fires. White steam and smoke poured from the dirigible, obscuring even the vaguest outline of the ship as it began its slow, spiraling descent toward the ground. Gieo scrambled back down the walkway to the radio room, cranked the hand-wheel to extend the antenna, and tapped out the distress code for a languishing aircraft.

“This is Dirigible Purple Six, going down,” Gieo shouted into the mouthpiece. “Do you copy, air-defense network?”

After a few minutes of trying and retrying the distress call, an old, familiar voice crackled back over the shortwave. “This is air-defense Tempe-2,” the dithering old man said. “There hasn’t been anything flying in years. My radio was buried under laundry.”

“There has too,” Gieo protested. “We went through this not six months ago.”

A long stretch of radio silence followed.

“Are you sure it wasn’t years ago?” Tempe-2 asked.

“Positive!” Gieo shrieked.

“Oh, well, I guess if you’re positive,” the old man said. “What’s your situation and location?”

“Situation is stable, but crashing,” Gieo said, “and location is sector 7-G.”

“That’s the Tombstone Three-Three-O,” Tempe-2 said. “I’ll see if I can get someone over there on the horn for a retrieval team, but don’t expect much luxury. Those Tombstoners are hardscrabble from tip to toe.”

“Whatever, it beats walking home,” Gieo said. “Dirigible Purple 6, over and out.”

This was her sixth crash in the last three years and the story was always the same. Tempe-2 was the only air defense network radioman left in the world as far as she knew, and he was half-gone most of the time. She suspected he was a methanol drinker, peyote user, or ether huffer. Every time she got shot down, it was like the first time for him. She was glad for his existence, as he always managed to get someone out from one of the free cities to pick her up, but he never remembered having done it.

“We’re at 750 feet,” Ramen’s voice came through the com.

“Get back to the shop,” Gieo replied. “Hopefully I’ll see you in a couple days.”

She heard her automaton’s escape tube fire and the telltale thumping of his helicopter blades as he flitted away, too small and well below the notice of the antiaircraft batteries. She climbed up the ladder into the spider room. The spherical room, dead center in the zeppelin cylinder, composed of a network of rubber tubing with a harness in the middle. She shimmied into the harness, hooked herself in, including the neck brace, and waited for the ship to hit the desert floor.

Crashing was becoming routine. She was more curious about who she was going to meet from Tombstone than she was afraid of the impending impact. She’d never met anyone from the Tombstone hunting camp, although their reputation for being hardcore, psycho Slark-killers was well-traveled.

Her thoughts were interrupted by four concussive explosions slamming into the underside of the airship—shoulder-fired rockets. One must have snuck through a chink in the ship’s defenses as the dirigible’s descent took a violent shove from soft flutter into chaotic tumble.

“Oh, you guys are dickheads,” Gieo growled. She reached into her pocket, thrust the mouth guard over her teeth, and braced herself for impact. The ship hit with an explosive crash as the blimp portion ruptured. The boiler launched itself away from the wreckage, and the pilot whipped around inside the spider room like whirling dervish.

If you've reached the end of this and you're all, "Hey, wtf happens to her?" The rest of the book can be purchased on Nook, Kindle, and Smashwords (for you Kobo and iPad users).

Character Evaluation: Captain Val

Character Evaluation:  Captain Val

What if cloning wasn't creepy?

              There are characters and stories I love that I want other people to love as well. One of those characters and stories is Captain Val in Of Pirates and Politicians found in Lesbians in Space: Astral Liaisons. The long story made short about where the entire story idea came from was I needed a clone story for the science fiction book and I was kind of into group sex fantasies at the time. From this kind of banal beginning, the story exploded in my head (no pun intended) and all of a sudden I’m thinking this could be a book, or a series of books even! There’s this cool, cult following for the story that I didn’t quite expect. Someone even made “Captain Val’s Girl” their login for Barnes & Noble (totally flattered by the way). It was one of the reasons I brought this idea to a pitch session.

            Pitch sessions (play on words for bitch sessions—and yes, that’s my term for it, publishers call it something else entirely, but I like pitch session) is when you take a bunch of ideas for your next project and you hurl them all at your editor’s desk and they tell you which one they like for your next project. Parlaying Of Pirates and Politicians into a book was one such idea, which they tossed out immediately. Astral Liaisons is the lesser selling collection of mine and a traditional space opera about a lesbian space pirate and her clone girlfriends seemed too antiquated/fan fictiony/cross-dressing Han Solo to my publisher apparently. Whatever. Someone named their website logins after one of my book characters—they can’t take that away from me.

            The one they ultimately ended up picking, which was ironically source materialed of Astral Liaisons as well, was The Gunfighter and The Gearhead. This I pitched with sample chapters and agreed to the promise that it could be done well in advance of Cowboys and Aliens. I kept up my end, but the movie flopped, and the publisher didn’t have the book ready for a coinciding launch anyway.

            The next project after that they approved is going to be Fabled Fang Girls, which is going right back to lesbian vampires. After that’s done, it’s back for another pitch session in which I plan to pitch Of Pirates and Politicians again. If you like Captain Val, and you’d like my October pitch session to go differently, you could give me a hand on the sales figures with a plug or review on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Hard sales numbers and money always appeals to for profit companies.

            Anyway character evaluation stuff:

-                     I love Captain Val because she’s uncertain about her course, but she’s a captain so she should always appear certain, which gives her some great moments in misplaced confidence.

-                     The sex was fun to write, but I also wanted to write a clone story in which the clones weren’t carbon copies of each other (nature versus nurture) and where a polyamorous relationship seemed just as loving and normalized as a coupling.

-                     If I were to cast Captain Val in a movie, I’d pick Kristin Kreuk. The clones would probably have to be played by Grace Park with Meryl Streep’s brain.

Enjoy the excerpt and hopefully you’ll fall in love with Captain Val as well!

            Captain Valentina Dex was lost in thought. It was a remarkable thing that she could be lost in thought considering what was being done to her. She was reclined on her bed, propped up slightly by a few pillows. Jesse was kissing her in a soft, loving way. Jane had pushed the front of her shirt up and was licking her breasts while stroking fingertips up and down the flat of Val’s stomach. And Jill was between her legs, flicking her tongue over Val’s clit and slowly working a whirring, vibrating toy in slow, deliberate passes in and out of her, tilting it on the way in to vibrate along the underside of her clit. It really was just about the most amazing sexual act Val could envision for herself if she wasn’t completely preoccupied.

            Jesse seemed to pick up on her distraction first. She pulled back from the kiss and grimaced a little. “You’re not enjoying yourself,” she said. Jesse was special, after a fashion, being the only blond clone to date that Val had found.

            “I thought you liked this,” Jane added. She was one of two redhead clones.

            “I did, I mean, I do,” Val said quickly.

            “She’s thinking about her,” Jill said, slipping the toy out of Val and turning it off.

            “I think it’s romantic,” Jane said.

            “You would,” Jill huffed.

            “It’s not a romance thing,” Val said.

            “So you keep saying,” Jill said.

            Their personalities were all so different. Jill was the dark haired beauty with a propensity to brood. Jane was the sensitive romantic type. And Jesse played the peacemaker in all things, sacrificing her own comfort for anyone around her. If Val didn’t know better, she would assume they were sisters. Of course, they didn’t treat each other like sisters; in fact, with the exception of Jennifer and Jesse having one brief introduction at a marketing conference three years ago, none of the six clones had even met before Val brought them together. The three clones with the longer names—Jennifer, Jasmine, and Josephine, incidentally the three older clones, were all straight and not remotely interested in the fun and games Jesse, Jane, and Jill enjoyed. The seventh clone Val had found, also the youngest by seven years, was in the ship’s infirmary, pulled off a derelict ship the day before, and hadn’t awoken from her coma yet. The name tag on her flight suit had identified her as Joey, and the ship’s log indicated she was fourteen, which was about all the information they’d managed on her thus far.

            “We could do something else,” Jesse offered, “maybe play a game on the computer.”

            “Do you need something, Jesse?” the ship’s computer chimed in.

            “She was speculating on potential activities using the word computer as the indirect object,” Val snarled at the glowing blue eye set in the wall that was the computer’s primary sensor in her bedroom. She hated the ship’s artificial intelligence. It went by the name of ‘computer’ and so any reference to comp, CPU, or computer would immediately trigger its name recognition software. Plus, the default voice was set to incessantly-cheery, slightly-effeminate, British male.

            “If it bothers you so much, why don’t you just change its name?” Jill asked.

            “When I stole the ship, I didn’t exactly have time to ask the previous owner how every little thing worked,” Val said.

            “Screw it,” Jill said, “I’m going to go take a shower.”

            Val dove across the top of the bed, managing to snag Jill’s wrist before she could escape entirely. Jill regarded the sprawled out Val coolly. Aside from a few, minor alterations, all the clones had the same face that looked slightly reminiscent of Pacific Islander with a flattish, round nose, semi-slanted eyes, smooth cheeks, and a cute little chin. Jill tended to narrow her eyes a lot more than any of the other clones though, and had given herself tiny lines in the process.

            “I owe you,” Val said.

            Jill’s frosty demeanor melted some. She tucked an errant strand of her straight black hair behind an ear and smiled down to Val. “Pass mine on to them,” she said, nodding in the direction of Jesse and Jane.

            Val released her wrist. Jill walked out of the room via the j-shape entryway. That was one of the other peculiarities about the ship Val couldn’t quite understand:  there were no doors, anywhere. Privacy was accomplished by having curved or cornered entries into rooms without so much as a curtain anywhere. Val looked back over her shoulder to Jesse and Jane who were cuddled at the top of the bed, on the pile of pillows Val had formerly reclined on.

            “What did you two have in mind?” Val asked.

            “Exponential decline,” Jesse said quickly.