This post is a response to a post on Usenet al.tasteless about flatulence. What’s Usenet? It’s what we had before web forums, Facebook, etc. What’s alt.tasteless? It was a Usenet group that specialized in… well… tastelessness; and body humor is a big part of that. Probably the best description, other than the one in the FAQ and found in the 1994 Wired article linked above about the AT war with rec.pets.cats, is that it “was created in the autumn of 1990 “as a place to keep the sick people away from rec.humor and other forums”. It’s what 4-chan thought it could be, before it it became infested with alt-right, MAGA types.

>Well I think I've figured out what the problem is here. I'm on a
>course of pills to try to overcome a long-term case of major
>flatulence that can come on oh-so-quickly with incredible strength
>(nostril-wise), a course of pills that involves 8 pills per day for a
>week.

Good god, man, why? Revel in the nebulous ether that is your flatulence! Why, in some circles, a person’s ability to rip a true stinker is tied to their promotability! I’m rather certain that my own ability in producing sphincter-tearing, paint-peeling methane emissions is largely responsible for my lofty position within the department. Many’s the trainee that has been laid low when they dared to challenge my dominance in this arena.

Picture a scene out of “The Matrix: An officer runs pell-mell into the locker room and shouts “The trainee’s trying to gas out Sarge!” The locker room empties and gathers around the door to the Sergeant’s office. The trainee, gripping the edge of the desk with whitened knuckles, strains until the veins in his neck bulge and corded muscle stands out along his forearms. He bears down with a “Hunnggghhh” and produces a watery, rippling fart that curls gelatinous tendrils around the nostrils of the onlookers. He smiles, surreptitiously patting his ass-crack to make sure he doesn’t need to change his underwear.

I lean back lazily in the chair, feet propped on the desk, and return his smile. “Yes, but-” I effortlessly release a subsonic rumbler that makes the paper-clip holder on the desk vibrate across the surface and tickles the inner ear in such a way as to cause vague feelings of panic and discomfort in the crowd. The titanic temblor continues unrelenting for nearly a full minute, singing the eyebrows of those who venture too close for a good view of my navy nylon-clad buttocks flapping together. The tired air-conditioning unit in the wall quits with a clunk and a sigh, refusing to process this vile effluvium through its filter.

The trainee slinks off dejected to the men’s restroom for a quick safety-wipe as the onlookers slowly shuffle back to the locker room, awed by the display. The first officer grabs a wizened Corporal and asks “But…. what does it mean?” The Corporal smiles and shakes his head.

“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. Everybody shits themselves, the first time.”

Final one for tonight. This was not a writing prompt, but an idea I had after having all four wisdom teeth surgically removed at once. What if a werewolf had a cavity?

---

“Well? How ‘bout it?”

Frank was a good guy, but I’d hit him with a lot of shocks lately. I waited patiently as he drained the two fingers of scotch, his back to me.

“I dunno,” he said finally. “It’s still kind of weird to me.”

“Hey… I haven’t eaten your kids or humped your dog yet.”

“I’ve seen the way you look at my dog. If she gets knocked up, you can take care of the puppies.”

“Anyway. What’s the problem? It’s just like any other procedure you’ve done. I’ve got money; I’ll pay extra.”

“It’s not the money, it’s just- look, I’ll do it, but you owe me.”

“For what?”

“For freaking me out three weeks ago. Couldn’t you just go to a vet?”

“I don’t know any vets. You, I know.”

He looked longingly at the bottle of single-malt on the counter before grabbing his jacket. “Well, then, let’s go.”

The drive was inordinately long. I guess if I had as much liquid cash as Frank, I’d live way the hell out of town as well. We parked close to the building. I stood patiently in the frigid air as Frank fumbled with his key ring. The door opened after a couple of grunting twists on the lock and he slid inside to disarm the alarm. I watched as he pressed the door shut with his shoulder, squeezing it the extra centimeter to get the bolt thrown.

“You charge these rich folks how much for an appointment, and you can’t afford to fix your own office door?” I asked.

“I just never got around to it.” He unlocked an interior door and began flipping on light switches. “Sit” he commanded, pointing to a large padded chair on a pedestal. I eased an instrument tray out of the way and began undressing. “Do you have to change?” he complained.

“You can’t get to it unless I’m changed,” I said. “You don’t have to watch.”

“Thanks.” He turned to a shelf and began selecting sealed packets, but I could see him watching me out of the corner of his eye.

I skinned off my underwear and kicked my clothes out of the way. I half-crouched over, holding my arms in front of me. After almost a month of practice, I still can’t change slow enough to actually see what’s happening.

There was an instant of pain, as if I’d caught my insides on something and pulled- and then it was gone. My arms were covered in thick, inch-long, chocolate brown fur. My hands were covered in shorter fur, with dark skin on the pads of my fingers and palms; and- most impressive, I thought- curved and wickedly sharp claws where my nails used to be. This time I imagined that I could see the fur sprout. Usually it’s over, bam, before I can blink.

I settled into the chair and leaned back into the headrest. It was quiet for a few moments behind me, and I could feel Frank’s gaze burning the back of my head before he rattled around again. I’ve watched myself in the mirror before; I guess it is kind of impressive, visually. I wore myself out in the first week, watching myself change over and over.

Frank had the same wallpaper that it seemed everyone in his profession did- a sort of olive-green vertical stripe with improbable looking flowers. Why couldn’t they just paint it a solid color, I wondered? Probably the wallpaper hides the blood splatters better. Directly in front of me on the wall was an enormous framed diploma. The school’s name was buried in so much filigree as to be illegible. The language didn’t look like any Latin I remembered- maybe Italian, or pig-Latin. The only things I could make out were in English- “Franklin Wesley Grimes” and “Doctor of Medical Dentistry”. Did that say “University of Grenada” under the signature?

Frank laid a set of mediaeval -looking curved picks on the instrument table. I looked up and jerked reflexively. His face was covered by a blue paper mask and a pair of bulbous goggles. “Gah!” I said. My voice is wonderfully deep and rumbly when I’m changed. James Earl Jones, eat your heart out. “The Communion aliens have landed!”

“Just open your mouth.” I shut up. Frank was jumpy. He adjusted the ancient enameled reflective light over my face- those things must be hideously expensive, because I swear they’re passed on from generation to generation- and I opened my mouth as wide as it would go.

Which, in median form, is quite wide. My canines are each an inch and a half long from gum to tip, and with my mouth open fully there’s a good five inches between them, tip to tip. The better to eat you with, my dear. Frank looked a little faint. I was about to ask if he was OK when he recovered and jammed a clear tube under my tongue that immediately sucked up the flesh there. He moved it and began looking around with his mirror.

I could see his nose wrinkle up under the mask. “What do you eat?”

“Ahr eet.”

“Whatever, it stinks. Don’t you brush?” He picked up one of the small hooks and began picking at my teeth.

“Oht aher ah ust ahe ah ehr.”

“What?”

“Oht aher ah ust ahe ah ehr.”

“I can’t understand you.”

I glared at him and pushed his fingers out of my mouth with my tongue, and then bit down hard. The plastic tube severed and I spit the end out. “I said, not after I’ve just taken a deer.”
He looked stricken. “That’s more than I needed to know. And add a quarter for the tube to your bill.” He plucked the stub out and replaced it with a fresh one and it went back to sucking up the underside of my tongue. I locked my jaws open and stared at the ceiling.

He wiggled the pick in every crevice in my mouth. When he got to the hole in the side of my left upper carnassial the pick went in and hung, but he pulled until it came free anyway. It sprang out of the hole with a ‘pop’ and the point imbedded in my gums. “That’s the one, eh?” he asked without a trace of sympathy. He dug around and picked and scraped in the hole, grimly prying the bits of tarter off the tooth and clearing out the hole. My head jerked with his more vigorous efforts. I was afraid he was going to stand on my chest and go to it with both hands.

He stopped for a breather and I swallowed, tasting blood from my tortured gums. “What happens to it when you’re… human?” he asked. I stared innocently at him until he pulled the suction tube out.

“I’m not sure. I can’t tell if the tooth is resorbed into the body, or just kind of retracts up into the gums. My jaw hurts about where that tooth is even though it looks like a different tooth when I’m in normal form.”

“Hunh. We’ll have to X-ray your jaw and see if we can see them up there or not…” He trailed off, as I was shifting back to human.

“Take a look.”

Frank had shut his eyes. “No.” he said.

I shifted back to median. “Geez, Frank, are you ever gonna get used to this?”

“No. Don’t do that.” He turned and fumbled on the table while I smirked.

I stopped smirking when he turned around with the pneumatic drill in his hand. “Whoa, now, what’s that for?”

He hit the floor pedal to give the drill a couple of experimental whirrs. “It’s for your filling. That’s the biggest the cavity I’ve ever seen… hell, that’s the biggest tooth I’ve ever seen. It needs a filling.” He stuck the tube in my mouth again and poised over my face with the drill. “But I don’t know how Novocain would effect you, or how much to use on you like this; so you’re just going to have to endure for a minute or so.”

I swear he was grinning.

“Thursday Prompts” were something an online writing group I was in would offer as writing exercises. The moderator would post a short “prompt”, and you would write a short story based off that. The only rule was you couldn’t take more than a set amount of time to write it… I don’t remember what the time limit was, but I strained it every time. For this one, the prompt was “Campfire”. I think I had been reading David Drake or someone similar at the time.

___

“You think that’ll keep ’em off us for a while?” Phil asked, slinging a brass casing over the sandbags. The augmented muscles of his combat armor sent the shell one hundred yards away, raising a small doughnut of gray ash when it hit.

Gaelen shivered and sub-vocalized to bring up his suit’s menu. Amber icons scrolled across his helmet display as he quickly flipped through them to SUIT ENVIRONMENTAL. Another flurry of characters brought him to TEMP as he nudged the suit heaters up a couple of notches. “Shit, man, who knows. Maybe a couple of days.” He leaned on the receiver of the pintle-mounted heavy machine gun in front of him, causing the mount servos to chatter slightly as they compensated for the weight. A thin gust of near-arctic wind blew across the blasted plain, carrying a cloud of dark ash with it into the bunker.

Gaelen shivered again, this time with the memory of the assault he had just survived. Who thought the wogs had that many soldiers in this sector? Wave after wave of ebon cloaked figures emerging from the treeline several hundred yards away; seeming to walk across the shimmering tracers that snapped across the grassy field. How many had he himself killed in that frantic hour? Hundreds, certainly; but they kept coming from the trees, along with poorly aimed low-tech mortar rounds and rockets. What sort of idiot sent a wave attack against armor and heavy weapons? But even so, they had damn near made it across through the minefields and over the berm. So many of them, with the same blank expressions; not crying out even when his .52 rounds tore through their light armor and exploded in a pink mist. They just fell, their bodies trampled by the soldiers behind them. If it hadn’t been for the incendiary rounds screaming in from over the horizon, so close that the heat from their plasma flash-baked the outer layer of sandbags to glass, they might have made it into the firebase.

The wind gusted again, keening through the upright supports of the bunker; stirring the smoking, shattered timbers of what had been an observation tower into sullen flame. The faint scent of charred wood, roasted flesh, and the acrid, biting vapor from the incendiaries carried through his suit filters. Phil turned and popped the release lever on the machine gun, sliding the barrel from the receiver and tossing it to the floor with a resounding clang. “Well,” he said, hefting a replacement barrel from the crate at his feet, “At least we’ve got a seat next to the campfire tonight.”

I think I’ve wanted to be an author since I was 10. From the first, not well thought out, gore-horror-mystery story idea I traumatized my 3rd grade teacher with; through the sketches for a sci-fi novel; onto college and my early 20s and a lot angsty, edgy werewolf shorts; through to the always unfinished novel; I’ve always had ideas and sketches for stories. Buoyed by Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury and Niven, I would write in spurts and drabs and dribbles.

For 30 years, never finishing anything to the point of attempting publication. I joined a “Thursday Prompt” writing group, and started to write again; and then real life intervened as it always does, and that fell off as well. At one point I removed all shorts I’d had published on my website, with the idea of packaging them and shopping publishers. I wasn’t sure if anyone would touch them if they were available for free on a website. Obviously, that never went anywhere; and, frankly, a lot of them weren’t saleable in any case.

But now, well… why not. Throw them back up and let them go.

(Really, this is just a warning that there’s frustrated author stories about to flood the ‘blog for the next little bit.)

What with my new-found spare time, I’ve been catching up on space science. Not just because it’s something that’s always fascinated me- I don’t count myself a trekkie or a Star Wars geek, but some of the first novels I read were Heinlein juveniles, and science fiction has always been my primary source of reading material- but because I also want to write science fiction. With role models such as Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, and Pournelle, is it any surprise that I want my writing to be as scientifically accurate as possible? My hard science background is rather limited- I was a biologist in college, not a physicist- but there are plenty of people with the same interest, and a burning desire to catalog what they know. I have to give Rocketpunk Manifesto and Atomic Rocket a lot of thanks for providing my reading material over the last week. There have been some advances since the last time I took a serious look at the state of the art in space travel and proposed travel, but no huge surprises for me. The future of sci-fi, space-opera, Trek and Star Wars style space flight is, on a realistic level, very depressing.

Why? Those pesky laws of physics. Faster than light travel? Not so far as we know. Travel times measured in months and years, finite amounts of fuel and food available to our intrepid explorers, ships that look like an erector-set explosion rather than some sleek, sexy dreadnaught; studded with ugly habitation rings (forget artificial gravity) and heat radiators (because no one escapes the laws of thermodynamics). Great space battles with masses of space-battleships crossing the T of the enemy fleet? Nope; you’ll know where they are from across the solar system and when they do get in range, the weaponry even by today’s theories is pretty devastating, if not visually exciting. No clouds of Battlestar Galactica Vipers or X-Wings, either; there’s little point in open space.

Which is why even the hardest of the great hard-scifi authors has to do some magic hand-waving and allow some bit of impossibility into the story to get the universes they do. The biggest, of course, is faster-than-light travel; it’s all but essential to the scifi most of us have come to know and love. They do try and keep some internal consistency, however; if you postulate X for your FTL drive, the side effects will be Y, and your characters will have to deal with them.

There’s a movement afoot, though, that says even this amount of handwavium is a cheat. “Mundane SF” says that look, what we know so far is that there’s no FTL, no alternate universes, very few habitable planets anywhere, much less close enough that we’d ever have a hope at reaching them- and the same for intelligent species, with whom we couldn’t hope to communicate and who are under the same restrictions as we are. Stop with the FTL battleships and Mos Eisley spaceports; they can’t exist. Our SF must be pure… no hand-waving allowed. One quote that struck me was “Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents’ homes. Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an ‘adolescent desire to run away from our world.’ However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they ‘create a new home of their own,’ which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.”

So. Every great SF author of the past 100 years has been childish. Past SF has been escapism, and only “mundane SF” is pure, and adult in theme.

Wow. That sounds a little… childish. Not pink-unicorn-rainbow childish, but grumpy-teenager-locking-themselves-in-their-room childish. Here’s a hint: All fiction is escapism, no matter how based on reality it is. Why else are people reading it? Why are they writing it? Saying that having a bit of handwavium FTL drive in an otherwise superbly consistent story is childish, as you sniff pretentiously and push your glasses back up the nose you’re looking down, is ridiculous. Don’t you think the author knows what e=mc^2 means, and its implications? Don’t you think the average hard-sf aficionado does? Here’s a hint, it’s called “willing suspension of disbelief”, and it plays a part in just about every work of fiction in some way and amount. Without it, your story reads like… well… like most blogs you read, including this one. Dry as a dog biscuit.

Does this mean I won’t be reading any mundane SF? Of course not… just because they’re hobbled by physical reality doesn’t mean they won’t be interesting and engaging. By the same token, is any SF that gets the science really wrong worthless and deserving of nothing but contempt no matter how compelling the story? Again, of course not. My complaint here is the assumption that any SF that requires a bit of handwavium to exist- whether it be an FTL drive, thousands of habitable planets, or a menagerie of exotic aliens- is automatically forfeit of any consideration; and, in fact, is no better than childish fantasy, no different from a Dr. Suess coloring book.

I bet the most vociferous Mundate SFers grind their teeth and stomp off to their room to play some Morissey at the very mention of Star Wars. Heh. Fiction is entertainment, it is escapism. Otherwise, what’s the point? When the pseudoscience reaches the point of interfering with the story, sure, then it’s bad. But for the most part, some bit of handwavium is inevitable, and even enjoyable. There is such a thing as being TOO much of a geek, you know. You know you’ve reached it when it interferes with your enjoyment of things.

Sourpuss.

See last post title. 43,400 words. The Novel (I’m starting to see it in capitals) started out as an ill-formed short story that grew. As a result, after re-reading what I have so far, I’m particularly happy with the last half; and cringing at the first. This will take some careful revision to make it flow correctly. I’m having to resist two urges: To re-edit what I’ve written over and over, so that I end up doing nothing but revising each time I sit down to write; and worrying too much about word count. I’m so paranoid that I won’t reach the magic “novel number”, 80,000+ words, that I become tempted to get too verbose. I need to let go of that idea and just write it like it should be written, and wherever the word count ends up, so be it.

I can also see the same old problems returning- not having enough time. As soon as I get comfortable with the world I’ve created, I’ve got to leave it to attend to such things as eating and attending my day job. I should probably schedule a “writing vacation”, but with my job, when would that be? There’s always too much to do. Speaking of which, it’s already past 11pm, and tomorrow’s Monday.

…at least for me.

My roommate recently started writing a novel of his own after reading some of my short stories, and it led me to re-read them after a long absence. Them, and the very much un-finished and un-polished novel I started, oh, 15 years ago. Ahem. I can still see running into the same problems I did then- not having enough time to stay in the world I created long enough to continue the same train of thought. But I find myself driven to try again.

My roommate also suggested trying to get the short stories published; although I’m not sure exactly where. Most of the submission guidelines stress “New and original treatments only!” How original is yet another werewolf story? Never mind that I don’t normally read books or magazines in this genre; so I’ve really no idea where to start.

The novel is currently hovering at 40,000 words, 181 pages.