Maybe Heaven SHOULD Wait

It’s what I think of as one of those “Awesome Questions”.  Those are the best kind.  

What if there is life in the universe?  Not only life, but soulful life, life of extreme intelligence and technological prowess to rival ours?  That would be so awesome.

But what if there’s not?  What if this planet, this one here, is a bizarre and isolated anomaly, the only one with life of any kind on it, and YOU ARE HERE BABY?  That would be so awesome.  No matter how you look at this thing, it’s just awesome.

I once wrote a story that never got past the draft stage, called “The Other Side of Eden”.  Interstellar astronauts come to visit the first exoplanet known to have life.  They’re astrobiologists who’ve been boffing each other since they came out of suspended animation.  Now a swarm of rogue space rocks has crippled the spacecraft and they escape to the planet in a landing craft to explore and see if they can survive in this world.  The life, though carbon based and oxygen breathing, is from a very alien biosphere which has evolved without predator prey relationships and knows nothing of death and decay.   Life forms, all vegetation, communicate through a simple and intense telepathy. 

The explorers, still encased in their spacesuits and helmets, are almost killed by falling into hallucinations whenever they approach a particular tree.  If they wish to survive here they will have to remove their suits and eat the local wildlife, because that’s how it’s done in the biosphere that we evolved from.  They will have to kill in a biosphere which has never used predation as an evolutionary mechanism and knows nothing of it.

And there’s another problem, the “Montezuma” problem.  When Europeans made first contact with the indigenous people of South America, the natives were not immune to the diseases the sailors carried.   They sickened and died in the thousands.  Our space explorers are carrying natural bacteria that the planet is not adapted to.  Homo sapiens uniquely excrete body waste directly through skin surfaces. If they so much as take off their helmets, they could cause a mass extinction event.  Finally they return to the doomed spacecraft, and live out their last hours making desperate farewell love and perish.  Their personal sacrifice spares life on this new world.

In movies and TV  shows, mostly lately “The Shape of Water”, we make a lot of assumptions that we can’t prove.  That creatures from other biospheres will aggressively devour other forms of life.  There must be death, eat or be eaten.  And maybe sex.  Life on earth was designed from the very beginning to do one thing very, very well – survive.  No matter what you do to this planet, something will get through.  There is such a variety of life here, living in every niche on the planet, and basically following the same rules of evolution through adaptation, adaptation pushed forward by sex and death, sped along by predator prey relationships.  That is the way life has evolved on earth.  That is the only way of life we have ever known. But that’s just us.  

What I’m sure of is that there is a very good chance we will experience alien forms of consciousness in the next fifty years.  And they will not come from space.  They will come from us.  Human beings will have to reevaluate what consciousness is. 

We who write in this genre have often played with the idea of humans and sexbots, which has since become a staple of popular science fiction on TV, i.e. “Westworld” and “Humans”.  Those scientists who work on artificial intelligence are more and more impressed by the daunting complexity of human intelligence.  Our range of expression and creativity, our ability to distinguish individuals, read emotions on faces and to improvise in social situations.  These abilities exist with other animals in nature, but so far AI creations can’t duplicate it.  Maybe someday they will.

What if  .   .    .

We all remember the early Chatty Cathy dolls.  These evolved into Tickle Me Elmos, who became the ancestors of Siri and Cortana.  This forward march will continue, especially driven by the toy and consumer industry.  Eventually artificial intelligence will sail through the “Turing Test”, the ability to fool a human being into believing the entity you’re conversing with is human.  Artificial Intelligence is not limited by the boundaries and slow development of biological intelligence.  Someday your granddaughter will be given a toy when she is just a toddler.  The toy will talk to her, respond to her, sleep with her, remember her and record all she says.  Soon she will learn to share her secret joys and sorrows with the toy which is unconditionally patient and empathetic, which is continuously updated, patched and uploaded to a database, immortalizing this little girl’s most intimate conversations and psychologically profiling them.  Soon the doll becomes a more mature doll, one that lives across platforms, through her cell phone, maybe an implant in her teenage head (“Black Mirror”) and then as she reaches a young adulthood, tormented by hormones and a craving for constant release, her life long toy companion will have been swapped out and it’s personality reloaded to the form of a young Adonis designed to match her age, and personality and proclivities and subliminal insecurities and longings, sexually capable of fucking endlessly, satisfying and soothing, in addition to knowing her on a deeply personal level and predicting her desires with startling precision and insight based on a lifetime of ongoing and tireless analysis. A life long companion, from a teddy bear, to a big teddy bear, to a young stallion with an adaptable phallus presentable on demand; a young stud-thing who has spent a lifetime knowing her better than any human being on earth, a man she can give  herself to freely and frequently in perfect emotional and physical safety.  A perfectly human like creation who can download from a cloud database, terabytes of exquisite sexual skills and novelties faster than she can peel off her bra.  Who can read her heart rate, monitor her breathing, the rising swell of her clitoral structure, analyze the sweat of her skin, her vaginal lubrication, even the pheromones she exudes, and lead her swift progress to orgasm after orgasm with precision no human Cassanova can match.  An erection that never needs a refractory period?   One who may, instead of semen, ejaculate an aphrodisial blast of rejuvenating chemicals, soothing medications, opioids and nutrients to revive body and soul?  Or become pleasantly high?

Compare this sexual athlete to the inept fumblings of a young human.  Can we compete?  Will humans depopulate and risk extinction from nonreproductive sexual gluttony?  Already we are glued to our cell phones in a way that is damaging us psychologically and socially.  What could possibly be as devastating a threat to our species as perfect emotional and sexual fulfillment? 

Sex In Space #AlienAlphas

So, sci fi…

To date I’ve written four sci fi stories. The first was in response to an invitation to contribute to an anthology. It never sold that well but was fun to do and writing the story I realised that in the sci fi genre pretty much anything goes. It’s the very definition of world-building and I included some seriously weird science in my hot little tale.

I wrote a couple of full length novels after that, the fairly familiar trope of captive/hunter/disciplinarian. They did OK, and included more of the surreal science which so intrigues me. I found I’d become quite good at dreaming up alternative realities. Sci fi gives my imagination more of a workout than either contemporary or historical because it has no need to be rooted in anything factual or accurate. The normal laws of physics can be disregarded or re-written, as can any less than helpful social conventions. Spanking is fine, smiled upon, even. Harsh justice is the norm set within, dictatorial, dystopian communities and drawing on totally new moral codes. No wonder the sex is explosive.

My most recent foray into the sci fi arena was my contribution to the current anthology Alien Alphas. In a previous blog I mentioned the tactic of hitting one of those coveted lists by banding together with other authors, writing an anthology, promoting the bejabers out of it and selling it for 99 cents. We did all of that with Alien Alphas, and lo and behold found ourselves on last week’s USA Today bestsellers list at #30.

Naturally I was pleased with myself and after dancing around the kitchen table a time or two I pointed the list out to my bemused family. After the derisive snorts of ‘what, only number 30…? had died away my daughter asked about the subject matter. She was horrified at the concept of inter-species sex, likened it to some form of bestiality. I must admit, and perhaps I’ve become jaded over the years, but such niceties entirely escaped me. And after all, it’s only a bloody story, not a manual.

Anyway, by way of celebrating the success of Alien Alphas, here’s an excerpt from my story in the set, The Enforcer.

“Erin, you have no choice.” His voice had hardened now and Erin forced herself to meet his steely gaze. He was angry, or should that be irritated? But even so he was a handsome devil. He always had been, she would admit as much although her innate attraction to the Ymirian was something she had successfully quashed throughout her entire acquaintance with him. She did not fraternize with aliens, and most decidedly not with convicts in her keeping. Such behavior would be wholly inappropriate at Amalthea II, and hardly less so now.

Despite her resolve she was unable to break his intent gaze. His hair was dark and worn to shoulder length. All Ymirians were tall, their bodies muscular, and their physical strength was well known but Ramone surpassed even the norm for his species. She knew him to be physically fit and healthy, the checks made when he entered her facility had established as much, but close up the truth of those bald facts was even more virulently evident.

He flexed his jaw as though at pains to retain his temper. Erin held her ground, determined not to allow him to intimidate her. Xyker Ramone was an imposing male, but this was her ship. And he was supposed to be her prisoner. She made another attempt to assert her authority.

“Xyker Ramone, I must insist—”

“Erin, just do as you’re fucking told. Place your palm on the sensor pad and authorize the coordinates that Zeke is about to transmit.”

“I—”

“Unless you prefer to spend a very uncomfortable few minutes over my knee with your bottom bared, I suggest you do as I say. I’m happy to start your correction now rather than on the planet and a decent spanking will help you to better comprehend your current situation, as well as convince you to stop arguing and fucking do as you’re told.”

Erin gaped at him. Surely, she had misunderstood. He hadn’t actually threatened to spank her. Had he?

“So, which is it? Your palm on the sensor or mine on your delectable bottom? I’ll count to five, then the choice is no longer yours.”

“You can’t… I mean, this is just wrong.”

“One.”

“Ramone!” She made to get up out of the seat but he prevented that with a stern shake of his head.

“Two.”

Erin clenched her buttocks and fought to disregard the unwelcome tingling between her thighs.

“Three.”

“This is ridiculous. I insist that you—”

“Four. Time’s almost up, Erin.”

She started to shake her head.

“Fi—”

“No! No, I mean yes. I’ll do it. I…” She leaned forward to extend her right hand onto the sensor plate.

Sex without bodies? #SexInSpace #SciFi #Menage

By Lisabet Sarai

I’ve been away for the past three days, without Internet, so I’m really late putting up this post. Furthermore, I’m going to cheat a bit, handling our new topic “Sex in Space” by posting an excerpt from my scifi ménage Bodies of Light.

I wrote this tale about the sole survivor of a starship crashing into two alien energy beings in order to explore the idea that one could enjoy sex without having any body at all. Personally, I’ve always felt that my arousal and pleasure began in my mind and flowed outward. In this story, I push that notion as far as I can.

Bodies of Light Blurb

Physicist Dr. Christine Monroe has devoted her lonely life to research on hyper-space travel. Her continued failure leads her to sign on to the Archimedes, a sub-light-speed mission aimed at establishing a colony in the Sirius B system. Waking from suspended animation, she discovers that the ship is wildly off course and the rest of the crew are dead due to equipment failure. At first she thinks the two handsome strangers who show up on the ship are figments of her imagination - erotic hallucinations created by isolation and stress. However, Alyn and Zed are solid, real, and ready to sacrifice their lives for the strong woman they’ve found stranded in deep space. As her ship begins to disintegrate, Christine must choose between the planet she was sent to save and the two alien beings she’s come to cherish.

He cupped his hands in front of his chest, about six inches apart, as though he were holding a ball the size of a grapefruit. “Relax. Take deep, slow breaths,” he told her. “Focus on the space between my palms.”

Christine struggled to let go of the arousal that was raising her pulse rate and making her pant. She closed her eyes for a moment to centre herself, then followed Zed’s instructions. Initially she saw nothing but Zed’s burnished muscles through the gap between his hands. Before long, though, she noticed that the empty space was occupied by a faint glow. The light brightened gradually and congealed into three luminous strands that twined together, rotating at a stately pace in an ascending spiral. The filaments were born near his wrists, coiled upward and disappeared at his fingertips, in a smooth, endless flow.

“Concentrate on the light,” Zed murmured. “Follow the light.”

The slow-moving helix fascinated her. Her eyes traced its path as it emerged out of nowhere, rose and vanished. At first the streaks of brightness appeared pure white, but as she focused she noticed tiny flecks of colour: amethyst in one, gold in another, ruby in the third. Like jewel dust the motes danced in the beams until they reached the upper limit and winked out of existence.

She could feel Alyn’s presence, off to her left, and could sense his concern. She knew Zed was watching her with those piercing jet eyes. Willing herself not to look at them, she trained her full attention on the hypnotic pillar of light. She dove into it, circling endlessly upward, spiralling into non-existence at the apex then regenerating at the base.

Christine forgot the two men. There was only the light, swirling, pulsing, drawing her ever deeper. The light rippled through her like pure water. The strands curled around her like laughter. Golden flames licked at her flesh without burning. Fingers of brightness soothed and teased her, kindling shimmers of delight.

“Christine!” Her name was a bolt of radiance, arrowing through the glow. “We are here with you.” It was true—their auras mingled with hers. Sparkling ribbons of silver and copper wreathed her presence, a crimson crystal beating in the velvet darkness. She knew them—Zed and Alyn, her attentive, untiring lovers—but now she saw how their gorgeous man-shapes were mere shells. Their full glory would have blinded her, if she had eyes. In her present state, unfettered by the limitations of her poor human senses, she saw them as they truly were: perfect, ageless, unutterably beautiful.

“I did it,” she said, or thought, or sang. Pride twined purple through the rainbow emotions that swirled around them. “Now I understand.” In their shared universe of flickering luminescence, she reached out to draw them closer.

“Lover,” came a bell-like song she recognised as Alyn. “Now we can truly be together.” His caress woke fireworks. Without a body, she felt the pleasure everywhere. It was searing heat, aching fullness, marvellous tension, buoyant joy.

“Darling.” Zed was a rich chord arcing through her, a rain of sparks that made her tingle and glow. He brought wetness, tightness, electric twinges that burned through her. The sensations recalled physical responses despite her disembodiment, except for their overwhelming intensity. She swelled and throbbed with need, wanting her lovers closer, inside her somehow, though she didn’t know how this could be possible. Before she could voice her desire, she felt their energy encircle and penetrate hers. Multi-hued pleasure exploded in her consciousness.

“Touch us,” Alyn sang, winding through her, drilling into her core.

“Open us,” Zed hummed, flowering incandescent at her centre. “Your mind is limitless.”

She reached into the luminous emptiness and allowed her thoughts to mesh with theirs. Now she thrilled with their sensations and emotions as well as her own. The connection should have been shocking, but somehow it felt completely natural. Alyn’s shy hunger and Zed’s raw lust seasoned her own arousal. The pleasure that shivered through them as she danced in their minds rocked her senses as well. Delight reflected back and forth. Each of them mirrored and amplified the others’ ecstasy.

Below these present-focused elements, Christine caught echoes of the aliens’ age-old pain and loneliness. She gathered Alyn and Zed into her self, singing liquid songs of comfort. Love wove its way into their shared tapestry of feeling, gleaming pure white among the lustrous strands of scarlet, emerald, turquoise and amber.

Work From Home

It perhaps counts as an irony that my post this time around focuses on the constant battle-choosing that comes with working from home. Ironic because I'm late posting, due to receiving a call to help my father move house, just as I was beginning to type this blog.

I mean, it wasn't a totally random event. "Yeah, I figured I'd move house today, so you wanna come help?" I'd already lugged a bunch of stuff a couple of days ago, in the mad humid heat in the middle of the day in Brisbane's subtropical summer. And I honestly don't mind, because while my dad's still a very fit man, he's in his mid-70s now.

Today's call was only slightly random in that we'd made the general offer to help, and it just so happened some things came up today that needed at least two adult males to move them. So I took my 14-year-old as well (who's as tall as I am now, the cheeky fecker). All good family time, and we helped my dad and stepmum move into their lovely new house with a heated pool. A pool we were eyeing off as we moved frickin' heavy plant pots around in the midday sun.

Now, while all that detail isn't strictly relevant to the blog I'm writing...that's exactly what MAKES it relevant.

All of you out there who work from home know the struggle. I've only worked from home in creative fields (writing and cover art...and a little bit of music). So while I don't profess to know how it might be for an accountant, for example, or for any more structured kind of work, I do imagine the struggles would have the same heart, even if saddled with a different face.

When you do work from home, it can be so easy for friends and family to focus on the "home" part, to the detriment of the "work" part. "You're home, so maybe you can..." It doesn't matter what you finish that sentence with. It's already something they're asking of you which they WOULDN'T ask you if you worked a desk job in the city. Or a bus-driving job. Or garbage pickup. Anything which has hours that are regulated by someone outside your skull.

So as I said earlier, we're constantly making these choices. These choices ARE our battle.

Do I stop writing this scene so I can answer that ringing phone? Or do I let it ring out?

Do I answer the door to that person who's clearly only going to ask for a donation? Or do I not?

Do I put pants on if I answered "yes" to that previous question?

The worst part of it all is that, in my case at least, I'm the worst offender. By that I mean, I still struggle with feeling that my working from home is validated. So when people do ask me to do something, or they ring me in the middle of my work hours, or come calling unannounced, nearly every time I allow that interruption. Similarly to Annabeth's previous post, I need to choose TO battle: for my work hours.

I'm not making any pledges about it. But I'm gonna work on it. I've already pledged myself to a couple of battles this year. First one is, I'm going to publish 50 titles in 2018 (probably not too many of them will be under the Willsin name...mostly short stuff on a new pen name). Early February should see the publication of two different Willsin stories, both in anthologies (see below for one of 'em).

The other one is not so much a pledge as an observation. January's not over yet and I've hit 26 covers made for other folks (and myself). I'm anticipating a 300-cover year in 2018.

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Sin & Seduction

Featuring New York Times, USA Today, and International bestselling authors, Sin & Seduction is a spicy, diverse collection of paranormal & contemporary, hetero & same sex romance reads designed to ignite fires of passion, love, and romance.
Bursting with sexy-as-sin heroes & devilish heroines, our titillating & romantic tales will seduce you and leave you craving more. Get ready for a passionate and exhilarating ride!


And my story within the anthology...

Forgotten Dreams by Willsin Rowe

Curvy Seattle-based singer Blaire Masters has made some tough choices in life. Driving 500 miles to hand divorce papers to a man she’s still in love with, though, has to be the hardest.

But when she comes to in the wreck of her car with no memory of who she is, the only thing she’s sure of is the hotness of the guy rescuing her.

David has lived alone on his Montana apple farm for two years, and has grown a tough shell in that time. Yet he can’t help the way his body reacts to his damsel in distress. She might be injured and without her memory, but she’s all he’s ever desired in a woman—curvy, beautiful and smells like heaven. The more time he spends with her, the more she glides her way through his defenses.

But when everyone else they meet seems to know Blaire intimately, she’s forced to ask questions of herself…and her rescuer. And she finds out their dreams have more in common than she’d ever have expected.