Butt Cleavage Heaven

Untitled, originally uploaded by Random Picss.

Oh. My. God.

There’s a group on Flickr called Random Butt Crack. I’m ecstatic, delirious, like a kid in a butt crack store. True, I have to wade through some hairy-guy butt crack (SOMEONE needs to show some discrimination on this group) but it’s worth it.

Amateur butt crack — 1,120 of ’em. ‘Kay bye gotta go.

***

Yeah, you knew I wouldn’t do that to you, not even for prime butt crack. Tonight, I think I’ll pimp Bam’s contest, even though I don’t have an entry and Bam never visits me anymore. Lovely idea:

I am sick of reading about dudes busting down doors, waving around semi-automatics, bragging about their three-thousand-dollar Ralph Lauren Black Label jackets— while the females in the story simpered and shook like a wet chihuahua and waited for the loud-mouth braggart hero to save her. The theme of this month’s contest? Two words: Kickass. Heroine. You want FIFTY AMAZON BUX!! (USD)? Here’s what you gotta do. In 400 words or less, write me a short little scene (or story) featuring a harsh, uncompromising, kickass female (think Gina Torres in Firefly or Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs. Smith) saving the precious, taut hiney of your male love interest.

But here’s the sad part. When I read this, I remembered a scene in my SF trilogy in which Bare Rump, a ten-foot-long sentient tarantula, defends her love interest (a sentient male fly half her size) from marauding giant wasps. And I thought, wouldn’t this be great for Bam’s contest? I’ll bet no one else will write about a kickass female tarantula defending her beau, a giant housefly!

I haven’t looked at this manuscript since May ’06; since then, I’ve written a romance, I’m a year older, and not much else has changed. Nothing except for my writing, apparently, because now I have the overwhelming urge to slash the page with indelible red ink (which would royally piss off the wife, since this is a relatively new flat screen monitor). Is this what happens when you leave a manuscript and come back to it after a year? Frightening. I’m wondering if I could cut the trilogy down to a normal-sized novel, in fact.

I think I’ve mentioned before how my first abortive novel (tag line: Casablanca — in space!) died for lack of discipline on my part. The plot bunnies would not stop multiplying. My story threads became knotted in dreadlocks. My characters kept asking one another, “Now, who the hell are you?” And now I’m wondering if my trilogy (tag line: Animal Farm — in space!) suffers from the same problem, albeit to a lesser degree. I did indeed pull all the threads together, and I killed off many bunnies in the third book, but the damnable thing lacks discipline. What — eight, nine POV characters? At least.

I’m beginning to understand why people write four or five or six novels before they manage to write their first publishable novel.

Ah, well, I suppose I should look at that manuscript when I’m daisy-fresh, not when I’m burnt to a crisp at the end of a radioactive week.

D.