When I sold my zombie story to Afterburn SF, I spent part of my payment on a one-of-everything order of all the booklets that have been put out by Goth House, the comic written by my very smart, funny and weird Clarion West classmate Julie McGalliard. I inhaled all five in a single night, and was happy I had. No supernatural elements (except in the ocassional dreamy segment where all the characters are reimagined as supervillains), just a very weirdly real vision of life for a bunch of (not really) "goth" 20-somethings in post-college drift, trying to maintain their sense of superiority to the general populace, decide who should wash the dishes since everyone claims not to eat, and find someone willing to rent out the unused room..."oh, hmm, I see the last tenant scrawled scary German words all over the walls....well, we'd clean that up before you moved in, of course." Etc. Is good.

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Speaking of good, only five years or so after everyone else in the world read it, I finished Philip Pullman's "The Golden Compass" on Wednesday night.

One of the things that can get lost in those books' popularity among uber-"literary" New Weird-ish circles is how incredibly much fun they are. Whatever sort of intellectual vitamins and nutrients are scattered among it--which I *also* enjoy, the way it's sort of ideologically the anti-Narnia--really shouldn't get in the way of the flying around in hot air balloons to infiltrate the kingdom of armored bears, opening up bridges to alternate dimensions, etc., etc., etc. In fact, despite being the first book in a trilogy, it had one of the best, highest-emotional-impact endings (and particular last sentences) of anything I've read in quite a while.

As is, I thought it was great. If I'd been able to read it when I was 12, I'm pretty sure I would have died from the sheer pleasure of reading it.

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Today was the South Florida Science Fiction Society's annaul picinic, which as per tradition involved an Inspiration Roulette contest. This is how it works...you randomly pick from piles of 3-by-5 cards, one from the Genre pile, one from the Setting pile, one from the Main Character pile, one from the Central Story Object pile and one from the X-Factor pile, the last being supposed to add an extra challenge to balancing the randomly chosen story elements. Once everyone has their cards, you're given pen and paper and everyone has 45 minutes to write a story based on their cards. There's a pile of books as door prizes, and the First Place winner gets first pick, followed by the Second Place winner, etc.

When I got my first two cards, I was already intrigued by how lucky my combination was (lots of people had to work with things that didn't work together nearly as intuitively as this.) When I got my last card, for the main character, the story pretty much wrote itself. (The cards were Setting: Bus Station, Object: Mysterious Slimy Thing, X-Factor: Everyone is physically filthy, make that vivid, Genre: Letter to Penthouse and Character: Dick Cheney.)

Anyway, I won First Place (and thus got to take home a hardcover of Nina Kriki Hoffman's new book), but I think for reasons that should be obvious, the story is utterly and unambiguously unpublishable, so I'm just going to stick it up here as a technopeasant freebie. It is what it is--rushed, based on a randomly-assembled premise, etc.--so I'm not going to try to take away the flavor of the thing by revising in any way. Here it is.

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Dear Penthouse,

I am an important man, and for reasons that should become obvious, I will need to change many of the names in my tale to retain that anonymity. Even so, the story that follows is so delicious that I feeel compelled to share it with your readers.

Let's just say that I work for the federlal government, and I was recently embarassed by the antics of a so-called "friend" who irresponsibly got in the way of my hunting rifle. I knew that the liberal media would try to twist this to use it against me somehow, so I told my boss--let's call him "Gleorge W. Bloosh"--that it would be best for me to stay out of the spotlight for a time. Gleorge is an innocent soul, and I had to explain this to him several times before he understood the public relations aspect. Finally, we agreed that it would be best if I spent a couple weeks in my Secret Undisclosed Location while all this blew over.

It was just as well. My wife had been getting on my nerves lately, and I needed some time in my secret undisclosed location.

Now, to get down to business, I don't mind admitting a certain preference for encephalopods, sexually speaking. A lot of people look at me like I'm some kind of goddamned queer when I say that, but as far as I'm concerned, they can go fuck themselves. I'm no fag--I only screw female octupi.

Anyway, I called the fellow who usually procures them for me, and he started telling me about some new species he got a hold of a sample of. "New species?" I asked. "Does it at least have tentacles?"

Oh yes, he assured me. Lots and lots of tentacles. In fact, by the time he was finished describing it, I was so excited that I agreed to meet at the location he wanted, since he claimed that this was too time-sensitive for him to be able to bring his sample to my Secret Undisclosed Location.

So there I was, in an abandoned bus station a bus miles away from D.C., just me and ten guys from the Secret Service, selected for their discretion and their knowledge of how I like to party.

I was starting to get nervous, like maybe my friend was going to pull something funny--I'd already told the fucker he could look forward to a long stay in Club Gitmo if any media caught wind of this--when I finally saw him, shambling towards me in a long brown overcoat.

My friend--G. Glordon Glibby, let's call him--was in terrible shape. His moustache was matted with slimy goo of some kind. His bald head was covered with dirt and huge, throbbing, puss-filled poils. One popped just as he came into the light, and he wiped it off with the sleeve of his overcoat. He held out his hand for me to shake. I told him he could go fuck himself.

Small talk concluded, he whipped out a gray cloth bag he'd been keeping in his overcoat and put it on the ground in front of me. It was covered with some kind of weird-ass symbols. The more I looked at it, I realized that it wasn't even gray. It was some color I'd never seen before, something that you could only call a color by analogy, if that makes any fucking sense. The bag was squirming on the ground, and slime dripped from its end.

"What the fuck is this? I thought.."

G. Glordon hastily explained that the creature he'd described would indeed be making an appearance very soon. He said it had been trapped there by some mad Arab--I got a little spooked at the mention of Arabs, but he explained that this was before Al Queda--and it was foretold to come out in glory on this very night, when the stars were right.

That all sounded like horseshit to me, but I didn't even have time to tell him to go fuck himself before there was a total lunar eclipse, and light started pouring out of the bag, and...

Oh, sweet Jesus, how can I describe it? Tentacles everywhere, dozens of feet long, and a three-lobed burning eye filling up the sky. Its goo splattered everywhere, and in a moment we were all covered in it, sores opening up all over our skins like Glibby's. I didn't care.

It instantly killed G. Glordon and the Secret Service guys, but sensing my devotion and desire, it let me live. We made sweet beautiful love, tentacles sliding in and out of every orifice in my body, tentacles cradling my cock and squeezing until...

Well, let's just say that it was the best night of my life, and if you have a problem with it, you can go fuck yourself.

Sincerely,

Dlick Chleney