Out of the blue – a sale is a sale!

I got the mail Saturday afternoon and found a letter from Man's Story 2. It was a contract for a story that I sent them August 9. This story is more risqué than even R rated and I didn't think that a soft porn magazine would go for it, but they did. I can hardly wait to see if they illustrate it. The zine is known for its cheesy black and white porn drawings.

Four months 9 days sale.

There is an ethical consideration here. I don't particularly want to write porn, but I don't believe in censuring artistic expression, even expression that can be judged poor taste. By publishing in a funny and quirky porn magazine I risk being labeled pornographer. My story is pure Science Fiction with suggestive elements, but is not intended to be prurient. Then again, a sale is a sale.

Interestingly enough, my name, at least, is connected from time to time with some of the most offensive porn around. In the 1980s I wrote PC utilities and one of the most popular was a little assembly language gem called TXT2COM. The program took a text file and wrapped a program around it that was similar to a web browser. It had meta tags that could control color and links and format. It was used largely for program documentation. I never charged for its use and millions of files were turned to TXT2COM files.

Someone, without asking me, converted a huge library of really disgusting sick porn.

Unfortunately, my name, copyright, address and telephone number are imbedded in every file. From time to time, this collection, which is available on CD, shows up on a website converted to HTML, but my name and personals are included in the file. If you do a search on my name, you can find some of this crap. Every year or so, I do a search on my name, find this stuff and politely ask the webmaster to alter it. This has always been done without question.