The Martians

There is some evidence that this race of colonists and explorers have visited our own Earth in the past and I can imagine what some poor medieval yokel made of them. While certainly intrepid and scientifically advanced, they are a rough people who remind me all too much of our neighbours on the continent. They have the warlike nature of the Prussians, the craftiness of the Dutch, the greediness of the Swiss, the viciousness of the Sicilians, the libido of the French and the rampant hairiness of the Spanish. Venus seems drawn to them, as a fly toward honey, which cultivates much disappointment in him.

From Professor Mancheeks' Alamanac of the Astonishing.

Where is the Elmore Leonard of porn?

I've not been posting much recently as I have been writing. The next installment of Crooked Sabre is a full comic length story and I've been trying to concentrate on writing, as odd as that might seem. Criticising the plot of pornography is trite, but it is also a bit weak to pretend that storytelling is irrelevant and porn must always just fall back on cliches. Thinking about this got me thinking about Elmore Leonard

Leonard's ear for cracking dialogue transformed many a dull and cliched scene, first in westerns and then in crime fiction. He can take a dull, by the numbers gunfight (usually with the kind of “you're going down”, “you'll never take me alive” nonsense) and turn it into a witty exchange of quips which, crucially, grounds us in a feeling of reality and tells us something about the characters. Of course Quentin Tarantino famously 'borrowed' this style in Pulp Fiction, but his take was less character oriented and more about pop culture references, but again this style can disrupt our expectations, make us see a scene we've seen a hundred times in a different light.