Thong in a Drawer

Cleaning the office, and I came across the original ms and correspondence file for Thong the Barbarian Meets the Cycle Sluts of Saturn, with Michael Reaves. 

Originally, we sold this story to Pulphouse, having to twist Dean's arm to get him to take it, and it turned out to be a magazine killer -- shortly after he agreed to buy the piece, Pulphouse was overwhelmed by the recurring small press tsunami and drowned. This was a loss for the field, even if Thong and the girls maybe not so much. (Looking at email that Reaves and I exchanged, I see that I once called the piece Thews and Hooters ...

Um. Eventually, Don Ahlquist heard us reading our orphan aloud at a convention, to much merriment amongst ourselves and the audience, and approached us to publish it as a short book. It is pretty damned funny read aloud. 

Only novelette-length at 12,000 words, that meant small pages and big type, as well as illustrations reflective of the prose. To make it a tad longer, I did an intro -- "How Thong Got His Blade Sharpened," and Reaves did a Retrospective, in which we explained how we had come to create the monster ... and there we were.

Eventually, the book came out. Don never said, but I suspect he lost his shirt on it -- the world wasn't ready for such a magnificent thing -- though they are now collector's items and spendy, if you can find any. One was a dust-jacketed regular hardback; two versions were bound in leather: Ten copies in red; one hundred numbered and twenty-six lettered copies in blue, the leather versions all autographed by the writers and artist. Last time I looked, there weren't copies for sale on eBay, though somebody had one of the plain ones up somewhere for like $250 or so -- I stuck my two leather covers into the gun safe.)

I haven't heard back if it's going to be an ebook or not yet. I'm still not sure the world is ready ...