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Grrl Power #866 – Rooftop rally
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Grrl Power #866 – Rooftop rally

by on August 13, 2020 at 5:00 am
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This is one of those transitional pages that doesn’t by itself contribute a lot. It doesn’t really land any big jokes or develop any characters (we already know Cora is a bit cavalier when it comes to distribution of ordnance, for example) but is useful for general continuity.

I really wanted to include the first panel from the next page at the end of this one as an answer to Sydney’s question, but it just wouldn’t fit. At least not unless I made the panels tiny. I maybe could have put panels 4 and 5 on the same line, then scooted panel 6 over, but the panel 1 from 867 is visually a little complex, and would have been diminished by trying to cram it all in.

So, instead, let’s talk Space Opera. If you happen to have a series you adore, share it. I’ve been hankering for a new book to read lately, and there’s so many damned novels with space ships on the cover, there’s just no way to make an informed guess about what might be good or not. You guys know that I like Star Justice and Three Square Meals as I’ve recommended them quite a few times. I think the thing I like about them… well, they’re solid male power fantasy pulp. I don’t necessarily need a harem, but a decent romance subplot definitely doesn’t hurt a book. Really the thing I like is a main character that is mildly to wildly OP who goes around kicking a lot of ass for good reasons.

Wildly OP is really tough to get right though. TSM does it right IMO. I mean, without spoiling the MC’s origin story… he gets pretty fucking powerful – but there are always appropriate challenges waiting for him and his crew. Like fighting a literal dragon with a battleship level shield generator and plasma weapons strapped to its back. Yeah. TSM has dragons.

Honestly, a smaller cast helps too. I like a “cozy” book in that regard. I generally get lost when I’m reading about how the MC’s contact talked to the Subchancellor of Mission Comptrollers and there’s a 45 page chapter about the 90 people that work for that dude. A little politics is fine, but I want a book about a dude or chick righting wrongs with railguns and a spaceship that has a sexy AI that no one else knew about, because there’s always a sexy AI on the spaceship.

Allow me to recommend a book that is… well, not a space opera, but has some space stuff at the beginning. It’s called “Upon a Savage Shore” and it’s basically “Enemy Mine” but replace Louis Gosset Jr. with three alien catgirls. The author for some reason never collected it into a book and put it up at Amazon or elsewhere, so you can only find it at Literotica. It does have some sex in it, but the vast majority of the story is shipwreck survivors making it on an alien planet while the one human guy tries to navigate all the cultural pitfalls of his co-castaway’s society.

That’s another thing I like. Some good, hard xenoanthropology. I don’t know why, but it pushes all the right glands in my brain that squirt out the happy juice.

Oh, here’s a tip for you guys that do a lot of reading online. Get Calibre, then get a plugin called FanFicFare. It lets you paste in the first chapter of a story from a variety of sites, then the plugin rips all the chapters into an e-book. It does an excellent job 99% of the time. Then you can set up Calibre with your kindle’s email address and have it send those books to you without fiddling with USB cables. One warning though, since I’ve discovered this combo (along with another one creatively called “Generate Cover” my kindle has become littered with tons of “books” with shitty covers that came from various websites.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!

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361 Comments

Some Book Recommendations

by on May 24, 2020 at 11:45 pm
Posted In: Blog

So I found some books that I really enjoyed, and I thought I’d make a separate post about them. It’s actually two series, both by the same author, Daniel Schinhofen.

The first thing I will tell you is, don’t worry about the covers. He’s kind of famous for having bad covers. The cover from Apocalypse Gates looks like a flat lit Doom 1 level.

Anyway.

The series I really liked is Binding Words, the first book of which is Morrigan’s Bidding. One of the things I liked about it was the book is very good at laying out the rules of the world the MC finds himself in. This might seem like a minor point, but the rules of this world are quite important, and some books don’t do a great job with set up. I will admit, I also like the fact that the MC is kind of OP, even though (and I don’t want to spoil anything) there’s not a lot of action in the first book. I’m sure some of you are like “How is he OP if he’s not kicking ass?” Ah, see? You gotta read it to find out.

One caveat – you guys know that I like the slice of life stuff, right? I mean, if you’ve been reading Grrl Power, you’ve probably figured that out. That said, by the time I got to the third book in Binding Words though, even I was like “I don’t really need to know what they eat for every single meal. It’s okay to skip ahead a few days.” But don’t let that dissuade you from checking out this series. I’m definitely snapping up the next book when it comes out.

After finishing all the released Binding Words books, I jumped straight over to a new series he’s working on called Aether’s Blessing. Or… the series is Aether’s Revival. Book 1 is Aether’s Blessing. It’s fairly different from Binding Words (though there is at least one common theme)

Some of you may be familiar with his other series, Apocalypse Gates and Alpha World. I have tried to read Alpha World on numerous occasions, and I can’t get into it. It’s not because the writing is bad, but I just cannot get into books that are set in video games. I just can’t bring myself to care about what happens, because no matter how it’s set up, whether it’s VR, or the character’s brain is trapped in the game or whatever, there just aren’t any stakes for me. If a horde of demi-liches are about to sweep the last bastion of humanity, I can’t help thinking, “Yeah, but what happens if some developer patches the game and now all the liches are covered in Mt. Dew branding like a NASCAR driver, or are accidentally flagged as neutral?” or “What if a janitor trips over the power cord to the server?” And also, what if the main character does defeat the horde of demi-liches? Do they just respawn the moment he turns his back so other players can take them on, thereby lowering the stakes even further? It’s a bad set up for a book. If an author wants to put game like stats in his novel, then just have the character wear some sort of contact lense that scans everyone’s strength levels, or make it a spell, or have aliens rip out everyone’s eyeballs and replace them with cyber eyes that give them special skills and make them duke it out on a planet full of dinosaurs. It’s just lazy writing IMO to make it a video game.

I’ll probably try again to read further into Alpha World, and maybe I’ll get to a point where I can ignore all the game stuff, because I really liked the two series I recommended above, but man, it’s tough. “Oh, he finally met a girl that’s probably going to be a love interest… but has he? Or has he met a lookup table with some clever dialog trees?”

Anyway. I liked his other books and maybe you will too.

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Obligatory Covid-19 Post

by on March 26, 2020 at 12:02 am
Posted In: Blog

Stay safe guys. I feel a little detached from all the disruption since I work from home, but I know this is a super weird time, and a lot of places have moved to quarantine in place protocols because humans are a bunch of dipshits that can’t figure out what 6′ of personal space means. A week ago I went to Chili’s to pick up a take out order, and there were 10 people milling around outside, and another 10 all bunched together in the little To Go closet they have. It took 90 minutes to get my food because apparently the management figured that since the city had told all restaurants in the city that dining in was not allowed for the foreseeable future, Chili’s management figured “Well I guess the amount of to go traffic won’t change and we shouldn’t staff up for some unpredictable rush.”

Ug. Hopefully everyone will start figuring it out soon, but you know what Einstein said; “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

My point is, be safe, and don’t contribute to the general level of dipshittery by being a dipshit. And don’t hoard toilet paper. I just can’t figure that one out. I mean, hand sanitizer, I kind of get, even though regular soap is perfectly fine, but the people hoarding TP are a bunch of assholes. There’s already reports of sewage systems getting fucked up because people have had to resort to using paper towels and those wet wipes for your butt that famously fuck up sewage systems. We’ve got a few rolls left in the house, but a month from now, I really don’t want to have to take a shower every time I pinch one off.

72 Comments

Tamer: Enhancer

by on January 23, 2020 at 9:05 am
Posted In: Blog

I wrote a book!

It has nothing whatsoever to do with Grrl Power. It’s actually Tamer fanfic. Hopefully that’s obvious from the cover there.

I’ve never written a book before, so I decided to see if I could. I’ve dabbled in prose before, like a lot of you, I’m sure, but never actually finished anything. I figured that using an established universe would make the process a bit easier. Actually I found writing quite enjoyable, editing is the hard part.

Please let me know what you think! Pacing, wordsmithing, characters, all that good stuff. I’m amenable to all constructive feedback. Feel free to leave comments here, but please be mindful of spoilers if you do. You can also email me at grrlpowercomic@gmail.

FYI – There are sex scenes in the book (spoilers, I guess.) Not a lot, but they don’t fade to black. Well, some are more terse than others. I would describe them as explicit, but not gratuitous, but those are obviously relative terms. If you’ve survived MSE sex scenes you’ll be fine.

Tamer: King of Dinosaurs is by Michael-Scott Earle. I’ve linked it several times in the past. The first book is free if you’ve never checked it out, but you don’t need to be familiar with Tamer to read my story.

Obviously, “Tamer: King of Dinosaurs” is Michael-Scott Earle’s IP and my fan work is by a fan for fans, and certainly not intended to infringe in any way.

Here’s a .mobi file for kindles, and an .epub for everything else. And here’s a .PDF if you like.
02/03/2020 – The book’s been updated with a ton of edits and fixes.
02/16/2020 – Even more fixes.

For those of you unsure of how to get a .mobi file onto your Kindle or Kindle app on your phone/ipad, the easiest way is to download it, then email it to your kindle email. You can find this on Amazon, under “Your Contents and Devices” you’ll see a list of books you’ve bought through Amazon. Click on “Devices” up at the top and you’ll see a list of kindles and phones etc that have the kindle app installed. Click on the box with the “…” next to each device and you’ll see an email address for it. Just email that address with the .mobi attachment.

Alternatively, I’m sure you could transfer it with dropbox or google drive or whatever poison you use.

156 Comments

Avengers: Endgame Talk

by on May 9, 2019 at 9:42 am
Posted In: Blog

Well, I finally got around to seeing Avengers: Endgame, and I figured everyone could use a place to talk about it without worrying about spoiling the movie for other people. So be aware, anything in the comments of this post is probably a spoiler of some kind.

Seriously, don’t click into the comments if you haven’t seen it yet.

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264 Comments

Book recommendation…ish – Three Square Meals

by on March 19, 2019 at 1:09 pm
Posted In: Blog

So, while waiting for Amazon to sort it’s shit out with Michael-Scott Earle, and we can finally get some new Star Justice and Tamer books, I’ve continued reading a bunch of other novels, and I came across one I really like. I’ve been kind of sheepish about recommending it because… well, it’s “erotica.” At least that’s the category it’s listed under at Amazon, but quite frankly, calling it erotica is underselling it a bit. There’s a lot of sex in this book. Like, a lot. So if that doesn’t interest you, you’re just not going to enjoy it. You’d be skimming through… quite a bit of text to get to the rest of the story.

Unlike a lot of other harem novels, however, the sex actually factors heavily into the actual plot. Yes, it’s almost like the author came up with a reason for the characters to have a lot of sex, beyond them being horny for the usual reasons, and then wrote a story about it.

If the sex doesn’t turn you off, or, if in fact you don’t mind some sex (or a lot) in your harem books, there’s a shockingly good space opera to be had here. I would actually put it on par with Star Justice, which is something I never thought I’d say, as it’s one of my favorite series of all time. Another thing I like about Three Square Meals is that there’s a lot of it. The story is over 2 million words long and counting. By the time you get through the first three books, the overarching plot is only barely starting to reveal itself. What can I say? I enjoy it when there’s a lot of something I enjoy. In a shorter story, you get to see the characters interact with one group or another, but then that’s usually it. In this longer format, you get to revisit those groups and see the sometimes empire shifting consequences of their interactions with the MCs. Plus, IMO, the story keeps getting stronger as the cast expands and the momentum of the story builds.

Another thing I like about the story is that it does OP right. The main character, (and the women in the harem) get really powerful. (Something I like in my harem novels is when the women are really awesome too, go figure.) The story keeps escalating so that they have significant challenges, but importantly, there are a lot of great scenes where the MCs have awesome moments of OP-ness* and are able to wow their allies, and/or crush their enemies, and see them driven before them, etc. That balance is important IMO, and a lot of books don’t get it right.

So here are some links;

  • The first 4 books are available on Amazon.
  • Nearly the entirety of the story is available on Literotica. There’s a bit of a delay for the most recent chapters. If you’re unsure about diving in, you can start here, then if you like it, you can support the author at Amazon or his Patreon. The Kindle versions have had an additional editing pass, with some extra scenes thrown in for good measure.
  • And the author has a Patreon, if you get caught up with all 2 million+ words and can’t wait for the next chapter to come out on Literotica.

*Hur hur, I said penis.

94 Comments

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