Quick notes on this week’s road show…

I think I’ll be working the Rotary circuit for a while before I take on my next target. Not sure who it will be yet. Kiwanis maybe? Lions? I haven’t done enough research to see which clubs have lots of chapters and opportunities for speaking engagements, but whoever they are, I’ll find them when I’ve exhausted all of the Rotary clubs close enough to make a visit worthwhile.

The Rotary Club tour continued this week. As you know, I’m no name-dropper, but if I were, I’d tell you that I made appearances in Hollister and Fremont, so there’s two more towns that will be working on restraining orders. Oh well…

In non-Rotary news, I managed to finally get a presentation scheduled at the Monterey Library, but that’s not until October so I still have time to memorize the Dewey-Decimal System.

And now on to the Story of the Week. Long-time reader Susan M. provided the for mature audiences only prompt of “professional, erectile engineer,” so if your sensibilities are permanently ruined, you now know who to blame for this one. What are you reading, Susan, that inspires these prompts? Without further adieu, here’s a tale that’s more Team Oppenheimer than Team Barbie.

Beam Me Up, Herman

“We gotta cut our costs,” the porn producer told Herman, a socially-awkward engineer. “We had to hire five fluffers for one orgy scene.”

“Right.” Herman nodded, completely clueless.

Once the producer graphically explained exactly what a fluffier does, Herman recovered and did some quick calculations on his phone.

“I’m sure I can help. I’ll find a way to employ force multiplication facets reminiscent of NCC-1701 technology.”

Weeks later, Herman returned with an AI-powered dragon that could “prepare” eight male actors simultaneously.

“Amazing,” the producer smiled. “Didja give it a nerdy sci-fi name?”

“Nah. We call her Fluff. Fluff the Magic Dragon.”

Prompt: Professional, erectile engineer

Please use the link below to rate this mash-up of disparate universes.

Finally, I just wanted to update you on something I finally got around to doing for the marketing arena. Eventually, I’m going to jump into the world of figuring out how to market my books online (Facebook and/or Amazon ads). When I get there, I’m told I need to hook potential buyers by giving them something for free. I came up with a magnet (that’s what the marketing gurus call these freebies) that is a small collection of my stories I dubbed “Five FAST FICTION Faves.”

If I had any Photoshop chops at all, I would’ve found a way to create five eggs instead of three, but since I just went with a book template that Apple gave me, this is what it looks like. Even five eggs wouldn’t have been totally accurate, since I couldn’t settle on five of my favorite stories, so I added two “bonus” stories. Five of the tales are from the first two books, while the other two are a couple of my newest stories that were hatched after the books were published. See what I did there?

In any event, if you’re interested in getting a copy of the lil’ booklet, just drop me a line and I’ll shoot you a PDF.

And on that note, I’m out of here. Thanks for listening.

Scotty out