Over the past several months – say, six or so – I have been reading an inordinate amount as I’ve been ramping up my production schedule. Not that I’ve met it, but I’ve been trying. Several almost complete works just waiting for that semi-final edit, two new stories from my Other Identity swirling around, and here I am in Paris struggling with what feels like a covid cough – oh, wait! Covid doesn’t exist any more … at least nobody tests for it and a whole plane load of coughing passengers on their way from Singapore (nobody masked) was just due to general unspecified viruses. Anyway when I finally called the brilliant SOS Medicins service – can you believe a doctor does a home visit at 11 at night after being called just an hour before ?- he didn’t express any interest in speculating about viral sources and was just very reassuring about cough mixture and the benefits of Paracetomol.

So, back to reading. As part of the effort to better define what ‘genre’ I am writing in, I have been gulping down all kinds of stuff. I joined Kindle Unlimited so I could read lots of books of completely unknown quality really quickly and send them back if I couldn’t stand them. And I did send back a lot. You can only have twelve out at one time. I was sending back two a day at one point. The contemporary writing and reading market is so peculiar. I discovered genres I could never have dreamt up. Well, maybe they are subgenres, whatever. Tentacle Aliens was pretty bizarre.

Their technical identity on Amazon is:
Tentacle Aliens and Monsters Erotic Short Stories

I really liked Rita Indiana’s book, although to be fair, it wasn’t a tentacle romance and it did not evolve within the Amazon ecosystem, being published as an actual book, ie a printed volume, by that excellent British publisher And Other Stories. Check them out!

Here’s what Rita’s blurb says: Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a Santería prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean – and humanity – from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was – with the help of a sacred anemone. Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

The real tentacle romances are a different kettle of fish, so to speak – slightly disguised erotic, but some weren’t bad.

I quite enjoyed

Nepenthe: A Tentacle Alien Space Fantasy (We Are Nepenthe Book 1)

by Octavia Hyde

I was cross that she had preempted my intended use of the name Nepenthe as a sub-division of Blackwing Press for experimental and off-the-wall writing. In the light of all this, I have cancelled Nepenthe Books as a concept altogether now. It seems far too tame, given what is out there already.

Moving on from Tentacles, I found that many male writers (at least persons writing under sturdy male-identified names) have been writing about catastrophic colonies on Mars or elsewhere in a decaying universe. Lots of (ditto) girl-sounding people are writing filth about billionaires and dom/sub desires, Mafia romances and Reverse Harem (that is when one woman has three or more men living/playing with her, some of them are bikies and some are cowboys, take your pick).

Paying special heed to post-apocalyptic themes I found a couple of (I think) young players writing not bad series. I downloaded a couple of Kyla Stone’s stories and followed on her blog-site and she was doing a very good marketing job. Sadly I just got completely bored with the stories which all seemed the same. Another was a New Zealand writer who seemed appealing when I watched her on one of the many talk programs run by one of the various online “how to be an author” groups, but I lost interest after realising that although she seemed like a very nice young lady, what she was writing was just too horrible for me.

So these are low-budget Kindle ebooks designed for the Amazon ecosystem. In most cases I didn’t have any compunction about returning the books with only a few pages read. (On Kindle Unlimited the author is paid according to how many pages are read). In a couple of others I could sense a good writer struggling to come out. One in particular was writtten by a Melbourne person (girl/woman self-presentation) and it was very well written and quite gripping in places although the key plot element was obvious from early on and in my view rather ridiculous. I finished it, and for a brief moment considered writing a proper actual review with real words – as against the silly five stars which now appear at the end of each Amazon ebook, uselessly as far as I can see – I never ever click them. But I hesitated. It’s a slippery slope.