You are probably not going to believe this, but there are certain things you simply cannot safely sell on E-Bay. My first good novel, Catch a Falling Star, took years to write. The research, interviews with survivors, fighting off remaining alien invaders left behind when the Telleron invasion failed, and clean-up of sites and inconvenient witnesses took at least from 1990 to 2012. And then, as part of my marketing-by-blogging strategy for the book, I took a box of leftover skortch pistols and listed them for sale on E-Bay. They turned out to be a very popular item. It took the first skortch ray almost a year to sell for a measly five dollars. It was bought by a woman with a very annoying husband. She apparently bought the item as a joke, thinking it would not actually work as a molecular disintegration weapon. But after she surprised her husband with it and then posted the surprising results on Facebook, I quickly sold out the rest of the 26 pistols in the box and made almost $800. I am told by concerned investigative reporters that crotchety old men, ugly wives, and particularly Dennis-the-Menace-like kids were disappearing all across the Midwest. I also learned that one skortch ray pistol came into the hands of a Republican political operative before the election in 2016. That fact may have accounted for the disappearances of large numbers of registered Democrats in both Michigan and Pennsylvania in the weeks before the election.
I wanted to inform you that I may have done something stupid on E-Bay. Therefore I am re-posting the drawing I did of Studpopper the Telleron demonstrating the firing of an example skortch pistol created by Zillokahsitter Industries on Telleri Prime with Sylvani technology. If you should see one of these in the hands of a spouse that thinks you are grumpy too much of the time, I would suggest an almost instantaneous program of self-improvement. And if you see one in the hands of someone in a red MAGA baseball cap, immediately put on your own red hat and say something inordinately stupid so they will assume you are one of them, and hope they skortch themselves by accident before they get around to skortching you.
Sorry about that. I should’ve thought this whole thing through more carefully beforehand.
