From March 1 until March 7, you, Dear Reader, can buy my two ebooks from Smashwords for half price! Why, that’s almost 50% off! 🙂 Both titles temporarily marked down from $6.99 to $3.50 in honor of nothing in particular, just that Smashwords gives all their authors a chance to do this every year, and I’d be a sucker if I didn’t take advantage of it!
Why Smashwords? Well, when I published Wet Goddess in 2010, they were the only ebooks publishing site that would accept “bestiality” — provided it was between consenting adults of both species, of course.
Nevertheless I’m in their debt, because the publisher fought hard to prevent the major distributor of ebooks from dropping the entire Smashwords lineup. So he got my second book as well, and a third ebook of Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair is in the offing!
I think a lot of my critic’s problem lies in their not believing that a creature like a dolphin can exercise free will, or, being female, can experience libido, or can change her behavior on the apprehension of a thought. But they can do and feel all these things.
I’m looking into new ways of exploring the dolphins’ world without getting wet, specifically Remote Viewing, the information-gathering technique used by the U.S. military and the CIA in the 1980’s to spy on Soviet military objectives, allegedly without the Soviets being aware of it. Scientists are, of course, skeptical of any kind of out-of-body experience, but I’ll perform some tests and judge for myself, thanks.
So hurry, get out your charge card — er, your cell phone — and get two of my books for the price of one! They won’t last long at this price!
WARNING!
Both of these books contain unusual sexual situations which some people may find objectionable, and Orgone Box in particular contains scenes of adults committing physical, sexual and emotional abuse on a child (me). I don’t believe in “being triggered,” because people are not Colt .45s who walk around half-cocked, as my father, a GI in WWII, used to say, but Godz forbid somebody should accuse me of doing that because of the content these books! You have been warned, okay? If you’re easily offended, don’t buy them and then complain about the subject matter. You have been warned!
Thought For The Day
“One of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you’re right, but not enough to know you’re wrong.” — Nick GT on The Joe Rogan Show.
PUNTA GORDA, Fla., USA – “The role of the self-published author is not an easy one,” Malcolm J. Brenner said, sliding onto a dingy leather couch that might have once been white.  “In addition to successfully writing one’s magnum opus, one must also bring it forth into the real world, where it will grow up to compete in a ruthlessly Darwinian struggle for readers and reviewers.”
Brenner sipped iced tea – his habitual summer drink, with the occasional hard cider thrown in for historic, recreational and religious reasons – and relaxed. He had the furrowed brow of a man who has a lot on his mind, and no wonder. He recently finished re-formatting a 113,000-word Microsoft Word file for the ebook version of his most famous, or infamous work, the 2010 autobiographical novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover.
“It’s basically a re-telling of a torrid love affair I had with a female bottlenose dolphin in the summer of 1971,” Brenner explained. Â “I just changed the names and a few details so that living people on whom the characters are based couldn’t sue me. Â Even though I’m publishing it as a novel, it’s much closer to Tom Wolfe-style ‘new journalism’ than it is to fiction.”
Malcolm J. Brenner in his trailer in Punta Gorda, Fla.
An admitted procrastinator since childhood, Brenner said that Smashwords, which publishes and distributes the ebook edition of Wet Goddess, alerted him last November that changes to their Premium Catalogue distribution system might require revising the file, which he first uploaded in 2011.  “I wasn’t clear on the details of what exactly the problem was, but apparently the old file no longer satisfied the new requirements, or so they said,” he said.
The Smashwords Premium Catalog puts the book into the hands of all the large ebook distributors, including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, OverDrive, Tolino, Gardners, Odilo, Baker & Taylor Axis 360 and more. Â “I’m interested in sharing my experiences with dolphins as widely as possible,” Brenner said. Â “They are non-human people, so it behooved me to take care of this update issue sooner or later.”
After receiving warning emails for several months, Brenner finally pulled up his socks and tackled the problem himself. Â This versatility, he said, demonstrates the technical virtuosity required of successful self-published authors in the 21st Century.
“If you’re an aspiring author and you’re lucky enough to land an agent or a publisher these days, you can thank a higher power,” Brenner scoffed.  “I knew a controversial book like Wet Goddess would be a hard sell even for a successful author.  I made a few stabs at finding a publisher without success, and an agent took me on for a while.
“She wined and dined me once at a book fair in Tampa, then, with no explanation, stopped communicating. Â Months went by with no word. Â It was only when I threatened to sue her to recover my manuscript that I learned from an irate family member she was still recovering from a near-fatal car crash months before.
“In publishing, like anywhere else, sometimes shit just happens,” Brenner concluded, with a hint of resignation. Â After more rejections, he responded by abandoning the idea of conventional publishing and taking on all the tasks himself. Â “It required me to become a jack-of-all trades, but the fact that I don’t get along well with many people actually makes that a good way to work,” Brenner admitted. Â “If I work for myself, I may have an asshole for a boss, but at least he understands me.”
Brenner pre-sold copies of Wet Goddess to family and friends to raise funds for the initial press run of 50 copies.  A sympathetic friend contributed necklaces made from fossilized sharks’ teeth as premiums for advance sales.  The worst problems came from trying to get the manuscript proofread before it went to print.
“Don’t get me started,” Brenner fumed.  “I hired a so-called proofreader from a local community college, but she could only proof in academic style!  Book manuscripts require what’s known as Chicago style, and besides, Wet Goddess has a lot of colloquial dialogue in it,” he recalled.  “Every time a redneck character used the word “ain’t,” she flagged it – more than 300 times in the manuscript!  You’d think that if she was professional she’d have called me up and asked me what my intention was, but no.”
As a result of this and other unforeseen difficulties that cost him the original author’s proof copy of his debut novel, the first press run of Wet Goddess shipped with about 250 typos in it, including one whole, and rather crucial, paragraph repeated, Brenner admitted.
“It appears very close to the, uh, shall we say ‘climax’ of the novel, and it was very embarrassing to find it,” he explained. Â “I hope I’ve got it stuck back in the right place now.”
For a cover, Brenner was able to rely on the talents of his daughter, Thea Boodhoo, an advertising industry professional and college-trained artist. Â “I was going to use a B&W photo of a dolphin that a friend in New Mexico colorized many years ago,” he said, “but Thea thought she could do better, and when I saw her finished work I knew she was right. Â I only made a couple of very minor Photoshop changes to the file she handed me to make the title stand out more and add the subtitle.”
A friend who owned a small desktop publishing business referred Brenner to Royal Palm Press, a nearby print-on-demand company, for production services. Â “I had no idea what the local reaction to the book would be, so I had a chat with Tom Lewis, the press’s owner at the time, to make sure he wasn’t blindsided,” Brenner said. Â “Tom said ‘As long as it’s between consenting adults, that’s fine with me,’ and that was that.” Â Brenner also served as his own layout artist, an experience he described as “a mad blur of on-the-job training.”
With book in hand, Brenner ventured onto the soggy ground of marketing. Â “Here, I got terrifically lucky,” he said. Â “I didn’t have the money to hire a public relations firm to distribute a press release, but I found one that had a reverse-charge policy. The media outlets who received the press releases paid for the service, not me, so my initial publicity was free!”
Upon its release in January 2010, the novel received intense press coverage due to its taboo-shredding themes of interspecies sex, zoophilic love and a dolphin character smart enough to out-think a human. Â “For a while it was frantic, but very gratifying,” Brenner recalled. Â “I was doing several interviews a week, sometimes two a day. Â A few of the interviewers were skeptical or harsh about what they thought might have been going on, but the majority were genuinely curious to know what happened, and to learn more about dolphins.”
Since then, the book has enjoyed sales surges whenever some news gatherer gets curious and wants to know about his experience, Brenner said. Â One came in 2011, when a New Zealand TV producer, David Farrier, released a videotaped interview with Brenner he’d recorded the year before. Â Others don’t conjure such pleasant memories. Â Brenner felt humiliated by shock-jock Howard Stern’s 2015 obsession with his zoophilia, and a 2011 interview with Bubba the Love Sponge cost him a gig with a local slick when its advertisers threatened to withdraw unless the magazine dropped him.
Brenner’s most recent foray into the murky waters of self-promotion was somewhat less melodramatic. Â “When I finally got around to looking at the Smashwords file, it said there was a problem with one of the book’s photos, but I couldn’t find it with a self-diagnostic program they offer,” Brenner said. Â “So I took a chance and asked Smashwords’ customer service, citing the warning notices they sent me.”
He quickly received a courteous reply from a guy named Kevin, explaining that the problem was probably due to the use of colons in his chapter titles and sub-sections. Â “I was glad it was so easily resolved,” Brenner said, “until I downloaded the file onto my computer to make the corrections and realized what a mess it was.”
In the interim between uploading the file in 2011 and downloading it in 2018, Microsoft had changed Word and given it a new file extension, .docx instead of the original .doc.  “That one little ‘x,’ unfortunately, made a hell of a lot of difference,” Brenner said.  “When I had to add a couple of pages to the print manuscript of Wet Goddess, converting the book from the old to the new file format inserted blank spaces more or less at random between paragraphs.  I had to start at the beginning and re-do the whole layout, including throwing in a couple of new photos to fill some yawning blanks.”
The problems with the ebook file were similar. Â There, many words were unnecessarily hyphenated, and photos had to be re-aligned to make sure they didn’t obscure the text. Â Brenner said the process took him about two weeks, including a couple of days off when he wasn’t feeling well, but he’s glad he did it.
“I don’t have the money to pay somebody else anyway,” he complained, “so I might as well do it myself, because being retired I do have a fair amount of time. Â Besides, whenever I master a task like this, I improve my overall word-processing skills, which helps me find work in the freelance job market.”
In the eight years Wet Goddess has been in print, it has sold about 1,500 copies in 18 countries, mostly in the English-speaking world, due to Brenner’s unflagging self-promotion efforts.  When a fan in Russia contacted him  three years ago to inform Brenner he’d undertaken an unauthorized translation, the author responded by granting him permission to publish it there!  “It hasn’t taken off yet, because the translator, Anton River, lives in a very conservative northern city,” Brenner said.  “He’s planning to move to a better climate soon, and I hope he’ll renew his efforts to promote the book when he does.”
In addition to Wet Goddess, Brenner has written and self-published two other books.
Growing Up in the Orgone Box, published in 2014, is an unflinching memoir of his torture and sexual molestation at the hands of Dr. Albert Duvall, an “orgone energy” therapist and close associate of the late Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and the dysfunctional family structure that allowed this to happen.
His 2016 novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair is a more light-hearted romp through the mythology and culture of the UFO scene, told from the point of view of a young woman determined to live up to her family’s expectations of her, no matter what it costs her personally.  “There is, again, inter-species sex, but since the other species is bipedal, mostly humanoid and obviously sapient, nobody should blow a 50 amp fuse over it,” Brenner said.  “After all, ‘Star Trek,’ Edgar Rice Burroughs and countless other science-fiction writers have only been doing it for about 100 years.”
Sales on these two books have been nowhere near those of Wet Goddess, Brenner said, and he’s had difficulty getting them any kind of publicity or reviews.  “That’s because, while they’re both sexually radical books, they’re not as radical as a man and a dolphin making love,” he said.  “Somehow, that just blows people’s minds.”
Having just turned 67, Brenner hopes to see his work more widely appreciated before he dies. Â Asked if he thought his writing would endure beyond his lifespan, he waxed philosophical.
“My daughter might take it on, but she’s not planning to have children, so who knows what will happen over the course of time? Â We only know of the Greek poet Sappho’s beautiful writing because it was used to wrap fish,” he noted.
“Let us remember that from the point of view of a book, which may endure for millennia if it’s an epic, humans are fleeting things who read it at some point in their limited lifespans, devoting to it some portion of their precious time,” Brenner said, drawing on an eerie theme reminiscent of the ambiguous Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.  “For this reason, books, especially long-lived books like Epic of Gilgamesh, Tao De Ching and Cattle Raid of Ulster, are grateful for the time their readers spend with them.  The books try to compensate the readers through a symbiotic relationship that informs you with a novel set of ideas, or supports your need for entertainment that doesn’t require batteries, WiFi or 3D glasses.
“I think that we humans, as a species, have a lot to learn from our dolphin cousins,” Brenner concluded. Â “As for my writings, they will survive if people find value in them.”
Let me make something abundantly clear: Wet Goddess was not written to promote bestiality or zoophilia, although I knew if I told my story it would probably come down to that.
I wrote Wet Goddess to share my experience with a creature that I found to be remarkably sophisticated, intelligent, aware, loving and worthy in every way of the designation, “non-human person.”
And she didn’t come out of some alien spacecraft. Her kind exist here on Earth, as they have for millions of years before we appeared, surviving ages of fire and ice in the arms of Mother Ocean.
In the decades since my experience with Dolly, science has, in many ways, caught up with my impressions and anecdotal experience. Now cognitive psychologists and others have explored the mind of the dolphin and arrived at the same conclusions I did in 1971: dolphins are self-aware individuals, able to recognize themselves in a mirror, experiencing a vast range of emotions and behaviors, language users and capable of employing “theory of mind,” the ability to calculate or imagine what another creature is thinking.
We should be devoting a large chunk of our resources as a species to understanding these creatures who have survived so much longer on this planet than we have. What are we doing instead? Some nations still slaughter them en masse in tuna nets, while others conduct murderous drive hunts and butcher them with glee. Some nations take the prettiest ones and commoditize them and sell them into enslavement, where they are forced to perform stupid tricks for our amusement. And we are polluting their environment at such a rate that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. I despair for their future.
My zoosexual love story with Dolly the dolphin is what has attracted most attention, but if I’d had sex with a barnyard animal or a household pet, do you seriously think I’d have spoken up, exposing a practice that most people find viscerally revolting?
Of course not. Zoophiles may still have to keep their sexuality a secret in most situations, but they are humans and accorded certain rights by law. Dolphins are considered chattel, or property, by the same system. I am advocating for changing that and giving dolphins rights under a framework that recognizes their status, as acknowledged by science.
And that, folks, is what I mean when I say “I didn’t write Wet Goddess for zoophiles, I wrote it for dolphins.”
Sorry I had to spell it out for those of you who so perceptively pointed out that dolphins can’t read.
Book Review: Uniquely Dangerous by Carreen Maloney. Published by the author.
By Malcolm J. Brenner
Every so often a non-fiction book comes along which threatens to expose the common wisdom about its subject for the misconception it really is. In my own life, I can think of only a few books that have had this profound effect on me. Growing up in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement, one was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-authored by Alex Haley; another was Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s short but damning tale of incarceration, Soul on Ice.
I mention these two books because they come most readily to mind, not because I want to make race an issue. The subject of Uniquely Dangerous is an Anglo man, not a person of color, and a privileged Anglo man at that, who rose to wealth and renown while concealing a dark secret from everyone around him, including those he loved.
His name was Doug Spink, and if that sounds vaguely familiar, you have a long memory for the perverse and obscure. It hearkens back to a 2010 raid by a multi-agency taskforce of 30 people on a tiny cabin in Whatcom County, Washington, to bring Spink in for probation violations relating to an earlier arrest for drug smuggling.
But that wasn’t what made the headlines. What got the big, bold typeface was the announcement by authorities that they had busted a “bestiality farm” run by Spink, where clients could be serviced by dogs or horses he had on the property (including a champion show jumper). The allegations grew even weirder when local animal rescuers announced that they have saved several rats covered with petroleum jelly. One “client,” an English tourist, was arrested with Spink.
Carreen Maloney was an experienced print journalist and a supporter of the Whatcom County animal shelter that received Spink’s animals. While the headlines about bestiality repulsed her, she wondered about a lot of things. Why hadn’t any of the reporters who covered the story tried to interview Spink to get his side? Weren’t journalists supposed to be fair? What happened to the animals, especially seven dogs and the mice, that went to the county shelter? And what made a successful businessman like Spink, who worked in cutting-edge encryption technology that even puzzled the Feds, drop everything to live like a hermit and indulge a sexual orientation many people found revolting?
Thus began an eight-year odyssey for Maloney, but her toil and research has paid off in a remarkable tale that reads like a mystery story but has the ring of truth. We find out that the 2010 raid was only the beginning of Spink’s troubles with the justice system, which seemed more concerned about ending his vocal support for his alternative sexuality than about punishing him for a non-violent crime.
Maloney has accumulated a huge volume of material on Spink’s dual life, a high-tech wizard by day and a zoophile by night, and distilled it to its most essential parts. The story plunges backward and forward in time, exploring Spink’s past, his family life, and the marriage that ended in failure when he came out as a zoophile, and a gay one at that. But Maloney handles these transitions with great skill, even weaving in her own narrative, as a tragic personal loss sets her on the road to telling Spink’s story.
Along the way, Maloney also takes sidetracks into other elements of the hidden zoo culture, showing us how it covertly appears in art, advertising, entertainment, religion, as an enduring theme of a group that’s uncomfortable with its own species. She uses Spink’s torment at the hands of federal prosecutors as a lens through which to view society’s loathing of human-animal sex, and she courageously asks the question, why? Why such a visceral reaction?
If you are a zoophile, or know someone who is, you owe it to yourself to buy Uniquely Dangerous, because seldom has writing on this inflammatory topic been so lucid, so even-handed and well-documented. If you are interested in the psychology of human sexual deviance, this book will provide useful insights. Similarly, those concerned with loss of personal freedoms and the erosion of privacy will find a story that illustrates their worst fears. If you like tales of personal will and courage in the face of overwhelming odds, you’ll cheer Spink’s outspoken defiance. And if you simply admire a riveting piece of journalism about a taboo subject, Maloney won’t disappoint you.
The portrait that emerges is of a complex, troubled man who always seems to find himself athwart the tides of life, whether he’s fighting his ex-wife for his beloved jumping horse or telling a federal court judge exactly how he feels. In the end, you may not like Doug Spink, but you might come to admire him. In a world that demands conformity, he refused to bend. Uniquely Dangerous is the balance sheet of what that stand has cost him.
— Malcolm J. Brenner, author: Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover
(In the interest of full disclosure, my novel, above, receives a brief mention in Uniquely Dangerous as part of material past the Appendix. This inclusion has in no way influenced my opinion of the book, however. — MJB)
PUNTA GORDA, Florida – If you’ve wanted to read something by Malcolm J. Brenner, now would be a great time to do so! Both Brenner’s ebooks Wet Goddess and Growing Up in the Orgone Box are on sale March 5-11 through Smashwords at savings of up to 50% off the regular $6.99 price.
“Wet Goddess” is a 1970’s-era novel about a hippie college student who’s falling in love with a captive bottlenose dolphin. It’s available at 25% off, or $5.24. Discount code: RAE 25
“Orgone Box” is Brenner’s memoir of being raised in a family that followed Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone therapy” beliefs and the trauma wrought on him when his Reichian psychiatrist turned out to be a sadistic pedophile. It’s available at 50% off, or $3.50. Discount code: RAE 50
“I’m trying to encourage sales of my work as ebooks,” Brenner said. “Right now, trade paperback copies of my writings are outselling the ebooks five to one, and I’d like to know why, especially since ebooks are supposed to be the ‘in thing.'”
Brenner is waiting to hear from Audible whether his third book, the science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair, has been accepted for distribution. It’s his first attempt to market an audio book.
As part of the 2017 Punta Gorda Literary Fair, Brenner will speak on “Writing the Offbeat Work” at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 9 at the Punta Gorda campus of Florida Gulf Coast University, 117 Herald Court in beautiful downtown Punta Gorda. Admission is free. Brenner will be at the Punta Gorda bookseller’s street fair to autograph copies of his work on Saturday, March 11.
Malcolm Brenner’s memoir of psychiatric sexual abuse and a dysfunctional family, “Growing Up In The Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood,” is now available as an e-book on Smashwords under the “Adult Content” listing.
“I suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of a sadistic pervert, Dr. Albert Duvall, who was appointed by Wilhelm Reich to practice his bogus ‘orgone therapy’ on innocent children like myself,” Brenner said. “My family poured thousands of dollars into this quackery on the basis that it would make us have better orgasms and be better people, but to this day I am filled with rage at what happened to me, and to hundreds of other unfortunate children.”
Duvall is the same psychiatrist whom entertainer Lorna Luft wrote about in her autobiography, “Me And My Shadows.” Â Luft is the daughter of actress Judy Garland.
“This type of abuse is typical of ‘true believers,’ whatever their belief system is,” Brenner said.  “One of the characteristics of the children who were molested by Duvall is that we all tried to tell our parents what was going on in his locked, soundproof office, and none of them listened to us.”
Duvall, who died in 1979, was never accused, charged or punished for his crimes.
“I hope ‘Orgone Box’ sets the record straight about Wilhelm Reich’s nonsensical beliefs and Duvall’s sadism toward his patients,” Brenner said. Â “The publication of this e-book makes my story available to more people, particularly in Europe, where Reich’s work remains popular, for some unfathomable reason.”
Malcolm J. Brenner 