Marilyn Foxworthy - The Start of Time

My name is Marilyn. I have written before about some of the remarkable men of the Jensen Family. This time, it’s a man named Mark. This is the first book of his story.

I call it “Book 1: The Start of Time”. But that’s not how it starts. It starts with Mark looking for memorabilia related to his favorite old pulp fiction adventure books. What he finds leads him on his own grand adventure.

Well, ready? Our story starts on a sunny morning on a foreign planet…

But first, before you turn the page, beware of several things that you’ll find on the other side of this door. I warn you now. Here’s what you should know before you decide to read the story of our hero and his wonderful life:

1. The story is, at times, highly sexual. At times graphically so. If that isn’t what you want to read, you better stop right now. Take the book back to the store and get your money back. There’s a lot of sex.

1. The story is long. It isn’t a quick read for a single afternoon. In fact, the tale is several volumes long. This is just one book of an epic saga. The entire series is long. If you want a short little diversion, stop now. If you get hooked on the story and spend more time than you wanted to reading, and possibly rereading, the entire adventure, maybe that’s my fault, but I make no apologies for it.

2. Spoiler alert: And this refers back to point 1, our hero is remarkable in many ways, but one of those is how several women may fall in love with him at the same time. And because he’s so remarkable, they generally have no jealousy between them. I’ll leave it to you to read how that plays out, but if the implications disturb you, I recommend a more traditional ‘Bodice-Ripper’ romance. OK, let’s just spell it out: there’s probably going to be some harem elements to the story. Heroes know how to satisfy. But, pay attention to the next point… about the allegory aspects of that.

3. Allegory alert: If you read the story correctly, many of the people, especially the women related to the primary hero in the story, will actually represent different aspects of the same person. As people, we are complex beings. You will find explanations of the ‘oneness’ of the characters, so keep in mind that what may sound polygamous, may actually be an allegory of one monogamous relationship. Or don’t. You can read it however you want to, but it was written in many respects as an allegory. That doesn’t make it any less fun. It does make it more like eroticism for philosophers though.

4. The story was written by me, but in the same style as my other books, as if our hero had kept journals of his adventures, and I just edited and published them. That may have been more the case in some books than others, but it’s the style I enjoy right now. I was a fan of the great pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I think it influenced the language and style to some extent.

5. I’ve tried to write the story in a way that’s easy for text-to-speech reader software to make sense of. I love listening to the stories myself, and I use a text-to-speech program on my phone or computer, and while I’m exercising or driving. I find that the rereading isn’t perfect, but it’s adequate. Some of the words will be mispronounced consistently, but you can probably tell what’s being said. For example, “I wound up being wounded” won’t pronounce the two different renderings of “wound” correctly, but you’ll be able to follow the story well enough. Also, to make it clear who’s speaking, a lot of the dialog starts with “He said, …” and “She asked, …” to try to make it more listener friendly. Otherwise, it might have been written differently.

6. You may notice frequent references to quoted movie lines, song lyrics, and passages from other books. They may seem obscure. If you find something that one of the characters says to be a bit weird, it’s probably a movie line. You can look it up on the Internet or something if you want to. If you get it, that’s fun. If not, I hope you don’t feel like you’re missing the joke

7. Refer to point 1, above. Really. I’m not kidding. It gets graphic. And pay attention to points 3 and 4 as well. You have been warned. And, just so you know what to expect, there’s no sexual humiliation, violence, bondage, or anything like that presented in any erotic way. If that’s what you’re looking for, something darker, this isn’t for you. There’s a lot of sex, but it is portrayed as respectful, consensual, and loving.

Happy trolls.

It was my second day on the ‘Red Planet’. Today I’d better find water. Food would be good too.

It wasn’t exactly like I had expected, but how could it be? I had followed an unbelievable path to an unbelievable destination. I had started out with a few expectations, but most of them were very flexible.

On the one hand, I had expected to find a dead-end and nothing to show but a few boring vacation photos. Maybe I would get an article out of it that I could blog about.

On the other hand, I had hoped to take a one-way ticket journey to a foreign planet that teenage boys of the past century had read about; and knew to be just fiction.

Reality turned out to be on that ‘other hand’. And I needed to find water.

My name is Mark Jensen. As I write this, I’m 47 years old.

My dad had been a big fan of classic American Pulp fiction. Not the movie, the books. Especially the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He called it ‘The Golden Age of American Literature’. No high-school English teacher would have ever agreed with him, but you might find an eclectic college professor somewhere who might.

My dad thought Hemingway was absolute crap. He thought Hawthorne and the rest of what was taught as great American lit, Fitzgerald and all those that his generation had been forced to read as if they were the kings of fiction, were detestable examples of the poorest writing imaginable. The greatest literature in his opinion were the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, even Doc Savage. My dad loved the classics: the pulp fiction dime novels of adventure from the first half of the 20th century.

That was what he raised me on. I was home educated; and it was a good education. Yes, I went to a public school as well, but my real education happened mostly at home. I got good grades, went to a good state college, got a good job, had a good career, and did pretty well for myself. We skipped the ‘crap’ and focused on what he called ‘the classics’. His favorite pulp series was the John Carter of Mars stories, and so was mine.

I loved them. I read every one several times. Dad and I would drive around or sit in the backyard and talk about the stories, but mostly he would talk about why he found them such great examples of fiction. When I had a son, I shared the love of these books with him as well.

The thing that brought me to the point that I was at on this day took place about six months previous, when my wife of 25 years died. Grief does funny things to you. All of the old patterns are disrupted. All of the conditioned emotional responses are broken. None of the things, the sounds and smells and sights, that you’ve grown so used to come to you anymore. Life is broken.

Did you ever have a dog for years and years, and then it died? And you come home after work and open the door and you can’t figure out what’s wrong? That when you opened the door, Scruffy should have been there in the way so that you had to tell him not to run outside? That you should have had to step over him as he got in your way as you made your way to the kitchen? That’s grief. It’s all broken. The patterns don’t work anymore, but your emotions keep expecting that they will. Scruffy’s gone, but you still expect him to be there on an unconscious level. You can’t help it.