Carmen Loup🌻🌈 Read Aliens in New Florida!

@carmenloup.com

2268 Followers 1293 Following

🪐 Space Opera Writer & Artist 🌈 Hippie mystical yoga type 💕LGBTQ+ and BLM 👽 Gender-free since 1995 (they/them) 😍 Married to @straysongdog.com Novels and art at: CarmenLoup.com 🖖

Fresh may and xan tattoo

Tattoo of xan that’s on my arm under my dang covid shot bandaid

Aliens in New Florida

Carmen Loup publishing timeline and reading order with Audacity comic book, 4 books in the series, horror short stories, and aliens in new florida from CarmenLoup.com

The audacity books in order

Cover aliens in new Florida

"Ugh.” She groaned, slouching in defeat. If she had to put a qualifier on the badness, it would’ve been “very”. Very bad. Maybe even extremely. Excruciatingly. Disastrously. Rather than admit out loud how horrible things were, she decided to show him. "Just…ugh…come on."

Reaching over her head, Xan shut the door. "You're trying to get out of this by making chainsaw bears in the middle of a blizzard! You're bleeding through your suit, mun." He held onto her shoulders to keep her focused. "How bad is it?"
"Ugh," she groaned, dropping her head back onto her shoulders. She really didn't want to think about how bad it was, but he would find out soon enough. "Just…ugh…come on."

Reaching over her head, Xan shut the door. "You're trying to get out of this by making chainsaw bears in the middle of a blizzard! You're bleeding through your suit, mun." He held onto her shoulders to keep her focused. "How bad is it?"
"Ugh.” She groaned, slouching in defeat. If she had to put a qualifier on the badness, it would’ve been “very”. Very bad. Maybe even extremely. Excruciatingly. Disastrously. Rather than admit how horrible things were out loud, she decided to show him. "Just…ugh…come on."

"Got bit," she said with a shrug, drying her hands on the dish towel. "I'm going to go make some bears," she told him.

"Got bit," she said causually, drying her hands on the dish towel. "I'm going to go make some bears.”

“So…this is what Earth looks like in color, huh?” Xan mused, looking around at the cabin, as if for the first time, trying to feel normal for a blip, cuddling beside the fire with her.

Paper back of aliens in new Florida

"Why? What was that?" asked Lucas, squinting accusingly at the woods. Gran gave him a pair of glasses she'd stashed in the pocket of her nightgown. (cut) She treated them like children, despite each of the "boys" being at least thirty.

Copyright © 2026, <$year> Carmen Loup
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
No AI has been used or will ever be used in any part of the creation of these books. What the fuck would be the point?! I even wrote this notice by hand, and it’s late and I’m tired so maybe it sucks but whatever. I wrote it with my own two brainsides. Left and right hemisphere, baby. Duking it out, making us miserable, writing and drawing everything without relying on an LLM or image generator.

Cover and character design by Carmen Loup, always.

"I'm sure she'll be pleased as five"

"Who's Mr. Peanut?" Xan asked, after some time of silence.
"He's a peanut, and a man. A fancy man."
Xan nodded. "The hat and eye circle make him fancy?"
"His attitude makes him fancy. The hat and monocle are just accessories."
"And what makes him a man?"
"The nuts," May said, chuckling at her own joke. Xan didn't get it, but he didn't ask. He just basked in the brief warmth of her laughter.

"Blitheon, no!" Xan laughed. "No, no, not sapient, just horny. Quite a few things in nature are not sapient, but do have a healthy sex drive. Tasseled moyhobbins, not least of them.”
They approached a monstrosity that was, quite obviously, the thing they had just purchased. Neon purple with strappy black detail work and glitter. An irresponsible amount of glitter. The body of the machine was bean-like, but in an erotic way. It hovered a hands-breadth off the floor, bobbing genially. Its three headlights slowly blinked open as they approached with its anchor-button. Its headlight’s eyelashes were tipped with little white pompoms.
"Xan, do you ever get the sense that we live in a really stupid made-up universe? That a higher power is just teasing us constantly? That we're perhaps being directly targeted by some sadistic intelligence?" Listay asked, pondering the eyelash pompoms.
"Frequently! But not about stuff like this. This is the kind of stuff that makes me believe in a benevolent creator,” he said, slapping the ship on its flank and smiling in amusement at its grateful shiver. "Let's go find May!

There was alcohol in her Void now, burning down her throat, seething through her nostrils. She swallowed, coughed, rubbed her face and sat up. "What do you want?" she muttered to the dark shapes silhouetted against the light of a wood-burning stove.
“See now, there she is!" said the old woman beside her. It was she who had just poured whiskey down May’s throat with a ladle. She had a face like a misshapen pumpkin—pinched in some places and plump in others, with sharp, dark eyes. Her hair, somehow still hanging on to its most of its original raven black, had been wrangled into a severe bun. A loose gingam button up shirt hung from her sturdy frame as if someone at a overstock clothing outlet had mistaken her for a clearance rack.
"You must be Gran," May said darkly, her voice hoarse from the whiskey.
The woman tsked, then turned to address the men standing behind her in a kind of pitiful gunless firing line. ”Where'd you say you found her, now?”

453 in Omaha

Mick and rawr in shanty van

Xan as Fuxoona Glizzel, his drag character, with May as a drag king

Me holding kombucha and lettuce like a good hippie

POLICY UPDATE
Our stance on AI-generated music
Hi Carmen Loup!
AI music generation tools are changing how music is created and distributed. As this technology evolves, Tidal is introducing platform standards to protect artists, their craft, and inform listeners.
Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy:
Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an "AI" badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated.
Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We're implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis.
Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales.
We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.

Aimz (pink hair, blue skin alien) and Listay (sunset hair purple skin alien) naked, Aimz is laying on top

Aliens in new florida in 3 slides

Table with audacity novels on it

Mick and rawr again but kicks top is white now

Mick and rawr from aliens in new Florida

Alien cults
NB/F romantic tension
Solarpunk
Roadtrip
Speculative fiction Unhinged weirdness Cinnamon roll/Badass
Sexy swamp creature

Cat toys kissing

Queer road trip books are one of my favorite things so it's no surprise I loved this. It's the perfect blend of bizarre and funny with characters you can't help but love. Rawr is such a little weirdo and I would die for them.
It's set in the same world as the author's The Audacity series but stands well on its own. The only thing you need the other books for is to know the answer to a trivia question the characters aren't sure about which lets you feel superior to fictional characters trapped in The Last Waffle House. Very important, but wholly unnecessary. If you're a fan of Douglas Adams and you haven't picked up one of Carmen Loup's books before, Aliens in New Florida is a great introduction to the author's work.

Loup has a talent for balancing whimsy and absurd humor with high stakes and heartfelt moments, and AINF is no exception. More than once, they had me laughing aloud one page and biting my nails on the next.

Zinnias

Xan posing sincerely

He shakes his head, squinting his eyes. Recalling present and future events. “Mr. Peanut? The fancy nut who’s also a man…right. A traitor to his own kind. His wealth gained while campaigning for the slaughter of his fellow nuts. Blitheon, what a monster!”
“Yes! Mr. Peanut represents the friendly face on the cannibalistic machine of capitalism,” May says. “You remember. You went into the Heart of LoCarmn and—

Spread sheet says joy of sex, I guess

Draft 0
Inside the heart, he's wiggling out of the top half of his suit, tying the arms around his waist, watching the dangling finger of mushroom *mycelium?* intently. Preparing himself. He doesn't even stop to look at her when she arrives inside the heart. He's too focused.
"You got the Porgord to leave?" she asked, sensing that they'd gone but not why.

Draft 1
Inside the white-walled chamber, Xan watched the dangling finger of mycelium as if he were preparing to pounce and devour it. Or maybe the other way around. His gaze was steady, but his body was fitfully wriggling itself out of the top half of his suit. He was usually an expert at that sort of thing, but recent events had rather thrown him.
“Hey, boha, what’s the score?” Aimz asked, unusually gently, trying to pry her way into his singular awareness.

Mick's spent two years searching post-apocalyptic New Florida for her missing girlfriend, guided only by a note stuck to her machete: _Meet me at the Kingdom._

But now Mick's fate is guided by Madam Clandestina, a dying omniscient relic of the past, who not only sets Mick up to escort Rawr, a charming wine-making cryptid, to the Kingdom, but also cheerfully tells her the exact circumstances of her impending death.

Along the way, they're sacrificed by an alien cult, trapped in a liminal Waffle House, chased by an alien-hunting mafia godmother, and attacked by a creature lurking in the bowels of an abandoned theme park.

All this cannot keep them from falling for each other, but Rawr's a walking biohazard, and Mick’s closer than ever to reuniting with her lost lover.

“You did break my ‘lectric air,” I say, swirling the honey wine in my happy mug. “But,” I swallow the last of it and hiccup. “You fixed it. And then you gave me all this”—I lift and slosh around the nearly empty jug—“wine! That pulls you ahead. Way ahead of most people I know. Knew.”
“No one ever lavished gifts of honey wine upon you, huh?”
“Not once!”
“Madam Clandestina always said I’d find someone who’d love me for my hobby.”

I smother a laugh once I finally figure out what they meant, then check the rayometer. The van’s finally charged enough to get started. “Must be a Monday,” I say.
The ancients had names for almost every kind of day, but the only two that had colloquially survived the cataclysm were Mondays (bad) and Fridays (good). Some real old-timers back in SunShineSkyTown would make a fuss about Sundays being important days for the observance of anxiety, but I never liked the concept much. So I had Mondays and Fridays, and mostly Mondays. The day I met Rawr had been a Friday.

The store’s banner calls it the “Biggest General Store in New Florida”, but someone has taken a red marker to it and inserted “Second” in front of “Biggest”.
In blue marker, someone has crossed out the “Second” and written “Good” between “Biggest” and “General”.
The red marker has tried and failed to turn “good” into the word “boob”.
“The Second Biggest Boob General Store in New Florida?” Rawr asks. “What’s a boob?”
“Good,” I say.
“Boobs are good?”
“No, it supposed to say—” I gesture toward the sign. “Well, yeah. Boobs are good. You don’t know what a boob is?”
Rawr shrugs with an apologetic wince. They expect me to tell them. I shake my head. Maybe I’ll show them later.

Black eye Susan’s

Rogue journalist Mick searches a decaying Florida to find her lost girlfriend and picks up an alien travel partner, Rawr, only to discover a world of ancient secrets, alien cults, anti-alien cults, and The Last Waffle House in New Florida. When Mick discovers the truth about her long-lost lover, she must race against time and fate to save Rawr before her own prophesied untimely death.

"Having fun playing your weird little horrible game, huh, Fate? Well, listen, boha, I've got some complaints to lodge. You know what you did to Listay? Zuut, what you did to me? How sadistic do you have to be? To saddle me with this horrible personality, which, by the way, I only have because I was raised by a maniac who swallowed so many zuxing toxic mushrooms when she was breeding that I was hatched with a brain full of mind-altering fungus, and now I can't die? That's completely zuxed, you pubic hair-munching taagshlorph. Why can't I die?"

"I never thought I'd get tired of having sex for gem, but..." he stared, despondent, at the noodles.
"You over it?" She clipped two finger-extenders on and used them to slurp up a string of noodle filled with a tangy sauce the vendor had called “eel blood". May figured it was a translation error. Firstly, because she figured there wasn’t such thing as an ‘eel’ this far out from Earth and secondly because it didn't taste like eel blood. In truth, eels are far more common the universe over than humans are, and since May had never tasted eel blood before now, she wasn’t a great judge of what was and wasn’t eel blood.
"May, I had twenty-eight ovipositors in my mouth today. Many of them at the same time! At the Agency I used to be able to get to know my clients, generate some kind of positive feeling for them, you know? Actually emotionally and psychologically connect as people before I got skewered with their various appendages. Here I might as well be a warm-blooded bedroom bot."

Old art of Xan doing a pinup pose at a bar.

Temperance card from tarot in space. Giant nonbinary person with two coffee pots

May from the Audacity

While it was true that May inherited the emotional capacity of a flea’s coffee mug from her mother, it was also true that the inevitable conversation between her and her father would have been difficult for even the most erudite emotionally stable saint to navigate.
Silence, thought May, was indeed golden. And, resolving to simply not ever speak to Apo again, she felt slightly better.
“So you’re May June July, huh?” Apo said immediately when she got in, making the silence plan a touch more awkward than she’d imagined it.
“Mm-hmm.” She stared straight ahead at the trees, their leaves catching the last golden rays of sunlight. Golden, like silence.

Aimz's pale blue cheek had nearly, but not quite, fused to the inflatable couch in the scantily-furnished apartment Xan and May were currently out working to pay for. Nearly, but not quite, Aimz had given up every one of her material, social, and personal desires. Nearly, but not quite, Aimz was ready to forfeit her eternal life and pretend to be a lumpy throw pillow until, presumably, the nearest sun exploded and she was shattered into sentient atoms.

Gilbert Baker Pride flag color meanings are.... PINK - sex

RED - life

ORANGE - healing

YELLOW - the sun

GREEN - nature

TURQUOISE - art and magic

BLUE - serenity

PURPLE - the spirit

Convention table with so much orange

Cover for aliens in new florida sporting a classic florida sunset and two characters, Rawr and Mick, cuddling on top of a hippie van. Rawr is a lizard-type alien and Mick is a human with tan skin and curly hair.

A distressingly realistic tour of one of ancient Florida’s most infamous episodes, The Gasparilla Experience will give you a greater appreciation for the simple joys of sunlight, clean water, and actual buildings. The people here might be fake, but the horrors are real. CarmenLoup.com

For the past ten rotations, Xan hadn't moved. He hadn't blinked. He hadn't breathed. He wasn't dead, of course, and Listay had checked his vital signs several times on both her BEAPER and his own just to be sure, but he was totally unresponsive otherwise. She could arrange him like a life-sized puppet, and had done, setting him back against the headboard. She even gently closed his eyes because the blank green stare was unsettling.