Saturday, October 29, 2011

A Succubus for All Hallow's Read

This is a brilliant idea from Neil Gaiman. Give someone a scary book this Halloween. I love it. Anything that encourages more people to read is always good.

In a very brief moment of insanity I did think about leaving one of my anthologies in the book cupboard at work. Then I thought it through. The upside is I’d have a lot more time for writing. The downside is I’d probably starve to death after about a month.

I also thought about getting involved by giving away some copies of A Succubus for Halloween, but I felt it would be a slap in the face to the long-time fans that supported me by buying the book on the first day it came out (and taking me to the top of the bestsellers list on eXcessica’s own website—thanks!).

In the horror world I’m still plankton (or maybe single-celled algae), so I have to start off small. Maybe one day I’ll grow big enough to give whole books away. In the meantime I’ve got a nice compromise that should please everyone.

For All Hallow’s Read I’ll put a brand new short story up here on my blog on Halloween*. Yep, check back on Monday, October 31st and there’ll be a brand new never-before-seen tale of spooky succubus fun.

And if you want to get involved, please feel free to pass out extra copies of “A Succubus for Halloween” to friends, family, outside schools—

HORRORHEAD! Bad Head! Down! Get back in your dark cave, now!


Check back here on the 31st. ;)

*Bear in mind I’m chronically bad with deadlines so it might appear late Monday night or sometime Tuesday.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Tidal Wave of Choice and a Deceptive Cover

More tubthumping from The Self-Publishing Revolution. My scheduled monthly post ended up being a real bitch to write so I'm doubling it up here to fill in for my usual Tuesday/Wednesday/uh Thursday? slot.

One of the fears about the rise in ebooks and self-publishing is that the world will be buried in a tidal wave of crap writing. It’s a familiar argument—there will be so many bad Twilight knockoffs and other rubbish uploaded to Amazon no one will be able to find anything worth reading amongst the great steaming piles of ordure.

It’s one way of looking at it. Personally, I think it’s just as easy to turn it around and see the positive aspects.

The problem when creativity is commodified is that the bottom line suddenly becomes the number one consideration. It’s not enough to be good; if someone has stumped up cash in advance, they’ll want to see a return on their investment, which means the work needs to be both good and popular (or failing that, just popular, hey, Hollywood ;) ). I suspect more than a few writers have run into, “It’s good, but we don’t think there’s a big enough audience”, before the gate slammed down on their foot. As a result niche, interesting, challenging is often overlooked in favour of safe, bland, reliable (Hey, hello Hollywood! ;) ).

The beauty with ebooks and self-publishing is that the initial outlays are so small. Writers can take risks. Even if they only find a niche audience appreciative of their work, that’s still profit (providing you don’t think too hard about the time spent creating and polishing your work!). It’s also good for readers. Yes, there are going to be a lot of bad books that shouldn’t have seen the light of day (and these too might find fans—taste is subjective), but there are also going to be a lot of quirky, interesting books that might not have made it out of the slush pile under the old system. Personally, I think more choice is better than less choice.

Take short stories. I love short stories, especially horror stories. Mainstream publishing houses seldom publish short story collections. They don’t sell very well. There was even a recent tweetathon to save the short story.

I’ve put out three collections of short stories. They haven’t found a massive audience, but they have been found by readers who’ve enjoyed them a great deal. Publishers have to worry about the cost of print runs and marketing budgets. I don’t. I’m free to write what I want. It doesn’t take many sales to cover the initial costs and everything after that is gravy. That’s good for me, good for the readers who like my writing, and good for short stories, as there are plenty of bloody-minded fools like me that still enjoy writing them.

I suppose this would be the appropriate point for the blatant book plug:



I love the cover Selena and the people at eXcessica came up with. It’s totally inappropriate. This is either the darkest collection of erotica you’re likely to read this Halloween, or the most twisted, sexy-perverse collection of horror tales you’re likely to read this Halloween. Someone is going to pick up this book thinking it’s another cutesy paranormal romance with fashion-conscious demonesses, and get the shock of their lives.

I’m more in love with that idea than I should be. I can’t help it. I’m a horror writer. We want to scare people. It’s in the blood. While marketing-types would be aghast, I’m sitting here and grinning like a Cheshire Cat as I go, “open it… open it…”

It’s Halloween. I’m going to have fun. Bottom line be damned.

Enjoy the book. She’s as cute and adorable as her cover. Honest… ;)

Saturday, October 22, 2011

A Succubus for Halloween is out!

She's out in the wild and eager to snare fresh prey with her seductive wiles:



My third collection of short stories is available to buy from eXcessica, amazon, smashwords, B & N and others. And if you'd prefer a more tangible copy, the print version is also available from CreateSpace (and probably amazon too, shortly).

So go on, enjoy a slice of darker erotica this Halloween...

Thursday, October 20, 2011

A Succubus for Halloween: The New Flesh

Only a few days to go before my third collection of short stories, A Succubus for Halloween, hits the online streets. I’ve talked before about trying to find a balance between posting stories up on the internet for all to read and holding some back to sell ebooks (which is good, as it incentivises me to write more stories). There are five brand new, previously unseen stories in A Succubus for Halloween. I’ve posted some excerpts over the past couple of weeks, now here are a few summaries to raise the excitement level.

Cleric vs. Succubus

Most of the stories are contemporary this time around, but I did include this tasty little historical piece. A luxurious Roman bath becomes a deadly battleground as a holy man fights for his soul against the seductive wiles of a rapaciously erotic succubus.

Oil-Wrestling a Succubus


Splash on some oil as it’s time for some kinky grappling with a lithe little hellcat. With succubi it’s always that kind of wrestling, but don’t expect her to fight fair.

I thought it was about time I covered the femdom wrestling fetish and this story gave me a perfect excuse. There’s also an interesting little scene for those that like to follow the tidbits of continuity I bury in my stories.

Shrimp and the Crab-Centaur Girls

In H-Space, beware the girls with multiple legs and pussy lips that can swallow a man whole…

This one’s insane. One for the voreaphiles to appreciate (I haven’t forgotten you) while everyone else can scratch their heads and wonder why I’m still allowed to roam the streets. If you like crazy Japanese anime, this might tickle your bits.

Serving the Earth Mother


The sultry witch, Annette Brite, lures a young couple into an obscene arcane ritual.

Every good horror film or book needs moments. These are the set pieces that stick in the memory and everyone talks about afterwards. The plot of this story is one such moment. You’ll understand what I mean after you read the story and attempt to describe it to someone else.

Fucked up doesn’t even begin to cover it.

It’s the penultimate story of the collection. It’s there for a reason. By this point the reader is probably thinking the stories can’t possibly get any darker or crazier.

They can and do.

Which leaves the last tale:

A Halloween Party with a Succubus

Fans of the lovely Nicole can rejoice. This is the all-new story featuring her.

She escorts a doctor to a Halloween reunion party where old resentments bubble under the surface. Nicole is not afraid of a little bit of exhibitionism, so the good doctor is in for a livelier night out than he first thought!

There’re these and a few old favourites, all wrapped up in the darkest, weirdest, most insane collection of horror erotica you’re likely to find this Halloween.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

"Strange Love" anthology out this week

October is certainly shaping up to be an active month for me. Strange Love, the fourth of the four anthologies eXcessica puts out every year to raise funds, is out today and features one of my stories: "A Summer Dance with a Succubus".


"A Summer Dance with a Succubus" features a young man being accompanied to a summer dance by the gorgeous and mysterious Nicole. It's one of my favourites out of the stories I've written. Mainly because everything dropped nicely into place as I was writing it. Winning me most of my kindle by placing in an online competition also helps!

Longtime readers will probably already be familiar with this story. I'm hoping that having it appear in this anthology will introduce the story to a wider audience that aren't familiar with my work.

And vice versa. If you've ever wondered what the other eXcessica authors get up to, here's a chance to pick up a sample of their work and maybe find someone new to read.

Strange Love - shapeshifters, genies, robots and other strangeness. Out today.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A Succubus for Halloween: Excerpt IV

Continuing with the excerpts, here's the lovely Nicole being very naughty (naughty as in if you're not 18, scram!) in "A Halloween Party with a Succubus."

* * * *

They stood outside on a wide balcony overlooking the park behind the house. It was quiet out here. Everyone else was back inside in the light and the noise of the party. Robert took a sip of beer and leant on the balustrade. He stared down at the trees below.

“Is everything okay?” Nicole asked. She put an arm around him.

“It was a mistake bringing you here,” Robert said.

“Oh,” Nicole said. She sounded hurt. “Did I do something wrong.”

“No, not you,” Robert said quickly, alarmed he might have hurt her feelings. “Them.” He nodded towards the light and noise of the party.

He paused.

“No. Me. What was I trying to prove? All I’ve done is expose you to their sniggers and snide remarks. I can hear them. They never did learn to talk quietly. Some of the things they’re saying about you...” Robert shook his head. “It’s not right, whatever your job and background are.”

Nicole looked back at the bright lights of the house. A muted babble of conversation and loud braying laughter could be heard on the other side of the windows.

“They’re not very nice people, are they,” she commented.

Robert paused. He hadn’t wanted to admit it himself.

“No, they’re not,” he said. “Aldrich was that kind of school. I was hoping the years might have changed them, but no, Aldrich is that kind of school.”

He plonked his half-drunk bottle of beer on the stone balustrade.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We don’t have to stay around here and listen to them snigger behind our backs. There’s a pub not far from Josef Schwarz with much better company.”

Nicole’s hand was in his. He turned to walk away, but Nicole didn’t follow. Instead she pulled him back with startling force.

Robert barely had a chance to register his surprise before her arms enfolded him in an embrace and her soft lips pressed against his. Her lips were moist and lusciously soft. A warm buzz flowed through Robert as she pressed them against his. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her body up against him. A jolt ran through Robert’s body as she wriggled against his crotch.

She broke off the kiss and Robert blinked as he looked at her smiling face. That had been unexpected.

Still smiling, Nicole backed away and twisted from side to side, dancing to a rhythm only she could hear as she crouched down lower and lower. Robert shivered as she pressed a palm against his groin and rubbed. Robert’s member, already slightly engorged, swelled up to full hardness.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Nicole gave him a whimsical smile before grasping the zipper of his fly and pulling it down.

“Something fun,” she said.

She reached into his trousers.

“But they’ll see,” Robert hissed.

The drapes were all pulled back. There was only glass separating them from the party guests.

“I want them to see,” Nicole said. Her smile matched the horns on her head.

“Why?” Robert asked. He trembled as she extricated his throbbing erection and brought it out into the cool October air. “Isn’t this confirming—”

Robert was cut off mid-sentence—mid-thought even—as Nicole kissed the tip of his cock with her soft lips and then sucked, taking in his full length right down to his balls. He leant back against the stone balustrade and closed his eyes as Nicole crouched in front of him and bobbed her head up and down on his erection.

* * * *

Not long now...

Saturday, October 08, 2011

October is the month for new manyeyedhydra stories

Not only do I have a 3rd anthology coming out on the 21st (I may have mentioned this a few times), but I also have a few runners in Literotica's annual Halloween competition.

"Guard Duty" features gangsters, a mysterious crime boss and a succubus in a cage. It expands on the little universe I'm slowly putting together and introduces a new player. It also features a very nasty bit of philosophical fridge horror if you look hard enough.

"Naga Massage Review" is a follow-up to "Naga Special Massage" and shows a different aspect of the lovely Amanda.

I might also enter a new Nicole story for the less death-by-sex inclined if I manage to finish it in time.

So there you go. Stories are like buses. You wait ages for one to show up and then a whole bunch appear at once.

Enjoy! ;)

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

A Succubus for Halloween: Excerpt III

Ever had the feeling you started something a little earlier than it needed to be? :)

Never mind. Here's an excerpt from one of the new stories in A Succubus for Halloween. The sultry witch, Annette Brite, is up to more mischief in "Serving the Earth Mother":

* * * *

Aaron felt a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach as he heard the clipped, perfect enunciation of the new voice. His yell for help had caught the attention of someone.

“It’s difficult to judge the amount of force required to knock somebody out, and it would have spoiled everything had I swung too hard and caved your skull in.”

Brite stood in the entrance to the stone cell. Her pale face looked white and insubstantial in the dim candlelight. She wore the same voluminous black dress as before, with a necklace of large wooden beads around her slender, elegant neck.

“What do you want with us?” Aaron asked.

“You’re a witch,” Andrea said. “You follow the Earth Mother, you know the Rule of Three. How can you do this?”

Brite chuckled.

“It’s a curiosity how language changes down the centuries,” she said. “Words that mean one thing can come to mean another. The same word can take on many different meanings. Many different meanings can even come together under the same word.

“What you call witch is a practitioner of Wicca. The word also has an older, darker meaning, a label given to those that seek knowledge and power through blacker arts. The old fairy tales were not so far from the truth.

“I am not a practitioner of Wicca.”

Brite took off her necklace and slipped out of her voluminous black dress. She was wearing nothing underneath and—like her face—the rest of her body was pale and flawless. She had a fantastic figure—soft and curvaceous around the breasts and hips, but lean around the waist and legs. In other circumstances Aaron might have thought her very sexy. Currently, sex was far from his mind.

“What do you want with us?” he asked.

Brite busied herself in the corner of the room. She painted a complex circle on the floor with a substance that was black and sticky like tar.

“The entities I call upon are more demanding and have darker appetites than your Earth Mother, I’m afraid,” she said. “And they are far less forgiving if their conditions are not met.”

She finished her design and stood up, examining each line and symbol carefully for possible errors.

“It won’t work,” Aaron said. He tried to ignore his fear and the chains around his wrists. He needed his voice to sound calm, a rational knife to cut through the woman’s obvious insanity. “It doesn’t matter how you sacrifice us. They won’t answer. They don’t exist. It’s all nonsense.”

It might be nonsense, but it wouldn’t make Andrea and him any less dead after she’d sacrificed them to her mythical deities.

Brite paused and her supple red lips curled up in an amused smile.

“I love this era,” she said, “so sure in your truth of the world even though you’re as innocent as newborn babes.”

She opened a black canvas bag and pulled out a roll of ancient parchment. She unrolled it and Aaron had the uncomfortable feeling he was looking at a tanned square of human skin.

The shopkeeper’s voice rose as she recited words in a language Aaron had never heard before. It sounded dry and long dead, like dust blowing through long abandoned temples. The words echoed and reverberated off the cold stone walls and sent shivers rattling up Aaron’s spine. The words sounded completely alien, as if the vowel and consonant sounds were not designed for human tongues.

Mumbo jumbo, he thought, products of her madness. They didn’t mean anything.

Brite finished reciting the words from the scroll. There was an expectant hush, as if the room itself was holding its breath.

“See, I told you nothing would—” Aaron started.

He didn’t finish.

The black candles standing around the circle Brite had drawn on the floor started to fizz and crackle. Thick plumes of brown smoke welled up from the candles like exhaust fumes from Hades. Rather than disperse through the room, the smoke coagulated into a thick brown cloud. A vile stench assaulted their nostrils, like a mixture of meat gone bad and stale flatulence.

Parlour tricks, Aaron thought. Nothing but—

The smoke slowly dissipated, revealing...

* * * *

That reveal will have to wait until Oct 21. ;)

Saturday, October 01, 2011

A Succubus for Halloween: Excerpt II

Three weeks to go and it's time for another excerpt to crank the hype handle. While I do love a deliciously sinful demoness with horns, wings, tail and a body so hot it smokes, occasionally I like to cut my imagination loose and get really freaky. Yep, it's time to enter Hell-Space again. Here's an excerpt from "Shrimp and the Crab-Centaur Girls":

* * * *

“Base, can you hear me? Base? Over,” Collins said into the radio.

All he got back was a hiss and crackle.

“Radio’s fucked again,” he said.

“Must be atmospherics,” Rutherford said.

“Or something else,” Shrimp said.

He showed them his iPod. The screen was going nuts. Black shapes flittered back and forth across it like over-anxious ants.

“That’s not all,” he continued. “None of my electrical equipment is working either.”

“We’ll carry on,” Hackett said. “It could be just a localised disturbance.”

They carried on down a barren wide valley lined with rough brown boulders. They travelled a short distance before Banks stopped them again with a raised fist. His hand wobbled, as if he wasn’t too sure of himself.

“What now?” Hackett asked. “You seeing another bare-breasted blonde?”

“Um...actually, yes” Banks replied.

What? Collins hurried round the bend in the path, eager to see like the rest of the squad.

A blonde girl stood behind a boulder up ahead of them. Only her upper body was visible and it was completely naked. What a body it was too. She was tall and curvy—a natural cheerleader. Her blonde hair was long and silky and her eyes were as blue as the skies back home.

At first she was coy. Her arms were folded to hide her exposed breasts. Then she looked at the men, smiled and her shyness tumbled away as she dropped her arms. A large pair of titties swung free, each topped with a perky pink nipple. She looked down at them, as fearless as a stripper.

Fuck, she was hot. Brains versus looks conversations aside, Collins had been lucky enough to have his pick of the girls during his school life. He would have traded all of them for a chance to put his hands on those ripe melons and fuck her from behind like a dog.

Everyone was motionless. No one was quite sure what to do. Rutherford looked like he wanted to wolf whistle as if he was back at his favourite strip joint. Shrimp’s eyes were as big as saucers. He probably hadn’t had many opportunities to see girls like this, naked and in the flesh.

Fuck, even porn directors didn’t get to see girls like this.

The girl moved to the side. A naked leg, lithe and gloriously long, stepped out from behind the boulder. She wore no shoes and even though her foot looked delicate, the rough ground didn’t bother her as she rested lightly on the ball of her foot.

A second leg followed, coming down a little behind the first and then it at all started to get weird.

A second leg?

Collins wasn’t sure of what he was seeing.

There was her right leg, gracefully bent at the knee, and behind that, another right leg, the same as the first.

He watched, incredulous, as a third joined the other two.

What the fuck?

It reminded him of paintings he’d seen in an Indian restaurant. The people in them had three times the number of heads and about five times the number of arms and legs. This was just like that.

A fourth leg stepped out behind the others and then the girl, or whatever she was, slid out from behind the boulder.

Her upper body was human right down to her hips. After that she became something monstrous. Her lower body expanded out into a wide bulbous disc. It looked like the abdomen of a spider or crab, but covered in fleshy pink human skin rather than a hard carapace. Four legs sprouted from each side of her abdomen. They looked like human legs, but she used them like a crab.

The worst part was where her human torso joined with her monstrous abdomen. There was an orifice there, right where the pussy would be on a normal girl, but it was far far larger. It looked like a mouth, a mouth with a gigantic pair of overstuffed lips. They were pink, plush and currently pouting in the grotesque mockery of a kiss. The lips parted a little and Collins saw an interior that was pink and moist.

* * * *

Don't worry. Not all the stories are this weird. Some of them are worse...