Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Updates and a (Maybe) Story Bonanza for Literotica's Upcoming Halloween Story Contest

By maybe, I think three stories...  Maybe.  Maybe more.  Whenever I try to be a bit more definite about these things something goes horribly wrong and scuppers all the plans.

Anyway.  Literotica's annual Halloween contest is on the way.  The details of which can be found here.

As an aside, if you're a budding writer that likes succubi/monster girls and is not afraid to get your hands dirty with a little bit of explicit smut, contests like this are a great way to cut your teeth and find readers.

As for me, currently some of my projects have stalled and trying to bludgeon through them isn't doing my productivity any good.  I think I'll use this contest as an excuse to let #ChaosWriting out of the cage and see how many short stories I can blast out during the three weeks of the contest.  With a bit of luck that might clear my head and get the production line moving again.

The first story is already submitted.  You should see that go up tomorrow when the contest officially kicks off.  After that I'm not sure what we'll get or how many.  That's the beauty of #ChaosWriting.

I'm not trying to win this time.  There's been a trend in recent competitions for some entrants to go long, and I mean 90K-word-novel long.  With the way Literotica's scoring system works, it's pretty much impossible for a good 5-10K short story to place over a good 90K+ novel, so I'm not going to worry about it.  This is more an exercise in clearing out some old ideas and trying to get back in touch with what made me so prolific in my early days writing for Literotica (being more carefree and less trying to brute-force stories at a guess).

There's another two stories where I'm nearly done with the first draft, so I reckon we might see three new stories in October and hopefully more if the juices really get flowing.

So where does this leave the other stuff?  Here are a few updates.

Sandwiched by Series
Sticking to a hard monthly schedule isn't working here.  I like the covers and concept, so it will continue, but with a more flexible release schedule. i.e. When the story is done and I'm happy it doesn't feel rushed.  The next one is "Sandwiched by Scyllas" and I'm about 60-odd% done with it.

Okasare Kenny Series
The original idea was for this to be the monthly serial for 2016. Then I tried to use it as crazy live-novel-writing challenge, which was a cool idea, but a bad thing to launch into with other stories (in particular Succubus Summoning) still incomplete.  The Sandwiched by series was a trial to see if I could keep to a regular monthly schedule for a series with more continuity.  I'm not confident I can do that at the moment, so I won't officially (re)launch Okasare Kenny until I have six months or so worth of chapters in the can and can be confident it won't stall like Succubus Summoning 201 did.

A Night With Ceptophthorié
Alas poor game-writing experiment.  This one got shoved to the back burner when I fell behind on first A Succubus for Saint Patrick's Day, and then various other things.  It's something I want to do, but I have to get my other writing stuff sorted first.

Jackson in HRPG-World
This is tailor-made for putting up on the blog in small chapters.  I need to get other things done first (Succubus Summoning 201!) before I can get back to this.  And I will get back to it because I know how the story pans out and I'm very excited to see readers' reactions to it. ;)

Succubus Summoning 201
The big one.  The one I really should get done considering Succubus Summoning 101 outsells all my other books put together.  Why aren't I on it?  It didn't get done in November/December last year basically.  That was when I went through a rather drastic life change that involved losing my job and changing countries.  It got put to one side while I got back on my feet (and aside from not being as productive with my writing as I'd like, I am thankfully back on my feet) and now I'm having a little trouble picking up the threads again.  I should be able fix this once I get around to the editing process in assembling the previous chapters into a coherent ebook.  I'll be on that as soon as I've had my fun with Halloween.  The aim is still to get the ebook finished before the end of the year and out as soon as there's an opening in eXcessica's publication schedule.  The final two chapters (of 201) will be posted as soon as they're written though.  I'm not going to let readers wait for them longer than they have to.

Some updates anyway.  It's been a weird 12 months.  Hopefully the next 12 months won't feature quite as many missteps, fumbles and failed experiments.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy the free Halloween stories (however many of them there end up being).

4 comments:

  1. These are all awesome news!!!:D

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  2. Good luck with the writing, MEH!

    Out of curiosity for what it's like to be a fiction writer, what kinds of issues make it difficult for you to finish a story? Do you generally know how you want your stories to go, but you just can't find the time to write them down? Or maybe you know how you want the stories to go, but you aren't satisfied with the quality of your prose? Or maybe you don't even know where the story is going?

    I assume these are all obstacles to some extent, but I'm curious if you find one of them to be more troublesome than the others.

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    1. Biggest pain points for me at the moment are:
      Trying to get something done for an arbitrary deadline. The more I push certain things, the more the procrastination centres push back. Sometimes I can deflect this by working on something else, but if I'm trying to force myself to remain blinkered on a certain project what normally happens is nothing at all gets done. That's something I need to fix.

      The other pain point is not finishing stories fast. I'm usually fast for the first couple days, but if the story is a long one, or I have a forced break (because I'm off somewhere at the weekend for example), the last few pages can take an age to write and result in a big slump in productivity.

      These are things I'm still working on. I have more time now. I really want to be making better use of it.

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    2. As a dilettante of authoring erotic fiction, I can agree that this is generally how it feels like things go down. It always starts off with huge enthusiasm, followed by a taper off, and then just a grind to the finish. As a novice, I actually have 0 plans with where I want my stories to go, instead just playing out how I think the characters would act in the given circumstances (I generally use characters that have already been developed in the dungeons and dragons games that I run, let's just say succubi make the occasional appearances in my games :P ), so I'm not sure how writing with a plan would affect things to be honest. My stories are also generally rather short, I think my longest story, which is not actually complete :P clocks in at around 4.5k words, so writing something like the succubus summoning 101/201 series is completely unimaginable to me right now.

      Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and say that I recently discovered your work and am quickly becoming a big fan, I especially can't wait to read the conclusion of succubus summoning 201!

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