Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Introducing the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary

...or as it will more likely be known—the really really grimdark book of sexy monster girls.

I like creating weird and wonderful monsters.  I’ve always wanted to create a monster bestiary.  This year I decided to start putting one together.  Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopedia is incredibly popular online after all.  I’m envisioning the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary (which we’ll abbreviate to MGB from here on—that combination of letters is still unused as far as I’m aware) as a sort of Western equivalent, with a heavy emphasis on sort of.

KC’s MGE is excellent.  As is Monster Girl Quest and Okayado’s Everyday MonsterGirls (known as Monster Musume in the West).  What I don’t want to do is simply copy them.  Yeah, I’d be creating something that was in English, but it’s not as if those works aren’t heavily translated already.   I already have my own slant on sexy monster girls and succubi in my fiction, so it would make sense to draw on that.  My take will likely be a little darker.  I’ve seen criticisms pop up on monster girl discussion threads from time to time that the MGE and EMG universes can be a little too light and fluffy.  Some people like their bad girls and bad ends to be bad.  Well that’s something I can do!

(As an aside, there is no ‘right’ interpretation here.  Some people like their sexy, evil demonesses sexy and evil, and others like their cute monster girls to take them home for Sexy-Snu-Snu Ever After.  Both are fine.  The MGE (mostly) does the latter.  For the MGB I thought I’d do the former.)

(As another aside.  If someone likes one of the H-space monster girls, but would rather they didn’t do the awful things that will inevitably happen in the final paragraph, feel free to imagine—or even write fiction about—them doing nicer things instead.  I don’t really care much for arguments on what is or isn’t canon.  I’ll probably be writing about the deliciously twisted and evil ones because horror-head needs to be let out of his cage to play now and again, but that doesn’t mean the nicer ones don’t exist.  Have fun however you see fit.)

(Which brings me to the last silly aside.  I’d love to see people have fun with this.  Both MGE and MGQ have generated tons of fanart and fanfiction all over the internet.  I’m hoping my H-space Monster Girl Bestiary will give those communities some new toys to play with.  Of course, this is also up to me to create toys people want to play with!)

What form will this take?

A short short story (1000-1500ish words) of the sexy (maybe) monster girl doing her ‘thing’ followed by a short profile summarising what she looks like and what her ‘thing’ is.  The plan is for a new one every week.  If I get behind, or find I need a breather, I’ve got a few pre-existing H-space stories I can create profiles from.  Or post fragments from if the story happens to be one of my eBook exclusives (expect much shilling of my own books those weeks – horror-erotica writers, even the crazy ones, gotta eat).

So no artwork?

Nope, sadly.  My art skills have atrophied to point of uselessness.  The short stories will give detailed (and extremely graphic!) scenes of the monster girls in action, but I know they won’t have the immediacy or going-viral potential of sexy illustrations.  Creators have to stick to their strengths and mine is words rather than line and ink.  Actually, I’m kind of hoping this takes off enough for people to start rattling off their own fanart, but again that’s largely down to me coming up with designs that fire people’s imaginations.  (to be honest, I’ve not got a good track record here—the only artwork I’ve ever seen related to my work was a fairly bad picture of Verdé, and the artist only did it because they thought the author was someone else.  sigh).

It’s not all doom’n’gloom.  If the bestiary is going well and I get a good royalty cheque one month I might see if I can get some artwork commissioned to see if that will help with promotion.

Why H-space?

H-space is my goto setting if I want to write about something too weird to fit in a conventional modern day setting.  It didn’t start off as my first choice.  I knew I wanted to write a series of super shorts about various weird and sexy monster girls.  One idea was to create a brand new story setting using a character I’d created for a forthcoming Sandwiched by story (I haven’t forgotten about that series).  Then I thought about setting it in a generic fantasy world with the plan of maybe incorporating it into a game idea.  In fact, the story coming out tomorrow had a different protagonist at one point.  I didn’t like this as I wanted something to distinguish it from the fantasy settings used in the MGE and almost every monster girl RPG.

(Again, no criticism of these settings.  I just didn’t want to do the same re-tread as everyone else.)

H-space seemed like the best fit for new weird and sexy monster girls.  I’ve already used it a few times in previous stories.  Those stories tend to be a little darker than my other tales and after seeing comments from people wanting to see badder Bad End monster girls I thought there was a good opportunity to do something slightly different to the existing popular monster girl universes, and that H-space would be a good setting to use.  Plus, I really like my horror and this seemed like a chance to let horror-head out of the cage to create some crazy shit.

Setting it in H-space also opens up the possibility of a few sneaky continuity tricks.  These might be short short stories, but there will still be hints of a larger story arc, exactly the same as what some of you might have spotted with my other fiction.

Why not the Succubus Summoning universe?

I was three stories in when the same question occurred to me.  This project could just have as easily been Ye Olde Magikal Grimoire of Monster Girls of Questionable Morality.  Maybe that’s something we’ll see next year after I’ve got the Succubus Summoning series back on track again (It.  Will.  Happen.  I fucked up the end of 2014 and fucked up 2015.  2016 is NOT going to go the same way.)

Obviously, that will be lighter and fluffi... wait... the daemons eat the students fairly regularly in that universe as well.  Funnier, maybe...?

(and there’s the potential to play even more games with continuity, especially when some of the monster girls start to look a little familiar... ;) )

Is this going to affect your other writing?

Not really.  The stories and profiles are short enough to slot in alongside whatever bigger projects I’m working on at the time.  Actually, because the short stories are so short, they make great ‘breather’ activities for those times when I need to take a break from banging my head against the wall trying to make a bigger story/novella/novel work.

They also serve as a useful extension of my ideas file.  There’s been a lot of times over the past years when the idea for a hawt monster girl sex scene has come to me, but I haven’t had a chance to write it down either because the rest of the story idea hasn’t fallen into place, or I was too busy writing something else.  Then the idea ends up being forgotten, or I’ll jot it down as a series of notes and then come back to them three years later and be unable to recall the initial hawtness that made me want to write the story in the first place.

Writing a thousand or so words is still a relatively low investment and is a much better way of preserving the original idea.  I can then reuse them at a later date as part of a more fleshed out story or chapter.

Will this be another one of those hare-brained schemes that fizzle out in a week or so?

Yeah, fair comment, 2015 was not the best on that front.

The H-space MGB will be a little more robust.  For starters, I already have a few stories stocked up.  Originally I wanted to copy a challenge of writing a story a day for a month as I’d seen MGExaminer do it on the MGU forum and it seemed like fun.  I had a few ideas and hammered out five in one week over the Christmas break.  Since then I’ve been writing a few more here and there whenever something else has stalled.  I have a buffer and keeping to a much more manageable weekly schedule (rather than attempting the daily schedule madness that wrecked me for parts of last year) should make it easier for this to settle into a regular feature.

This, of course, is dependent on the H-space Bestiary being good.  Some ideas might seem good at the time, but they don’t always pan out.  If it’s not working out and the interest isn’t there, I’ll give the thing a quiet burial and move on.

(Although I’ll probably keep writing the scene fragments for my ideas file.  I’m amazed I didn’t think of doing it this way sooner.)

Anyway, there’s your introduction to the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary.  If you have any further questions, stick ‘em in the comments below.

The first story will be posted tomorrow and the profile will follow on Friday.


(and to answer one question I know plenty of people want to ask.  I’m still trying with the next chapter of Succubus Summoning.  After the various fuck ups of 2014 and 2015 I’m not going to get people’s hopes up until I actually get something written down.  I’ll let you know as soon as I break through that block and get Phil’s adventures restarted again.)

7 comments:

  1. This is an awesome idea!!

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  2. Huh, after the chapter in Succubus Summoning where Phil learned about the geography of hell, I'd always assumed that the H-space and SS universes where one in the same. Either way, I think this is great.

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  3. I have to say I love this idea from you. You've made plenty of interesting monstergirls in the past, so seeing a unique girl's potential Bad End sounds great.

    All I hope is that not all the endings are just "Sucked dry until death then discarded". Part of the appeal of MGQ was that there were such a wide variety of Bad Ends(The only thing that bummed me out was that most fanfiction followed the "Vanilla" mamono like Alice or the Heavenly Knights, rather than the more unusual ones).
    Your protagonist can be drained away(like from an average succubus), conscious but helplessly absorbed(Anglerfish girl, Mud Golem Girl), permanently hypnotized(Siren), incorporated and left on display as part of the monstergirl(Paintgeist or Gargoyle), swarmed and perpetually buried within a mindless orgy(Seraph Eden, Frog Girls, Zombie Girls), caught off guard by an opportunist(the Imp, a tiny Trick Fairy permanently impaling herself on you and being too tight to remove)...

    I know I'll probably enjoy anything you write regardless, I just don't want all the Bad Ends to feel the same. "Bad" is a pretty subjective word after all...

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  4. Look forward to this should do several girls that even though there not the type to kill there partner it's still dangerous to do it unprepared.

    Example a Oni is looking for a good time and is slightly drunk kidnaps the first adventure she finds(or tricks him into sleeping with her) and its ends rather painfully with a broken pelvic. So while not a deadly result but still a semi-dark one.

    Hope to see some more Succubus Summoning soon. If you do get it running normally again any way we can have some more human characters/friends for the Main Character....that don't die in a few chapters?

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  5. Hey ME,
    Love your work, it's unfortunate you don't get more attention for it. I would really like to see some artwork though. Is there any chance you would commission an artist for some artwork and sell it with the stories?

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    1. Possible. I'll have to run the numbers. Ideally I'd like produce a nice, illustrated book. I don't have experience of more than basic ebook formatting. I'll see where I'm at with the number of stories later in the year. Maybe something like kickstarter (or offbeatr as kickstarter are fairly hostile to adult material) could work here - but I'll do some research to make sure I know what all the costs and requirements are likely to be. Crowdfunding has picked up a bad rep from people abusing it.

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    2. I think offbeatr got taken down lol.

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