Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Changes with M.E. Hydra books

I should have posted this earlier, but it's been a busy month yadda yadda.

A few weeks ago I received an email that eXcessica would be closing its doors and unpublishing all its books at the end of November.  First up, there's nothing controversial about this.  Excessica was started as a sort of writer's collective right before Amazon's Kindle blew the doors off self-publishing.  This was back when alternative book sites required "publishers" to have at least three authors in their stable and Selena Kitt wanted to both start her own career as an author and recognised there was a lot of untapped talent on Literotica that could be brought along for the ride.  I feel honoured and grateful to be one of those writers and have nothing but praise for Selena and her hardworking crew for having me along.

All good things must come to an end, and in an era where it's trivially easy for a writer to upload their work to Amazon and other places, there is no longer the need for writer's-collectives-cum-publishers.  It's time for us to make our own way, and I fully understand the decision.

What does it mean for M.E. Hydra books on Amazon and elsewhere?

As far as I know, the ones put out through eXcessica will be unpublished at the end of the month, so if you want to grab the old versions, you might want to do it pretty sharpish.  The books affected are Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, and the A Succubus for collections (6 of them).  The Sandwiched by novellas were fully self-published by me and won't be affected (I really should get back to finishing that series off!)

The books won't be gone for good.  As soon as I've sorted out the logistics of rights transfers and the rest, I'll be reuploading them under my own author account.  For Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, that will probably be right away as I'm happy with the current covers for those.  They'll just need some tweaks to the copyright page and the removal of the old logo and should be good to go.

As for the A Succubus for collections, I might use this as an opportunity to tweak these and rebrand the series as a whole.

As part of the rebranding I definitely want to redo the covers and number them as a series.

The other thing I might do is rejig the contents and running orders.  Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed links between characters and events, and realised these are all taking place in a shared universe.

This was not always the case.  Early on, I wrote them as standalone short stories, which means there are some that don't quite fit within that shared universe - the superhero parodies, that one science fiction story, some of the "Succubus vs." stories.

While I haven't put any books out for a while, I have continued to write stories.  Some have been Patreon-exclusives, others have been posted on Literotica.  I probably have enough for a new collection and some left over.  I'm thinking of replacing some of the older stories in the older collections, and then rebranding the collections as part of a much larger ongoing story in the same universe.

What do people think about that?

Go with the rebrand, or preserve the collections with their original line-ups?

Either way, expect the Succubus Summoning series to be reuploaded fairly quickly, and I'll likely follow with the new A Succubus for editions over the first half of 2022.  Maybe, if everything falls into place, a brand new 7th collection to follow the updated editions.

As for covers, I'm still checking on whether it's allowed, but the WOMBO dream app has thrown up a few pictures I wouldn't feel too bad about sticking on a book cover.


A Succubus for Halloween?


A Succubus for Freedom?


A Succubus for Remembrance?

What do you think?

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Wombo-ing up the House of Hellish Harlots website

This is a x-post from my patreon (where I posted a few more pics, coz they can't all fit in this post).

If you've checked out the House of Hellish Harlots website recently, you might have noticed it has a little bit more colour now.


My webdev skills are rudimentary at best (probably less, to be honest - when it comes to IT I'm more of the backend math model coding type).  It looks vaguely okay on my laptop, but I haven't been able to test it for other devices.  If it looks like ass on your display (rather than just garish - that's intentional! :D ), let me know.

The art is from the new viral AI art toy, WOMBO Dream, you might have seen floating around on social media.  You can play with it here:
https://www.wombo.art/ 

You feed it some keywords or phrases, and it spits out an impressionist painting in a variety of different styles (I'm guessing they're using some kind of neural network and trained it on a massive art catalogue).  Obviously, me being me, I fed it a bunch of filth and the results were... interesting.


Currently, the AI only really seems good for abstract and impressionist works.  It seems fairly difficult to get anything resembling a human form out of it, with "house7" below being the closest I got.  Most of the time it spits out a weird jumble of body parts and facial features that looks bad rather than weird or disturbing.


I like it more with buildings and room interiors.  The lines are still 'off', but they're off in a way that looks weird and hallucinatory.  Especially if you feed it conflicting terms such as "house" with "hellish" and "sexual pleasure"/"perversion".  That results in the AI blurring the lush voluptuous curves painted by the old masters with the regular lines of a building, and resulting in something that's 'off' in an interesting and slightly perverse way.  Perfect for the House of Hellish Harlots, which is more than it appears!


I'm not sure if the developers intended it as anything other than a fun toy, but it seems to me like a really good way to produce abstract art for album or book covers (especially for self-published authors).  Looking up the guidelines for use, the people that made the app don't want people trying to sell the artwork, but seem okay with people using it as album/book covers.  I don't know how long that will stay in place as I suspect other people will latch onto the usefulness fairly quickly.


In the meantime I thought some of these would make nice background art to brighten up the website.  It's a nice interim fix to hold me over until I can get some proper artwork commissioned.

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

HoHH Art Commission - Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress

After seeing how Pori turned out, I contacted the artist, and ran a poll for patrons to pick a HoHH harlot to have art commissioned for.  Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress won and this is the finished result.



Reception on Patreon has been pretty mixed.  I think a lot depends on how thicc you like your succubi.  Personally, I think it conveys her raunchiness pretty well, but I also understand it might not be everyone's cup of tea.  We all have different preferences.

I hope you enjoy anyway.



The artist is HunggryCroissant.  They have a gallery on Eka's Portal here, and they gave me this link as their artist page if you'd like to contact and commission them:
https://croissantx.carrd.co/

I've put aside a little war chest for character commissions, so I hope to get more harlots commissioned in the future.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.026

The public version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to version 0.026.  You can play it here.  There are 2 new harlots added in this release, taking the total count up to 42.

Cíocha Gadaí-na-Bod
The boobfairy.  If you like your monster girls deliciously evil, Cíocha is definitely your gal.  She's a little on the spiteful side.  For some reason, the fairies I add to the House have some of the nastiest Bad Ends, and Cíocha is no exception.  Make good choices and I hope you don't wince too hard.

If you do survive, you'll notice her mention a 'big sister'.  That is Cruiscíní.  I haven't finished her yet.  Cíocha is intended to be a one-two punch scenario similar to Osculia's, where she returns right after with a more dangerous scenario.  That will be in a future release, as well as a solo scenario for the big boobfairy.

Misty
If you remember the very early demo I put out a couple of years ago, there was a fog succubus that killed the player if they dallied too much on the way to the House.  I've given her a harlot scenario.  It's fairly short and simple.  This is close to the original idea I had for how the scenarios would be (so the project wouldn't take too long).  I think I might rattle off a few more like this over the next month or so, just to pump the numbers up a bit.

I've also messed around with some fonts to hopefully make the site a little bit easier to read.  My webdev skills are distressingly basic, so we'll be stuck with plain text for a while until I can get hold of some nice artwork to pretty things up a little.

As I'll be maintaining, the Patreon version is a month ahead.  They're on v0.027 and Suffocatrix Assphyxia finally makes an appearance within the House.  If you want to check that out and help support the project, follow the link here.

As always, any feedback gratefully received.  November was a rough month for some personal reasons, so v0.027 was a small release.  December is also shaping up to be very busy with other things, so I expect that to only add 1 or 2 harlots as well.  I'll post more in detail on that in a couple of days.