A Succubus for Christmas is out!

It's publication day!  Or rather, second publication day.  My 1st collection, "A Succubus for Christmas and other tales of Devilish Delights" is now live on Amazon (and other ebook stores) and ready to buy.  You can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Christmas-other-Devilish-Delights-ebook/dp/B0B66LRCT4

And the obligatory back cover blurb:

Beautiful, seductive, enthralling, sensual, irresistible... deadly.

The succubus is an enduring icon of myth – a demon that seduces and sleeps with her prey before taking their life and soul.  In this collection M. E. Hydra brings you thirteen erotically charged tales of sexy succubi and other exotic creatures.

In “A Succubus for Christmas” a man discovers his surprise sexy gift also possesses a dark side.  “The Masterton Covenant” asks how much would you risk for one night of perfect pleasure.  Four men are taken to a very special establishment in “Flesh Pitchers of Prague”.  A tough demon slayer discovers why ‘men can’t fight them’ in “Slayer vs. Succubus”.  A man is drawn into a deadly yet delectable web by a sexy spider woman in “Arachne’s Web”.

You will be enthralled, aroused, and terrified in equal measure by these and other tales of dark, seductive beauties.  They’ll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares...

This is a republication of my 2010 short story collection.  My previous publisher, Excessica, has sadly closed their doors, so I'm republishing my old books under my author account.  To mark the republication I've added a new cover and an afterword detailing where the stories first appeared and the inspiration behind them.

The others will follow over the next few weeks.  I'm also hoping I'll kick my lazy ass in shape and get that brand new 7th collection finished before the end of year as well (or at least early next year).

A Succubus for Christmas is available for pre-order

A Succubus for Christmas and other tales of Devilish Delights is now available for pre-order on Amazon.  You can find it here.

Here is the obligatory blurb:

Beautiful, seductive, enthralling, sensual, irresistible... deadly.

The succubus is an enduring icon of myth – a demon that seduces and sleeps with her prey before taking their life and soul.  In this collection M. E. Hydra brings you thirteen erotically charged tales of sexy succubi and other exotic creatures.

In “A Succubus for Christmas” a man discovers his surprise sexy gift also possesses a dark side.  “The Masterton Covenant” asks how much would you risk for one night of perfect pleasure.  Four men are taken to a very special establishment in “Flesh Pitchers of Prague”.  A tough demon slayer discovers why ‘men can’t fight them’ in “Slayer vs. Succubus”.  A man is drawn into a deadly yet delectable web by a sexy spider woman in “Arachne’s Web”.

You will be enthralled, aroused, and terrified in equal measure by these and other tales of dark, seductive beauties.  They’ll give you pleasures beyond your wildest dreams, and terrors beyond your darkest nightmares...

This is a republication of my 2010 short story collection.  My previous publisher, Excessica, has sadly closed their doors, so I'm republishing my old books under my author account.  To mark the republication I've added a new cover and an afterword detailing where the stories first appeared and the inspiration behind them.

These are mostly my early stories before I started to tie them together into a shared universe.  One of them, "Arachne's Web", can only be found in this collection and might arguably be the best one in there.

If you already have the old collection, you probably don't need to pick up the newer version, but I'm certainly not going to say no if you wish to buy it to support my future writing!  I'd appreciate reviews if people can give them, but this is erotica (and fairly weird erotica at that!), so fully understand people wanting to remain anonymous with their purchases.

The ebook is scheduled to go live on Friday (15th), but is available for pre-order now.  I'm not normally the best at self-promotion, so I'm trying to give a little more pre-warning than usual.  A spike of sales is usually good for pushing a book up the ranks and helping more readers to discover it.

More importantly, I hope you all have fun reading it!

Story Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas

Despite getting distracted by various things, I still want to get those old short story collections back up for sale again.

One thing I wanted to add was a little segment at the back detailing the inspiration behind the stories.  Writing them (or rather rewriting them as I wrote some for Christmas and Valentine's Day a while back) did unfortunately lock me up last month and is part of the reason why I've been a little quiet recently.  It's usually the non-fiction that locks me up, for some reason.  It's why I stopped blogging on almost anything other than documenting recent releases.

In this case I wasn't happy.  What I was writing felt self-indulgent.  I know I'm only trying to emulate what I've read in other horror short collections/anthologies, but let's face it, I'm not Stephen King and a previous publication history of "I uploaded them to Literotica" is not as interesting as a list of dates and original magazines the stories were published.

I think it might be better to use this segment to answer questions people might have on the inspiration for the characters and story, or to clarify things I intentionally left vague and cryptic.

Starting up is "A Succubus for Christmas", which has this line-up:

1) A Succubus for Christmas
2) The Masterton Covenant
3) Bubble Bath
4) Flesh Pitchers of Prague
5) Hookah'ed
6) Pool of the Undine
7) Slayer vs Succubus
8) Arachne's Web*
9) Wrapdance
10) The Coils of Aenictia
11) Squeezed
12) Happy Ending
13) Incall with a Succubus

*exclusive to the collection

If you've read the stories before and have any burning questions on them, fire away below.

That might be a little more interesting for me to write about than "I was inspired by a monster girl picture I saw on the internet and uploaded the story to Literotica on [insert date here]".

More Potential Covers for "A Succubus for Christmas"

 Getting closer, I think.

1. My current favourite (and why I put it first).  Abstract enough that the usual AI weirdness doesn't seem out of place.  I think I might change the font colour from gold to silver to make it stand out from the background.

2. Technically the 1st from filenames, but I thought I'd change the order to put the good one first.  This one has similar problems to the old pic I posted and is the weakest of the 4 options in my opinion.

3. Okay, but maybe not as good as 1 and 4.  I like that she appears to be wearing some kind of bondage mask.  Gold again might not the right choice for the font.

4. My second favourite.  The colours are nice and vibrant.  Has a decent impression of a feminine figure without falling into the uncanny valley problems.

Thoughts?

Playing around with potential covers for "A Succubus for Christmas"

I'm still playing around with Wombo Dream for potential cover prospects.  Christmas was a tricky one to get anything workable.

I had this as a candidate, but after adding the titles, I'm not so sure.  I think it might not quite be abstract enough to get away with looking weird.

Thoughts?

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas (part 3)

And the stories behind the stories for the remaining five tales from A Succubus for Christmas:


Wrapdance

The club and background comes from real life inspiration.  I was in Moscow and - after copious amounts of alcohol - found myself in a strip club where the girls gave out lap dances in a similar fashion to how they’re described here.  I changed the dancers to succubi and made the venue another Strip Club With A Dark Secret.  The real tension is the protagonist’s struggle between his body’s desire for primal pleasure and the mind’s desire to stay alive.  The story picked up an editor’s choice tag when it went up on Literotica.  This gave me a nice little ego boost at the time and made me think I was doing something right with my writing.


The Coils of Aenictia

This is another story inspired by artwork I’d seen on the internet.  This time it was of a lamia or slug-type monster girl engaged in unbirth.  I didn’t know that much about the vore fetish at the time.  The picture seemed sexy and it gave me an idea to give the protagonist a kind of twisted rebirth (to make a change from all the Sucked To A Withered Husk stories).  The planar catastrophe was another excuse to throw a clearly non-human monster girl into a contemporary setting.  Trying to think about how that catastrophe happened gave birth to hell-space, my goto setting for monster girls that aren’t an easy fit for a modern-day setting.


Squeezed

This was the second story I submitted to Literotica.  Succubi and similar monster girls are one interpretation of the highly seductive, sexually-dominant femme fatale.  Other classic examples come from super-hero comics (eg. Poison Ivy).  The character that eventually became Sister Squeeze was originally going to be in “The Embrace of Uvulu’ai” until I realised her bright and colourful powers were more suited to a comic book setting.  The story was also a fun opportunity to have a sideswipe at the so-called moral guardians who are less than moral themselves.


Happy Ending

The title is both a troll and an allusion to the euphemism of ‘Happy Ending’ (a sex act that gives a client an ejaculation at the end of a massage) used by massage parlours.  Erotic body-to-body massage given by a girl on top of an airbed is one of my favourite porn scenarios and I’ve used it a number of times in my stories (it’s also a lot of fun irl too ;) ).  It was a perfect opportunity to bring back Annette Brite and also add a sneaky reference back to “Bubble Bath” (yes, the stunning girl Clive walks past as he enters the shop is the succubus from “Bubble Bath”).  The troll part is an acknowledgement that most of my stories, while sexy, often don’t end well for the central characters.  The title reflects that irony.


Incall with a Succubus

And then the real happy ending.  I knew I couldn’t constantly write about ‘dude encounters sexy demon girl, demon girl sucks out his life/soul’ without it starting to get repetitive and/or people starting to wonder if I had some deep-seated psychological problems about sex.  Horror (and horror films specifically) doesn’t have a good track record here when the central message of most slasher flicks can be summed as thus:  Have Sex And You Will Die!!!

I needed a ‘nice’ succubus and along came Nicole.  All the sexy goodness with none of that icky death stuff.  Maybe.  I wanted to leave enough hints of darkness so the readers don’t forget what she is (and a little uncertainty makes the sex more thrilling).  Jack Newman is a politician because it was a realistic way of establishing Nicole’s credentials as an exclusive escort and also because I liked the irony of a politician, normally a despised profession - with good reason - in fiction, being the one to get the ‘happy ending’.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas (part 2)

Carrying on with where the inspiration came from for the stories from my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.


Hookahed

This was the first story I submitted to Literotica.  It’s another old fantasy of mine.  For the early stories the plots were usually excuses to set up a twisted sex scene with hot demonesses.  Koontz’s unconventional appearance was inspired by news stories of a real life mob boss (think it might have been Vincent Gigante) walking around outside in nothing more than a bathrobe to make the authorities think he was crazy.  The idea of a mob boss with a harem of succubi at his command seemed too good not to use again, and so Koontz became another of my regular characters.


Pool of the Undine

Another story inspired by a monster girl picture I’d seen online, this time of a slime girl.  The weird cave out in the moors seemed like a nice location for her to hide.


Slayer vs. Succubus

This was intended as an affectionate subversion of the classic eighties action hero stereotype.  I love those films even though it’s obvious anyone behaving like that in real life would most likely fuck everything up epically.  Super virile action hero versus infernal mistress of temptation was never going to end well in my universe.  This is a story I’m torn on.  It’s fun, but it’s also very goofy.  Quite a few readers let me know they liked this one and I try to remind myself to write similar stories every so often to break up the flow of grimdark ones.


Arachne’s Web

This one is unique to this collection.  I’d wanted to do an Arachne story for a while, but unlike succubi, which are easy to hide in a modern-day setting, a demon with the lower body of a giant spider is a little more noticeable.  I made her a dream demon to get around this.  The non-sex part of the story was inspired by a real life (and tragic) news story of an otherwise successful Brit going on the run in the states after shooting his wife.

The writing of it is another story.  Selena Kitt spotted my work on Literotica and encouraged me to put a collection together for publication through eXcessica.  I knew it would crazy to expect people to pay for work that was already available for free online, so I decided to include at least one original story (ideally a novella) for the folks prepared to part with their cash.  That was this one and it ended up being a complete bitch to write.  I suspect this was because I knew I was writing something for publication rather than fun and some of those old niggling writer doubts about being good enough had resurfaced to fuck around with my productivity.

I hated the story at the time.  It was only when I came back later I saw how nicely the concepts and imagery (the way she ‘eats’ the memories of his past loves and replaces them with her) came together.  It’s my favourite of the collection.  It might make a decent horror film as well (hint hint, for anyone out there with experience of making such things).


I'll finish off with the last five stories on Friday.

Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas (part 1)

A couple of months back I wrote a post on examples of where I got my inspiration from.  I said I might expand on this for stories I'd already written and a few folk seemed interested.  Most horror collections include some musings by the author at the back as to where the stories came from.  I thought I'd copy that theme and run through the stories from my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas.

It's a behind-the-scenes look, so there might be a few spoilers if you haven't already read these stories.


A Succubus for Christmas

I wanted a Christmas-themed story to enter into one of Literotica’s online story competitions.  For a while I was struggling to think of a way to combine succubi and horror with holiday niceness, and then the little black cells vomited out this idea and it fell into my lap pretty much fully formed.  At the heart it’s the classic horror genie trope—character finds artefact containing wish-granting entity, gets good stuff . . . but what about the cost.


The Masterton Covenant

Another classic horror trope—old guy in a bar telling a tale of woe.  It’s one of the few stories I’ve written using first-person PoV.  I’m not a big fan of using it for horror as—found footage stories and obnoxious stylist tricks aside—it’s a fairly glaring tip off the protagonist survives.  In this case it’s the point of the story.  He’s trying to warn others but he knows that ultimately the succubus left him alive as bait to draw in fresh prey.


Bubble Bath

This is an old fantasy—a sexy succubus coalescing out of bubbles to share a sexy bubble bath with a(n) (un)lucky dude.  This is the first story to feature Annette Brite, New Age shop owner and possible witch.  In the original idea she was a wizened old crone with a market stall.  I changed her into the alluring and mysterious owner of a New Age shop and realised this was an interesting character I could reuse in further stories.


Flesh Pitchers of Prague

The inspiration for this came from various artworks I’d seen of monster girls that were pitcher plant hybrids.  This was the 7th story I posted up on Literotica and my old short story writing instincts were returning with a desire to add more background and story to flesh out the obligatory sex scenes.  Strip Club With A Dark Secret is another classic horror trope (Think From Dusk ‘til Dawn, Vamp, etc.).  In those stories the survivor is usually the morally upstanding one that never wanted to be there in the first place.  I deliberately subverted that as brutally as I did to knock readers off guard.  The imagery for the final scene was inspired by a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.


I had a set plan when picking the stories for my first collection.  The first is a generic succubus story.  The second lays out the general background for people unfamiliar with the succubus myth.  The third expands on the myth and shows more imaginative interpretations.  The ending of the fourth is to let the reader know we’re not fooling around here – this is an erotic horror collection.

I'll continue running through the other stories later this week.

Reviews, Lovely Reviews (Me this time)

Reviews are like buses, wait ages for one to come along and then you get two in the same week.

Here’s a lovely one for A Succubus for Halloween on The Horror Fiction Review:

http://thehorrorfictionreview.blogspot.com/2012/05/may-2012-reviews.html

The horror writer in me that died over a decade ago might have unearthed himself and done a little jig after reading that. As a quasi-self-published author, I always have doubts about whether my work is actually good enough to see print. Reviews like this are great for kicking those bad thoughts back down into the cellar where they belong.

And a nice (and detailed!) one from Tera for A Succubus for Christmas over on The Succubi’s Tale blog:

http://www.succubus.net/blog/2012/05/04/a-review-of-a-succubus-for-christmas/

That one did remind me I’ve been neglecting the fun stories of late. I haven’t written anything like "Slayer vs. Succubus" for a while, something I intend to correct. Don’t worry. I’m not going to stop with the dark stories either. Balance is good. Always keep the audience on their toes. That way they don’t see it coming when you sock them in the guts…

I haven’t seen a big increase in sales after the reviews. That’s fine. Contrary to what some people say about us self-published ruffians, money is not our sole motivation. I’m having fun writing and I’m glad to see I’m not embarrassing myself with my efforts.

I think I might hold off on letting the folks know about the pseudonym for a while—not sure how they’d take to “kinky and depraved”. :D

More Hentai Game Badness: Pretty Warrior May Cry

Pretty Warrior May Cry is a game I stumbled on in the dlsite store while looking for the link to the Violated Hero game I reviewed last week. It already comes with an English translation and there are two versions. The Enhanced Edition has more scenes (but not more monster types) and a custom scenario editor, but personally I think the original 3D graphics are better than the 2D-ised graphics of the enhanced version.

Rather than a parody of the Capcom classic Devil May Cry as the name suggests, Pretty Warrior May Cry is a fun (and filthy) little Dungeon Keeper clone. If you can remember that far back, you’ll remember Dungeon Keeper was an old PC game with a great concept—you’re the bad guy building a Deathtrap Dungeon to fend off hordes of invading heroes. My enthusiasm for the original waned after the first couple of levels when it strayed from that concept and morphed into a Real Time Strategy clickfest (a genre I don’t have much truck with unless it involves mowing down enemies in a buggy to Emperor’s "Thus Spake The Nightspirit"). Pretty Warrior May Cry sticks closer to the original idea. You play an evil (persecuted) wizard on the run. The goal is to dig out a labyrinth to hide in and populate it with monsters to slow down and take out those pesky pursuing heroes.

Of course, as it’s a hentai game, your monsters are going to do more than just attack the heroes…

An effective way to keep a marauding knight "occupied"

Whenever a monster comes across a hero of the opposite sex it will attempt to rape them, triggering a sex scene in the right hand panel. You have a faithful little demonic eye creature-thing that allows you to toggle between various molested heroes.

Sadly, aside from some corrupted and converted heroines, Lilith above is the only actual monster girl in the game. The rest of the game is hardcore ryona, which means using your monsters to inflict as much rape, degredation and abuse onto the hapless female wizard and swordswoman characters as possible (and even poor Lilith, if you leave her in a room with a giant). And I mean a lot of abuse. We’re talking tentacles, devil dogs and even girls being held down and buggered up the ass by enormous dragons in some extremely graphic scenes.

That kind of stuff isn’t really my cup of tea, but the actual game is well put together and surprisingly playable. My main disappointment was the lack of female monsters. There isn’t really anything past the Liliths you start with.

Trust me. The other ways of taking out the female warriors are far worse...

It’s always a difficult choice for any kind of ‘kink’ erotic game. Do you throw in lots of different kinks to attract different audiences and risk pleasing no one, or focus on one particular kink to guarantee an audience? In this case the developers, 7th dream, have set their sights on the ryona crowd. Succubus fans need only bother with the trial version.

I like the concept though. I would love to see a similar game done with more of a monster girl focus. Given the success of Monster Girl Quest, there might even be a big enough audience to make it worth doing. If 7th Dream are out there listening, or maybe other developers, I might have a few ideas I can contribute… ;)

Numbers from a Newbie Writer's First Year

Here's the latest post I put up on the Self-Publishing Revolution blog detailing how my first year as a self-published(ish) writer has gone. Thanks to everyone who supported me through buying my books and I hope you enjoyed them! More to come next year!

I had a nice early Christmas present when my third quarter royalties came through. I was expecting this to be fairly light, but it also included some October sales, which was when my third collection of short stories, A Succubus for Halloween, came out. The amount this quarter was $600, a nice little sum right before Christmas.

That takes my total profits, after taking out initial setup costs, author copies and seller’s/publisher’s cuts, to $1,300 for my first (kind of) year as a writer. Obviously this is nowhere near the same ballpark as self-publishing titans Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath, but this is all money in the black, with the only outlay being my free time spent in an activity I enjoy doing anyway.

I put out three collections of short stories, with A Succubus for Christmas coming out October 2010, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day coming out February 2011 and A Succubus for Halloween arriving October 2011. Christmas and Valentine’s Day were originally priced at $5.99 and this was dropped to $3.99 about halfway in the year after eXcessica head honcho Selena Kitt did some experimenting on pricing. Christmas and Valentine’s Day sold just under 200 copies and Halloween just over 100, making 500 books (print + ebook) in total for the whole year. It’s a modest amount, but not bad considering collections of short stories rarely sell well and my subject matter is about as far from the mainstream as you can get! :)

More promising is the growth. Christmas and Valentine’s Day sold nearly 200 each over the whole year. Halloween came out at the end of the third week in October and my royalties run up until the end of October, which meant it managed those hundred-and-so sales in the first week. Baby steps, I know, but they’re going in the right direction.

Unsurprisingly, the lion’s share of these sales was through Amazon, but they are not the only game in town. I can understand why some might think Amazon’s current dominance is a cause for concern, but I suspect if Amazon really started to abuse that dominance to the detriment of writers and readers, they’d quickly find themselves outstripped by one of their competitors in the way Nintendo was usurped by Sony in the console wars of the ‘90’s. For the moment they’re fantastic and a budding writer would be foolish not to take advantage of what they have to offer.

Writers shouldn’t restrict themselves to only Amazon. Having their own webpage for direct sales can be very useful once they’ve built up a following. By promoting eXcessica’s coming soon link for A Succubus for Halloween heavily on my personal blog in the month leading up to its release I was able to generate 40 sales, nearly half of the total for that book, directly through eXcessica’s own store (which also took Halloween to the top of their bestsellers list, yay! Now if only I can match Selena’s sales out in the rest of the big bad world. :)).

For people looking to self-publish as a route to fame and riches, these numbers aren’t very exciting. If I was trying to make a living as a full-time professional writer, 500 sales and a return of $1,300 for the year would be horrifying. Thankfully I’m not, so I can feel chuffed about the numbers instead of worrying about what I’m going to live on next year.

Next year I plan to put out my first novel and a fourth collection of short stories. I don’t know where the path is going to take me, but it’s going to be fun to find out!

All the best for 2012!

2011 2nd Quarter Royalties

My second quarter royalties for 2011 came in from eXcessica today. At $180 I think it's safe to say I won't be handing in my notice at work tomorrow. :)

$180 is still $180. Can't sneeze at that. Both Succubus for Christmas and Succubus for Valentine's Day have sold nearly 150 copies each now. With Succubus for Halloween coming out next month (more on that later!) I'm hoping it'll create enough of a bump to take the overall year up to somewhere between one or two grand. I know my stories are far too extreme to ever trouble the mainstream, but it's nice to have a little sideline and maybe sow the seeds for a little longterm notoriety.

Thanks to everyone who bought the books and I hope you enjoyed them. Plenty more on the way if all goes to plan ;).

Now the question is, how much of that $180 to plough into a nice book cover for Succubus Summoning 101 after I finally acknowledge I'm too rubbish to do it properly myself...

Spiders, Silk and Sex

Oo-er, Succubus Summoning 201 has gone a bit...spidery. When the chapter goes up later this year (once I've got the whole arc down in rough draft), it'll probably be my first story up on Lit featuring that Monster Girl staple: the spider-girl or arachne.

It's not my first spider-girl story. Both of my previous spider-themed stories (there's one in the forthcoming Valentine's Day collection) managed to bypass Literotica somehow. Here's a taste of what you're missing from "Arachne's Web" in A Succubus for Christmas and other tales of Devilish Delights.

Gordon was underground, but he wasn't sure where. Unlike the other vaults he'd visited in his dreams lately, this room was so vast he couldn't see the walls in any direction. Old cobwebs formed gauzy hangings all around him. Dream or no, Gordon didn't want to see the spider that had produced them.

He picked his way through a forest of silken threads. They were sticky and stronger than they looked. Pulling them off his naked skin when he accidentally brushed into them was energy-sapping work.

Gordon heard a chuckle from above him, feminine and dripping with evil.

“So eager to return to my parlour, little fly,” the voice said.

Gordon looked up and saw Arachne sitting above him. She was completely naked and sat, suspended, in the white threads as easily as if they were a hammock or swing chair. Her green eyes sparkled and her luscious red lips curled up in a cruel smile as she looked down at him.

“You can't resist my body,” Arachne said with a smile.

Struck dumb, Gordon said nothing. He was mesmerised by the curve of her tits.

Arachne leaned back and opened her legs, baring the hairless gash of her pussy to him. As Gordon watched she reached down and caressed her smooth labia. One of her fingers slipped inside and her breathing roughened to soft little gasps. Gordon felt his own arousal grow as he watched her play with herself.

Arachne's gasps grew louder and huskier until finally she gave a strong shudder. He watched, astonished, as a stream of thick white liquid jetted from her pussy. The liquid solidified in the air to form white strands that floated down and stuck to his exposed flesh.

What the? Gordon thought.

It was silk, just the same as the old threads around him.

“I'm not letting you go now,” Arachne said, her luscious lips curled up in a cruel smile.

She sprayed more white fluid from her pussy and it rained down on Gordon in gossamer filaments. He tried to brush the strands away, but they adhered to his skin and tangled together like a net. When Gordon tried to back away he tripped over and fell into a dense knot of threads. Hopelessly entangled, Gordon could only look on as Arachne, moaning and sighing with pleasure, squirted more and more strands of silk over his supine form. They looked feathery-light, but Gordon couldn't break them and soon his arms were entangled as well.

Arachne laughed at his struggles. She flipped over onto her front, her hands grasping old threads as if they were ropes. There was something unnatural about her body, as if her arms and legs had joints in the wrong places.

Gordon paused in his struggles and watched in astonishment as Arachne descended down from above, supported by a thick white rope of silk extruded from her pussy. She abseiled down like a spider, flipping as she approached the ground to land lightly on her feet.

What was she? Gordon thought. The lithe curves of her body were absolutely breathtaking as she walked towards him, but there was something utterly alien about her that registered in his most primal senses. He resumed his struggles, desperate to escape the thing walking towards him.

Go on, you know you want to read what happens next...

"A Succubus for Christmas" is available!!!

It's out!!!

I've been waiting for this moment for a long time. My first collection of short stories is out from eXcessica.

You can buy it directly from them here.

The ebook is also available from smashwords here.

The print version can be bought from Amazon right here. Currently it's ranked #5,585,978 in books. There could be room for improvement there... :)

If you have one of those new-fangled Kindle things (I envy you!), you can even get the Kindle version here. I have no idea how good/bad being ranked #42,575 is, but having a ranking means someone's at least already bought a copy (I think), so yay!

Huge thanks to Selena and eXcessica for the formatting and getting the book out there. I hope everyone enjoys the anthology as much as I did writing it.

This is where I go out drinking to celebrate.

In a few months I'll be out drinking again to drown my sorrows when I find out I've only shifted five copies. :)

Closing the gap

Long time followers of my writing on Literotica and Storiesonline (Eep - I didn't even get round to posting any of SS201 on there!) will notice I haven't exactly been prolific for 2010. This is because I've been busy creating short story collections for eXcessica and they run a year in advance. I was hoping to fill in the gap by continuing Succubus Summoning 201 but...more on that later.

Anyway, the good news is that the gap is about to close. New Many-Eyed Hydra material is on the way. "A Succubus for Christmas" is out in two weeks time. A lot of the stories will be familiar already, but there's a brand new story that's long and packed to the brim with the usual mix of sex and horror. I'm currently finishing off the new stories for the third collection, the unsurprisingly titled "A Succubus for Halloween". I'm thinking of entering one or maybe two of them into Literotica's Halloween competition running at the moment, mainly to show I haven't dropped off the face of the planet.

The bad news is that the reason I've looked like I haven't been as prolific as usual, is because I haven't been as prolific as usual. Some combination of real job impinging, deadline allergy, tricky story plots and other things have put a ball and chain on my writing. Still working on fixing that.

Phil's adventures in Succubus Summoning 201 are on hiatus at the moment, although you might have already guessed this since it's been a few months since 202 came out. Don't be alarmed. This isn't 'hiatus' as in 'the lead singer slept with the drummer's girlfriend and now the band all want to kill each other' hiatus. I don't think it's fair for me to continue to release the chapters in the stuttering dribs and droughts that are happening at the moment. When it comes back, it'll mean I've got a good chunk of the 201 arc written with the next few chapters already in the bank.

Hmm, NaNoWriMo starts next month...

Escaping the Writing Doldrums

I suppose we all get stuck there at some point. A combination of real life and a heavy workload have left me becalmed for what feels like a couple of months now. That’s maybe the thing that frustrates me the most about my writing. I’m fortunate in that I never have any shortage of ideas. There’s a black pool of sludge at the back of my mind that spits out new and ever more inventive pieces of depravity at regular intervals.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the actual process of setting words to paper (or typing them onto a screen), I’m painfully slow. I’m a chiseller. Each word has to be painstakingly chipped out of stone rather than flowing freely from my fingers.

Okay, sometimes the words flow freely and it’s a wonderful thing.

And then there are the other times...

It’s almost like a natural lifecycle of the creation process. At the beginning the idea is fresh and new and I thrash out the first few pages in a burst of excitement. Then it depends on whether I can ride that crest of excitement to the finish or not. I’ve started a number of stories thinking, ‘it’s only a quick one, 3,000 words at most, it’ll only take a couple of days’, only to see those stories balloon to around 4,000 words with the ending still off somewhere in the distance.

Then it starts to get tough. I start to get antsy. The story’s too long. There must be too much padding in there. I get scratchy. Doubts set in. Is that the correct grammar? Maybe this sentence would be better, or this one.

That’s the worst by the way, getting stuck on That One sentence. By the time I’ve got it down to my satisfaction, I’ve invariably forgotten what I was going to write next. Cue another lengthy pause while I try to remember what that sentence was supposed to be, because obviously it was perfect and much better than the alternates I’m thinking of now (it wasn’t, I just think that). And then, yeah, the whole thing grinds to a shrieking halt. I look at the clock and realise an hour’s gone by and I’ve written a couple of lines.

I think it’s mostly impatience. I want to move onto the next idea. The current idea is fully formed, a solved puzzle, I just haven’t got round to committing the actual words to the screen and until I do it’s clogging up the pipes. Normally I can get round this and beat distraction behaviour by having another story become my distraction behaviour. It’s fine unless I’m around a deadline. Then I’m stupid and tell myself I should only be working on the one story, and then end up getting nothing done as distraction behaviour sends me off to play computer games or randomly surf the internet.

I’ve got two stories holding up an overdue third collection (and other projects!). They’re good ideas, but they’re also complicated and they’re at that point where scratching out each paragraph seems to drag out longer and longer. It was the same for “Arachne’s Web” in my first collection (out next month if you’ll excuse the shameless plug), but I dragged it over the line and was ultimately pleased with how it turned out. It’ll be the same for this pair I’m sure.

So, has anyone else experienced the same? How did you escape your own writing doldrums?

Win a Kindle 3!

Excessica is running a Scavenger Hunt to win a Kindle 3 and other goodies. You can read about the details here. The kindle will come pre-loaded with a collection of e-books including my very own "A Succubus for Christmas".

To enter you need to find the little scavenger hunt graphics. One of them is buried (okay, lightly covered in some fallen leaves) somewhere on this blog. Happy hunting!

Hehe, now I bet you're glad I only post something like once every week!