Lifeboats and Contingency Measures

Hullo Patrons (and other people that read my blog).

Apologies for the cryptic nature of the post that sent you here.  While posting the Harlot Spotlight earlier today I received a warning that that particular post had some naughty no-no words in it and might be reviewed by Patreon's Orwellian "Trust and Safety" team.

It might be nothing, or it might mean a very big axe is hanging right over my account and about to fall.

If this does happen and my account suddenly vanishes overnight, I'd like to let you know I have already prepared a lifeboat and have contingency plans.

I've been running a mirror account on SubscribeStar, featuring all the same content I've posted on Patreon, for the past couple of years.  If my Patreon account does fall prey to the axe, you should be able to jump ship and be able to find everything that was on Patreon.

Here is the link:
https://subscribestar.adult/manyeyedhydra

I had a feeling Patreon might not take too kindly to me advertising a competitor on their site, hence a bit of skullduggery and a redirect to my personal blog.

Hopefully, it will turn out to be a dumb warning and nothing will come of it, but it always pays to be prepared.

If SubscribeStar turns out to be a problem and you know of other similar sites you use to fund creators, please let me know below.  You can't have too many lifeboats in these crazy modern times!

Oh, and here's a picture of Succuba from House of Hellish Harlots.  I'm not spending all the money on myself.  I want to make a good succubus/monster girl game!

Many-Eyed Hydra is on SubscribeStar!

I hope.

I think I've set it up okay, but there's always a chance I might have boomered something up.

I've been meaning to do this for a while and finally got around to it.  I know some people would like to support me, but have either ethical or technical problems with Patreon.  Given that Patreon has deplatformed people in the past with minimal warning, I felt it was also important to have a backup just in case their Trust & Safety Team decides to get Orwellian again.

I'm not sure how it will work out.  I'd like to give it a couple of months to see what they're like in terms of ease of payouts, etc.  If you're already on Patreon, don't jump across just yet.  If you're not but would like to support me (and receive early looks at new stories and game releases), I hope SubscribeStar meets your needs.

Currently, I've just added the latest "House of Hellish Harlots" release (v0.035).

Going forward I'm just going to be mirroring posts so both Patreon and SubscribeStar get the same posts and attachments.  You won't need to subscribe to both.

(I have no idea how I'm going to manage polls across the two sites.  Combine the numbers?)

Anyway, it's another funding option, and diversifying income sources seems pretty important nowadays.

Here's my SubscribeStar page:

https://subscribestar.adult/manyeyedhydra

Let me know if there are any obvious screwups.

Some Quick Notes on Patreon vs Blog/Literotica

Seen a few concerns about me paywalling everything behind Patreon and whether I'm going to post stories on Literotica again.  I thought I'd address them here.

I'm always conscious of a need to give people something in return for their hard-earned money, so I want to produce at least one thing (short story, CYOA scenario) for patrons every month.  I should stress these are temporary exclusives.  The two CYOAs I've done were later posted to the internet.  The short stories will find their way into later ebook short story collections.

Anything past that first item is open to be either posted to Literotica or held back as an ebook collection exclusive (I do like to have a few of these to entice people into buying the books).

This would work better if my productivity wasn't quite so painfully slow at the moment.  I'm aware of it and trying my best to fix it.

So, no, I've not quit Literotica or posting stories for people to read for free.  I just need to shake off this annoying pernickity perfectionism that's crept into my writing process and get back to being a carefree pulp writer of succubus smut again.

The Patreon Problem

Another xpost from my Patreon.  I'm trying to get all of this out of the way so I can hit the ground running with my regular writing as soon as 2019 hits.

Thank you to the people sending me comments over the past couple of days.

In case you were unaware, Patreon have been de-platforming creators on what appear to be ideological or political grounds.  I object strongly to this for both ethical and practical reasons.

Ethically, I believe it wrong for a company to discriminate on political or ideological affiliation and hide this behind a gauze of vague "hate speech" rules.  This has been happening far too regularly and companies that play these games deserve to go out of business.

Practically, it is hard for me, as a creator, to justify spending lots of time and energy building up a following on Patreon when my account can be yanked at any time on a whim by their Trust and Safety team.  Patreon have as much as admitted they're making up the rules as they go along with respect to their ToS.  This makes them a very unsafe and untrustworthy platform for creators, as we can be terminated at any moment for not adhering to rules that are subjectively enforced and can change at any time.

At this point I'm not sure what to do.  The ethical thing would be to close everything down and refuse to countenance Patreon's BS.  But this would also hurt me and the people who wish to support my writing (I've heard you, thanks for your comments and support).

I don't like Patreon and would like to move everything over to a more political neutral platform (ideally one that sees a "Trust and Safety Team" for the Orwellian nonsense it is) as soon as a reliable competitor emerges.  Any suggestions here will be gratefully received.

I also need to work something out for the patrons who no longer feel they can keep an account up on Patreon in the light of Patreon's Orwellian nonsense.  If you supported me during November and December I still owe you a boob monster girl short story and the next CYOA.  I'll need some way of getting those to you when they're done.  Suggestions again gratefully received.

And once again, I'm really sorry for wasting good writing time on this political shite.  I know you're here for sexy succubus smut, not to hear me sperg out about free speech.  Unfortunately, this is something I've always held a fairly absolutist position on, largely out of self-interest.  I write horror.  I write erotica.  While we might not always be first in line, we're usually somewhere in the queue when it comes to banning people and stripping their income.  That's why it's important to always take a stand against censorshit whenever it rears its ugly head.

Blegh.  I just wanted to write sexy succubus smut.

Anyway, have a lovely New Year's Eve out there, ya filthy animals!  Let's all hope for a better 2019. 

-manyeyedhydra

Something for Patrons - Stealth Tuckers

This is a xpost from my Patreon (which I will likely be exiting soon in light of the Orwellian creepiness they've displayed recently).  This is currently for paying patrons, but I might expand it to whatever platform I move to in 2019 if there's interest.

First up, apologies for the quietness this December.  Some other-life stuff cropped up at the start of the month and by the time I was through it I was caught up in the holidays.

And then Patreon decided to shit the bed…

I'm not going to go into it in great detail, but I am of the opinion Patreon is no longer a safe or trustworthy platform for creators.  If it wasn't for the fact other work had caused my current writing projects to fall behind schedule, I would have already cancelled my account here.

More on this later, but for now I thought I'd do a better job of managing expectation and lead off with the more positive stuff first.

First, as far as I'm concerned, everyone who has subbed to me up until December is owed a sexy boob monster girl short story and an advance look at the next monster girl CYOA.  I intend to stick to that plan regardless of what happens here.  If you no longer wish to use Patreon in the light of the Orwellian nonsense they've been pulling recently (or support me—I'm fully aware my own output has been very erratic), I fully understand.  If you have been a backer up until now, I will try to get the projects to you as soon as they are completed.

Whatever happens, I do want to thank the people here that have supported me, even for this brief period of time.

Because of the nature of my work, I'm aware a lot of you are uncomfortable about seeing your names in any kind of credits list.  However, I think I might have a sneaky solution that might be of interest.

All of my stories contain references to writers, movies and bands that I've enjoyed over the years.  These are usually reflected in the names of characters, but I'll sometimes use them as references for place names (street names, etc).

I should also add that I don't do "Take That's."  I only ever reference things I've enjoyed, so even my most feckless and/or despicable characters are named after creators/creations I like.  This is because of a story I heard (possibly apocryphal) about Wes Craven naming his iconic Freddy Krueger after a bully who used to torment him at school.  It might have been initially intended as a Take That, but then Freddy Krueger became a horror icon.  My imagination pictures that bully looking at a film poster years later and thinking, "I used to beat this runt up at school and he went on to name a horror icon after me, how cool is that!"  So, no Take That's, ever.

More recently I've been moving away from this.  It's fine for a random nobody on Literotica, but starts to look icky on a sort-of erotic horror writer with multiple books published on Amazon, especially if people come to the erroneous conclusion they were intended as disses.

However, this does leave me with something I can give back to those of you who've supported me here.  Whatever happens in the future, I'm still going to be writing stories and those stories will have characters and places that requires names.  It doesn't even need to be a name.  It can be a little snippet of description—something you'll be able to recognise and think, I helped fund this.

If you would like to be included in this, please comment below with the name or little descriptive tag you'd like to see used in a story at some point.  If you want, also add your favourite monster girl or fetish and I'll try to use your reference in an appropriate story.

Just to be clear, this is just a minor name or descriptive tag rather than any insert characters.  When it comes to storytelling, I always do what I feel is right for the story first.  On that note, it's quite likely your name might get dropped on a less-than-stellar example of humanity (my succubi do love slurping up assholes).  If you really really don't want this, let me know and I'll try and apply your moniker to a less-assholish doomed succubus meal instead (my succubi also love slurping up the innocent as well).

Also, if you'd prefer even this sneaky reference to be totally anonymous, feel free to DM me rather than commenting.  My aim is to put a private list together and dip into it for future stories.

(And maybe even grow that list with future subscribers if this political nonsense blows over, or an apolitical competitor to Patreon emerges.)

Obviously, I can't put a timeline on when I'll sneak your reference in—there are over a hundred of you for starters!

Once again, thanks for your support and apologies for the uncertainty.  I'll try to post again over the weekend while I try to figure out some backup plans for 2019.

Fuck Censorshit!

-manyeyedhydra

October 2018 plans

Here's a xpost from my patreon (I should be doing this for all public posts - during the late-stage panic of finishing Volumpula I kept forgetting to update here).

"Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" is out.  If you're a patron, you can grab that file from the relevant patron update post.  (If you're not a patron, fear not, I'll be posting it up on philome on Monday.)

Please let me know what you think - what worked, what didn't (and most importantly - let me know if anything seems broken!)

After completing these things I usually like to review the code a little and see what can be cleaned up and what can be generalised to shave time off future scenarios.  How Twine/Sugarcube handles arrays is quirky, and will be something I need to keep in mind for future projects (I'll do a full post on that later as it might be useful for other people trying to make their own Twine games).  The other thing that was a little clumsy (behind the scenes) is handling repetition of text.  A late change I made was to tweak the text when the player returns to a passage after reconsidering struggling.   I want to try and avoid immersion-breaking repetition where possible, and there are probably built in tools to track how many times a player passes through a particular passage.

Overall, the development process took too long at 3 months.  Some things went a little awry in the middle there and deadline panicking turned the later stages into a bit of a death march.  I'm more productive when enthusiastic, so I think I'll look at project rotation system, so I have something to switch to rather than sitting around twiddling my thumbs when I hit a temporary wall on one project.

The CYOA development process consists of these stages:

1) Brainstorming and ideas - come up with the monster girl, sex scenes and a rough plan.
2) Create the map of the scenario in Twine.
3) Write out the text freehand.
4) Type up text.
5) Plug text into the map and add the HTML formatting (adjusting the map if the text calls for it)
6) Edit/Debug (99% errors are forgetting to put in the <</if>> statement.)

I think it might make more sense to take a break between each stage and work on a short story or even earlier stages of subsequent scenarios.  The development time might still be 3 months, but I'll also be getting shorts stories or half the next CYOA scenario out of the same time period.

Now let's move away from the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stuff and talk about what's next.

I have 2 short stories I'd like to get finished.  One will be a temporary patron-exclusive.  The other will be an entrant for Literotica's Halloween Competition.

I've also begun brainstorming the next "Escape the" scenario.  At the moment I'm thinking it will be an elf/dryad with a very unusual flower collection, but that will depend on if it pans out.

And that ends the Thursday update.  I'll try to make a regular thing of this on Thursdays even if the updates are of the "got captured by a succubus and her hellhound ate my homework" type.

Literotica's Nude Day Contest Results

Are in.

I didn't place, but I think I came close.  I was on the site just as the results were announced (which tends to be important if you want to check scores as winners usually have their entrants bombed by jealous eedjits right after the announcement).  The 3 winners were all in the 4.83-4.84 range and I think my story finished up around 4.82-4.83.  So, close.

Closer than I was expecting to be honest.  Usually I have to throw in a nice ending and a satisfying twist like this or this to place.  "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" has 3 idiots who end up being very very lucky.  But it's good fun and I know the "nice-ending" fans have been a little under-served of late with all the grimdark H-space stuff.

The main purpose was to get back on Literotica, and that was achieved.  I'm hoping this will continue.  I have a story I didn't quite get finished for last Halloween and hopefully by next Valentine's Day I will have retrieved "The Heart Squad" from its current production hell.

And also, you'll notice on the right...

roughly about here if I got my placement right--------------------->
(Which I... uh... didn't)

...I have a link button to my Patreon.

Yes, I finally managed to set one up if you missed my announcement yesterday.

My Patreon page is here.

I'm going to be using this to fund things like writing the Literotica stories, the H-space monster girl bestiary shorts and the CYOA scenarios.

A big thank you to the people who are already backing me.

Today I've mostly been writing bouncy paizuri scenes with a lovely pink slime girl.  That CYOA scenario is back on the go, even if it has spiraled a little out of control.  More updates to come as soon as I'm nearer completion.

Many-Eyed Hydra finally has a Patreon

I've faffed around with this for a while, to be fair.

First up, I'm terrible at asking for anything, so writing what is essentially a begging "giz us cash" post is alien and uncomfortable for me.

Turns out a couple of big dentist bills on the horizon are pretty good for making one swallow his pride.  (I had a root ripped out today after the crown snapped off a few weeks ago.  Ow.  I'm not sure which is more painful - the pliers or the imminent damage to the bank account.)

Secondly, there was a smidgeon of doubt.  Last couple of years I've been a bit all over the place - The H-space monster girl bestiary stuff, the long (probably too long) Monmusu Quest: Paradox walkthroughs, the bits of novels you haven't yet seen because they didn't quite get there and are currently on hiatus.  I didn't want to open up a Patreon until I felt confident I could give people value for their subscriptions.

After publishing the "Escape the Arachne" CYOA scenario and finally getting back to Literotica with a 13K word monster short story, "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy", I feel in a much better place productivity-wise.  Another story I got about halfway through before sticking on a backburner has recently popped up and punched me in the face with a "Finish me!"  One of the hopes I have with the Patreon is that it'll free me from thinking - "I can't do the short stories like before, I need to be writing novels and things I can put on Amazon for money," and I'll just get back to writing what feels right at the time (which usually ends up turning into a series/novel or short story collection anyway).

Finally, there was the fear.  Not starting up a Patreon is a bit like Schrödinger's cat.  As long as you haven't launched it, it can't actually fail.  Once you launch it, well... reality ensues and you have to face the prospect of it only making $5 a month.

Feh, if it happens, it happens.  No-one has an automatic right to be rewarded and recompensed for their creative endeavors.

(It would be fairly soul-destroying, though, so please support me if you can. ;) )

But we can swiftly move on past all that mewling.  I've finally got off my ass and got the Patreon up.  You can find it (and hopefully back me) here.

(Having a tooth ripped out does wonders for focus.)

Some nitty-gritty.

There is only one reward tier currently ($1).  According to Patreon this is taken out the moment you back me and then again at the 1st of each month.  I will add more tiers in future when I have a better idea of what I'm doing.

My plan is to give patrons early access to stories and CYOA scenarios.  As a test I've made available a later version of "Escape the Arachne" where I jiggled the math a little and added a "hard" mode (tests fail on ties rather than passing).

This will be my plan for future CYOA scenarios and regular (i.e. non-contest) short stories and serial chapters.  I don't plan to make any of these totally exclusive, mainly because it could come back to bite me in the ass if I really want to use a particular story in a future collection.  The period of exclusivity will likely be for a week before I post the story on Literotica or here.  For some stories it will be a lot longer as they won't be put on Literotica or the blog and instead will be earmarked for future ebook short story collections.

I'll probably also post snippets of various bit of works-in-progress.  Some might become something, some might not, but the individual scenes will likely still be enjoyable.  (I have a hot one with Nicole and Madam Voluptula having a lot of fun together lying on one of my hard drives somewhere.)

Anyway it's up.  I would love it if you could support me.

Also, as I'm new to this, I would love feedback on the page, tiers, etc.  If anything seems obviously broken, or awful and cringy, please let me know.  Expect the first couple of months to be a little amateurish while I figure stuff out.

I'm hoping this will motivate me to get some new fiction out.  It's about time I reclaimed Lit's Erotic Horror category...

EDIT: I've also added a handy button link.  It does appear to go to the right Patreon page through some black magic beyond my ken.  (I might be getting too old - I was convinced I had to hack the raw HTML in the button example somehow and yet it just goes straight where I want it to after pasting it into the blog's widget section.)

More Patreon Thoughts

Many thanks for the feedback and comments on my first post about this.  From them I gleaned a few things.

One, people are happy to ship a $1/month to support my writing.  That is reassuring.

The other is that this would be for my fiction writing.  The game reviews, walkthroughs, etc I post on the blog here are nice distractions, but not what people want to be funding via a Patreon.  This is also good to know.

If I hadn't checked first I suspect my Patreon page might have ended up an unholy kludge of talking about blogs, monster girl bestiaries, Japanese hentai games, half-baked game ideas, oh and did you know I sometimes write succubus porn.

Now I know it should be:

"Give me money to write erotic horror fiction featuring sexy succubi and monster girls.  I'm really good at it.  Here's my Literotica page so you can see."

The next point concerns when to go live.

I was originally planning to have the Patreon page up and running by now.  I had a rethink after seeing the excitement in some posts and also some justifiable concern in others (as I've not exactly been the most prolific on the new story front of late).  I don't want to hype things up, get people subbing, and then have that turn bad if the fifth or sixth story in a row I'm working on falls apart before I finish it and I have nothing to show for it by the middle of March.

I want to do this right.

So this is the plan.  I have two short stories on the go at the moment.  When I've finished both of them, I'll open up the Patreon.  I'm aiming to post one to Literotica's usual annual Valentine's Day contest.  The other will be a Patreon-exclusive.  This is so that when I launch, I will be launching with something.  It's also an incentive for me to stop dicking around and finish the stories I'm working on.

That's the plan for launch.  Next, for going forward.

I want to get back on Literotica (and similar sites) this year.  Last year I went for the big novel plans, failed and knocked my confidence a little, so I think a spot of rebuilding on Lit might do me some good.  And who knows, might even result in that long-awaited "Succubus Summoning 301" chapter finally getting posted.

This means taking a look at the other things I have running.

The H-space monster girl bestiary has drifted a little from its original purpose.  Initially it was supposed to be somewhere for me to park monster girl/sex scene ideas until I had a full story to put them in.  With the last few I found the opposite to be happening.  The idea started to expand into a full story in the process of writing it.  Rather than fighting this, as I was stupidly doing for most of last year, I'm going to write these out as full-length H-space stories like the ones I used to write in the past (like this, or this).

The playthrough series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox I'm currently in the middle of has proven to be more contentious than I realised.  I know some people like it from the comments, but I also know some people don't like it because they think it's taken over my fiction writing.  To be honest, me not posting any new stories for ages because there's seven or eight of them rotting half-finished in various notebooks has not helped dissuade this perception.  So my fault there.  I don't want to abandon the series halfway through because I don't think that's fair to the people currently enjoying it.  However, as part of these Patreon discussions, this would be a good point to consider what to move on to next.

One thing the series has been good for is getting me in the habit of keeping to a regular schedule.  (Yes, I broke it today for this, I know.  Writing this post was way more of an ass than I realised - I was supposed to post it yesterday for starters.)  The series even kept going unscathed during a 100-hour playthough of Persona 5, which is impressive considering my bad habit of occasionally going completely AWOL for a couple of weeks at a time on computer RPGs.  Now, if I can transfer this good habit of posting 750-1K words every Mon, Wed and Fri over to posting an original fiction series, we might be onto something.

Yes, I did try this last time with Okasare Kenny, and it didn't work out too well.  The difference there was I was trying to keep to a much more gruelling daily schedule with an idea I knew I should have kept to its original form of a series of novellas.

I think I should be able to keep to 1k word chunks every Mon, Wed and Fri without it swallowing up all my writing time and this would be something that would fit very well to the Patreon model.

So here's the feedback part.  I have a couple of ideas and - as part of a post where I'm looking to grab some Patreon bux - I thought it might be a good idea to toss them out there to see what people think.

1) Ongoing series - [4 (or more) Guys in MGQ-world]

Not MGQ world exactly (I don't write fan fiction), but a similar fantasy setting filled with sexy monster girls that are more interested in fucking the characters than fighting them.  The characters would likely be from our world (similar to the Jackson in HRPG-world stories I wrote a few years ago).  I imagine the mood will be pretty swingy on this one - goofy to start, but very dark in places, especially with the more vore-themed monster girls, but not as grimdark as say H-space.  I've been itching to go full horror-head on an MGQ-style setting for a while, and this might give me an excuse.

The advantages: I'm following on from the game playthrough series with an original fiction series in a similar setting (likely written in a similar style to what I use in the playthrough).  This should hopefully appeal to both the people that like the MGQ playthrough and people wanting original fiction with graphic sex scenes.  I also won't give a shit about quality.  This shouldn't sound like an advantage, but with me - who is way too nitpicky with his own writing - it might free me up to splurge thousands of words of fun adventure and sex on the page without obsessing over how "good" it is and locking up in the process.  Also, gamers in a fantasy world requires zilch in the way of research, removing another barrier to just having fun writing.

This is my preferred option, mainly because while thinking it up I came up with a few "meta" ideas for audience participation that would work very well with Patreon.

On the other hand, it is more MGQ-type stuff, which people might be sick of at this point.

2) Succubus Summoning

This is the option I think most people would want - me continuing Phil's adventures in bite-size chunks here on the blog.

The advantage here is obvious.  Those bite-sized chunks quickly become full chapters and then, before you know it, a full novel.  Plus, people have really really been wanting me to write this for a long time.

I think it also has the biggest danger of failing or falling behind schedule, because I do give a damn about this story and want it to be the best it can.

That said, one of my biggest problems is being nitpicky and obsessing over making a story the best it can.  Trying to hit 3 1K-word deadlines a week, every week might bust me out of that, or wreck me.  Not sure.  The thought of trying to make the series work under those conditions does scare the hell out of me, but maybe that's what I need right now.

High risk, but potentially very high reward.

3) Barry Lyle Goes Out In Fucking Style

You probably don't have a clue what this is.  It's the book I was trying to write in the first half of 2017.  An overwhelming army of succubi invade a city on earth.  Barry Lyle is a student at university when the sky turns black with demons.  After hiding for a while, he realises he has no chance of surviving and throws himself at a group of seven succubi in the knowledge that at least he'll die having his brains fucked out.  The problem: all 7 succubi saw him at the same time and succubi don't fight over food.  Barry is going to have to make a choice and the 7 succubi couldn't possibly let him make that choice without letting Barry have a taste of what they have to offer first...

This is an easy option for me.  The first quarter is mostly written, so I probably have about 3 or 4 weeks worth of updates without even having to do anything.

I don't know how strong the overall idea is.  The mood is all over the place on this one.  The setup is clearly comical, but in order to make Barry's decision to take the suicide-by-succubus option plausible, I had to show him what the other non-succubus demons were doing to the students they caught.  Those scenes... are not comical.

4) Various Mini-Series

Another easy option.  No big series, just various little ones.  I've done this before with the Jackson stories.  The reason you haven't seen the bee girl H-space story was because as I was writing it I thought this might make an interesting little mini-series about a team of soldiers trying to burn down a bee girl hive and eventually being overwhelmed sexily by various bee girl types.

This would make a decent filler option for those times when I need to take a breather on a longer ongoing series.

Those are some thoughts.  I estimate I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the MQ:P series (which will return Friday as normal).  I think it will be another month or so before that winds up.  This gives me some time to get a follow-up series prepped and ready.  (If I decide to go with Succubus Summoning, having the whole first chapter done would be a must before I'd even consider running it.)

Whew, this post was a real ass to write.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

Now, time to get back to that succubus Valentine's Day story.  (You are not fucking stalling out on me this time!)

Patreon Thoughts

Last year wasn't the best for me writing-wise, so I've been looking and thinking of ways to change things up this year.

Starting up a Patreon is something I've ummed and ahhed over for some time.

On the one hand, it's been around for a couple of years now and is pretty much proven as a good funding tool for creators.

On the other hand there's always that faint whiff of e-begging to it, of people seeking handouts rather than trying to produce work people want to buy.

I think the latter probably says more about my own stupid pride and upbringing, rather than being an accurate reflection on reality.  A lot of authors (and other creator-types) use Patreon nowadays and there isn't anything wrong with that.

(Although I do get a spot of the side-eye when I see an award-winning author announce their work is being made into a TV series one minute, while begging for rent money on Patreon the next.  But, to be fair, I don't know other people's circumstances, and if their fans are happy to hand over money, maximum power to all concerned.)

Anyway, this is what would I'd be looking to use Patreon funding for.

1) Smooth out my income.

I'm fortunate in that I made some good decisions in the past and got into the habit of living very frugally.  I don't make a lot of money from royalties, but between that, the occasional bit of supplementary income, and living damn frugally, I'm just about able to cover most of my living expenses.  That said, the income is not exactly consistent and varies from month to month (well, quarter to quarter).  Having an alternate revenue stream to fill in the gaps for those months when sales are low wouldn't be a bad thing.

2) Get payment for things that are otherwise difficult to monetize.

I'm talking about stories/series posted to Literotica* and other places, the H-space monster girl bestiary shorts, and - to a lesser extent - the humorous walkthroughs of monster girl hentai games** like I'm doing at the moment with Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2].  Having a Patreon for this type of stuff frees me from fretting over whether I should be doing work that pays bills/puts food on the table instead.

I notice a few regular writers on Literotica have their own Patreon accounts.  It doesn't seem a bad idea to be honest.  If I'd started up writing later, I probably would have had less reticence and got on Patreon earlier.

*As some have noticed, I haven't been as active on Literotica recently.  I'd like to fix that this year.

**This is more a sort of hobby, but I'm not going to turn it down if people enjoy the series enough to throw a couple of dollars my way.

3) A psychological trick to make me think I have a boss(es) and get that writing productivity back up again.

Because I know I'm my own boss, I have a bad habit of being a little too flexible on the hours I work.  It happens.  I'm writing.  The current section I'm on is proving tricky, so I think I'll take a breather, go play Playstation or something for an hour, then come back to it afterwards (SPOILER: Did not come back to it after an hour).

It's a little thing, but knowing people are giving me money every month to create new sexy succubus smut might trick my lazy ass into thinking I should stay at my desk and treat this as a proper job rather than a glorified hobby.  A more productive me means more hot succubus smut for people to enjoy.

4) A fund for commissioning art and other things.

Now this is where I'm most likely to use any Patreon money.  I've enjoyed seeing my characters brought to life by VezoniaArtz, RaidouZERO and others, and it's given me ideas to take projects further.  I'd like to push my succubi/monster girls and worlds to get the same kind of attention as KC's Monster Girl Encyclopedia, Okayado's Monster Musume or Toro Toro Resistance's Monster Girl Quest.  The thing is, the internet is primarily a visual medium.  Pictures get far more attention than plain text.

I'd like to commission artwork of the various succubi/monster girls in the H-space bestiary (and my other stories).  The internet always needs more sexy succubus/monster girl artwork as far as I'm concerned.

I'd like to reorganise my website so the H-space stories, H-game walkthroughs, etc are easily navigable rather than being buried in my blog post history.

These things require money (artists are creators and like to be paid too).  A Patreon fund might help out a lot here.  Also, it would make me feel like I was using the money to create something people would want rather than "Can uze pay my rent, plz".

* * *

That's what I'd get out of it, the more important question is what you people out there think about it.  Which is why I'm putting this out here first.

Do you think the stories I write and this blog are entertaining enough that you'd be willing to chuck a spare quid/buck my way every month, so I'd have the financial security to continue doing it?  (Or in this case fund a war chest I can use to flood the internet with more perverted monster girl artwork, hyuk hyuk.)

This would likely be the baseline Patreon reward band - $1/month for me to keep the blog running and post regular stories/chapters to the internet (here, Literotica, etc).

I did think of using the other Patreon option of $1/story or chapter, but it doesn't really fit with one of the central aims of keeping this blog going.  Also, it would require some thought on what constitutes a proper story/chapter, whereas I'd rather have them be the length that feels right for the respective story/chapter.

1$ a month (or more, if you're feeling generous.  I'm not about to say no!) should make it a more predictable outgoing.  It should also keep me honest.  If you feel I'm slacking off, just withdraw your funding.  I'll figure out quick enough. :D

Looking at other Patreons, I notice they also offer other bands/tiers of rewards.  This is where I'd welcome some input from you all out there.  What can I offer that would be of interest?

Some thoughts:

1) Exclusivity.

I don't want to lock any of my work off behind paywalls so only a very narrow audience can access it.  That will impose restrictions on where I can use the stories in the future and will probably end up biting me in the ass.  What I can do, is timed exclusives - maybe make the new stories/chapters available to Patreons a few days before they're due to go live on the rest of the internet.

Also, I usually hold back some stories as exclusives for my ebook collections.  In future I can make some of those available to Patreons.

2) Behind the scenes stuff.

Thoughts on how a story came together.  Ideas in the pipeline.  Early versions.  I'm not sure what might be of interest here, so let me know in the comments.

3) Polls.

I'm normally so scattershot this might help me.  These would be of the type - "Here are three ideas, what should I write this week?"

(That would certainly be one way to force me to get back to Phil's adventures... :) )

As I'm also planning to use a lot of the cash to fund art commissions, this is certainly poll-able.  Which H-space monster girl would we like drawn next and by who?  That might be fun.

4) Tuckerizations.

Get yourself inserted into one of my stories so you too can be killed off in a horribly gruesome sexy manner by your favourite succubus/monster girl.

This seems a decent possibility for a high-tier reward.

There will be some caveats for my own sanity.  I won't be inserting people into the story.  It'll likely just be names and descriptions hung over another character.  This gives me some flexibility if the story calls for the character to be an asshole or die in a particularly unpleasant fashion.

Those are some ideas anyway.

If you have any other suggestions for things you'd be interested in as Patreon rewards, please let me know below.

This also includes if you think this is a terrible idea and I'm being greedy arse.  That's probably worth finding out now rather than being traumatized six months later when my Patreon is only bringing in $6 a month! :D

At the moment I'm throwing it out there to test the waters.  If people are fine with it and would like to fund my various perverted endeavors, I'll see if I can get an account set up next week.

Let me know what you think.

H-game Translations by =Together=

So I received an email that appeared to be a blatant plug for someone's Patreon.  After doing the obvious thing of immediately pressing delete...

"Translating Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~"

*pause deletion*

...after doing the obvious thing of reading and following the link to their Patreon, I decided to blog about it on the off chance of giving them a boost.

Here is a link to =Together='s Patreon site.  They look to be a two-person team working on fan translations of various low-budget hentai games.  Currently they're working on a translation for Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~.  You can also find updates on their progress at this thread on ulmf.org.

I had a brief look at Succubus Prison ~House of Lewd Demons~ back here.

It looks like a typical RPG-maker RPG, but is actually more of a puzzle game where you have to escape a house occupied by a trio of succubi before they snu-snu you to death.  It's a pretty good game and has some of the best Succubus Bad End H-scenes I've seen in any game.  It's also very confusing and difficult to play without translation.

Readers may have noticed I don't blog about Monster Girl H-games as much as I used to.  Since upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 I've had a helluva game trying to get any of them to work with the usual AGTH/Translation Aggregator combo I use for machine translation.  I was only able to play Succubus Prison at all because I bought it early.  Versions over 1.00 don't work with AGTH at all (at least on my machine).  So I'm really happy to see someone is taking on an attempt to translate it.

The usual caveats with crowd-funding apply.  There are always going to be scammers or idiots that think they can remake Monster Girl Quest as Skyrim with a dev team of one.  Even projects with good intentions and sensible objectives can sometimes go awry.  So always be careful to manage expectations before putting up your hard-earned cash.

That said, an English version of Succubus Prison would be awesome.

One last thing.  Regardless of the form the translated files take, if you play it and like it, please be sure to support Tokinokogiri and buy their game.  I'd rather they were happy to see attempts to make their game more accessible to the Western market rather than actively trying to sabotage them over fears of piracy (cough ROBF cough).