This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be. The first part is here.
Venus of the Red Lights
I’ve visited Amsterdam a few times and De Wallatjes (better known as the main red light district) is an evocative location for a horror story. In fact this idea is a leftover from my days when I tried to write “normal” horror. Most of the non-supernatural elements of this story are based on firsthand experience or stories I’d heard.
The Soul Worm
I have no idea where the monster girl from this one came from. They bubble up from the depths of my imagination every so often and I think it’s best not to pry further.
At the end is a blink-and-you’ll miss appearance of a character you’ll see more of in the future.
Foam Shower
This is the follow-up to “Bubble Bath”. The unusual succubus from that is just as pleasant to share a shower with as she is with sharing a bath. Sadly, those pleasures are invariably fatal, but we can’t have everything.
A Summer Dance with a Succubus
One of the pleasures of writing is when a story comes together and all of the elements slot neatly into place. I’d read a few articles about sex workers who provided services to disabled persons who would otherwise not experience the pleasures of sexual intercourse. This was something I could see my “good” succubus escort character, Nicole, doing. I also needed a story for a summer-themed contest and one of the things about summer is it’s ephemeral – all summers end to be swallowed by the dark and cold of winter. Some lives are also tragically short and ephemeral. But rather than obsess over the coming cold and dark, we enjoy the sunshine and long lazy days while they last. And life is no different. That’s how I pictured Terry – proud and defiantly making the best of an unfortunate hand.
This was the first of my stories to place in the Literotica contests and I used the money from that to buy a Kindle from Amazon. It’s still one of my favourites to this day.
I hope you've enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how some of my stories came to be. I'll do the same for A Succubus for Halloween at some point in the future.
Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ideas. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 2)
This is a look behind the scenes at how the stories of my second collection, A Succubus for Valentine's Day, came to be. The first part is here.
The Spiders of Thomisoidus
I’m not entirely sure where this came from. Spiders and silk work well with bondage fantasies and a planet full of sexy babes is a classic sci-fi fantasy. Also the intro allowed me to have fun with a character bemoaning his lot after being suckered into taking a contract on a pleasure world that doesn’t really live up to expectations. The teasing, stop-start nature of the sex scene was also highly pleasurable to write.
Delivery Special Soap
This is another story to indulge my fetish for soapland-style mat play. It’s heavily influenced by Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City (anyone who’s seen the anime will know the scene). I was starting to think about how my story universe worked and how the various monster girl demons interacted with each other. As the demons are operating under a kind of masquerade, it made sense for them to have rules to prevent the sort of overt conflict that would attract the attention of the human authorities. It also made sense that Inari would know how to work these rules to her advantage and by including a reference to her I could also hint at a larger story taking place beneath these short stories.
Knight vs. Succubus
This story has an interesting tale behind it. I was asked by a developer working on a succubus game to write a story that would help publicise the finished game (sadly, I don’t think it was ever finished). My first attempt was this story, which was rejected for being too dark. I liked the story and then had an idea for another loosely connected series of “X vs Succubus”. The connection is largely restricted to the title. This is a much darker tale than the tongue-in-cheek “Slayer vs Succubus”. It’s also one of the few times I’ve felt guilty about offing the protagonist.
Interrocution
I think the initial idea was a cocky criminal bound to a chair and at the mercy of a succubus. I like blending gritty mob tropes with supernatural elements. The story is also a fitting introduction to Koontz’s right hand “man” – Physalia. She’s a much colder and fearsome succubus. As Koontz’s enforcer she’s definitely not to be messed with.
The title is a mashup of interrogation and execution.
Crushed Between Her Breasts
This story came about through an impromptu challenge contest on the Literotica forums. The theme was revenge stories if I remember correctly. I had the idea of a chauvinistic IT manager annoying one of his female workers to the point where they seek external help to teach him a lesson.
Oddly, the double team of Eryx and Eunectis are also part of my recurring roster of characters, although readers wouldn’t know it as those stories are still waiting to be published. Nancy’s debt is still outstanding . . .
I'll post the last part on the remaining stories tomorrow.
The Spiders of Thomisoidus
I’m not entirely sure where this came from. Spiders and silk work well with bondage fantasies and a planet full of sexy babes is a classic sci-fi fantasy. Also the intro allowed me to have fun with a character bemoaning his lot after being suckered into taking a contract on a pleasure world that doesn’t really live up to expectations. The teasing, stop-start nature of the sex scene was also highly pleasurable to write.
Delivery Special Soap
This is another story to indulge my fetish for soapland-style mat play. It’s heavily influenced by Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Wicked City (anyone who’s seen the anime will know the scene). I was starting to think about how my story universe worked and how the various monster girl demons interacted with each other. As the demons are operating under a kind of masquerade, it made sense for them to have rules to prevent the sort of overt conflict that would attract the attention of the human authorities. It also made sense that Inari would know how to work these rules to her advantage and by including a reference to her I could also hint at a larger story taking place beneath these short stories.
Knight vs. Succubus
This story has an interesting tale behind it. I was asked by a developer working on a succubus game to write a story that would help publicise the finished game (sadly, I don’t think it was ever finished). My first attempt was this story, which was rejected for being too dark. I liked the story and then had an idea for another loosely connected series of “X vs Succubus”. The connection is largely restricted to the title. This is a much darker tale than the tongue-in-cheek “Slayer vs Succubus”. It’s also one of the few times I’ve felt guilty about offing the protagonist.
Interrocution
I think the initial idea was a cocky criminal bound to a chair and at the mercy of a succubus. I like blending gritty mob tropes with supernatural elements. The story is also a fitting introduction to Koontz’s right hand “man” – Physalia. She’s a much colder and fearsome succubus. As Koontz’s enforcer she’s definitely not to be messed with.
The title is a mashup of interrogation and execution.
Crushed Between Her Breasts
This story came about through an impromptu challenge contest on the Literotica forums. The theme was revenge stories if I remember correctly. I had the idea of a chauvinistic IT manager annoying one of his female workers to the point where they seek external help to teach him a lesson.
Oddly, the double team of Eryx and Eunectis are also part of my recurring roster of characters, although readers wouldn’t know it as those stories are still waiting to be published. Nancy’s debt is still outstanding . . .
I'll post the last part on the remaining stories tomorrow.
Monday, December 08, 2014
Hydra's Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day (part 1)
This is another post where I go over where some of my stories come from. Last time up I went through my first collection, A Succubus for Christmas. This time I'll run through A Succubus for Valentine's Day.
There might be a few spoilers for people that haven't already read the stories.
A Succubus for Valentine’s Day
When it comes to Valentine’s Day I’m a bit of a black-hearted curmudgeon. Most of the stories I’ve entered into Literotica’s Valentine’s Day contests have been anti-Valentine’s Day tales of some description. It was while trying to think of an entrant I hit upon the idea of re-using the nameless succubus from “A Succubus for Christmas”. This then became an idea for a (semi) regular series featuring her, the succubus tablet and various themed days. In this story she’s playing a similar role to before – the evil genie that gives her poor victim what they think they want . . . until they actually get it.
I did get some comments misinterpreting Kurtzberg as a ‘nice guy’. Admittedly, I did set the story up to present him in a sympathetic light, and maybe fool the reader into thinking this might be one of those romcoms where the unfortunate slob ends up with the pretty girl after all. Then the story takes a turn into murkier territory until it culminates in what I hope is a gut punch of an ending (as every good anti-Valentine’s Day story should have). Kurtzberg is unfortunate and deserves some sympathy, but his actions take him far beyond the realm of nice.
Observant readers will have noticed the version in the collection, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day, differs from the version online. When I first started out I used to seek feedback on the Literotica forums. For this story someone made the suggestion that the ending would be nastier if Kurtzberg was left alive to let the horror of what he’d done sink in. It was such a good suggestion I rewrote the ending to incorporate it.
Initial Infiltration
Aside from the usual asshole victims, a regular target of mine is the naive. GRRM has it right with A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for TV watchers). When one of his characters makes a poor choice politically, he doesn’t step in to bail them out.
There has been cultural pressure to move Science Fiction away from blasting the Other on sight to presenting stories where the only correct response is to attempt to resolve conflicts through discussion and understanding. Personally I don’t like simple black and white certitudes. When the motives of the Other are completely unknown, which approach is correct can only be ascertained with the benefit of hindsight. In another story, another universe, Donaldson would have been the perfect protagonist to prevent inter-dimensional war. Sadly for him, this is not that story and hell-space is not that universe.
Succubus Summoning 101
This story eventually ended up being the first chapter of the novel of the same name. It was originally meant to be a short story about student warlocks making incorrect (and fatal) assumptions about which bits of succubi are dangerous to stick your cock in. On the surface there is a twisted sense to the logic. Succubi pervert the role of sexual intercourse to create new life by using it to take life. Anal sex can’t create new life; therefore under the same logic succubi can’t use it to drain life. Of course it doesn’t work out that way.
I neglected to kill Phil at the end of the story and since then he’s stubbornly just about managed to stay alive despite my best efforts.
The main reason I put the story in the collection was to protect myself from plagiarism. Someone had already tried to pass off the Succubus Summoning 101 series as their own on another website. Amazon’s kindle store was rife with plagiarists mining story sites like Literotica for material to rip off. Having the original Succubus Summoning 101 story in here would give me some protection against that kind of shit while I was working on the ebook version.
Puffed Up
This is another superhero deconstruction story in the vein of “Squeezed”. Sexy villainesses have always been a feature of comics even if they rarely get to fully show their stuff (generally speaking, the hero has to survive otherwise that’s the end of the comic book). This story is a none-too subtle dig at the counterproductive aspects of the war on drugs in our own universe. Reading it years later I think I might have been a little too cynical with the ending.
I stopped included the superhero stories in later collections because they didn’t fit in with the shared universe elements that were starting to emerge in the series as a whole. I do have some ideas for other sexy super-villainesses. At some point I might assemble them into a themed collection.
I'll go through the remaining stories over the next couple of days.
There might be a few spoilers for people that haven't already read the stories.
A Succubus for Valentine’s Day
When it comes to Valentine’s Day I’m a bit of a black-hearted curmudgeon. Most of the stories I’ve entered into Literotica’s Valentine’s Day contests have been anti-Valentine’s Day tales of some description. It was while trying to think of an entrant I hit upon the idea of re-using the nameless succubus from “A Succubus for Christmas”. This then became an idea for a (semi) regular series featuring her, the succubus tablet and various themed days. In this story she’s playing a similar role to before – the evil genie that gives her poor victim what they think they want . . . until they actually get it.
I did get some comments misinterpreting Kurtzberg as a ‘nice guy’. Admittedly, I did set the story up to present him in a sympathetic light, and maybe fool the reader into thinking this might be one of those romcoms where the unfortunate slob ends up with the pretty girl after all. Then the story takes a turn into murkier territory until it culminates in what I hope is a gut punch of an ending (as every good anti-Valentine’s Day story should have). Kurtzberg is unfortunate and deserves some sympathy, but his actions take him far beyond the realm of nice.
Observant readers will have noticed the version in the collection, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day, differs from the version online. When I first started out I used to seek feedback on the Literotica forums. For this story someone made the suggestion that the ending would be nastier if Kurtzberg was left alive to let the horror of what he’d done sink in. It was such a good suggestion I rewrote the ending to incorporate it.
Initial Infiltration
Aside from the usual asshole victims, a regular target of mine is the naive. GRRM has it right with A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones for TV watchers). When one of his characters makes a poor choice politically, he doesn’t step in to bail them out.
There has been cultural pressure to move Science Fiction away from blasting the Other on sight to presenting stories where the only correct response is to attempt to resolve conflicts through discussion and understanding. Personally I don’t like simple black and white certitudes. When the motives of the Other are completely unknown, which approach is correct can only be ascertained with the benefit of hindsight. In another story, another universe, Donaldson would have been the perfect protagonist to prevent inter-dimensional war. Sadly for him, this is not that story and hell-space is not that universe.
Succubus Summoning 101
This story eventually ended up being the first chapter of the novel of the same name. It was originally meant to be a short story about student warlocks making incorrect (and fatal) assumptions about which bits of succubi are dangerous to stick your cock in. On the surface there is a twisted sense to the logic. Succubi pervert the role of sexual intercourse to create new life by using it to take life. Anal sex can’t create new life; therefore under the same logic succubi can’t use it to drain life. Of course it doesn’t work out that way.
I neglected to kill Phil at the end of the story and since then he’s stubbornly just about managed to stay alive despite my best efforts.
The main reason I put the story in the collection was to protect myself from plagiarism. Someone had already tried to pass off the Succubus Summoning 101 series as their own on another website. Amazon’s kindle store was rife with plagiarists mining story sites like Literotica for material to rip off. Having the original Succubus Summoning 101 story in here would give me some protection against that kind of shit while I was working on the ebook version.
Puffed Up
This is another superhero deconstruction story in the vein of “Squeezed”. Sexy villainesses have always been a feature of comics even if they rarely get to fully show their stuff (generally speaking, the hero has to survive otherwise that’s the end of the comic book). This story is a none-too subtle dig at the counterproductive aspects of the war on drugs in our own universe. Reading it years later I think I might have been a little too cynical with the ending.
I stopped included the superhero stories in later collections because they didn’t fit in with the shared universe elements that were starting to emerge in the series as a whole. I do have some ideas for other sexy super-villainesses. At some point I might assemble them into a themed collection.
I'll go through the remaining stories over the next couple of days.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
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’.
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’.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
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.
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.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Where does Hydra get his inspiration from: part 1 of an infrequent series
Monday was one of those days when a whole bunch of news stories caught my attention and triggered some ideas.
I was going to post this on Monday, but I was out drinking that night and after that in the middle of a blog post on something else that I later abandoned because I realised it was pandering to the holier-than-thou crowd, and as they're a group not exactly known for their intelligence or reading comprehension, it was time I was better off spending on something more worthwhile - like writing more succubus smut.
First off there was the story of the poor drunk lass tricked into giving 24 blokes oral sex in a Magaluf nightclub for a $4 cocktail (she thought she was getting a holiday). This is fairly extreme behaviour even by the usual standards of drunk Brits abroad. Sadly for her, some wanker filmed it, uploaded it to the internet, and . . . well you can guess what happened next.
While it's an embarrassing story for the poor lass in the middle of it, I thought that scenario could be flipped around into an interesting succubus story. A group of drunken lads out on the lash in a Spanish tourist hotspot, and then a ribald and debauched challenge organised by one of the tour guides. The woman is mysterious and extremely sexy, and she seems eager to give out blowjobs to a whole line of blokes. Of course she sucks out more than semen and that might be a fun story to write from the perspective of the last bloke in the line as he starts to get a feeling something is wrong . . .
Then I heard about a US artist taking a slum vacation in one of Bangkok's shanty towns and using the resulting shack as an installation piece. I don't really want to judge the bloke. It sounds horribly condescending to the people that have to live there day in and day out, but he might have done it with the best of intentions.
Of course, in fiction-world, that sort of character can be painted as the stereotypical rich, condescending asshole more interested in stroking their own ego that helping the plight of those in poverty. Tasty monster girl chow, in other words. I have a few ideas for some interesting monster girls, but no protagonist to make it a proper story. Take exotic locale, throw in annoying artist tourist, ring the dinner bell . . .
And speaking of prime monster girl chow. This showed up in my facebook feed as a (presumably feminist) friend of a friend posted it with a single comment: "vile".
http://www.returnofkings.com/37273/a-guide-for-getting-laid-at-anime-conventions
Um, yeah. I don't do the whole outrage or holier-than-thou thing, so we'll describe that one as a little . . . blunt, and leave it at that.
An anime convention has certain advantages as a succubus story location. As with Halloween or a fancy dress party, the succubus-type character can be placed in the open. All the other characters will assume she's just a hot girl in a slutty succubus costume (although I may have used the 'protagonist realises it isn't a costume' denouement a few too many times already). The protagonist presents options. They can be an out-an-out bastard, in which case it's a straightforward Cosmic Justice tale. Or I can muddy it up and give them an insecure centre to make them a little more sympathetic (although last time I tried that I muddied it up too much and ended up with a protagonist more sympathetic than I originally intended.)
I also now have the desire to create a 'landwhale' succubus character for the hell of it. Big, curvy, beautiful, irresistible . . . yum.
For anyone writing their own stories, taking newspaper/online articles and thinking up a possible 'masquerade' explanation for what's happening behind the scenes is a good story-telling exercise. But avoid the obviously weird ones, because hundreds of other writers will already have gone through the same thought processes and scrawled down the exact same story.
And then there's my highly fucked-up imagination. I saw this:
(I found it on E-Hentai galleries, bizarrely enough. The artist is Caroline Jamhour and more of her work can be found here)
. . . and remembered the eyes-as-nipples scene in Ken Russell's Gothic. I was thinking there wasn't really anything I could do with--
The demon woman has eyes where the nipples should be. She pushes her boobs into the face of her victim. The eyes in her breasts eat the eyes of the victim and then take their place. They send feelers into the brain and the victim sees . . .
Um, thanks imagination. I guess.
That was one day of the little black cells working on overdrive for new story ideas.
If it sounds vaguely interesting, I can write some more where-did-that-idea-come-from pieces for the stories I've written (assuming I can remember, some are a few years old now). Let me know in the comments below if there are any you're curious about.
I was going to post this on Monday, but I was out drinking that night and after that in the middle of a blog post on something else that I later abandoned because I realised it was pandering to the holier-than-thou crowd, and as they're a group not exactly known for their intelligence or reading comprehension, it was time I was better off spending on something more worthwhile - like writing more succubus smut.
First off there was the story of the poor drunk lass tricked into giving 24 blokes oral sex in a Magaluf nightclub for a $4 cocktail (she thought she was getting a holiday). This is fairly extreme behaviour even by the usual standards of drunk Brits abroad. Sadly for her, some wanker filmed it, uploaded it to the internet, and . . . well you can guess what happened next.
While it's an embarrassing story for the poor lass in the middle of it, I thought that scenario could be flipped around into an interesting succubus story. A group of drunken lads out on the lash in a Spanish tourist hotspot, and then a ribald and debauched challenge organised by one of the tour guides. The woman is mysterious and extremely sexy, and she seems eager to give out blowjobs to a whole line of blokes. Of course she sucks out more than semen and that might be a fun story to write from the perspective of the last bloke in the line as he starts to get a feeling something is wrong . . .
Then I heard about a US artist taking a slum vacation in one of Bangkok's shanty towns and using the resulting shack as an installation piece. I don't really want to judge the bloke. It sounds horribly condescending to the people that have to live there day in and day out, but he might have done it with the best of intentions.
Of course, in fiction-world, that sort of character can be painted as the stereotypical rich, condescending asshole more interested in stroking their own ego that helping the plight of those in poverty. Tasty monster girl chow, in other words. I have a few ideas for some interesting monster girls, but no protagonist to make it a proper story. Take exotic locale, throw in annoying artist tourist, ring the dinner bell . . .
And speaking of prime monster girl chow. This showed up in my facebook feed as a (presumably feminist) friend of a friend posted it with a single comment: "vile".
http://www.returnofkings.com/37273/a-guide-for-getting-laid-at-anime-conventions
Um, yeah. I don't do the whole outrage or holier-than-thou thing, so we'll describe that one as a little . . . blunt, and leave it at that.
An anime convention has certain advantages as a succubus story location. As with Halloween or a fancy dress party, the succubus-type character can be placed in the open. All the other characters will assume she's just a hot girl in a slutty succubus costume (although I may have used the 'protagonist realises it isn't a costume' denouement a few too many times already). The protagonist presents options. They can be an out-an-out bastard, in which case it's a straightforward Cosmic Justice tale. Or I can muddy it up and give them an insecure centre to make them a little more sympathetic (although last time I tried that I muddied it up too much and ended up with a protagonist more sympathetic than I originally intended.)
I also now have the desire to create a 'landwhale' succubus character for the hell of it. Big, curvy, beautiful, irresistible . . . yum.
For anyone writing their own stories, taking newspaper/online articles and thinking up a possible 'masquerade' explanation for what's happening behind the scenes is a good story-telling exercise. But avoid the obviously weird ones, because hundreds of other writers will already have gone through the same thought processes and scrawled down the exact same story.
And then there's my highly fucked-up imagination. I saw this:
(I found it on E-Hentai galleries, bizarrely enough. The artist is Caroline Jamhour and more of her work can be found here)
. . . and remembered the eyes-as-nipples scene in Ken Russell's Gothic. I was thinking there wasn't really anything I could do with--
The demon woman has eyes where the nipples should be. She pushes her boobs into the face of her victim. The eyes in her breasts eat the eyes of the victim and then take their place. They send feelers into the brain and the victim sees . . .
Um, thanks imagination. I guess.
That was one day of the little black cells working on overdrive for new story ideas.
If it sounds vaguely interesting, I can write some more where-did-that-idea-come-from pieces for the stories I've written (assuming I can remember, some are a few years old now). Let me know in the comments below if there are any you're curious about.
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