Wrapping up Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] and moving on

I was going to go into a little more detail on the gameplay and mechanics, but I think people are getting antsy for me to move on... :)

Not much more to say.  As a game MQ:P just about holds up, mainly on the strengths of the characters, story and the wide variety of weird, wonderful and mostly sexy monster girl designs.  The JRPG elements are still too grindy IMHO, and not the best fit for the femdom-esque Bad Ends, although the series does have a harem element not present in the original series.  Overall, I think TTR's baby, while still very good, is in danger of being dethroned by other up-and-coming whippersnappers.  Tokinokogiri's Succubus Prison is probably the benchmark for hot succubus/monster girl Bad Ends now and even Dieselmine managed to raise their game with Monmusu Labyrinth.

She really likes to give you a good squeeze (Succubus Prison)

The main thing MQ:P lacks now is animation for the Bad End scenes and I'm not sure how easy that would be to add given that the Monster Girl Quest series' greatest strength has been the sheer number and variety of monster girls.  That's a lot of dicking around with puppeting tools to get all those boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner.  Used selectively, maybe...  One of MQ:P [part 2]'s biggest weaknesses is that all the monster girl queens fought later in the game are repeat encounters from the original series.  A little bit of sneaky puppeting/animation might have given those old sex scenes a fresh twist.

Boobies bouncing around in a pleasing manner (Monmusu Labyrinth)

Anyway, that's enough on Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] for now.

I suspect you're more interested in the moving on part.

I definitely want to get back to some original fiction.  The odd blip aside, the thrice-weekly posting schedule I used for the MQ:P series worked pretty well for me.  I'd like to apply that same discipline to my original fiction and see where it takes me (ideally the raw material for a new book I can submit to my publisher every 4-6 months).

What is something I haven't yet decided.  I'm still in the middle of some upheaval as I have another trip (this time for work) scheduled to knock out most of next week.  Getting back to and finishing off "The Heart Squad" seems like a decent interim project before I decide whether to launch into Succubus Summoning 301 or something completely different.

If work on "The Heart Squad" starts flowing again, expect that to resume Friday (or Monday).  If it's still stuck, expect a bit of wibbly-wobbly inconsistency while I pick something else to work on.

There is something else I've been tinkering with recently, an old project dragged off hiatus.  That does appear to be going somewhere, but I'll hold off on posting more about it until I have something a little more presentable.

Does this mean you're done with Japanese monster girl games?

I think I'll lay off the extended "Let's Play" series for a while.  It's been too long since I last submitted a book to my publishers and I need to concentrate on my own fiction for a bit.

Ideally, I would like to keep reviewing the good ones as they come out, but there is an issue here unrelated to clashes with my other work.  Windows 10 appears to be in some kind of weird arms race with the tools I use for text-hooking and machine translation.  Every Windows 10 update broke my tools.  I was able to keep going by reverting the Windows updates, but in the end I was in a race against time to actually finish MQ:P before a deadline where I'd have to either accept those updates or leave my machine unsupported.  So, as of now, I'm back to having no means of hooking and auto-translating Japanese games.  This currently makes playing and reviewing them rather difficult.

Assuming I can fix this, I'd have to have a long think before doing another big series on MQ:P [part 3] when it comes out.  It would be nice to do it to complete the series, but I'd have to think carefully about how to do it in a way that doesn't swallow up all of my time.  Running two series alongside each other doesn't work for me (as you may have noticed when my schedule went to hell right after starting posting "The Heart Squad"), so I might look at some kind of one month on, one month off schedule to prevent my blog being completely swamped by MQ:P stuff.

I suspect that will be a long way off though.  I imagine TTR still has plenty to do before unleashing the final chapter of Paradox on the world.

Lest we forget MQ:P also has some very nice succubi (Monmusu Quest: Paradox)

Anyway, I hope those of you that enjoyed the series, enjoyed it, and apologies to those who felt it ran on for way too long.

Friday (or Monday) I think it's time we found out what happened to that software engineer on his very special Valentine's Night...

So, What Happened to October?

Those that have been following me for a while know by now I have an unnerving ability to fade out from time to time, with ideas not exactly reaching fruition...

There was a pile up of other work and responsibilities that ended up scuppering my plans for Literotica's Halloween Contest.  I couldn't clear it in time, so no story from me this year, sadly.  I think the idea I have for the contest period is pretty good, though, so I'm planning to run it next year, but with better advance planning to clear everything else off my table a couple of weeks before the contest starts.

The H-space Monster Girl Bestiary is going to be cut back slightly.  Trying to hit the weekly schedule was devouring all my writing time and giving me a false sense of accomplishment.  At the moment I've set aside one day a week to work on them.  I didn't get one finished for this week, but with a bit of luck it should be done for next week.

There will be a print version for Succubus Summoning 201.  The coverflat came in from the artist this week, but there were some issues on file size.  I'm looking to fix those over the weekend and I'll post here as soon as the print version goes live on Amazon.  Unfortunately, it will still be Print on Demand, and those are a little pricey compared to the usual mass-market paperbacks.

The big news is now that I've finally completed Succubus Summoning 201 and cleared my table of the other distractions (filing taxes etc), I'm finally able to start work on a novel idea I've been wanting to write for the past year or so.  I want to get the bulk of that done before the end of the year, so if the blog here goes a little quiet for a while, it's because there's a big juicy full-length novel on the way.

So What Now For Many-Eyed Hydra?

Succubus Summoning 201 is finally done, dusted, and out for you all to buy (aside from the print version, but I'm just waiting on the artist for the full coverflat of that).  That's a great weight off my shoulders.  While it was in an unfinished state I was in an awkward situation of wanting to move onto other ideas, but feeling like I couldn't because the arc was still incomplete.

So what now?

Here's a list of various things I'm planning on getting stuck into over the next few months/year.

First up I want to get the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary back to its regular weekly slot.  There will be a few slight changes.  The last few entries had started to creep up to 2K+ mini-stories, which wasn't the original purpose.  I'm planning to spend the next week or so writing up the various ideas that have accumulated in my notebook so I have a nice surplus to post weekly while working on other stuff.

Literotica's Halloween Contest is on the way.  Last year I wanted to enter as many short stories as I could and ended up with just two (although missing the deadline with "A Chance Glance..." likely resulted in it being a better story overall).  Writing the Nurse Honey story "Last Night of Freedom" under ridiculously tight time constraints for the A Night at McHooligans ebook taster showed me I could do it when sufficiently prodded.  I'm thinking of using the month around the contest as an experiment - a sort of coin-operated Hydra where some of the choices are made by the audience, i.e. you.  I doubt it will be fully interactive, more like a series of options decided by vote or first response, and then I have 2-3 days to get a 5K story based on those options entered into Lit's contest.  Possibly something like what Lunareth has done with their Queen of Butts series.  We might end up with 5-10 cool stories, or I might break down into a quivering heap after a week.  Who knows.  Might be fun.

More on that next week once I've had a think on the framing device and how to make it work.

After that silliness the next step is make the Sandwiched by series a thing again.  I got halfway through Sandwiched by Stomachs before it got knocked aside by more pressing concerns.

The reason why I want to make Sandwiched by work is because it was a test case for a proper serial with continuity - Okasare Kenny.  I always intended that to be an ebook novella series and then in a fit of madness tried to turn it into a daily serial on my blog right after doing the Let's Play of Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  That did not go so well as I predictably burnt out from the posting schedule after a couple of weeks and had to halt it.  I liked the original idea though - 13 monster girls, each in their own novella in a monthly serial spread out over a year.  Given what happened with Sandwiched by I don't think writing it month by month will work.  For that one I'll need most of it, likely at least the first 8 or 9 chapters, in the bank before I start publishing.

Another thing I want to write is a novel idea featuring Nicole.  This is something I've had plotted out in my head for a while.  I wrote an opening chapter a while back, but it was another of those ideas I felt too guilty to push further while the Succubus Summoning 201 arc was still unfinished.

Which leads us to Succubus Summoning 301.  Phil's adventures clearly aren't over yet, but after the way 201 dragged out, I know I need a short break to work on something completely different so I can clear my head and get enthusiastic about the series again.  This will likely be the book I move onto once the Nicole novel is done.

Anyway, this is a rough plan of what I think I'll be working on over the next year.  Of course, #ChaosWriting might throw me off in other directions, but I won't mind so long as those are productive directions.