More Potential AI Art Covers

I'm still playing around with AI art for covers and have mocked these examples up.

Given how Wombo works, and the difficulty when it comes to human figures/faces, I think it's best to fully lean into the abstract aspects.  I'm also hoping I might be able to lure some more mainstream horror readers over, and I think the usual smiling anime succubus might scare them off.

It's not ideal.  That would be getting a decent fantasy artist and commissioning art similar to the old Weird Tales covers.  I'm not sure I have the budget for that or even know where to find someone to do it.  I'm also conscious I need to get these ebooks back up, sooner rather than later.

I think these are better than the Christmas example, but are they good enough?

(The Freedom one I think is, Halloween and Remembrance are borderline, but might be abstract enough to get away with it.)

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.028

The public demo version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to v0.028.  you can play it here.

This adds Cíocha's bigger sister: Cruiscíní Gadaí-na-Duine.  She can either show up alone or with Cíocha for a much more dangerous scenario.  She's a boobfairy scaled up to the size of a human, so expect a vore theme and a lot of fucked up lactation in her scene.

As always, patrons are a month ahead.  For them I released v0.029.  Because I have a bunch of other stuff going on at the moment and I'm focusing on writing lots of new harlot scenarios, v0.029 is another small release and just adds 1 new harlot - the "love heart succubus" Amoura D'Coeur.

If you want to check it out and support the project, the Patreon page is here.

As this was a very small HoHH release, I thought I should give my patrons something more for January.  I get comments here asking how my various characters would interact with each other.  A few years back I began a novel idea that featured both Nicole and Madam Voluptula.  That didn't pan out and is currently on hiatus while I work on other projects, but I thought I'd share the opening chapters with patrons.  That 6.5K opening novel fragment can be read here.

I'm still in the middle of trying to get all of my books back up on sale, so there is some ongoing disruption to my work on HoHH.  However, I've been building up a little stockpile of new harlot scenarios ready to type up and implement.  I'm hoping February will get back to 3-4 harlots per release rather than the single-harlot releases of the past couple of months.

Lovely Photo Manip inspired by "Vampiric Boobies"

Normally, I regard Twitter as a horrible place.  I have a twitter handle on there (@manyeyedhydra), but for the last couple of years I've only used it to post dry updates of projects in progress.  The number of potential negative interactions far far outweigh the potential positive interactions on that platform, especially if you're someone like me who slaloms all over the usual political lines.

This was one of those rare positive interactions as I got tagged in on a thread where a photo manip artist had posted a piece inspired by one of my stories.  I liked it and asked if I could share, and the artist agreed, so here we are:

I don't know if it's meant to be Acarina or another vampire girl inspired by her.  Either way it's a really good interpretation of the blood draining scene from "Vampiric Boobies".

If she's anything like Acarina, that poor bloke is about to be given a horrible choice...

The artist is @Smut_Demon on twitter.  They regularly post photo manips of succubi, vamps and aliens, and they're pretty damn good from what I've seen.

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

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

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

Thoughts?

Succubus Summoning 101 and 201 are back on sale

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my publisher, eXcessica, closed their doors at the end of last year.  This meant all my ebooks (with the exception of the shorter novellas I self-published myself) were unpublished and taken down from sale.  I've been steadily putting them back up again under my own name.

Succubus Summoning 101 and Succubus Summoning 201 are now back up.  In fact, they've been back up on Amazon for over a week.  I've just been waiting for approval to go through at other sites.

That process was... a little interesting.  While I'm no stranger to it, having self-published the Sandwiched by series (which I need to go back to a straighten out at some point), it's been a few years, so there was some rust to shake off and copious swearing at manuscript formatting software that insists on changing text formatting whether you want it to or not!

You can find them here:

Succubus Summoning 101 at Amazon

Succubus Summoning 101 at Smashwords

Succubus Summoning 101 at Kobo

Succubus Summoning 101 at Apple Books

Succubus Summoning 201 at Amazon

Succubus Summoning 201 at Smashwords

Succubus Summoning 201 at Kobo

Succubus Summoning 201 at Apple Books

They should also be showing up on Google Play and Barnes & Noble at some point.  I'm still waiting for either my account to be approved or other distributors to push them out.

If you have an ebook retailer you use that isn't one of those and would like to be able to buy my ebooks from them, let me know and I'll get them up there.

Also, because formatting can be an imprecise science, if you pick up a copy and it looks like ass on your device, let me know and I'll try and get it fixed.  I checked them against the site's previewer, but sometimes things can get mangled when converting files.

The collections are still on the way.  I wanted to take this as an opportunity to redo the covers and maybe tweak the contents.  More on that in a week or two!

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.027

The public demo version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to v0.27.  You can play it here (ignore the Patreon splash page at the start - I forgot to create the public version of the file back at the start of December).

As November was a rough month for me personally, that release only added 1 new harlot: Suffocatrix Assphyxia.

Suffocatrix Assphyxia is another smother specialist like Suffocatrix Mamilla, and has a similar scenario focused around erotic asphyxiation.  Mamilla specialised in breast smothering.  Assphyxia specialises in... well, you can probably guess from the name.

While a similar scenario to Mamilla, Assphyxia doesn't yet have the repeat visit functionality and alternate "End" of her smother sister.  I will be adding that at a later date as well as a bonus scenario where both Mamilla and Assphyxia get to work on the player at the same time in an "ass vs tits" content.

As a part of the release, I also updated Mamilla's scenario.  She has slightly different likes and dislikes now.

Patrons continue to be a month ahead.  For them I released v0.028.  This adds Cíocha's bigger sister: Cruiscíní Gadaí-na-Duine.  She can either show up alone or with Cíocha for a much more dangerous scenario.  She's a boobfairy scaled up to the size of a human, so expect a vore theme and a lot of fucked up lactation in her scene.

If you want to check her out and support the project, my Patreon is here.

Both November and December's releases have been fairly small because of other things going on.  January might be the same because - as I mentioned in the previous post - I'll have to spend some portion of it updating and reuploading my old ebooks.

I do have multiple new harlots on the go or with 1st drafts written up, so hopefully I'll get back to HoHH releases that feature more than 1 or 2 harlots.

Happy New Year!

Changes with M.E. Hydra books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do people think about that?

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

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

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

A Succubus for Halloween?

A Succubus for Freedom?

A Succubus for Remembrance?

What do you think?