How not to make your print cover

As promised, here is the whole sorry saga of why it took so long to make the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 available.

First off I should go through the process I follow to make print versions of my books available for readers to buy.  My publisher, eXcessica, uses Amazon's CreateSpace to produce Print On Demand paperback versions of their books.  The files they need from me, the author, are a correctly formatted manuscript and a high resolution pdf of the coverflat.

The coverflat is the full cover of the book - back, spine, front - laid out flat.  In order to create this CreateSpace asks the author to fill in a bit of data on how big they want the finished paperback to be and how many pages the manuscript is.  The number of pages value is needed to determine the thickness of the spine.  Once CreateSpace has all the info it spits out a template that looks like this:

I'll go over what the dotted lines and other stuff means in a mo.  First there's the obvious dependency - CreateSpace can't give you this template until you know the total number of pages in your book, and you won't know this until you've finished and correctly formatted the manuscript.  This is a problem for people like me who have an unfortunate tendency to push our deadlines rather fine.

When I get caught in a time crunch, my usual approach is to focus on making sure the ebook version is ready in time and then try to get the print version done as soon after as possible (the manuscripts are formatted a little different - nothing major, but it does take a little fiddling around).

As a result the cover art is done backwards.  Rather than getting my artist to create the full cover art and then cutting out the front cover part to serve as the ebook front cover, I have them create the front cover first and then give them the full template to do the rest as soon as I have it.

The ebook front cover is relatively straightforward.  What you see is what you get and the artist has control of where the boundaries occur.  For Succubus Summoning 201, that gives us this front cover:

My art direction was to follow on the theme of Succubus Summoning 101 and make the cover look like one of those old leather-bound tomes with clasps and bits of metal around the edges.  Sort of like this:

For the ebook cover this is relatively straightforward as the artist knows the exact margins and where the exact edge of the cover is.

For the print coverflat is becomes a little more complex.  If you look at the template above you'll see there are dotted lines and a salmon-pink border.  The dotted line indicates where the cover will be cut out, but this is not 100% precise, hence the salmon-pink border.  This represents the bleed area and everything in it is a sort of Schrödinger's artwork - it might get cut off and not appear on the final cover, but you have to have something there in case it doesn't.  So this something should look okay enough that you don't mind it being on the front cover, but also shouldn't be important enough that it has to be on the front cover.

For most book covers (and the case with all my short story collections) this isn't a problem.  The edge is background stuff that can be chopped off at any point.  Then we have the Succubus Summoning 201 cover and those little corner pieces...

Oh boy.

Somewhere in the (sort of) commissioning process I managed to totally confuse my artist on what the bleed area was and what it meant.  Many mistakes were made, over and over...

I should also mention at this point that my cover artist is also my brother and he volunteers his time for nothing more than thanks and beer.  As he has a family and full-time job, he only has the spare time to work on things at his own pace.  This means that turnaround times are going to be, by necessity, slow and inconsistent.

The first mix-up was with the dimensions.  The correct dimensions for the coverflat should be 3468 x 2475, 600 ppi.  The coverflat template comes with a resolution of 300 ppi.  In between our respective art programs we managed to get stuck between the right resolution but four times the size, or the right size but the wrong resolution.

I found this out after sending a ridiculously huge file to Stacey, the assistant at eXcessica, that took some finangling to even send it through email before she realised it was way too big for CreateSpace.

We managed to get that sorted and then the bleed area problems hit.

The next submission was rejected by CreateSpace for having text too close to the edge.  This was where I managed to confuse my brother.  He misunderstood what I meant by having a bleed area around the edges and his first fix was to increase the size of canvas to add a bit around the edges.  This doesn't work as the cover is still going to be cut out at the same dotted lines.  The next attempt had the right-sized canvas and the blurb on the back moved away from the margins.  It also positioned the corner ornamentation right in the bleed area.  When I overlaid the template I saw straightaway that virtually all of the corner pieces would be cut off, and sent it back.

My proposed fix was to position the whole coverflat inside the salmon-pink border and then fill the edges with background cover.  I wanted to extend the pseudo-metal ornamentation to the edges, so I told my brother to widen them to fill out to the edges.

This didn't work either as Stacey came back to say the coverflat had been bounced again for having essential art bits within the bleed area.

I asked her if we could just overrule it as I didn't mind if some of it was cut-off.

Unfortunately this was something she didn't have any control over.  My guess is CreateSpace has some automated checks on the cover art.

So, back to the drawing board for the umpteenth time.  As my brother's time is limited, these back and forths took place over the course of a couple of months.  Rather than bother him again I repositioned an old version of the coverflat inside the safe area and filled the borders with a flat colour taken from the background to blend it in.  This left me with this:

...which was thankfully good enough to pass as well as turning out okay when displayed on the Amazon site:

So there you have it - less of an excuse and more an acknowledgement of me and my brother being giant idiots.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes of the publishing process.  Thankfully, there is a happy ending.  As I posted on Monday, the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now available to buy on either Amazon, or directly from CreateSpace.  Sorry for making you all wait so long!

Print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is finally here!

A little (lot!) later than planned, I can finally say the paperback version of Succubus Summoning 201 is available to buy.  This continues Phil's sexy (mis)adventures with Verdé, Rosa and friends as the hapless warlock tries to learn magic while surviving the amorous advances of various seductive succubi and monster girls.

You can get it from Amazon here, or directly from my publisher, eXcessica here.  I get more money from the second link, but sales from Amazon bump up the book's rating and make it easier for new readers to find, so I don't mind where you get it from.  Go to whoever suits you best.

Here are some 'inside-baseball' answers to a couple of questions I imagine people will have.

Why is it so expensive for a paperback book?

POD (Print on Demand), I'm afraid.  This is the reality of being a quasi-independent author.  Mass-market paperbacks have print runs in the thousands to keep the costs down (with the downside that the publisher ends up out of pocket if the book turns out to be a dud).  I'm below that level, so the only way to produce paperback versions is as a speciality item with prices to match.  On the flip side, independents can price their ebooks lower as they don't have to worry about cannibalising their print market.

Why did it take so freaking long to get the print version done?

Um, yeah.

The tl;dr version is my cover artist and I managed to get horribly mixed up on what was meant by bleed area on the cover template and mistakes were made... over and over.

The even shorter version - see those metallic embellishments on the corners of the book, don't do this on your book designs.

I'll go into the full sorry saga tomorrow as it might be of interest to other self-published (quasi or otherwise) writers looking to put out print versions of their books through CreateSpace.

But back to our regular scheduled content...

The print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now out.  Sorry for making you all wait so long.  I hope you all enjoy it and find a place for it on your bookshelves.  Although you might want to put it somewhere where innocent neighbours don't pick it up and flick through by accident.  Or maybe you do... 😈

Game Design Fumbling: An Arachne Scenario

While playing around with some GameBook/text-based videogame ideas I sketched out this scenario for an arachne encounter:

It ended up coming out a little more complex than I thought...

H-space MGB Profile: Leech-Tongue Succubus

Name:  Leech-Tongue Succubus
Type:  Succubus
Habitat:  Unknown.

Description:
Pale or slightly bluish-skinned humanoid with the typical succubus/devil girl additions of horns, wings and tail.  Only one specimen has been encountered so far.  Her horns, wings and tail were very dark blue in colour, almost verging on black.  As with other succubi, she was slightly taller than the average human woman and possessed a figure straight out of typical male fantasy—slender, toned and extremely busty.

Their identifying feature is a long black tongue terminating in a leech-like sucker mouth.

(Again I'm uncomfortable classifying the different variations of succubus as separate species.  They could be, but they could also all be part of the same species, and the different feeding strategies and attack strategies we've observed could be the result of other factors such as exotic body augmentation and different training regimes.)

Attack Strategy:
Only the primary feeding mechanism is known for this succubus.  They feed using their long leech-like tongue.  They use it to suck in a man's penis and then stimulate him to repeated ejaculations (usually with the help of mammary intercourse) until the man is fully depleted of fluids.

This happens rapidly, as fast as if the succubus was draining their blood.  How do they induce the man to produce so much semen, so quickly?  An agent in the saliva can't be enough.  There must be some other factor.

Countermeasures:
As of yet we don't know anything about the offensive capabilities of this type of succubus.  It's possible they are part of a civilian class and rely on other HSIOs such as the scarlet imps to bring them human captives.  This is not an assumption I feel safe making.  All succubi-class HSIOs encountered so far have shown formidable mind control skills and regenerative abilities.  As always the best strategy is to disengage.  If this is not possible, hit fast and hit hard before the mesmeric abilities of the succubus compromise your ability to fight them.

Threat Level:
Unknown.

(Who am I kidding—High!)

H-space MGB Story: Leech-Tongue Succubus (part 2)

continued from part 1

The wet, slurpy sounds grew louder and sloppier.  Kowalski's moans rose above them before tailing off in an exhausted rattle.  Then...

Silence.

Bate heard the clicking sounds of the succ's high heels against the stone floor.  She rounded the pillar and turned to face him.  Was it his imagination or had the pale round globes of her boobs grown even bigger since he'd last seen her?  It didn't matter that she wasn't human.  Those twin bulges triggered a powerful surge of arousal in his groin.  She crouched down and smiled sluttily up at Bate.  Her hands were covered in shiny black gloves.  She stroked one hand up his cock and it swelled out rigid like an iron bar.  Her other hand pulled down her top and let her big tits flop out.

Bate spat on her face.  With his arms and legs currently trapped within the meat wall it was all the defiance he could muster.

The she-demon smiled up at him.  She licked the spittle off her face with a tongue as black as the lingerie she was wearing.  It wasn't just the color of her tongue that was off.  Bate thought he saw the end open up, like the blind maw of a leech or maw.  Only briefly, easy enough to miss, but Bate had seen it.

Not that it mattered to his raging hard-on.

The succ slid Bate's cock between her big slutty tits.  Being wedged between her big soft boobs felt even better than the soft caress of her hand.  Her skin was warm and silky smooth, and her boobs felt like big soft pillows.  The succ pressed them together and they smothered his cock completely.  She looked up at him with her smoldering slutty eyes and started to tittyfuck him.  She pressed her hands into the sides of her swollen breasts and lifted them up and down, rubbing that sensually smooth skin against Bate's bulging cock.  Her lips pouted in a wanton pout as she switched to alternating her up and down movements, jostling Bate's member between her flesh cushions.  The movement and the feel of her tits turned Bate on even more.  He felt like he was heating up all over.

Squeeze.  Rub.  Plump plump.  Jiggle.

Bate's temperature kept rising.  His balls felt tight and itchy.

They made you want to come.  They made it so good it felt like you had no other purpose in life but to come.

The scarlet imps watched like creepy children out of a horror or science fiction film.  Bate barely noticed they were there.  The succ pressed her tits together around his cock and a cracked moan escaped his lips.

The succ's mouth opened and her tongue fell out, and kept falling.  It was long, far too long.  It was black and shiny like a leech, and with a gaping maw at the end like the mouth of a leech as well.  A mouth within mouth.  The inner one dilated like it was tasting the air.

Her tongue kept reeling out of her mouth like a snake slithering from a cave.  It was long enough to reach all the way down to her breasts.  There, it wormed down into her cleavage.  Bate felt it sucking on the end of his cock.  It stretched and engulfed first his glans and then the rest of his penis.  He felt the muscular walls grip him as her tongue covered him like a warm living sheath.

"Now she's going to suck you all up," one of the imps said, her eyes shining in expectation.

The succ pressed her tits together and started jiggling them again.  Her tongue flexed and squeezed so that it felt like continuous rings of pressure were rolling up his shaft.

Sucking on him.

The heat in Bate—the tension in his balls—grew unbearable.  He let out a loud moan as his hips bucked and he spurted cum up the narrow tube of her long flexible tongue.  He heard wet noises as she sucked it up.  The wet noises intensified and with it the suction.

Oh God.

Bate tipped his head back as another ejaculation erupted from him in a white burst of pleasure.  The succubus kept plumping her tits against his cock.  Her tongue kept tugging on him with muscular squeezes.  Kept sucking.

A third ejaculation burst from Bate.  A fourth.  His head thrashed from side to side as he was lost in thrall to the pleasure she was giving him.  A fifth.  A sixth.  He fancied they were travelling up her tongue in little bulges, dragged out of him like a string of precious pearls.

Seven.  Eight.  Nine.

So many Bate could no longer keep count.  They all rolled into one continuous flow of pleasure up her gulping tongue.  His cries and sighs rose to a peak and then terminated in a final weak rattle as the succubus sucked up the last of him.

She retracted her tongue, stood up and moved onto the next one.



"Wait.  Go back to the start."

"Where?"

"The moment the squad was able to fire their guns."

"Oh right, the moment the dimensional phenomenon passed."

"What else happened then?"

"Squad-Sergeant Henry Dunlop ran a succubus through with a piece of steel rebar.  Then Specialist Benjamin Hicks and the other members of the squad opened fire and—"

"Stop."

"What is it?"

"A thought.  No, it's probably nothing.  Unless...  But how?  Hmm, I need to think about this.  You can go now."

H-space MGB Story: Leech-Tongue Succubus (part 1)

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H-space MGB Profile: Nuru Nuru Girl

Name:  Nuru Nuru Girl
Type:  Humanoid
Habitat:  Only seen so far in the inflatable cave system, an unusual structure discovered underground.

Description:
Close enough to human to be mistaken for one at first glance.  They resemble women of East Asian descent, with bronze skin and straight black hair.  As with other observed HSIOs, their features mimicking human sexual characteristics are highly exaggerated.  Their breasts are considerably larger than a typical human woman of their size, although in this case there is a functional reason for this as their breasts contain the glands that produce the copious amounts of lubricating fluid that give the nuru nuru girls their name.

Other divergent features include the hands and feet.  Their wrists and ankles are longer and allow their hands and feet a greater degree of rotation and movement.  The feet also have much longer digits, to the point they resemble a secondary pair of hands.

Attack Strategy:
The nuru nuru girls are named for the complex lubricant exuded by their skin and in particular their breasts and sexual organs.  This has a similar appearance and consistency to nuru gel, a product used in a special type of Japanese massage.

(I assume this is a sex thing.  My assistant was curiously reticent when pressed for further details.)

The lubricant is a complex blend of oils, enzymes and some compounds that defy chemical analysis.  Aside from its lubricating properties, the substance is also corrosive—but only to non-living fabric.  There is also a strong narcotic component that induces a euphoric state in the subject once absorbed through the skin.  The body-to-body massage a nuru nuru girl gives her victim is thought to aid in this absorption.  With their prey docile and non-resistant, the nuru nuru girl covers them with a fluid that softens human tissues while still preserving their intactness.  As of yet, we have been unable to duplicate this softening effect under laboratory conditions.

(Maybe it requires the unusual physical laws of H-space.)

Once her prey has softened to the point of liquefaction, the nuru nuru girl draws them up into her body through her vaginal opening.

Countermeasures:
Physically, the nuru nuru girls are no more strong or agile than a human female athlete of comparable size.  Their main threat is their secretions.  Unprotected skin contact results in a euphoric state that impairs mental acuity and combat effectiveness.

Thankfully, liquefaction of tissues only occurs after prolonged and sustained contact (and possibly only while engaged in physical copulation with the nuru nuru girl).  Smaller exposure to the lubricant appears to have no long-term deleterious effects, although it is advised to wash it off at the earliest opportunity.

Threat Level:
Low.

Some of my colleagues are excited by the pharmaceutical potential of the nuru nuru girls' secretions.  My personal opinion is that the lubricant will not behave in the same way under Earth's different physical laws.

H-space MGB Story: Nuru Nuru Girl

SGT Stewart Peter Bate was running with the others when one of the nuru nuru girls took him down.  They hadn't been that threatening when Bate and the others had first come through this way, but the men had had guns then and were still functioning as a well-drilled unit.

Now...

They were fleeing in panic.  Bate didn't have his gun.  He'd dropped it and left it behind, just like the others.  What was the point of having a gun?  They were no use against that... thing.  All they could do was run.

Run for their immortal souls.

The nuru nuru girls were one of the more human-looking hindigs.  They looked like pretty Asian girls, the type you might find in a seedy downtown rub'n'tug joint.  Except their hands and feet were a little too long.  And no Asian chick had boobs that big unless they were fake.  Neither did most other women either.

At first glance they'd looked so close to human their science officer, Briggs, had mistaken them for unfortunate wretches pulled into H-space by some weird unidentified inter-dimensional phenomenon.  He'd been very surprised when one of the girls had tackled him to the ground and leaked a clear fluid on him from her over-sized breasts that had melted his clothes away like it was acid.  Fortunately for Briggs, the corrosive properties had been restricted to his clothing.  The science officer had been none the worse for wear after they'd driven the girl off and helped him back to his feet.  If anything he'd been a little too good, a little blissed out as if he'd just taken a heavy dose of psych medication.

The explo team had carried on and...

Bate didn't want to think about that.  He didn't want to remember the cave, the thing in it... and he definitely didn't want to remember what it had done to Briggs.  All he wanted to do was run.

The cavern where they'd encountered the nuru nuru girls was strange even by H-space standards.  It resembled a giant inflatable, as if they were walking inside the world's largest bouncy castle.  The floor was a patchwork of bright, artificial colors.  It had even felt like they were walking on large, air-filled bladders—soft, spongy and yielding.

Briggs had said it must be artificial.  The first time through Bate had wondered who or even why someone would take the time to build this.  Especially here, underground.

The second time through he was more concerned with trying to keep his footing.  The yielding, pitching surface made running hard work.  Out of the corner of his eye he saw men slip or stumble.  The nuru nuru girls were upon them before they could get back to their feet.

Bate kept running.

The exit was maybe ten meters away when Bate felt a weight crash into his back and he fell forward onto the swaying ground.  The weight came with him, pinning him to the floor as it lay on top of him.  He felt wetness flood his upper back as if someone had emptied a jug of warm water over him.  Breast fluids from a nuru nuru girl.  He already knew it ate through clothes after seeing what had happened to Briggs.  Now it was happening to him.  He felt the cool air of the cavern against his back.

The exit was so close.  He could see it.  He tried to buck her off, but any force he generated was dampened by the yielding surface beneath him.  Another flood of warm liquid was poured onto his exposed back.

Oh.

Bate stopped struggling.  He understood now why Briggs had looked so blissed out after they'd forced the nuru nuru girl off him.  The warm liquid felt like a miracle drug that soaked into his flesh and made all the aches and twinges of his back and shoulders melt away.  He felt the pressure of two soft objects against his back and realized the nuru nuru girl was lying on top of him with her big tits squashed against his back.

"Relax," she whispered, her lips close to his ear.

Her words slithered past his surface understanding and burrowed into deeper folds of his brain.  They triggered a pleasant static-like tingling on his scalp that tickled down his neck and spine.

Bate didn't resist as the nuru nuru girl started to massage him using her whole body.  She rubbed her big soft boobs all over his back as if they were sponges laden with warm water.  The fluids melted away more of his uniform until her naked flesh was rubbing directly against his.

His fear and the flight—all were forgotten and pushed aside.  The cave, H-space, went away with it.  He was lying on an air mattress by the side of a pool on warm summer day while a hot girl with big tits rubbed warm oil into him... with her body.  He relaxed and murmured his pleasure as she rubbed her big soft boobs up and down his back.  She lay on top of him and her hands glided across his shoulders and then down his arms, spreading relaxing warmth in their wake.  Bate wondered if she had a friend as it felt like a second pair of hands were rubbing down his thighs and the back of his calves.  Her touch was bliss.  His aches and twinges melted away beneath it.

The heat of her body—or was it her desire—lay over him like a warm blanket.  She whispered seductive suggestions in his ear and followed them up with cheeky thrusts of her hips against him.  The floor, soaked in lubricant, made squishing sounds as her weight shifted on top of Bate.

She sat up and her nimble fingers went back to work kneading the meat of his neck and shoulders.  Bate didn't resist as she slid an arm underneath him and turned him over onto his back.  Why would he?  It gave him a better view of her body and she was gorgeous.

Straight black hair curved around and framed an exotically beautiful face.  She smiled down at him over the soft rounded peaks of her big tits.  Her skin was a rich bronze in color.  Her whole body was slathered in oily lotion to the point it dripped from her in glistening strands.  She flopped down on him and rubbed those shiny boobs up his chest.  Bate lay back and let her pamper him.

There was one bit of tension she made no attempt to smooth away.  Instead she encouraged it by rubbing the smooth skin of her belly against his rampant erection.  Then, after sitting up, she coaxed him to maximum hardness with sensual strokes of her hands.  Bate's excitement grew as she lifted herself up over his hard-on and let the pink folds of her pussy rest against the top of his swollen glans.  Hot thick juices poured out of her vagina and dribbled down his shaft.

Put it in, he thought.

She obliged.  She pressed down, her labia parted around his cock and he entered her.  She was tight, but so wet he slid smoothly into her.  More fluids bubbled out and flooded down his shaft.  Their warmth seeped through his skin and coagulated in his balls.

She smoothly bounced up and down on his shaft.  Bate watched mesmerized as her heavy breasts swayed with her movements.  He didn't have to move as the inflatable-mattress floor rocked and bucked for him.  He felt the pressure of her tight pussy gently squeezing him.  Her vaginal walls massaged his member with the same care and attention her hands and breasts had given his body.

Massaged him until...

Bate let out a soft moan as his balls clenched, his cock throbbed and he emptied his seed inside her.  The nuru nuru girl flopped down on him at the moment of orgasm, covering him with her warm body.  The walls of her vagina pulsed in time to his own throbbing ejaculation, coaxing him first for more and then milking the last dregs from his spent cock.

Then she sighed and came.  Really came.  Her orgasm was a great shuddering quake that flooded his crotch with warm fluids and set her vaginal walls vibrating all around him.  Her big boobs, trembling under the same forces running through her, poured oily lubricant all over Bate until he was covered in a layer of clear gel.  He liked it.  He felt comfortable beneath it.  Relaxed.

The nuru nuru girl wasn't done.  That meant Bate wasn't done either.  Little bounces of her hips and squeezes of her pussy brought his cock twitchingly back to life.  From there it didn't take long for the wet friction of her tight little pussy to take him back over the edge.  He released another burst of semen inside her.  Much more this time.  Long.  Slow.  Relaxed.

The aftermath felt like nirvana—like she'd drawn out every bit of tension in his body until he'd melted into a warm, blissful puddle.

And like a puddle, once his muscles had softened too much to enable ejaculation, Bate's liquefying form was sucked up into the nuru nuru girl's vagina.  To Bate it felt like another, greater feeling of release.  Finished, her belly distended as though she was pregnant, the nuru nuru girl slithered back to her hole to quietly enjoy her claim.

H-space Monster Girl Bestiary Fan-art - Boob-Snake

I received this through email:

She's a boob-snake, one of my H-space monster girl demons.  You can read her story here and the profile to go with it.

The artwork is lovely.  I love the way her serpentine lower body is just breaching the surface.  It's as if she knows you've strayed too close and no longer cares about hiding what she is.

The artist is Yenn-Ash.  You can check out more of her work on DeviantArt here and her own blog.  I think she did a brilliant job with this piece and I hope my writing (and others) inspires her to create more like it.

Now to get off my lazy ass and get that next batch of H-space stories written and posted.

New Monster Girl Games up on DLSite - Demon Angel Sakura vol.4, Drain Dungeon, Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono

Lorks o'Lordy.  You wait ages for a monster girl game and three come out on the same day.

First up we have Demon Angel Sakura vol.4.

Long time followers will be familiar with this series.  I've already reviewed vols 1, 2, and 3 on the blog.  This is the 4th and last entry in the series.

It's a 2D platform/action game where you control the diminutive Sakura as they fight off various hungry monster girls eager to eat him (her, them?).  The first two games were boss rushes.  The third added a lot of random mooks, each with their own animated Bad End scenes.  The fourth carries on the changes introduced in the third.

Oddly, it's not actually completed yet.  The creators fell behind schedule, but decided to release what they had with the final area (and 3 bosses) to follow early next year.  Despite this, there's still plenty of content with 3 bosses and 15 or so mooks.

I must admit Demon Angel Sakura never really turns me on that much.  Normally this would be a failing for an eroge, but I'm mostly playing to see what ridiculously over-the-top indignities are heaped on poor Sakura in the imaginative Bad End sequences.  The game rarely disappoints.

If you've ever fantasized about having a giant succubus fart in your face and then insert you headfirst into her pussy as a human dildo, this is the game for you.

What, did you think I was joking...?

I've already bought this one and will bring you all the vore-y details in a couple of days or so.

Next up we have Drain Dungeon.

I played this demo a few weeks back after seeing it mentioned on ulmf.org and it looked interesting.  It's a dungeon crawler, but with the dungeon abstracted to a linear sequence of left or right choices (similar to what Desire Dungeon did).

The main gimmick here is that the hero (i.e. you) is always reset to level one upon leaving the dungeon, so a trio of enterprising succubi strike up a deal to... um... "drain" those levels from you before leaving rather than letting them go to waste.

Yes, that kind of "draining".

The three succubi fit the usual range of body shapes, so you have the busty milf one, the slutty elder teen one, and the blatant loli one (who's probably the eldest of the three).  The loli is a bit too loli for my tastes, so that likely means a third of the game's H-content won't interest me.  The busty milf however...

Levels?  I'll get you levels.  All the levels you want...

The dungeon also has some additional H-content provided by various monster girl bosses.  I ran into and afoul of a slime girl in the demo.  The rest of the monsters were the standard stock RPG Maker sprites, so there is a danger the game might get too grindy and repetitive later on.

The biggest problem I found is that the game uses the Wolf RPG Maker system and that traditionally hasn't played very nice with text-hooking.  I like the premise and it looks interesting, but I'll hold off on getting it until I can find the h-code (or alternate text hooker) to make it translatable.


The third game out today is Bifrost's Brothel of Mamono.

This is a genre I don't look at too often - the brothel simulator.

The back story is that you've ended up in debt to the devil/some kind of succubus and have been whisked off to an alternate world to run a brothel in order to pay it off.  Unfortunately, AGTH failed to hook this one at all, so I wasn't really able to work out what was going on in the demo.

From what I saw the gameplay appears to be purchasing captured monster girls off slavers, breaking them in with various sex stuff and then pimping them out to clients to bring in the cash.

Aww, poor lickle Harpy.

Not my cup of tea to be honest, but it might be of interest to people who like their sexy monster girls to be served up without a side helping of femdom and potential death-by-snu-snu.  The art and UI looked fine from what I saw, although not being able to translate anything means I don't know how well the strategy/gameplay mechanics hold up.

Obligatory Post-Election Political Post

I've been off-grid for a few days. Did I miss anything important? /s

After the election result came in I did think about writing something.  It seemed like every other bugger was doing it.  Then I wondered if that in itself was a symptom of the problem.  I'm an entertainer.  I entertain people with filthy sexy stories of succubus porn.  You shouldn't give a shit what entertainers think about politics.

Then I saw this video and it sums up what I think far more eloquently than anything I could have wrote:

It's a comedy skit and Jonathan Pie is a satirical creation, but Britain has a long and distinguished history of letting their comics sneak out uncomfortable political truths and this is spot on.  Hats off to Tom Walker and Andrew Doyle for six minutes of glorious sweary brilliance.

It's what I've been saying for a while now.  Continually throw rocks at people in the middle ground and eventually they'll move over to the side not currently throwing rocks at their head.  And when elections are won by which side can most successfully overlap the middle ground...

I'm not going to lie.  I did derive some pleasure in watching some of the more horrible holier-than-thou types in the media (social and mainstream) go from smug confidence, to panic and then finally to full-fledged meltdown over the course of Tuesday night.  They'd earned that.  Less pleasant was seeing a lot of folks on my personal facebook, mostly decent lefties of the non-sanctimonious variety, be genuinely fearful about what the future holds.  I feel for them.

One thing I did think genuinely odious in the aftermath of the election was the number of "If you voted Trump don't read/watch/play my books/films/games" comments from people that really should know better.  Fuck that shit for the condescending bilge it is.  Every person's circumstances are different and I'm never going to begrudge you for voting for the candidate you think is personally better for you, even if it wouldn't be my choice.

I don't mind if you voted Trump.

I don't mind if you voted Clinton.

I don't mind if you voted third party.

Heck, I don't even mind if you didn't vote at all.  (To be honest, if faced with the choice between Trump and Clinton I'd have probably thought "sod it all!" and buggered off down the pub for a pint.)

Neither do I mind if you don't give a shit whether I mind one way or another.  As I said before, you shouldn't give a shit what entertainers think about politics.

I'm not you.  They're not you.

It was your vote.  Don't let any fucker try and guilt-trip you over how you used it.  They haven't lived your life.

And now... I guess we're in the Chinese definition of "interesting times".  On the plus side, the media were so horribly wrong about everything there's a good chance they were horribly wrong about Trump being the second coming of Hitler as well.  I think a lot of the energetic centipedes on reddit that voted for Trump, the human-shaped Fuck You! sign to the liberal media establishment, will be a little disappointed when Trump, the man, doesn't live up to their expectations, but that's a lesson we all learn about politics eventually.

In the meantime, there are some scared people out there and not all of them are obnoxious SJW shits.  If you were one of those that rode the big orange wrecking ball to see it smash SOCJUS political correctness to bits, remember and reassure the vulnerable.  Have their backs against the lunatic fringe of the other side when it slithers out of the rocks to take advantage of the current pendulum swing, and it will.  The right side of history is now you.  Be better.

As for me, I'll continue writing.

The new novel is progressing, if a little slower than I'd like.  There is a new batch of H-space monster girl bestiary stories on the way.

I'm an entertainer.  Time to get back to entertaining.

Hentai Game Review: ViotoXica

This is another hentai game that caters primarily to the Ryona/Vore fetish crowd, but also has some content that might be of interest to Monster Girl/Succubus fans.  The makers, Xi, were responsible for the Viocide vore action game released a few years back.  ViotoXica is more of the same, but with a fantasy rather than sci-fi backdrop.  You play a magical girl princess attempting to escape from a castle full of monsters trying to eat her (and sexually molest her in their stomachs, because that... um... aids digestion or something...).

I wasn't able to get any translation for this as AGTH continues to implode everything it touches in Windows 10.  In this case it didn't matter too much as ViotoXica is an action game in the metroidvania vein.  The game has various upgrade paths for the main character as well as a shop system where you can buy extra sockets to upgrade weapons and armours.  This is more for higher difficulties though.  If you just want to play for the H- or rather vore-content, you can stick the game on the 'Super Easy' setting and breeze through fairly easily without needing to understand the more complex mechanics.

As with metroidvania games, a large part of the gameplay consists of finding the upgrades and keys to open up more of the map.  Upgrades include double-jump, high-jump, roll, and some kind of heat shield.  Even without knowing Japanese I was able to mostly figure out what was needed where without too many problems.  Up Arrow + Menu Button (V) to reveal the whole map is your friend when it comes to figuring out where to backtrack.  Although one improvement I would have liked to see is the colour-coding extended to front-on doors on the map as well as the side-on doors.  The one time I did get stuck was because I forgot about a locked red door on the top right of the map because it was one of the face-on teleport doors rather than a side exit.

I will commend Xi on their game-making skills.  The main character handles really smoothly and it plays like a good metroidvania game.  I almost regretted playing on Super Easy and therefore not needing to learn the nuances of the upgrade system, but then I remembered how terrible I am at 2D (or 2.5D) platformers.

One weird thing about vore games is YouTube appears to have less qualms about showing footage from them as opposed to something like Monster Girl Quest, which is theoretically possible to upload... providing you have plenty of black squares on hand to cover most of the artwork.  Anyway, there is a trailer for ViotoXica that provides a taster of the artwork, gameplay and (surprisingly good) music.

Now, onto the important stuff - the filthy snu-snu.

First off, this is a vore game.  That means a good chunk of the enemies are going to be worms, plants, frogs and the like, and they're not going to auditioning for an appearance in anyone's wet dreams anytime soon (unless those people happen have very... specialised tastes).  There are 13 enemy types total.  Six of those are what I would class as monster girls - two types of succubi, bee girl, arachne, sort-of-alraune and a butterfly demon girl as the final boss.

Most of the game is 2D (or 2.5D - some sprites look hand-drawn and others like 3D models).  Each enemy has a grab attack that will result in the main character being swallowed and a Game Over regardless of their HP total if they don't break out of it.  This is seen first as a 2D animation on the main game screen...

...and then, after the Game Over, the action switches to a much more detailed 3D clip of the heroine getting gulped up...

...and then bouncing around inside something's stomach with the obligatory ryona-style clothing destruction.

I'm not a hardcore vore enthusiast.  My interest lies in the overlapping Venn diagram of sexy monster girls being sexy-evil and dominant (in this case having a rather more literal interpretation of "I want you inside me" than most would consider comfortable).  For this type of game I'm looking for a bit of flirt from the monster girl before her victim goes down the hatch.  Or, failing that, scenes of such sublime ridiculousness (such as Demon Angel Sakura's giant farting fairies) I can have a chuckle and admire the creator's depraved inventiveness.

Viotoxica is a bit light on that.  The Bad End scenes are rather thrashy, with slobber flying everywhere as the magical girl princess gets gulped down.  The churning animations are also a little too exaggerated, unless one of the magical girl princess's magical abilities is to change into a big block of crystal after being swallowed.  Bear in mind this is a subjective criticism from someone on the borders rather than being at the centre of the target audience.  If you're more into the ryona side of things, these are not negatives at all.

Another disappointment was the sameness of the monster girl Bad Ends - monster girl opens out her tail or abdomen like a trumpet and hoovers up hapless magical girl princess.  It looks okay for the succubus-type monsters, but a bit ridiculous for the arachne.  The exception to this is the final boss.  I'm not going to spoil it here, but it was certainly different...

Overall I appreciated this more for the smooth gameplay than the H-scenes.  Worth looking at if you like your monster girls more on the predatory side.  Really worth looking at if you like a bit of vore or ryona.

Problems with Text-Hooking and Japanese Games

Now, normally this blog is the place where I play the smutty Japanese games and toss (oo-er missus)... um give out advice on how to play them if you can't read Japanese.  This time I'm going to flip it around to as I've been hitting a few problems with text-hooking and getting things to just damn work, and I'm wondering if any of you out there might have fixes for some of the problems I (and likely others) have been experiencing.

There hasn't been as much H-game content on here lately.  I think the Echidna Wars DX piece I blogged yesterday might have been the first for a while.  This is partly because Monster Girl Quest set the bar so high that there's only so many "generic RPG Maker clone with ten short vanilla H-scenes" games you can play before the novelty factor wears off.

A bigger problem has been the slow and steady degradation of the tech I use to extract and translate the Japanese text into something close enough to English to be able to follow what's going on.  If you don't know how it's done, I found this handy guide on hongfire to be very helpful when I was setting up things on my machine(s).  How it works in general is you create a shortcut for the game, go into properties and redirect the link to start AGTH first, AGTH copies the text to the clipboard, Translator Aggregator picks up whatever is in the clipboard and sends it off to various web sources to be machine translated.  What comes back isn't always that accurate of a translation, but it's usually close enough to be able to roughly follow what's going on (This was how I was able to create the enormous Let's Play series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox last year).

Unfortunately, time passes, software gets upgraded, compatibility problems arise, and trusty tools start to degrade.  Translator Aggregator used to link to multiple web sources such as Google, and between four or five sources it was usually possible to get a good translation of a passage.  Over time those web sources started blocking TA until currently there's only one, or maybe two of the sources still working.  It's still possible to 'read' whats going on, but it's fiddlier and some of the more complex RPGs such as the ROBF series become very difficult to play as the detailed instructions the player needs to follow in order to advance the plot end up being literally lost in translation.

Couldn't read it... :(

This is a relatively minor problem when compared to the games that use oddball engines where text hooking slides off.  Dieselmine's Monmusu! Reverse R*pe Academy looked interesting despite being a more standard visual novel than a game, but nope, AGTH couldn't hook in.  I could hook Succubus Rhapsodia, but that game suffers from a similar problem to the old Succubus Quest games - the combat spams so many lines of text to the clipboard that digging out the juicy stuff becomes a chore and the game loses its charm.  A shame as the artwork - especially the various succubus designs - looks fucking lush.  One I wouldn't mind seeing an English translation of, but I'm not sure whether the gameplay holds up well enough for there to be the demand to get someone to do this (as happened for the original MGQ and Violated Hero games).

Looks gorgeous, but too damn fiddly to really enjoy... :(

Unfortunately, on top of this, a recent Windows 10 update seems to have completely buggered either AGTH, some games, or how AGTH interacts with those games.  This seems to affect the various games built off RPG Maker engines.  Attempting to start them through AGTH results in the game crashing right after launch.  At first I thought I might be screwing up the settings somewhere, but a look around revealed some other people have been having similar problems and the cause might have been the recent Windows 10 anniversary update.

These are dark times indeed for monster girl hentai games enthusiasts...

To be honest, I've been bumbling around with the same translation setup for a while and it's inevitable it would reach the end of its natural life cycle.  The question is, what next?  I'm going to do some digging, but I thought I'd throw the question out on the off chance some of you might have already encountered and solved some of these problems.  Please chime in with useful advice and links in the comments below.

I suppose I could always get off my lazy ass and actually learn to read Japanese.

(remembers how bad he was in school at French and other languages.  weeps.)

Hentai Game Preview: Echidna Wars DX

Monster Girl/Vore fans might remember a game a while back called Millia Wars.  It was a 2D action game where you played a Magical Girl fighting off various ambulatory stomachs, slugs, and (the bit I was interested in) sexy monster girls in the form of lamia, harpy and arachne.

Now it looks like D-Gate/Camel is giving that a touch-up in the form of new artwork, new characters and new monsters and will be releasing it as Echidna Wars DX later this year.

I'm not sure, as I am unfortunately illiterate when it comes to reading Japanese, but I believe this is a collaboration between Camel and Asimofu, with Asimofu providing the new artwork.

When I saw the screenshots on Camel's blog I was originally sceptical.  The new artwork looked a little pixelly compared to the original.  Playing the trial version changed my mind.  The animations of the snake girl are gorgeous.  Not only that, but she has multiple animated grapple attacks and finishing moves as well.  What animation you get depends on how the lamia grabs you and whether the Magical Girl protagonist has any SP left.

Here's a look at some of those moves.

If she grabs you with her hands the magical girl goes in the vagina feet first.

A grab with the tail triggers a steamy bit of making out.

Run out of SP and that hand grab segues to a spot of sexy snake hula dancing with you inside her.

Let the tail grab you at zero SP and the poor magical girl heroine goes in head first for an intensive all over body-rub.

If, after this, the heroine still has some HP left, she will be pulled or spat out for further fun and games.  No HP and - gulp - down deeper she goes.

The new version looks interesting from the trial and I'm really keen to see what new tricks we'll see from the arachne and others when the final game comes out.

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.

H-space MGB Story: Sex-Spawn Pit

They dropped SPC Stewart Peter Bate into the pit with Brown, Gomez and Schultz.

They were demons.  Not aliens, not exotic fauna, not HSIOs, not hindigs... demons.  Those idiot scientists hadn't opened a gate to a parallel dimension, they'd opened a gate to goddamned hell.  Bate was convinced of it.  Just look at them.  The women had red skin, horns, tails, and black bat wings.  The men, if they could be called that, were muscular brutes with the heads of horned goats or worse.

Despite them looking more human, Bate was more repulsed by the female ones.  They had a way of touching you that caused sin to burrow under the skin and bubble back up as unwholesome thoughts.

Demons.  Like out of the sermons of Pastor Jones back home.

The demons had captured them when FOB Helmuth had fallen.  Bate didn't remember much about it.  There had been some kind of weird pink fog.  He'd fallen asleep and while he was sleeping he'd had the hottest dream he'd ever experienced.  It had been shameless—him, the entire Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad.  Just thinking about it triggered a guilty throb in his junk.

On waking he'd found himself in chains and in the hands of these demons.  Along with the other captives, he'd been taken to a forsaken and unholy city in the middle of a desolate range of hills.  During the journey Bate had wondered if that pink fog had really been poison gas and now he was dead and in Hell.  He'd tried to live a good life, but he knew he'd made mistakes.

The soldiers looked at each other uneasily.  All four had been stripped naked by their captors before being thrown into the pit.

"They expect us to fight?" Brown said.

The pit was sunk into the floor, about ten feet deep.  The walls and floor were pinkish-brown and reminded Bate uncomfortably of flesh.  The hellish denizens standing and sitting around the pit were in raucous good spirits.  Bate saw something that could have been a clock.  On the wall below it was a large board with parallel lines drawn across it.  Strange symbols were chalked on the board that made Bate's eyes water just looking at them.

The pit and the way the demons were gathered around it like an audience reminded Bate of a sleazy show he'd seen at a biker dive out in San Leon.  They'd taken some kind of inflatable—like a kids' paddling pool but deeper—and poured in a thick layer of watery slurry.  Naked chicks had wrestled in it while the audience whooped and hollered.  The walls of this pit had a similar padded look and the floor beneath their feet was as spongy and bouncy as if they were standing on an inflatable.

Kinda...

The surfaces didn't look or feel like rubber.  To Bate they looked more like flesh, and every so often a little shudder would go through the walls and floor.  Like the pit was alive in some way.

The men glanced at each other warily while the demons watched in raucous anticipation.

What were they expected to do? Bate thought.  Wrestle?  Fight?  ...to the death?

A bell rang and the watching demons roared with excitement.  The pit the four men were standing in trembled.  They watched as one of the corners bulged outwards into the pit.  A split appeared at the apex of the bulge and resembled some kind of fleshy orifice.  Brown slurry oozed from the rupture as something resembling a dark brown blob pushed through from the other side.  The pit wall flexed and strained as if it was a living thing, although Bate couldn't tell whether the thing was giving birth or taking a shit.

Giving birth, maybe, he decided as the wall pushed out a large human-sized sac.  The membrane surrounding it was glossy with lubricating oils.  The sac slithered to the floor and ruptured, spilling out more fluids onto the already-slippery pit floor.  A humanoid figure—a young woman—struggled free of the membrane.  She was naked, hairless, and covered in slime.

She looked human.  More human than the horrors looking down on them anyway.  Another captive?  Had she been transported here in ways too foul to dwell upon?

Schultz thought so.  He saw a woman on the floor—shocked and catatonic—and his protective instincts kicked in.

"Are you okay, miss?" he asked as he held out a hand to her.

"Wait," Brown warned.

With good reason.  The girl lifted her head to reveal weird black eyes that were definitely not human.  She sprang at Schultz and wrapped her legs around his waist before her weight sent both toppling to the floor.

Bate watched it unfurl like he was watching a scene in a horror movie.  There was that same feeling of helplessness.  He knew the monster was going to pounce on its victim and he couldn't get there in time to stop it.

Of course, had this been a horror movie the demon girl would have torn out Schultz's throat with her fangs.  This being H-space, what followed was weirder than that.

The girl started fucking Schultz.  She lay on top of him and the round swell of her ass pumped up and down like she was a porno bunny.  Schultz resisted at first, and then he seemed to like what she was doing as he joined in until the two of them were writhing and grunting on the soft floor like a pair of porno bunnies.  The curvy little demon girl seemed indefatigable.  She kept bouncing up and down on top of him, cheered on by the demons looking down at them.

A sex show? Bate thought.  Was that all they wanted—humans for their live sex show?

No, it wasn't.

A gasp and a trembling of his ankles indicated Schultz had got a nut off.  Then the other soldiers noticed something weird seemed to be happening where Schultz's naked flesh met the floor of the pit.  At first it looked like the surface was stuck to him, then as if his skin was merging with it.  Schultz sank into the floor and seemed to spread out as the pit absorbed him.  The demon woman went with him, the round curves of her ass still bouncing up and down all the way.

A great cheer went up amongst the demons as Schultz was absorbed.  It was followed by furious haggling over who would be next.

The remaining three soldiers looked at each other.  Gomez hopped awkwardly from foot to foot as if he was terrified the floor might swallow him up at any moment.

They barely had a chance to ponder the awfulness of what had just happened before another shudder ran through the pit and a bulge appeared at the opposite corner.  The skin split and another slime-covered demon girl was squeezed out into the pit.  Like the other one she was lithe and curvaceous—a body most men would have described as sexy.

Brown snapped her neck.

The demon girl gave a disappointed sigh as she fell.  Her body sank into and was absorbed by the floor of the pit.

The three men glanced at each other.  They knew what they had to do.  They stood back to back in the center of the pit as another bulge formed on the pit wall.

Brown snapped her neck too.

And the one that followed.

After that the wall bulged in two places at once and two naked humanoid girls entered the pit.  Bate handled the second one.  Physically it was easy—the demon spawn were weaker even than the vulnerable naked girls they resembled.  Mentally...

It felt wrong.  Bate looked down at the lovely body crumpled up at his feet and felt sick inside.  Such a waste.

The demon girls didn't seem to care.  They didn't even cry out when they were killed.  As more entered the pit they stepped over their fallen sisters without so much as a second glance in their rush to hug, kiss, make love to the men currently killing them.  They seemed more like manikins made out of flesh.

This was so fucked up, Bate thought.

The walls churned in constant motion as more slits opened up and disgorged fresh naked women into the pit.  The men punched and kicked as they tried to keep the over-amorous women away from them.

"How many of these muthafucking things are there?" Brown said.  He sent one cartwheeling to the side of the pit with a roundhouse punch to her face.

Bate watched as another of the manikin-women was absorbed into the floor of the pit.  He had the horrible feeling the pit was merely recycling them to send wave after wave at the trapped men.

They got Gomez first.  He lost his balance on the shifting floor and two of the girls got their arms around him and pinned him back against one of the fleshy walls.  A third bent over and shoved her ass into Gomez's crotch.

Bate's attention was diverted by having to fend off the attentions of three more of the flesh-manikin women.  When he looked back he saw Gomez helplessly in the grip of the three women. The two pinning him to the wall kissed him on his cheeks and probed his ear with their tongues.  The third, having got Gomez's cock inside her, rocked back and forth into him.  She waggled her hips in an attempt to get him off.

It didn't take long.

Gomez let out a gasp as he came inside her.  Then the wall behind him softened and he was drawn into it.

That left two.

Bate drove his elbow into the face of one of the girls and felt her cheekbone give way beneath the impact.  Letting his martial arts training guide him, he grabbed her arm, broke it, and then sent her to the floor with a sweep of his leg.  The girl didn't cry out once.  She kept looking up at him with adoring eyes even with her right arm flopping uselessly with an additional joint broken into it.

Would you like me to bake those cookies you like, honey?

He saw the similarity in her face to his girlfriend waiting for him back home and something broke in his heart.

He couldn't do this.

He'd been trained to kill, but it was to kill other fighting men, not soft women who were only trying to embrace and kiss him.

Fuck it.  Bate held up his arms and let them swarm him.  He felt soft bodies press up against him and lascivious hands roam all over his naked flesh.  He didn't resist as they took him down to the soft floor.  Two of them lay on his arms and legs and whispered sweet nothings in his ear.  Another straddled him and impaled herself on his erection.  He felt her tightness wrapped all around his cock and then the pleasurable friction as she started to rise up and down.  Panting huskily, she bounced up and down on him and the soft surface they were lying on bounced with them like an inflatable mattress.

It wasn't just her either.  One of her friends stood astride his head and sat down, smothering his face between her luscious butt cheeks.  The last he saw before she buried him in pussy and ass was Brown bellowing as he tried to stay upright with at least four of the flesh-manikin girls clinging to his body.

Just give up, Bate thought.

This had to be better than the sickening crunches he felt when busting up their soft, lovely bodies.  It felt a damn site better.  The little porno bunny bouncing on his cock was so tight inside it took next to no time for her to get him off.  His body bucked and he gasped into the other girl's smothering pussy as he felt his cum well up inside his cock and burst out inside her like oil from a strike.

That felt a fuckton better.  The post-orgasmic glow was so relaxing it felt like he was melting into a blissful puddle.  Buried beneath soft nubile flesh he was drawn down to where it was warm, soft, and extremely comfortable.

Brief Update

I've been snowed under with non-writing related things for the past week or so and I'm off again for (other) work this weekend.  The Sex-Spawn Pit story (and others) is still on the in-progress pile.  The first draft is done, I just haven't finished typing up and editing, and likely won't have time before I leave.

Sorry to keep you all waiting in anticipation.  Hopefully I'll hit a more productive phase again once I've got this weekend out of the way.