Now there's a trap I wouldn't mind triggering!
The rest of the webcomic is a fantasy themed sex-comedy (NSFW!) centered around a hapless apprentice to a sorceress queen.
I wish I was good/fast enough to do artwork. I think the Succubus Summoning 101 series I write would look good as a hentai doujin/web comic. Sadly, all the artistic ability in me belongs to Horror Head and whatever those pictures are, they certainly ain't erotic!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Bad Nanny Apple
This sucks. They censored the erotica from their bestsellers list. It’s Apple’s toy and they can do what they like with it, but I think this kind of control freakery will only end up biting them in the ass. Amazon didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory when all the gay books ‘vanished’ or when the big grab fairy came and took back George Orwell’s ‘1984’ from people’s ebook readers, but at least they had the decency to mumble something about a ‘glitch’ in the first place and a rights fuck up in the other.
Apple, nope. They swept them away and tried to tell us reality was something else, which is never going to work as somebody is going to spot it, and then everybody else will know about it and pretty soon everyone will be looking at their bestsellers list and singing: “We know you’re lying...”
It’s silly. They could have handled it sensibly in any number of ways. Don’t sell the smut in the first place (although that’s bound to result in endless hilarity when someone gets over-zealous and blacklists “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Lolita”). Filter your bestsellers list by price to remove the cheap little novellas. Filter your bestsellers list by genre (Both fine as long as the filtering is stated).
Or suck it up and show a sense of humour in the “Gosh, who’d have thought adults would buy ‘adult’ titles” vein.
Instead they tried to pretend the world is basically flat.
I don’t hate Apple. They make a lot of cool stuff and I love my iPod to bits. But they also have a habit of building nice walled gardens and putting machinegun nests on the walls. And then wondering why the masses deserted them in droves for a competitor’s knock off that doesn’t come with a built-in nanny.
Nice to see erotica ebooks doing well against the big boys anyway.
Here’s hoping to hit the #1 spot in the invisible ‘real’ bestsellers list sometime soon ;).
Apple, nope. They swept them away and tried to tell us reality was something else, which is never going to work as somebody is going to spot it, and then everybody else will know about it and pretty soon everyone will be looking at their bestsellers list and singing: “We know you’re lying...”
It’s silly. They could have handled it sensibly in any number of ways. Don’t sell the smut in the first place (although that’s bound to result in endless hilarity when someone gets over-zealous and blacklists “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Lolita”). Filter your bestsellers list by price to remove the cheap little novellas. Filter your bestsellers list by genre (Both fine as long as the filtering is stated).
Or suck it up and show a sense of humour in the “Gosh, who’d have thought adults would buy ‘adult’ titles” vein.
Instead they tried to pretend the world is basically flat.
I don’t hate Apple. They make a lot of cool stuff and I love my iPod to bits. But they also have a habit of building nice walled gardens and putting machinegun nests on the walls. And then wondering why the masses deserted them in droves for a competitor’s knock off that doesn’t come with a built-in nanny.
Nice to see erotica ebooks doing well against the big boys anyway.
Here’s hoping to hit the #1 spot in the invisible ‘real’ bestsellers list sometime soon ;).
Friday, August 06, 2010
A Bizarro challenger emerges
This caught my attention in the Guardian a week or so ago. They describe it as the literary equivalent to cult movies, which piqued my attention as it brings back fond memories of staying up late to watch whatever weirdness was showing on Channel 4 or Alex Cox’s Moviedrome. Titles like ‘Shatnerquake’ and ‘Ass Goblins of Auschwitz’ are clearly not meant to be taken seriously, but are they not as bad as they sound, so bad they’re good or so bad they’re just terrible?
They have a nice website and I liked the two articles by Carlton Mellick III. Good storytelling is universal, no matter how weird the concept might be.
I noticed they also feature a few of Edward Lee’s books. I remember his “Mr. Torso” being far beyond anything else in Hot Blood IV for sheer deranged inventiveness.
Ah, is this where all the horror writers ran off to when their genre was overrun by sparkly vampires?
And yeah, the mercenary bastard in me was wondering if this was a market I could try and hawk my wares in. One of the book ideas I’m chipping away with at the moment does have the working title: “Porno Fighters from Planet Earth” :).
Also I see it as another challenge. Even though it’s fairly juvenile, I often write with the aim of trying to take on and beat the worst excesses of Japanese manga/anime for weird and freaky sex. It’s an impossible mission. Every time I think I’m getting close I run across another Apocalypse Zero and realise I’ve got a long way to go.
I hadn’t really thought about films/books from the west. I thought they were lacking that essence of WTF imagination. Only goes to show I wasn’t really looking hard enough... :)
They have a nice website and I liked the two articles by Carlton Mellick III. Good storytelling is universal, no matter how weird the concept might be.
I noticed they also feature a few of Edward Lee’s books. I remember his “Mr. Torso” being far beyond anything else in Hot Blood IV for sheer deranged inventiveness.
Ah, is this where all the horror writers ran off to when their genre was overrun by sparkly vampires?
And yeah, the mercenary bastard in me was wondering if this was a market I could try and hawk my wares in. One of the book ideas I’m chipping away with at the moment does have the working title: “Porno Fighters from Planet Earth” :).
Also I see it as another challenge. Even though it’s fairly juvenile, I often write with the aim of trying to take on and beat the worst excesses of Japanese manga/anime for weird and freaky sex. It’s an impossible mission. Every time I think I’m getting close I run across another Apocalypse Zero and realise I’ve got a long way to go.
I hadn’t really thought about films/books from the west. I thought they were lacking that essence of WTF imagination. Only goes to show I wasn’t really looking hard enough... :)
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Answering Anonymous: 202
I try and answer most comments I get through email, which covers most questions (the ones I’m prepared to answer anyway). Same goes for the public comments left on stories posted on Literotica. This is for the anonymous questions I couldn’t respond to. Not sure if ‘anonymous’ will see this, but hey, I tried!
I covered the queries on Verdé last time round. The other common question was along the lines of “Where is this story going?” or, to borrow a Monty Python catchphrase, “GET ON WITH IT!”
I’m glad people are keen to read about Phil’s lessons at Wargsnouts. There is a plan and it will (may) make sense at the end. I took a slight detour because it seemed like a hot scene and to give myself some breathing room while I plan out how the arc is going to play out.
I was a little surprised at one comment wanting the story to move away from Phil’s constant harassment by deadly demons. It’s good that the story is holding up well enough to interest readers as well as the obvious sexual titillation, but I don’t want to let the plot start to crowd out the sex scenes. It’s still supposed to be erotica!
I don’t think Rosa would let me anyway.
There’s a reason behind everything anyway, even what might seem like a little filler scene with two smoking hot daemons. It will all become apparent.
203 is in progress, but will be delayed. I’m frantically trying to get a third anthology (with mostly new stories) finished for eXcessica and that’s running a little behind schedule. Normal (slow!) service to be resumed soon!
I covered the queries on Verdé last time round. The other common question was along the lines of “Where is this story going?” or, to borrow a Monty Python catchphrase, “GET ON WITH IT!”
I’m glad people are keen to read about Phil’s lessons at Wargsnouts. There is a plan and it will (may) make sense at the end. I took a slight detour because it seemed like a hot scene and to give myself some breathing room while I plan out how the arc is going to play out.
I was a little surprised at one comment wanting the story to move away from Phil’s constant harassment by deadly demons. It’s good that the story is holding up well enough to interest readers as well as the obvious sexual titillation, but I don’t want to let the plot start to crowd out the sex scenes. It’s still supposed to be erotica!
I don’t think Rosa would let me anyway.
There’s a reason behind everything anyway, even what might seem like a little filler scene with two smoking hot daemons. It will all become apparent.
203 is in progress, but will be delayed. I’m frantically trying to get a third anthology (with mostly new stories) finished for eXcessica and that’s running a little behind schedule. Normal (slow!) service to be resumed soon!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
The Dilemma with Verdé
She's sweet, nice, warm-hearted...and she kills people.
As a writer it creates a dilemma for me. Verdé is liked because she appears nice and good-natured, and seems to care for Phil rather than wanting to suck out his soul at the first opportunity. She isn’t a Nicole or Amanda though. She’s still a succubus, which means some of what she does is going to be unpalatable to most readers.
Now I could hide those aspects of her character off-screen, or try to justify them with plenty of they-had-it-coming’s, but that would feel like a lame cop-out. As much as I don’t want to prick the fantasy, I don’t want to shy away from what she is either.
The end of 202 was intended as a gentle reminder. She’s not quite as nice as you think.
If the lovely Verdé was on a bed in front of you in all her seductive glory and there was an open door behind you, the sensible thing – for a long and hearty life – might be to run for that door. Fast!
Maybe.
Maybe she might decide she likes you. Maybe she won’t kill you. She’s not Rosa after all. She’s capable of having some feelings towards her human ‘snacks’. It might be worth the risk...
It's those contradictions which I hope make her character complex, intriguing and appealing.
As a writer it creates a dilemma for me. Verdé is liked because she appears nice and good-natured, and seems to care for Phil rather than wanting to suck out his soul at the first opportunity. She isn’t a Nicole or Amanda though. She’s still a succubus, which means some of what she does is going to be unpalatable to most readers.
Now I could hide those aspects of her character off-screen, or try to justify them with plenty of they-had-it-coming’s, but that would feel like a lame cop-out. As much as I don’t want to prick the fantasy, I don’t want to shy away from what she is either.
The end of 202 was intended as a gentle reminder. She’s not quite as nice as you think.
If the lovely Verdé was on a bed in front of you in all her seductive glory and there was an open door behind you, the sensible thing – for a long and hearty life – might be to run for that door. Fast!
Maybe.
Maybe she might decide she likes you. Maybe she won’t kill you. She’s not Rosa after all. She’s capable of having some feelings towards her human ‘snacks’. It might be worth the risk...
It's those contradictions which I hope make her character complex, intriguing and appealing.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
I Write Like...
...James Joyce, apparently. Or is it Stephen King, or maybe Margaret Atwood, or possibly H.P. Lovecraft and maybe sometimes even a smidgeon like Anne Rice? Sometimes I even write like Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer.
Yes, it's the funky, hot-trending, salve-for-aspiring-writers-everywhere, IWriteLike tool!
It's all a bit of harmless fun really (or a sinister idea-harvesting machine of diabolic proportions). I'm not sure what's whirring away behind the screen, although a previous incarnation of me would postulate they're using some kind of vector space model with maybe some extra doodads to score other metrics such as sentence length, etc.
How useful? Probably not very. It's a nice boost to be compared to someone successful and famous, but ultimately the program is only returning whichever writer in their database (I believe there are 40) you happen to be closest to. Close in this case being relative. Even if they’re all clustered tightly together at a position in space marked ‘publishable and famous’ and you’re way off in the void of ‘never-to-be’, one of them is still going to be the closest to you.
What they needed to do was raid the slush piles of a big publishing house to create some more realistic reference points such as ‘rejected for lousy grammar’, ‘rejected for overly flowery language’, ‘rejected for unbearable dullness’, ‘rejected because it doesn’t contain any vampires’ and ‘rejected because our intern fell behind and couldn’t be bothered to read it’. In the absence of those points Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer appear to have been designated as the badges of shame. Not sure why really. Personally, I’d be quite happy to be told I write like people who’ve amassed bank balances large enough to capsize small islands. :)
Yes, it's the funky, hot-trending, salve-for-aspiring-writers-everywhere, IWriteLike tool!
It's all a bit of harmless fun really (or a sinister idea-harvesting machine of diabolic proportions). I'm not sure what's whirring away behind the screen, although a previous incarnation of me would postulate they're using some kind of vector space model with maybe some extra doodads to score other metrics such as sentence length, etc.
How useful? Probably not very. It's a nice boost to be compared to someone successful and famous, but ultimately the program is only returning whichever writer in their database (I believe there are 40) you happen to be closest to. Close in this case being relative. Even if they’re all clustered tightly together at a position in space marked ‘publishable and famous’ and you’re way off in the void of ‘never-to-be’, one of them is still going to be the closest to you.
What they needed to do was raid the slush piles of a big publishing house to create some more realistic reference points such as ‘rejected for lousy grammar’, ‘rejected for overly flowery language’, ‘rejected for unbearable dullness’, ‘rejected because it doesn’t contain any vampires’ and ‘rejected because our intern fell behind and couldn’t be bothered to read it’. In the absence of those points Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer appear to have been designated as the badges of shame. Not sure why really. Personally, I’d be quite happy to be told I write like people who’ve amassed bank balances large enough to capsize small islands. :)
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