While I was back home for the Christmas holidays I paid a visit to my local Waterstones to see what was lurking on the horror shelves.
Paranormal Romance is still very much the ‘in’ trend. So much so there was a whole rack of shelf space given over to ‘Dark Fantasy’. Love 'em or loathe ‘em, it doesn’t look like the hunky dudes with fangs and the hunky dudes with fur and fangs are going away any time soon.
In the actual ‘horror’ section proper—Waterstone’s labelling, don’t look at me like that!—Monster Mash’em’ups are the other bandwagon rolling down the hill. I haven’t read them and sort of suspect they’re a one-punchline joke stretched far beyond its use-by date.
Of course, it’s because of this kind of nonsense Christopher Fowler (I wish I had a blog like his—he must type like a zillion words a minute or something) and Maura McHugh kicked off the Campaign for Real Fear.
Me, I’m kind of ambivalent. These are not the horror books I want to be reading, but they are for a lot of other people and they enjoy them enough to buy them by the truckload. Few things piss me off more than the whole snobbish ‘your taste is rubbish, you should read/watch/listen to what I’m reading/watching/listening to’ attitude, so I’m not going there. Even if it means I must accept the existence of true horrors like Eastenders, Friends and X-Factor.
Trends are cyclical anyway. Someone’s going to write the book where the shy but pretty heroine falls for the tall, dark and handsome vampire...who then tortures her relentlessly over the next couple of hundred pages by making her watch while he kills everyone she ever cared about, and we'll remember that vampires are actually really fucking scary.
Next year it will be...well, probably no Waterstones and its slot taken by a shop selling iPhone cases and other tat, I reckon.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sticking with Dead-Tree Technology
One of the things I was happy to pick up over the Christmas break was a fresh set of A5 writing notebooks. It seems a bit weird to still be writing out stories longhand in the age of word processors and other computery goodness, but I find that works best for me. I’m old enough to remember my mum typing up estimates for my dad on a fancy electronic typewriter, but not old enough to have ever used one myself.
I keep trying to kick the habit. Ink and bits of dead tree, I mean it’s so primitive. Look, there’s this lovely shiny laptop with a blank screen all waiting to be filled with words. And look at this keyboard, so much faster and more efficient at producing words than that awkward scratching.
It never works out that way. It’s that delete button. It’s far too easy to use. If you’re of a slightly perfectionist bent (which I am), the delete button is the concrete block waiting on the tracks to derail the writing process. It’s too easy to get stuck at a point in the story, writing and re-writing variations of the same sentence over and over until I completely lose the thread of where the story was supposed to be going in the first place.
I like my little writing pads. They’re the tortoises—slow and steady—of the writing process. They’re a little more portable than laptops and don’t run out of battery. I like taking one with me to lunch and getting a couple of extra pages done over the break. I like the steady accumulation of pages until a story or chapter falls out. I like how I can write any old bollocks to skip snags, because it’s only the first draft after all.
With discipline (and maybe some tape applied over the delete button), I could do most of this on a word processor. I think I like the little pads because they're a clear separation between first and second draft. It doesn't matter if the first draft was done on paper or typed in Word, I usually end up typing the whole thing again for the second draft. I find it's the best way to trim out all the needless fat from a story. Copying up from a notebook is easier than having two Word's open and the fonts at magnifying glass size.
Alas poor trees, it may be a while before I'm weaned off you yet.
I keep trying to kick the habit. Ink and bits of dead tree, I mean it’s so primitive. Look, there’s this lovely shiny laptop with a blank screen all waiting to be filled with words. And look at this keyboard, so much faster and more efficient at producing words than that awkward scratching.
It never works out that way. It’s that delete button. It’s far too easy to use. If you’re of a slightly perfectionist bent (which I am), the delete button is the concrete block waiting on the tracks to derail the writing process. It’s too easy to get stuck at a point in the story, writing and re-writing variations of the same sentence over and over until I completely lose the thread of where the story was supposed to be going in the first place.
I like my little writing pads. They’re the tortoises—slow and steady—of the writing process. They’re a little more portable than laptops and don’t run out of battery. I like taking one with me to lunch and getting a couple of extra pages done over the break. I like the steady accumulation of pages until a story or chapter falls out. I like how I can write any old bollocks to skip snags, because it’s only the first draft after all.
With discipline (and maybe some tape applied over the delete button), I could do most of this on a word processor. I think I like the little pads because they're a clear separation between first and second draft. It doesn't matter if the first draft was done on paper or typed in Word, I usually end up typing the whole thing again for the second draft. I find it's the best way to trim out all the needless fat from a story. Copying up from a notebook is easier than having two Word's open and the fonts at magnifying glass size.
Alas poor trees, it may be a while before I'm weaned off you yet.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
More fun with Japanese translations...
I’m quite impressed with this automated machine translation malarkey. I mentioned it last week when I talked about a Japanese game coming out that looked like fun. A quick poke around the http://mon110.sakura.ne.jp website reveals they’ve (I think it’s the same people, but I may be wrong) also done a series of audio plays. The name of the series auto-translates to “Whispers of human habitation Rina - Tengai - Slutty girl and inhuman treatment”, which is probably wrong as that sounds horribly unwieldy.
If you like my stories, then you’ll probably enjoy these audios as they feature being captured and then pleasurably...um...drained by various femdom-y succubi and monster girls. For those that like that kind of thing, they even provide some alternative endings with a more vorish bent. Mostly it’s lots of shlurp shlurp (with a variety of squelchy sound effects that sound like a brush being plunged back and forth into a pot of paste) until the victim ejaculates themselves to death (or exhaustion). My faves are probably Vol.7 with the Arachne and Vol.10 with the big-titted Succubus Lilia (Lily I presume).
They are in Japanese, which normally would be a substantial hurdle if, like me, you can’t speak a word of the language. Thankfully, they also provide transcripts of the audios. These are also in Japanese, but with handy use of Ctrl+C and Translation Aggregator, voila, English words fall out. Again, it’s automated machine translation, so the usual caveats about using common-sense and imagination to make sense of the translations apply. Mapping the transcripts to the voices is a little tricky, but I found it got easier once I started recognising the “fufufus” and the “ora oras”. After that it’s a case of lying back and enjoying their work. The corrupted little story-making cells in my brain have certainly been twitching with fresh inspiration.
If they are the same people, I think it’s a pity they aren’t planning to include voice work in the forthcoming game. Some of these scenarios rendered as a game would be a lot of fun I think.
There is some hentai artwork of varying quality included with the volumes. Some of the victims border a little too close to shotacon for my tastes, but that’s often par for the course with these things. Oi, artists! Real succubi can take down real men y’know! It’s only pixels in case anyone’s feeling too outraged. Me, I’m just here for the freaky monster girls with big boobies.
Well worth a listen if you fancy being teased and taunted by a Japanese energy-sapping succubus. My Japanese vocabulary has increased, albeit with words I suspect I must never ever utter in public! ;)
If you like my stories, then you’ll probably enjoy these audios as they feature being captured and then pleasurably...um...drained by various femdom-y succubi and monster girls. For those that like that kind of thing, they even provide some alternative endings with a more vorish bent. Mostly it’s lots of shlurp shlurp (with a variety of squelchy sound effects that sound like a brush being plunged back and forth into a pot of paste) until the victim ejaculates themselves to death (or exhaustion). My faves are probably Vol.7 with the Arachne and Vol.10 with the big-titted Succubus Lilia (Lily I presume).
They are in Japanese, which normally would be a substantial hurdle if, like me, you can’t speak a word of the language. Thankfully, they also provide transcripts of the audios. These are also in Japanese, but with handy use of Ctrl+C and Translation Aggregator, voila, English words fall out. Again, it’s automated machine translation, so the usual caveats about using common-sense and imagination to make sense of the translations apply. Mapping the transcripts to the voices is a little tricky, but I found it got easier once I started recognising the “fufufus” and the “ora oras”. After that it’s a case of lying back and enjoying their work. The corrupted little story-making cells in my brain have certainly been twitching with fresh inspiration.
If they are the same people, I think it’s a pity they aren’t planning to include voice work in the forthcoming game. Some of these scenarios rendered as a game would be a lot of fun I think.
There is some hentai artwork of varying quality included with the volumes. Some of the victims border a little too close to shotacon for my tastes, but that’s often par for the course with these things. Oi, artists! Real succubi can take down real men y’know! It’s only pixels in case anyone’s feeling too outraged. Me, I’m just here for the freaky monster girls with big boobies.
Well worth a listen if you fancy being teased and taunted by a Japanese energy-sapping succubus. My Japanese vocabulary has increased, albeit with words I suspect I must never ever utter in public! ;)
Sunday, January 09, 2011
"Divine Matches" anthology out this week
"Divine Matches", a new anthology from eXcessica, is out this week and it features one of my stories!
This is a collection of erotic tales about mythical creatures and gods and goddesses. My contribution is "Naga Special Massage" and features a naga, a creature with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower body of a snake, in a modern day setting. Technically, I suppose it should be "Nagi Special Massage" as she's female, but even mythical entities have to move with these modern, liberated times! In the story, she takes a man suffering from claustrophobia and shows him she's very adept at using her serpentine body to give a sexy full body massage. And then things get hotter...
Anyway, check it out if you fancy getting a taste of what the other talented writers at eXcessica are up to.
This is a collection of erotic tales about mythical creatures and gods and goddesses. My contribution is "Naga Special Massage" and features a naga, a creature with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower body of a snake, in a modern day setting. Technically, I suppose it should be "Nagi Special Massage" as she's female, but even mythical entities have to move with these modern, liberated times! In the story, she takes a man suffering from claustrophobia and shows him she's very adept at using her serpentine body to give a sexy full body massage. And then things get hotter...
Anyway, check it out if you fancy getting a taste of what the other talented writers at eXcessica are up to.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
A game release I'm looking forward to
This game at http://mon110.sakura.ne.jp looks like fun. It’s a Japanese RPG. You play a brave lad who picks up his sword and heads out into the world looking for adventure...and ends up being, um, molested by various sexy monster girls.
There’s a demo up which features a bit of introduction and a fight (sort of) with a slime girl. It looks a bit like Succubus Quest, only with more elaborate ending sequences when you lose the fight (which is the fun part let’s face it).
Yes, it is in Japanese, but I managed to hook it up to some automated translation software. Which sounds rather complicated, but thankfully a very nice person up on hongfire.com has posted a comprehensive guide on how to set this up. The translations are far from perfect, as you’d expect from automated machine translation, but if you use your imagination they’re good enough to follow what’s going on.
The first part of the game is scheduled for around January/February. They boast of featuring nearly 200 types of monster girl in the finished game, some of which look very weird indeed judging from the side menu. That sounds awesome, but also a little worrying. 200 seems like a heck of a lot of work. If the rest of the encounters are as detailed as the one with the slime girl in the demo, the game would still be awesome even with only 20 types. I’d rather see a completed game with fewer enemies than a too-ambitious project doomed to an eternity in development limbo.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to its release when I can go forth and engage in unmentionable sexual acts with...ahem...save the world from dastardly demon girls.
There’s a demo up which features a bit of introduction and a fight (sort of) with a slime girl. It looks a bit like Succubus Quest, only with more elaborate ending sequences when you lose the fight (which is the fun part let’s face it).
Yes, it is in Japanese, but I managed to hook it up to some automated translation software. Which sounds rather complicated, but thankfully a very nice person up on hongfire.com has posted a comprehensive guide on how to set this up. The translations are far from perfect, as you’d expect from automated machine translation, but if you use your imagination they’re good enough to follow what’s going on.
The first part of the game is scheduled for around January/February. They boast of featuring nearly 200 types of monster girl in the finished game, some of which look very weird indeed judging from the side menu. That sounds awesome, but also a little worrying. 200 seems like a heck of a lot of work. If the rest of the encounters are as detailed as the one with the slime girl in the demo, the game would still be awesome even with only 20 types. I’d rather see a completed game with fewer enemies than a too-ambitious project doomed to an eternity in development limbo.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to its release when I can go forth and engage in unmentionable sexual acts with...ahem...save the world from dastardly demon girls.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
New Year's Writing (Non)Resolutions
There’s probably going to be a ton of these spunked onto the web. Given how just about everyone breaks their resolutions before the holiday season is over, I’m going to engage some reverse psychology and create some resolutions for things not to do in the hope I break them spectacularly.
1. I’m not going to write faster.
This needs work. When I first started writing stories for Literotica I told myself I wasn’t going to get bogged down with the self-doubt and obsessive perfectionism that had afflicted my horror short story writing and just have fun. Now I’m starting to take it a little more seriously, the stories have grown more complex and elaborate and the flaws have crept back in. This year I want to get back the fun and less worrying about what I’m writing.
2. I’m not going to make more frequent blog posts.
Related to 1 above. More writing and less chiselling. Often I’d have an idea of something to post, tie myself in knots with attempting to write it and then abandon the whole thing because it was taking too long. These are supposed to be quick blog posts, not graded essays.
And now the individual writing projects.
3. I’m not going to polish Succubus Summoning 101 up and get it ready for publication.
I should have done this earlier. It’s popular on Lit and about the right length for a novel. Plus, if I don’t do it, some sleazebag will probably try and plagiarize it as has unfortunately happened recently to various Lit authors.
4. I’m not going to finish Succubus Summoning 201
Ugh. Important rule for building up a fanbase—don’t leave them waiting months for the next chapter. Sorry peeps. 203 has been stuck on the backburner for a while now, mainly because the 201 arc has a plot I thought I needed to work out in advance. It’s a fallacy of course. I wrote 101 a chapter at a time and it dropped nicely into place.
5. I’m not going to finish two more short story collections.
This is the tough one. I should be able to get one done, but getting a second finished will be very much dependant on speeding up my writing, especially as I don’t have much left in the pool of already finished tales.
Now let’s get down to breaking those resolutions as fast as possible!
1. I’m not going to write faster.
This needs work. When I first started writing stories for Literotica I told myself I wasn’t going to get bogged down with the self-doubt and obsessive perfectionism that had afflicted my horror short story writing and just have fun. Now I’m starting to take it a little more seriously, the stories have grown more complex and elaborate and the flaws have crept back in. This year I want to get back the fun and less worrying about what I’m writing.
2. I’m not going to make more frequent blog posts.
Related to 1 above. More writing and less chiselling. Often I’d have an idea of something to post, tie myself in knots with attempting to write it and then abandon the whole thing because it was taking too long. These are supposed to be quick blog posts, not graded essays.
And now the individual writing projects.
3. I’m not going to polish Succubus Summoning 101 up and get it ready for publication.
I should have done this earlier. It’s popular on Lit and about the right length for a novel. Plus, if I don’t do it, some sleazebag will probably try and plagiarize it as has unfortunately happened recently to various Lit authors.
4. I’m not going to finish Succubus Summoning 201
Ugh. Important rule for building up a fanbase—don’t leave them waiting months for the next chapter. Sorry peeps. 203 has been stuck on the backburner for a while now, mainly because the 201 arc has a plot I thought I needed to work out in advance. It’s a fallacy of course. I wrote 101 a chapter at a time and it dropped nicely into place.
5. I’m not going to finish two more short story collections.
This is the tough one. I should be able to get one done, but getting a second finished will be very much dependant on speeding up my writing, especially as I don’t have much left in the pool of already finished tales.
Now let’s get down to breaking those resolutions as fast as possible!
Monday, December 27, 2010
Praise be the Kindle!
Ugh! Now that was a horror journey. Stuck in Schipol airport for over twenty-four hours while KLM did a passable impression of a headless chicken repeatedly running into the same brick wall. To be fair, I can’t really begrudge an airline when their planes are grounded by snow. The frustration arose when the snow cleared, the sun came out and KLM’s systems went into meltdown trying to clear a day’s backlog of passengers.
I say system, but there was little evidence of any system or process here.
I’ve always hated the automated systems airlines have been sneaking in to replace human operators. Machines are only really useful when they’re carrying out the same simple function every single time. Deviate from this and the machine becomes useless, which was exactly what happened here. Want a new boarding pass for the next available flight because your last flight was cancelled? Gronk. Fizzle. Klunk. Bleugh.
So it was time to join the queues. Oh, the queuing!
Thank god for my shiny new kindle. Amazon have done some fairly bone-headed things of late, but they’ve got a winner here (unless they keep up with the bone-headed practises of going in and deleting books their punters have already bought—sigh). I picked mine up about a month back. As a replacement for print books, it’s a little on the expensive side, but I was fortunate enough to have a $100 gift voucher lying around after coming second in one of Literotica’s competitions.
Buying new books was a little on the non-intuitive side, mainly because the little shopping basket appears to have vanished and it took me a little while to find the Download-to-Computer option (no Orwelling books I’ve already bought, thank you Amazon!). .pdf files can also be uploaded to the kindle, but I found the display of them to be extremely variable (and I haven’t got round to reading the manual to figure out anything beyond Open, Read, Go!).
I couldn’t determine if there was a back light option, so when the lights went out on the plane, that was the end of reading for me (and those extra hours of Zzz’s turned out to be damn useful as it happened), but this is no different to dead-tree technology anyway. While queuing the kindle really came into its own. I worked through more books than I’d normally carry and it was slimline enough to fit in my jacket pocket without threatening to burst it like the latest Stephen King doorstopper. One downside is either the extreme cold weather or being bashed in my bag has caused the on/off switch to stick a little.
It’s a nice piece of tech anyway and I’m hoping to catch up on some reading and maybe discover something fresher than the usual bookstore dross. Please don’t kill it through your idiocy, Amazon.
I say system, but there was little evidence of any system or process here.
I’ve always hated the automated systems airlines have been sneaking in to replace human operators. Machines are only really useful when they’re carrying out the same simple function every single time. Deviate from this and the machine becomes useless, which was exactly what happened here. Want a new boarding pass for the next available flight because your last flight was cancelled? Gronk. Fizzle. Klunk. Bleugh.
So it was time to join the queues. Oh, the queuing!
Thank god for my shiny new kindle. Amazon have done some fairly bone-headed things of late, but they’ve got a winner here (unless they keep up with the bone-headed practises of going in and deleting books their punters have already bought—sigh). I picked mine up about a month back. As a replacement for print books, it’s a little on the expensive side, but I was fortunate enough to have a $100 gift voucher lying around after coming second in one of Literotica’s competitions.
Buying new books was a little on the non-intuitive side, mainly because the little shopping basket appears to have vanished and it took me a little while to find the Download-to-Computer option (no Orwelling books I’ve already bought, thank you Amazon!). .pdf files can also be uploaded to the kindle, but I found the display of them to be extremely variable (and I haven’t got round to reading the manual to figure out anything beyond Open, Read, Go!).
I couldn’t determine if there was a back light option, so when the lights went out on the plane, that was the end of reading for me (and those extra hours of Zzz’s turned out to be damn useful as it happened), but this is no different to dead-tree technology anyway. While queuing the kindle really came into its own. I worked through more books than I’d normally carry and it was slimline enough to fit in my jacket pocket without threatening to burst it like the latest Stephen King doorstopper. One downside is either the extreme cold weather or being bashed in my bag has caused the on/off switch to stick a little.
It’s a nice piece of tech anyway and I’m hoping to catch up on some reading and maybe discover something fresher than the usual bookstore dross. Please don’t kill it through your idiocy, Amazon.
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