A loss of one of Britain's under-appreciated film directors

It’s a sign I’m getting old when the authors and filmmakers that inspired me as a youth are exiting this world. Last week we lost the Grand Dragon-lady of Pern, Anne McCaffrey. This week one of Britain’s more flamboyant and iconoclastic film directors, Ken Russell, died at the age of 84. Sadly, his vision and talent never really found a home in either Hollywood or the British film industry, and he struggled to find funding in his later years.

While best known for The Devils and the Oscar-winning Woman in Love, which earned Russell a nomination for Best Director, I’ll always have a soft spot for his campy cult horror classics Gothic and The Lair of the White Worm. Here’s a clip of the delectable Amanda Donohoe vamping it up as Lady Sylvia Marsh in the latter film (won't allow me to embed unfortunately):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK61O6H3E9s

If you ever wondered how the characters in my stories "Naga Special Massage" and "Naga Massage Review" got their names, now you know.

Fun Things to do on a Black Friday

We don’t have Black Friday in Britain. The term confused me for a while as Black [Insert Weekday] in Britain is used for points in history when whatever moron we had for a chancellor at the time spunked millions (or billions) of pounds up a wall. I suppose the nearest equivalent we do have is the Boxing Day sales after Christmas.

I’m a bad person. Ok, that’s a lie. I’m a good person, probably boring by most people’s standards, but I do have bad bad thoughts.

After reading about the scrums, crushes and even shoppers using pepper spray on each other, impish little ideas started to germinate in my corroded black cortex. Wouldn’t it be fun to go to one of these stores, where people have been queuing outside all night and are grumpy and sleep-deprived, and hand out swords and maces like a regular Leland Gaunt. Out of idle curiosity…to see what happens next…

Hopefully, nobody actually died today, otherwise this blog post might be rather inappropriate.

I think I’d find it hard to be too sympathetic. All death is ignoble, but being trampled in a stampede to get the latest Playstation for a hundred dollars less has to be one of the more depressing and pointless ways to exit this earth. I’m being a curmudgeony young fart, I know, but pictures of mobs bulldozing into stores, their eyes lit up with naked greed at the thought of the bargains inside, highlight a side of human nature that’s a little unseemly to me. Kind of like Reality TV shows.

Anyway, how about this lovely--and very sharp--little sword…?

I’m a bad bad person.

Making my own personal NaNoWriMo

November is turning out to be one of those months. Certain projects (curse my atrophied artistic skills) are stubbornly refusing to get finished. I think I'll run from the official NaNoWriMo and make December my own personal NaNoWriMo instead.

A week or so of clearing out the nagging remnants of old projects and then 50,000 words of juicy Succubus Summoning here we come!

Some Naughty Little Bondage Elves For Christmas

The season of new manyeyedhydra stories is not quite over. Literotica have kicked off their Winter Holidays competition and I have a runner. Because it's the season of goodwill, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., I did the usual thing and entered a nasty horror story with lashings of gratuitous and inappropriate sex.

You might never look at Santa the same way ever again:

"What Bad Boys Get For Christmas."

Perfect bedtime reading for unruly children...

Bad Horror-Head! Get back in your cave!

With another anthology opportunity/deadline presenting itself and my glacial art skills leaving the cover for Succubus Summoning 101 still at the top of the Urgently To Do list, this is a bad month to attempt NaNoWriMo. I think I'll set myself my own personal NaNoWriMo from Mid-Nov to Mid-Dec to see if I would have achieved it with a clear run right from the start.

Don't Judge a Game by the Cover: Catherine

A little tale. I was in my local video games store. They’re a small store, so they tend to only stock the latest AAA titles. I was surprised to see Catherine sitting on the shelf. Catherine is an odd little Japanese game made by Atlus, the same people that did the Persona series. I’d been interested in picking it up, but had resigned myself to having to order it through Amazon or someone like that as my local games shop is useless and only stocks the latest slick-but-empty titles from Activision/EA.

I mentioned my surprise to the girl behind the counter.

“Oh, that one’s been popular. There are not many games for girls.”

Feeling my manliness being called into question, I of course responded with:

“Um. It’s a horror game.”

Doubtful glance from girl behind counter.

“A pair of girls bought a copy yesterday.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a horror game,” I said rather feebly as I handed over my money.

I don’t think she believed me.

It’s understandable as the cover looks like this:



But the game is actually this:



The uh-thing is firing pink hearts out of its mouth. I guess that’s girly. Right?

Despite the titillating nature of the promotional material, another reviewer summed it up correctly by describing it as an adult game without being an “adult” game. This isn’t Monster Girl Quest. It is, however, completely bonkers and a lot of fun. Well worth checking out. I'm also glad to see it's sold a lot as well, this bodes well for a future where oddball games can exist.

And Catherine, the character, is completely adorable, even if she is a [Spoilers!]


(Oh, and I know the concept of girl’s games and boy’s games is/should be an anachronism in this day and age, but you know what I mean--I hope!)

I'm on Goodreads

Goodreads is kind of like a Facebook for readers/writers. I set up an account a while back, but it was classed as a reader account and didn't link to my books because I'd used "M. E." as the first name rather than "M.E.". Ah, CompSci string matching. Anyway, I set up an author page over the weekend, which is here.

I'm not sure how I'm going to use it just yet, but I'm sure it will come in useful at some point.

I might move onto other social media at some point for the filthy book plugging. I tried with Facebook a while back, but it seemed a little finicky when I tried to create a page for this pseudonym rather than the real actual me, and given Facebook's inconsistent approach to what should remain hidden, I really don't want to risk the separate identities being linked!
Until we've finished absorbing and assimilating this foolish human. Hssss...
Of course there's always FetLife, but I'm a little scared of the girls my stories might attract... :)

Succubus Summoning NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an annual writing competition to encourage people to quit procrastinating and finally focus their energies to spit that novel out. It’s a simple goal – write 50,000 words in the month of November.

I’ve been wanting to give it a go for a couple of years, but in the past I’ve been too busy finishing up final edits for anthologies and panicking about deadlines to take best advantage of it. Technically, this year is no different. I still have the cover/final tweaks to finish on Succubus Summoning 101 and need to finish two stories for a fourth collection. Then I thought, what the heck, I’ll sign up anyway. I might not get to 50,000, but if I get a good chunk of a novel idea done it will have achieved its purpose.

I also have an outstanding writing project that could use a little push to get over the edge. It’s time to finally drag Succubus Summoning 201 off the backburner and continue Phil’s (mis)adventures.