Wednesday, January 02, 2019

Ebook plans for 2019

After all the recent negativity over Patreon being a bunch of Orwellian cunts, here's me trying to be positive with plans for 2019.

2018 (and 2017) were a little weird.  In terms of word count I'm still producing a decent amount of content.  In total word count, "Escape Volumpula, the Pink Jelly" was about the same size as a large novella and "Escape the Arachne" wasn't much shorter.  The main problem with them is they're not something I can easily monetise on Amazon.  Patreon was a good fit... until they decided to shit the bed.  "Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy" was also very lengthy.  That I think could be expanded into a full novel.

The instability at Patreon has forced me to reassess priorities. Ebook royalties are a reliable portion of my income. It's been a while (2 years) since I've put any out and I want to rectify that in 2019.  This doesn't mean I'll be abandoning the CYOAs.  Given how chaotic my writing process is, there will no doubt be times when I want to tinker with game mechanics and programming rather than working on whatever ebook I'm supposed to be working on!

Here are some candidates to get done in 2019.  I'll probably expand them out into full posts later to discuss in more detail.

A new A Succubus for collection
While I haven't been as active on Literotica as I would like, I do now seem to have accumulated close to enough material for a new collection.  I don't have my stockpile of stories to use as collection (or even Patreon) exclusives.  About 4 or 5 brand new ones should be enough to finish a collection.

Succubus Summoning 301
This is probably the thing I need most to stabilise my royalty income.  While I am terrified of fucking it up, I think I might just sit down and let the story go where it wants to go rather than obsessing about not wanting to let people down.  (Please don't kill him, Rosa and co.  I have bills to pay!)

These two are my highest priority.  The collection because it's easy.  Succubus Summoning 301 because it's long overdue.

Tales from H-space
I've been trying to figure out what to do with the bestiary shorts for a while.  I think they could make a nice themed short story collection, possibly a regular ongoing series.  It would require rewriting and expanding the better ones into "proper" short stories as I don't think they are high enough quality in their current state (and I never really felt I got the accompanying "monster manual" file entries right).

This could be an easy win.  Or the rewrite process could be nightmarish.  The concept as a slightly more grimdark version of the Monster Girl Encyclopaedia was always a good one.

Sandwiched by
I've given up trying to chase my tail on hitting a regular monthly schedule with these novellas.  I want to relaunch them with new covers.  I think the best way to do that is to stealthily write them all in advance, then release them on a monthly basis over a year.  Another stealth project I'll keep quiet on until the whole thing is done and ready to release.

Okasare Kenny
Similar to Sandwiched by.  This is perfect as a novella serial released monthly over a year.  I already know I can't chase my tail in terms of deadlines, so the best thing would be to write it all out in advance.

Both have been screwed up by me in the past through a twitchy desire to rush something—anything—out.  I want to get away from that mentality and just focus on getting the proper groundwork done to be able to release them as I originally intended.

Then some speculative projects.  I'm not going to force myself to work on set things given that it made a mess of my productivity last year.  These will jump up and down my priority queue depending on how burning hot the desire to work on them is.

Night of the Nude Succubus Orgy
I think the short story could be expanded into a full novel.  It would likely be a strange mix of nasty period horror (the initial sacrifices and rituals) mixed with modern-day pornfest.  Could work.  Maybe…?

The Succubus Trap
The Nicole novel.  The first couple of chapters are really hot (Nicole and Madam Voluptula tag-teaming to fuck someone's brains out) and I think it would do really well as a novel, which makes my inability to get beyond chapter 3 incredibly frustrating.  Maybe I'll finally figure out how to bust through that block.

The Succubus Invasion
Another one I've already written multiple chapters for, but haven't quite got it to click.  It's also a strange mix of nasty sexual horror and goofy pornfest moments.

Jackson in HRPG-World
Less a novel than 8 short stories set in game-parody worlds.  I wrote the first four, hit a wall on the fifth and it's been stuck in development hell ever since.  Given I have nearly half the material written already, I should really focus on getting this done and published.

Then the really speculative stuff.  I don't think I'll get to these, but I might suddenly get a burning desire to work on them and I want to try and raise my productivity by letting enthusiasm dictate what projects to work on rather than trying to brute force specific ones.

Bubblelicious
Themed collection set around a soapland-style massage parlour.  Stemmed from a single short story idea.  This one is probably super-speculative,

Invading the Hive
A H-space novel, themed collection?  The bee girl entry for the H-space monster girl bestiary ended up getting a little long and complex.  I think it will likely be seven or so elaborate sex scenes featuring bee/wasp monster girls stitched together with some kind of underlying plot.  I've had a similar idea for a slime girl cave kicking around for years.  Maybe another series prospect?

There are others, but they're either far from ready or been left on hiatus long enough to require a degree of archaeology to dig up.  I might post them as glimpses into my ideas file for patrons.

My plan is to try and be more flexible in 2019.  Trying to force things out backfired far too often in 2018.  I'd rather have a 10-hour day working on some of the speculative stuff, than limping to a 2-hour day trying to brute force a more "important" project.

Anyway, that's a glimpse of my current ebook project plans.  Let's hope 2019 will be a lovely year filled with sexy succubus smut!

-manyeyedhydra

Monday, December 31, 2018

The Patreon Problem

Another xpost from my Patreon.  I'm trying to get all of this out of the way so I can hit the ground running with my regular writing as soon as 2019 hits.

Thank you to the people sending me comments over the past couple of days.

In case you were unaware, Patreon have been de-platforming creators on what appear to be ideological or political grounds.  I object strongly to this for both ethical and practical reasons.

Ethically, I believe it wrong for a company to discriminate on political or ideological affiliation and hide this behind a gauze of vague "hate speech" rules.  This has been happening far too regularly and companies that play these games deserve to go out of business.

Practically, it is hard for me, as a creator, to justify spending lots of time and energy building up a following on Patreon when my account can be yanked at any time on a whim by their Trust and Safety team.  Patreon have as much as admitted they're making up the rules as they go along with respect to their ToS.  This makes them a very unsafe and untrustworthy platform for creators, as we can be terminated at any moment for not adhering to rules that are subjectively enforced and can change at any time.

At this point I'm not sure what to do.  The ethical thing would be to close everything down and refuse to countenance Patreon's BS.  But this would also hurt me and the people who wish to support my writing (I've heard you, thanks for your comments and support).

I don't like Patreon and would like to move everything over to a more political neutral platform (ideally one that sees a "Trust and Safety Team" for the Orwellian nonsense it is) as soon as a reliable competitor emerges.  Any suggestions here will be gratefully received.

I also need to work something out for the patrons who no longer feel they can keep an account up on Patreon in the light of Patreon's Orwellian nonsense.  If you supported me during November and December I still owe you a boob monster girl short story and the next CYOA.  I'll need some way of getting those to you when they're done.  Suggestions again gratefully received.

And once again, I'm really sorry for wasting good writing time on this political shite.  I know you're here for sexy succubus smut, not to hear me sperg out about free speech.  Unfortunately, this is something I've always held a fairly absolutist position on, largely out of self-interest.  I write horror.  I write erotica.  While we might not always be first in line, we're usually somewhere in the queue when it comes to banning people and stripping their income.  That's why it's important to always take a stand against censorshit whenever it rears its ugly head.

Blegh.  I just wanted to write sexy succubus smut.

Anyway, have a lovely New Year's Eve out there, ya filthy animals!  Let's all hope for a better 2019. 

-manyeyedhydra

Friday, December 28, 2018

Something for Patrons - Stealth Tuckers

This is a xpost from my Patreon (which I will likely be exiting soon in light of the Orwellian creepiness they've displayed recently).  This is currently for paying patrons, but I might expand it to whatever platform I move to in 2019 if there's interest.

First up, apologies for the quietness this December.  Some other-life stuff cropped up at the start of the month and by the time I was through it I was caught up in the holidays.

And then Patreon decided to shit the bed…

I'm not going to go into it in great detail, but I am of the opinion Patreon is no longer a safe or trustworthy platform for creators.  If it wasn't for the fact other work had caused my current writing projects to fall behind schedule, I would have already cancelled my account here.

More on this later, but for now I thought I'd do a better job of managing expectation and lead off with the more positive stuff first.

First, as far as I'm concerned, everyone who has subbed to me up until December is owed a sexy boob monster girl short story and an advance look at the next monster girl CYOA.  I intend to stick to that plan regardless of what happens here.  If you no longer wish to use Patreon in the light of the Orwellian nonsense they've been pulling recently (or support me—I'm fully aware my own output has been very erratic), I fully understand.  If you have been a backer up until now, I will try to get the projects to you as soon as they are completed.

Whatever happens, I do want to thank the people here that have supported me, even for this brief period of time.

Because of the nature of my work, I'm aware a lot of you are uncomfortable about seeing your names in any kind of credits list.  However, I think I might have a sneaky solution that might be of interest.

All of my stories contain references to writers, movies and bands that I've enjoyed over the years.  These are usually reflected in the names of characters, but I'll sometimes use them as references for place names (street names, etc).

I should also add that I don't do "Take That's."  I only ever reference things I've enjoyed, so even my most feckless and/or despicable characters are named after creators/creations I like.  This is because of a story I heard (possibly apocryphal) about Wes Craven naming his iconic Freddy Krueger after a bully who used to torment him at school.  It might have been initially intended as a Take That, but then Freddy Krueger became a horror icon.  My imagination pictures that bully looking at a film poster years later and thinking, "I used to beat this runt up at school and he went on to name a horror icon after me, how cool is that!"  So, no Take That's, ever.

More recently I've been moving away from this.  It's fine for a random nobody on Literotica, but starts to look icky on a sort-of erotic horror writer with multiple books published on Amazon, especially if people come to the erroneous conclusion they were intended as disses.

However, this does leave me with something I can give back to those of you who've supported me here.  Whatever happens in the future, I'm still going to be writing stories and those stories will have characters and places that requires names.  It doesn't even need to be a name.  It can be a little snippet of description—something you'll be able to recognise and think, I helped fund this.

If you would like to be included in this, please comment below with the name or little descriptive tag you'd like to see used in a story at some point.  If you want, also add your favourite monster girl or fetish and I'll try to use your reference in an appropriate story.

Just to be clear, this is just a minor name or descriptive tag rather than any insert characters.  When it comes to storytelling, I always do what I feel is right for the story first.  On that note, it's quite likely your name might get dropped on a less-than-stellar example of humanity (my succubi do love slurping up assholes).  If you really really don't want this, let me know and I'll try and apply your moniker to a less-assholish doomed succubus meal instead (my succubi also love slurping up the innocent as well).

Also, if you'd prefer even this sneaky reference to be totally anonymous, feel free to DM me rather than commenting.  My aim is to put a private list together and dip into it for future stories.

(And maybe even grow that list with future subscribers if this political nonsense blows over, or an apolitical competitor to Patreon emerges.)

Obviously, I can't put a timeline on when I'll sneak your reference in—there are over a hundred of you for starters!

Once again, thanks for your support and apologies for the uncertainty.  I'll try to post again over the weekend while I try to figure out some backup plans for 2019.

Fuck Censorshit!

-manyeyedhydra

Friday, December 21, 2018

Monster Girl/Succubus H-games on my Radar

As I've stated before, I haven't played many of late because of problems with getting Machine Translation to work on my computer.  (I could solve all this by actually learning to read Japanese, but unfortunately I'm English, and we're congenitally awful at picking up other languages).

Thankfully for us gaijin slobs, other solutions are starting to appear.  DLSite has been posting some products with English translation (of varying degrees of quality) and other talented folks have made or are making English translations of juicy succubus smut games.

Domination Quest ~ Kuro and the Naughty Monster Girls




AKA the brand new one, as it came out yesterday (the day before?).

It's from the same people that created Demon Angel Sakura.  This time they've gone for traditional RPG rather than a platformer.  Bizarrely, rather than use something like RPG Maker, they appear to have tried to build something like RPG Maker in Unity, which might just be the most Japanese Game Dev thing ever.

Given that it's from Kokage no Izumi, the people that made Demon Angel Sakura, I'm guessing it's going to be weird and end up frequently crossing the line between erotic and WTF! a lot.  In theory it's your typical Gotta Get 'Em All monster girl harem game, but the way the main character picks up new waifus is by shrinking them down and gobbling them up with a tail mouth coming out of his butt.

So, basic Demon Angel Sakura weirdness then.

I would caution against picking it up just yet.  It looks like the creator rushed the game out a little too soon and it's extremely bug infested.  I hit a game-breaking bug within the first half hour where I couldn't continue down a path because the game kept putting the character sprite on the exit point of the new screen, promptly looping the player right back to where they'd just come from.  I've seen comments that this can be avoided if you hit the right spot on the screen, but I haven't found it yet.  The same people have also reported encountering lots of crashing problems later in the game.

I have it and it looks interesting enough that I will write about it once the current broken stuff is fixed.  For now I'd advise staying clear until a patch or two has dropped.


Drain Dungeon

While checking back to see if Domination Quest had been patched, I noticed the English version of Drain Dungeon sitting in my DLSite game library.  This surprised me as I don't remember buying it.  I think what might have happened is DLSite gave me the English translation as a freebie as I already owned the original.




This is an old one.  2016, I think.  You stomp down an abstracted dungeon and then spurt all your accumulated levels inside a trio of succubi on the way out.  I think I played it a little a while back.  Now, with the English version I can give the whole game a thorough...

Actually, scratch that.  I must be getting senile as well as old and fat.  I already wrote a full review of this back here, including delving all the way down the final (and hot!) succubus boss.  The fact I can't remember this is probably not a good endorsement for the game.

Oh well, it might be fun to have a playthrough where this time I actually know what all the items do.  (And have all that delicious draining done in English-text Bad Ends.)


Shrift




Ignore the art style.  A lot of people have been impressed with this game, and I think with good reason.  It might be the best implementation of femdom battle fuck mechanics around.  The creator has given a lot of attention to the various binds and status effects to make the player horny and helpless before the monster girls moves on to the snu snu.  The art style is... idiosyncratic... but they do make good use of puppeting to animate the scenes.  It ends up being a lot more sexier than I expected.

This level of detail on the battles combined with an artist like Setouchi or Shiki would be my dream monster girl H-game combo, I think.

There is a workable English translation patch for the game.  I haven't managed to delve too deep into it yet.  The game also has a bit of Undertale's quirk to it.  The obvious influence is in the separate genocide and pacifist routes, but it also seems to be doing similar funky meta stuff with saved games.  This makes going back to redo various "fights" difficult as the character isn't there anymore.  My last run sort of petered out because I managed to get myself trapped in a fight versus the doll girl that was virtually unwinnable with the equipment I had.

I'm tempted to run at this again and give it the full let's play treatment.


Lust Grimm





Another game that has been recommended to me multiple times in the comments.  I was iffy on the demo.  The art style looked delightful, but the Bad Ends seemed short.

A lot of this was because I was playing with no English.  Translation team =Together= are working on a full translation of this (They've already translated Succubus Prison).  I have played the translated demo and can definitely appreciate the game a little more.  As with Succubus Rhapsody, there's a lot of sexiness in the text of the battles.  Now I'm eager to play the full thing when the complete translation is done.


Because of my translation issues I haven't been keeping as close an eye on interesting H-games as I'd like. Domination Quest is new, but both Lust Grimm and Shrift have been out for a while (although Shrift is using a chapter release model, with the fourth and final chapter not out yet).  If you've spotted any other juicy succubus games, let me know in the comments.

I am tempted to run another let's play type thing again (but maybe not as detailed as the Paradox series).  I'm nervous of doing them because of time that could be spent writing, but I also don't like leaving the blog empty for too long when I'm working on longer projects.  Having something at the forefront that's quick and easy to put out might make for an appropriate screen for those times when I want to be working on larger-scale project in the background.  I don't like the regular update posts.  They're great when things are running smoothly, but end up doom-spiraling my mood pretty quickly when I fall behind.  I think I might have to learn the time-honoured corporate strategy of keeping shtum until I can properly wow people with a new thing.

(For instance, it would have been far better if I'd not told people about the boob monster story and just released it when it was done, rather than fucking up the time estimations, again!, and have people wondering where the fuck is this story and why is it so goddamned late?)

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Someone made a hentai anime of Cornelica, Town of Succubi

While wading through the sticky swamps of 4chan I found a link to this:

(these hentai sites tend to be iffy on things - make sure adblock is on and virus shield is fully deployed! :) )
http://hentaimama.com/episodes/muma-no-machi-cornelica-episode-1/

It's a hentai anime of Dieselmine's Cornelica, Town of Succubi game.




This was a game I ended up skipping.  If you're wondering why I don't cover Japanese succubus/monster girl H-games as much as I used to, the main reason is because successive Windows updates have completely borked most of the hooking and machine translation tools.  Unless I get around to learning to read Japanese, I can't really play these.  I did try doing a walkthrough of Monmusu Conquered World blind, but the results were a bit shit to be honest.

(although some have had translation patches - I really need to write about Shrift and Lust Grimm at some point)

Cornelica looked interesting, but Dieselmine did their typical Dieselmine thing of having the random encounters have the nice pseudo-animated (basic Photoshop puppeting at a guess) scenes while the main, named characters all had static-image Bad End scenes.  They did get this right with the following game, Monster Girl Labyrinth, which did have some delicious Bad End scenes, including the lovely boob monster girl who inspired the current story I'm working on (No, I haven't forgotten about it).

I did like the setting.  A town of succubi seems a fun location to work with and it's nice to see someone make an anime using the location and characters.  The big-boobed innkeeper succubus, the big-boobed temple succubus and the cat-eared shopkeeper succubus all get to fuck the hapless protagonist, much to the disgust of his succubus girlfriend.

Maybe I'll try the game out if I can ever get hooking and translation to work again (or get a new laptop with a non-shit version of Windows).



(As an aside, yes I know I went AWOL for a couple of weeks again.  This is what happens when you effectively live two lives and the other one has to take precedence for a short while.  Rather than post yet another not-update post I thought I'd post links to some sexy succubus snu-snu instead.) 

Friday, November 30, 2018

A belated November update

Apologies for the belated update.  I've had some dental work done which has knocked me about a bit (having bits of metal screwed into your skull will do that!).

So, what has Hydra been up to?

As part of my commitment to patrons, I've been looking at posting story ideas from my ideas file and behind-the-scenes looks at some of my stories.  I wanted to do a piece on H-space, but I wasn't really happy with how that piece was turning out.  Mostly, I was unhappy with how long it was taking.  When I'm in slow, scratchy periods of writing, pieces like that sometimes eat up far too much of the day.  That's time that should be spent writing fiction or creating CYOAs.

(This is the reason I stopped writing the more general blog posts on other subjects – I'm not very quick at writing them and it's time that should be spent writing more useful things.)

I don't want to stop writing those pieces, or the game reviews, walkthrough etc.  Currently I'm experimenting with zoning off bits of the day so I can write these bits'n'bobs without suddenly looking up and realising I've wasted most of the day dicking about on some less-important paragraphs when I could have been bashing out another short story/chapter.

I'll come back to the H-space behind-scenes-stuff article at a later date.  I've been trying to think about what to do with the H-space bestiary.  I think I can make a good collection (or collections) with the material I have, but I think the current stories need a little more fleshing out before I'd be comfortable publishing them (and others) as an ebook.

In the meantime, I've set aside an hour a day.  I'll use it for the more general posts to keep both the manyeyedhydra blog ticking over with new content as well as give some nice behind-scenes insights for patrons.

(Although, for the next week it's mostly going to be needed for filing my tax returns.  Blegh.)

As for actual writing.  That was a little spotty about the time of having dental work, but is moving quite rapidly again.  The first draft of the boob monster girl story is pretty much done and I'm about 2K words into typing it up.  I'm hoping to have that done in the next couple of days.  It will be a patreon exclusive, I'm afraid, but only a temporary one.  I'm getting close to enough material for another ebook, and it will be included in the next collection.

I put the CYOA on the backburner a little while I was focused on getting the boob monster girl sort story written.  That should jump back to the forefront now the first draft of said boob monster girl story is done.  I'm targeting end December/early January for that, although it might slip depending on how difficult the central mechanic proves to implement in Twine.

And that's that for this week.  I'm still looking to find the right day for these update posts, so expect them to slide around a little until I find a slot that fits.

-manyeyedhydra

Thursday, November 08, 2018

A brief look at Toro Toro Resistance's new thing

Toro Toro Resistance (とろとろレジスタンス) is the person (people?) behind Monster Girl Quest and Monmusu Quest: Paradox.  You might be familiar with those.  I've talked a lot about them in the past.

Toro Toro Resistance has a new thing on the way.

It's... uh... different?




This is going to present a challenge.  How to talk about this without coming off like an overly judgmental prick or have the rozzers knocking on my front door tomorrow morning with a warrant to examine the contents of my hard drive.

I checked out the demo (it can be downloaded from Toro Toro Resistance's blog).  In structure it seems very similar to the Monster Musume HYAKURAN Vol. 1 product TTR put out between MQ:P 1 and MQ:P 2.  i.e. Rather than being a game, it's more a collection of illustrated Bad End scenes selected from a menu.

Choices... choices...

The demo has two encyclopedia entries and an introductory section showing off the artwork for some of the other things that will likely appear in the finished product.  I don't have access to machine translation at the moment, so I can't give more information than what's in the blurb or can be google-translated from Toro Toro's blog.

The main difference to Monster Musume HYAKURAN vol. 1 - and I imagine this will be the main deal-breaker for a lot of Monster Girl Quest fans (it is for me, to be fair) - is this time the monsters don't have the girl part tacked on.  Instead of cum-hungry succubi, harpies, slime girls and the like, there are cum-hungry leeches, insects, plants, worms, slimes, and other oddities.


I think nope.

I'm guessing each will have a encyclopedia entry detailing their stats and a Bad End scene/story.

The central framing device is an unusual shop selling sex toys, with the witchy owner telling stories about their use in a variety of settings.

That in itself doesn't seem a bad idea.  I can see the erotic potential in a witch selling a variety of unusual and living sex toys, which are just a bit too good at sucking semen out of their unsuspecting users.


Slurp? Mmm... nope.


This is not exactly new territory for TTR either.  Their earlier voice dramas had some scenarios where the femdom villainess would set some crazy biological cum-sucking device loose on the hapless (lucky?) hero.  I just didn't think those scenarios were as hot or as sexy as when the villainess set a sexy spider-girl or alraune loose on the hero.

But... diff'r'nt strokes for diff'r'nt folks and all that.


Nope nope nope nope.

However, there is a massive elephant in the room concerning the age of the (un)lucky individuals getting to try out these exotic sex toys.  The work's title is The Encyclopedia of Tentacles for Boys Vol. 1.  The artwork I've seen definitely puts it into the shota-esque category.

While I am intrigued to see what bizarre and exotic organic sex toys TTR's devious mind can come up with, I wish they'd set them loose on a cast of gormless eighteen-year-old university or college students.  It's hard to enjoy a good wank over a sexy witch and her selection of fantastical sex toys when you're concerned someone else (the authorities especially!) might consider the Bad End scenes child porn.

WTF!!!!  Nope!

Kudos to TTR for trying something different, but I think I'll pass on this in these outrage-hungry times and wait for MQ:P 3.

(There's also not enough hawt femdom succubus boobage for my liking.)


Nop...  Hmm, wait.  How much...?