Friday, January 21, 2022

Playing around with potential covers for "A Succubus for Christmas"

I'm still playing around with Wombo Dream for potential cover prospects.  Christmas was a tricky one to get anything workable.

I had this as a candidate, but after adding the titles, I'm not so sure.  I think it might not quite be abstract enough to get away with looking weird.

Thoughts?



Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Succubus Summoning 101 and 201 are back on sale

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my publisher, eXcessica, closed their doors at the end of last year.  This meant all my ebooks (with the exception of the shorter novellas I self-published myself) were unpublished and taken down from sale.  I've been steadily putting them back up again under my own name.

Succubus Summoning 101 and Succubus Summoning 201 are now back up.  In fact, they've been back up on Amazon for over a week.  I've just been waiting for approval to go through at other sites.

That process was... a little interesting.  While I'm no stranger to it, having self-published the Sandwiched by series (which I need to go back to a straighten out at some point), it's been a few years, so there was some rust to shake off and copious swearing at manuscript formatting software that insists on changing text formatting whether you want it to or not!

You can find them here:









They should also be showing up on Google Play and Barnes & Noble at some point.  I'm still waiting for either my account to be approved or other distributors to push them out.

If you have an ebook retailer you use that isn't one of those and would like to be able to buy my ebooks from them, let me know and I'll get them up there.

Also, because formatting can be an imprecise science, if you pick up a copy and it looks like ass on your device, let me know and I'll try and get it fixed.  I checked them against the site's previewer, but sometimes things can get mangled when converting files.

The collections are still on the way.  I wanted to take this as an opportunity to redo the covers and maybe tweak the contents.  More on that in a week or two!

Saturday, January 01, 2022

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.027

The public demo version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to v0.27.  You can play it here (ignore the Patreon splash page at the start - I forgot to create the public version of the file back at the start of December).

As November was a rough month for me personally, that release only added 1 new harlot: Suffocatrix Assphyxia.

Suffocatrix Assphyxia is another smother specialist like Suffocatrix Mamilla, and has a similar scenario focused around erotic asphyxiation.  Mamilla specialised in breast smothering.  Assphyxia specialises in... well, you can probably guess from the name.

While a similar scenario to Mamilla, Assphyxia doesn't yet have the repeat visit functionality and alternate "End" of her smother sister.  I will be adding that at a later date as well as a bonus scenario where both Mamilla and Assphyxia get to work on the player at the same time in an "ass vs tits" content.

As a part of the release, I also updated Mamilla's scenario.  She has slightly different likes and dislikes now.

Patrons continue to be a month ahead.  For them I released v0.028.  This adds Cíocha's bigger sister: Cruiscíní Gadaí-na-Duine.  She can either show up alone or with Cíocha for a much more dangerous scenario.  She's a boobfairy scaled up to the size of a human, so expect a vore theme and a lot of fucked up lactation in her scene.

If you want to check her out and support the project, my Patreon is here.

Both November and December's releases have been fairly small because of other things going on.  January might be the same because - as I mentioned in the previous post - I'll have to spend some portion of it updating and reuploading my old ebooks.

I do have multiple new harlots on the go or with 1st drafts written up, so hopefully I'll get back to HoHH releases that feature more than 1 or 2 harlots.

Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Changes with M.E. Hydra books

I should have posted this earlier, but it's been a busy month yadda yadda.

A few weeks ago I received an email that eXcessica would be closing its doors and unpublishing all its books at the end of November.  First up, there's nothing controversial about this.  Excessica was started as a sort of writer's collective right before Amazon's Kindle blew the doors off self-publishing.  This was back when alternative book sites required "publishers" to have at least three authors in their stable and Selena Kitt wanted to both start her own career as an author and recognised there was a lot of untapped talent on Literotica that could be brought along for the ride.  I feel honoured and grateful to be one of those writers and have nothing but praise for Selena and her hardworking crew for having me along.

All good things must come to an end, and in an era where it's trivially easy for a writer to upload their work to Amazon and other places, there is no longer the need for writer's-collectives-cum-publishers.  It's time for us to make our own way, and I fully understand the decision.

What does it mean for M.E. Hydra books on Amazon and elsewhere?

As far as I know, the ones put out through eXcessica will be unpublished at the end of the month, so if you want to grab the old versions, you might want to do it pretty sharpish.  The books affected are Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, and the A Succubus for collections (6 of them).  The Sandwiched by novellas were fully self-published by me and won't be affected (I really should get back to finishing that series off!)

The books won't be gone for good.  As soon as I've sorted out the logistics of rights transfers and the rest, I'll be reuploading them under my own author account.  For Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, that will probably be right away as I'm happy with the current covers for those.  They'll just need some tweaks to the copyright page and the removal of the old logo and should be good to go.

As for the A Succubus for collections, I might use this as an opportunity to tweak these and rebrand the series as a whole.

As part of the rebranding I definitely want to redo the covers and number them as a series.

The other thing I might do is rejig the contents and running orders.  Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed links between characters and events, and realised these are all taking place in a shared universe.

This was not always the case.  Early on, I wrote them as standalone short stories, which means there are some that don't quite fit within that shared universe - the superhero parodies, that one science fiction story, some of the "Succubus vs." stories.

While I haven't put any books out for a while, I have continued to write stories.  Some have been Patreon-exclusives, others have been posted on Literotica.  I probably have enough for a new collection and some left over.  I'm thinking of replacing some of the older stories in the older collections, and then rebranding the collections as part of a much larger ongoing story in the same universe.

What do people think about that?

Go with the rebrand, or preserve the collections with their original line-ups?

Either way, expect the Succubus Summoning series to be reuploaded fairly quickly, and I'll likely follow with the new A Succubus for editions over the first half of 2022.  Maybe, if everything falls into place, a brand new 7th collection to follow the updated editions.

As for covers, I'm still checking on whether it's allowed, but the WOMBO dream app has thrown up a few pictures I wouldn't feel too bad about sticking on a book cover.


A Succubus for Halloween?


A Succubus for Freedom?


A Succubus for Remembrance?

What do you think?

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Wombo-ing up the House of Hellish Harlots website

This is a x-post from my patreon (where I posted a few more pics, coz they can't all fit in this post).

If you've checked out the House of Hellish Harlots website recently, you might have noticed it has a little bit more colour now.


My webdev skills are rudimentary at best (probably less, to be honest - when it comes to IT I'm more of the backend math model coding type).  It looks vaguely okay on my laptop, but I haven't been able to test it for other devices.  If it looks like ass on your display (rather than just garish - that's intentional! :D ), let me know.

The art is from the new viral AI art toy, WOMBO Dream, you might have seen floating around on social media.  You can play with it here:
https://www.wombo.art/ 

You feed it some keywords or phrases, and it spits out an impressionist painting in a variety of different styles (I'm guessing they're using some kind of neural network and trained it on a massive art catalogue).  Obviously, me being me, I fed it a bunch of filth and the results were... interesting.


Currently, the AI only really seems good for abstract and impressionist works.  It seems fairly difficult to get anything resembling a human form out of it, with "house7" below being the closest I got.  Most of the time it spits out a weird jumble of body parts and facial features that looks bad rather than weird or disturbing.


I like it more with buildings and room interiors.  The lines are still 'off', but they're off in a way that looks weird and hallucinatory.  Especially if you feed it conflicting terms such as "house" with "hellish" and "sexual pleasure"/"perversion".  That results in the AI blurring the lush voluptuous curves painted by the old masters with the regular lines of a building, and resulting in something that's 'off' in an interesting and slightly perverse way.  Perfect for the House of Hellish Harlots, which is more than it appears!


I'm not sure if the developers intended it as anything other than a fun toy, but it seems to me like a really good way to produce abstract art for album or book covers (especially for self-published authors).  Looking up the guidelines for use, the people that made the app don't want people trying to sell the artwork, but seem okay with people using it as album/book covers.  I don't know how long that will stay in place as I suspect other people will latch onto the usefulness fairly quickly.


In the meantime I thought some of these would make nice background art to brighten up the website.  It's a nice interim fix to hold me over until I can get some proper artwork commissioned.

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

HoHH Art Commission - Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress

After seeing how Pori turned out, I contacted the artist, and ran a poll for patrons to pick a HoHH harlot to have art commissioned for.  Alsharajea Hira, the Corruptress won and this is the finished result.



Reception on Patreon has been pretty mixed.  I think a lot depends on how thicc you like your succubi.  Personally, I think it conveys her raunchiness pretty well, but I also understand it might not be everyone's cup of tea.  We all have different preferences.

I hope you enjoy anyway.



The artist is HunggryCroissant.  They have a gallery on Eka's Portal here, and they gave me this link as their artist page if you'd like to contact and commission them:
https://croissantx.carrd.co/

I've put aside a little war chest for character commissions, so I hope to get more harlots commissioned in the future.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.026

The public version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to version 0.026.  You can play it here.  There are 2 new harlots added in this release, taking the total count up to 42.

Cíocha Gadaí-na-Bod
The boobfairy.  If you like your monster girls deliciously evil, Cíocha is definitely your gal.  She's a little on the spiteful side.  For some reason, the fairies I add to the House have some of the nastiest Bad Ends, and Cíocha is no exception.  Make good choices and I hope you don't wince too hard.

If you do survive, you'll notice her mention a 'big sister'.  That is Cruiscíní.  I haven't finished her yet.  Cíocha is intended to be a one-two punch scenario similar to Osculia's, where she returns right after with a more dangerous scenario.  That will be in a future release, as well as a solo scenario for the big boobfairy.

Misty
If you remember the very early demo I put out a couple of years ago, there was a fog succubus that killed the player if they dallied too much on the way to the House.  I've given her a harlot scenario.  It's fairly short and simple.  This is close to the original idea I had for how the scenarios would be (so the project wouldn't take too long).  I think I might rattle off a few more like this over the next month or so, just to pump the numbers up a bit.

I've also messed around with some fonts to hopefully make the site a little bit easier to read.  My webdev skills are distressingly basic, so we'll be stuck with plain text for a while until I can get hold of some nice artwork to pretty things up a little.

As I'll be maintaining, the Patreon version is a month ahead.  They're on v0.027 and Suffocatrix Assphyxia finally makes an appearance within the House.  If you want to check that out and help support the project, follow the link here.

As always, any feedback gratefully received.  November was a rough month for some personal reasons, so v0.027 was a small release.  December is also shaping up to be very busy with other things, so I expect that to only add 1 or 2 harlots as well.  I'll post more in detail on that in a couple of days.