Story Inspiration - A Succubus for Valentine's Day

As I said in a previous post, to mark the rerelease of my ebook short story collections I want to add a section at the end with behind-the-scenes notes.  So, if you have any questions about story/characters/inspiration, fire away below.  It'll likely be something I hadn't considered and would therefore be good to add in that section.

Today we'll be looking at "A Succubus for Valentine's Day".

Here is the running order for that collection:

1) A Succubus for Valentine's Day
2) Initial Infiltration
3) The Succubus Heart Squad**
4) Puffed Up*
5) The Spiders of Thomisoidus*
6) Delivery Special Soap
7) Knight vs Succubus
8) Interrocution
9) Crushed Between Her Breasts
10) Venus of the Red Lights
11) The Soul Worm
12) Foam Shower*
13) A Summer Dance with a Succubus

* Exclusive to this collection

** This was the 1st chapter of Succubus Summoning 101 in the original collection.  Back then there was a minor gold rush of people rushing to self publish on Amazon's kindle platform and some less scrupulous people were ripping stories off places like Literotica to publish under their own name.  I'd already had someone try to swipe the Succubus Summoning series a year earlier for a smaller fan-writing site, so included the 1st chapter of SS101 in this collection (which was originally written as a standalone short story) as a form of pre-emptive copyright protection.  Now that Succubus Summoning 101 exists as its own book, that isn't necessary, so I'm planning to replace it with the appropriately Valentine's Day themed "The Succubus Heart Squad".

Fire away with questions below.  I did get distracted for a while at the start of the year, but I am hoping to get these collections back up on Amazon ASAP.

Story Inspiration - A Succubus for Christmas

Despite getting distracted by various things, I still want to get those old short story collections back up for sale again.

One thing I wanted to add was a little segment at the back detailing the inspiration behind the stories.  Writing them (or rather rewriting them as I wrote some for Christmas and Valentine's Day a while back) did unfortunately lock me up last month and is part of the reason why I've been a little quiet recently.  It's usually the non-fiction that locks me up, for some reason.  It's why I stopped blogging on almost anything other than documenting recent releases.

In this case I wasn't happy.  What I was writing felt self-indulgent.  I know I'm only trying to emulate what I've read in other horror short collections/anthologies, but let's face it, I'm not Stephen King and a previous publication history of "I uploaded them to Literotica" is not as interesting as a list of dates and original magazines the stories were published.

I think it might be better to use this segment to answer questions people might have on the inspiration for the characters and story, or to clarify things I intentionally left vague and cryptic.

Starting up is "A Succubus for Christmas", which has this line-up:

1) A Succubus for Christmas
2) The Masterton Covenant
3) Bubble Bath
4) Flesh Pitchers of Prague
5) Hookah'ed
6) Pool of the Undine
7) Slayer vs Succubus
8) Arachne's Web*
9) Wrapdance
10) The Coils of Aenictia
11) Squeezed
12) Happy Ending
13) Incall with a Succubus

*exclusive to the collection

If you've read the stories before and have any burning questions on them, fire away below.

That might be a little more interesting for me to write about than "I was inspired by a monster girl picture I saw on the internet and uploaded the story to Literotica on [insert date here]".

More Potential Covers for "A Succubus for Christmas"

 Getting closer, I think.

1. My current favourite (and why I put it first).  Abstract enough that the usual AI weirdness doesn't seem out of place.  I think I might change the font colour from gold to silver to make it stand out from the background.

2. Technically the 1st from filenames, but I thought I'd change the order to put the good one first.  This one has similar problems to the old pic I posted and is the weakest of the 4 options in my opinion.

3. Okay, but maybe not as good as 1 and 4.  I like that she appears to be wearing some kind of bondage mask.  Gold again might not the right choice for the font.

4. My second favourite.  The colours are nice and vibrant.  Has a decent impression of a feminine figure without falling into the uncanny valley problems.

Thoughts?

More Potential AI Art Covers

I'm still playing around with AI art for covers and have mocked these examples up.

Given how Wombo works, and the difficulty when it comes to human figures/faces, I think it's best to fully lean into the abstract aspects.  I'm also hoping I might be able to lure some more mainstream horror readers over, and I think the usual smiling anime succubus might scare them off.

It's not ideal.  That would be getting a decent fantasy artist and commissioning art similar to the old Weird Tales covers.  I'm not sure I have the budget for that or even know where to find someone to do it.  I'm also conscious I need to get these ebooks back up, sooner rather than later.

I think these are better than the Christmas example, but are they good enough?

(The Freedom one I think is, Halloween and Remembrance are borderline, but might be abstract enough to get away with it.)

Public Demo Version of "House of Hellish Harlots" Updated to v0.028

The public demo version of "House of Hellish Harlots" has been updated to v0.028.  you can play it here.

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.

As always, patrons are a month ahead.  For them I released v0.029.  Because I have a bunch of other stuff going on at the moment and I'm focusing on writing lots of new harlot scenarios, v0.029 is another small release and just adds 1 new harlot - the "love heart succubus" Amoura D'Coeur.

If you want to check it out and support the project, the Patreon page is here.

As this was a very small HoHH release, I thought I should give my patrons something more for January.  I get comments here asking how my various characters would interact with each other.  A few years back I began a novel idea that featured both Nicole and Madam Voluptula.  That didn't pan out and is currently on hiatus while I work on other projects, but I thought I'd share the opening chapters with patrons.  That 6.5K opening novel fragment can be read here.

I'm still in the middle of trying to get all of my books back up on sale, so there is some ongoing disruption to my work on HoHH.  However, I've been building up a little stockpile of new harlot scenarios ready to type up and implement.  I'm hoping February will get back to 3-4 harlots per release rather than the single-harlot releases of the past couple of months.

Lovely Photo Manip inspired by "Vampiric Boobies"

Normally, I regard Twitter as a horrible place.  I have a twitter handle on there (@manyeyedhydra), but for the last couple of years I've only used it to post dry updates of projects in progress.  The number of potential negative interactions far far outweigh the potential positive interactions on that platform, especially if you're someone like me who slaloms all over the usual political lines.

This was one of those rare positive interactions as I got tagged in on a thread where a photo manip artist had posted a piece inspired by one of my stories.  I liked it and asked if I could share, and the artist agreed, so here we are:

I don't know if it's meant to be Acarina or another vampire girl inspired by her.  Either way it's a really good interpretation of the blood draining scene from "Vampiric Boobies".

If she's anything like Acarina, that poor bloke is about to be given a horrible choice...

The artist is @Smut_Demon on twitter.  They regularly post photo manips of succubi, vamps and aliens, and they're pretty damn good from what I've seen.

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?