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  This meant all my ebooks (with the exception of the shorter novellas I self-published myself) were unpublished and taken down from sale.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:

Succubus Summoning 101 at Amazon

Succubus Summoning 101 at Smashwords

Succubus Summoning 101 at Kobo

Succubus Summoning 101 at Apple Books

Succubus Summoning 201 at Amazon

Succubus Summoning 201 at Smashwords

Succubus Summoning 201 at Kobo

Succubus Summoning 201 at Apple Books

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!

Succubus Summoning Art - Nurse Honey by VezoniaArtz

Some more Succubus Summoning artwork for you today.  Here's a piece depicting Nurse Honey I commissioned from VezoniaArtz:

This is Nurse Honey in her much more intimidating Mamǝḵā Bēyˁṯān form.  I wanted this to be a companion piece to the Nÿte picture VezoniaArtz did for me earlier in the year and they did a great job again.

Hope you enjoy.

(Yes, I missed a Monmusu Quest: Paradox [part 2] playthrough post.  I'll be back to normal schedule on Saturday.)

Succubus Summoning Art - Nÿte by RaidouZERO

Some more lovely Succubus Summoning art by RaidouZERO.  This piece is of Nÿte.

I'm not sure if that's one of her prized skulls or a fresh victim about to be dropped onto her pile of "trash" skulls.  I like how her head wings seem natural and seem to fit in this picture.  I usually advise artists to leave them off, but they work with this style.

Here is RaidouZERO's original version on DeviantArt (where he also has links to some alternate versions with slightly different horns).  He's also done some lovely pictures of Nurse Honey and Verdé.

Thank you to Jude Duval/LudedWolf for commissioning the piece and RaidouZERO for creating it.

Succubus Summoning Art - Rosa

Yes, I know I was supposed to put a new part of my Monmusu Conquered World Text Play up today, but...

I went and commissioned another piece of Succubus Summoning artwork from the highly talented VezoniaArtz.  So how do we like Rosa?

I know I neglected her a little in Succubus Summoning 201 (It was a deliberate running joke).  I intend to make up for that when I get around to writing Succubus Summoning 301. ;)

Succubus Summoning Art - Nÿte

I'm happy to share another piece of gorgeous Succubus Summoning art on the blog today.  This is VezoniaArtz's interpretation of Nÿte.  I think they absolutely nailed it.

This was my first time at getting a piece of art commissioned.  I really liked the Verdé piece VezoniaArtz did for Jude Duval and thought they'd be perfect for Nÿte.  It was a great experience.  VezoniaArtz was very professional, thorough and fast.  Highly recommended.

And more artwork of hot succubi is always a good thing!

Succubus Summoning Art - Verdé 2.0

Jude Duval/Luded Wolf has been busy again and commissioned another piece of Verdé, this time from VezoniaArtz:

Verdé is a nature gal.  Her garden is so lovely you might just end up staying there forever...

Love this piece.  It reminds me of old fantasy art cards.  VezoniaArtz's style is really suited for dark fae type creatures.  You can check out the rest of their gallery on DeviantArt here.  I'm tempted to see how busy they are and whether they might be interested in doing a few more pieces like this of gothic succubi and other monster girls.  Any suggestions for H-space girls or other characters people would like to see done in this style?

Thanks again to Jude Duval for commissioning these pieces.

More Succubus Summoning Art - Verdé

Some more delicious Succubus Summoning art.  This time Verdé:

And also completely nude.

Come in close for a hug.  What could possibly go wrong...

Once again thanks to RaidouZERO for drawing it, and Jude Duval/LudedWolf for commissioning it.

(At some point I will get off my ass and start commissioning pieces of the H-space monster girls!)

More Succubus Summoning Artwork - Nÿte by ArbuzBudesh

More thanks to Jude Duval for commissioning this piece of Nÿte from ArbuzBudesh.  It was actually done a couple of months ago, but I have been a little AWOL recently as you might have noticed... :)

ArbuzBudesh creates a regular webcomic, Price For Freedom, which you can check out here.  The Lady Wolf character that shows up later in that serial might be of interest to people that like their demon femdom on the more extreme side.

There are other variants in Jude Duval's DeviantArt gallery.  An interesting byproduct of these art commissions is it's made me aware of areas where I haven't been as precise in character description as I could be.

Once again, thanks to Jude Duval for turning the wheels required to have these pieces created.

(Temptation to do something similar with the H-space Monster Girl Bestiary rising... ;) )

Gorgeous Piece of Nurse Honey Artwork

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

How not to make your print cover

As promised, here is the whole sorry saga of why it took so long to make the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 available.

First off I should go through the process I follow to make print versions of my books available for readers to buy.  My publisher, eXcessica, uses Amazon's CreateSpace to produce Print On Demand paperback versions of their books.  The files they need from me, the author, are a correctly formatted manuscript and a high resolution pdf of the coverflat.

The coverflat is the full cover of the book - back, spine, front - laid out flat.  In order to create this CreateSpace asks the author to fill in a bit of data on how big they want the finished paperback to be and how many pages the manuscript is.  The number of pages value is needed to determine the thickness of the spine.  Once CreateSpace has all the info it spits out a template that looks like this:

I'll go over what the dotted lines and other stuff means in a mo.  First there's the obvious dependency - CreateSpace can't give you this template until you know the total number of pages in your book, and you won't know this until you've finished and correctly formatted the manuscript.  This is a problem for people like me who have an unfortunate tendency to push our deadlines rather fine.

When I get caught in a time crunch, my usual approach is to focus on making sure the ebook version is ready in time and then try to get the print version done as soon after as possible (the manuscripts are formatted a little different - nothing major, but it does take a little fiddling around).

As a result the cover art is done backwards.  Rather than getting my artist to create the full cover art and then cutting out the front cover part to serve as the ebook front cover, I have them create the front cover first and then give them the full template to do the rest as soon as I have it.

The ebook front cover is relatively straightforward.  What you see is what you get and the artist has control of where the boundaries occur.  For Succubus Summoning 201, that gives us this front cover:

My art direction was to follow on the theme of Succubus Summoning 101 and make the cover look like one of those old leather-bound tomes with clasps and bits of metal around the edges.  Sort of like this:

For the ebook cover this is relatively straightforward as the artist knows the exact margins and where the exact edge of the cover is.

For the print coverflat is becomes a little more complex.  If you look at the template above you'll see there are dotted lines and a salmon-pink border.  The dotted line indicates where the cover will be cut out, but this is not 100% precise, hence the salmon-pink border.  This represents the bleed area and everything in it is a sort of Schrödinger's artwork - it might get cut off and not appear on the final cover, but you have to have something there in case it doesn't.  So this something should look okay enough that you don't mind it being on the front cover, but also shouldn't be important enough that it has to be on the front cover.

For most book covers (and the case with all my short story collections) this isn't a problem.  The edge is background stuff that can be chopped off at any point.  Then we have the Succubus Summoning 201 cover and those little corner pieces...

Oh boy.

Somewhere in the (sort of) commissioning process I managed to totally confuse my artist on what the bleed area was and what it meant.  Many mistakes were made, over and over...

I should also mention at this point that my cover artist is also my brother and he volunteers his time for nothing more than thanks and beer.  As he has a family and full-time job, he only has the spare time to work on things at his own pace.  This means that turnaround times are going to be, by necessity, slow and inconsistent.

The first mix-up was with the dimensions.  The correct dimensions for the coverflat should be 3468 x 2475, 600 ppi.  The coverflat template comes with a resolution of 300 ppi.  In between our respective art programs we managed to get stuck between the right resolution but four times the size, or the right size but the wrong resolution.

I found this out after sending a ridiculously huge file to Stacey, the assistant at eXcessica, that took some finangling to even send it through email before she realised it was way too big for CreateSpace.

We managed to get that sorted and then the bleed area problems hit.

The next submission was rejected by CreateSpace for having text too close to the edge.  This was where I managed to confuse my brother.  He misunderstood what I meant by having a bleed area around the edges and his first fix was to increase the size of canvas to add a bit around the edges.  This doesn't work as the cover is still going to be cut out at the same dotted lines.  The next attempt had the right-sized canvas and the blurb on the back moved away from the margins.  It also positioned the corner ornamentation right in the bleed area.  When I overlaid the template I saw straightaway that virtually all of the corner pieces would be cut off, and sent it back.

My proposed fix was to position the whole coverflat inside the salmon-pink border and then fill the edges with background cover.  I wanted to extend the pseudo-metal ornamentation to the edges, so I told my brother to widen them to fill out to the edges.

This didn't work either as Stacey came back to say the coverflat had been bounced again for having essential art bits within the bleed area.

I asked her if we could just overrule it as I didn't mind if some of it was cut-off.

Unfortunately this was something she didn't have any control over.  My guess is CreateSpace has some automated checks on the cover art.

So, back to the drawing board for the umpteenth time.  As my brother's time is limited, these back and forths took place over the course of a couple of months.  Rather than bother him again I repositioned an old version of the coverflat inside the safe area and filled the borders with a flat colour taken from the background to blend it in.  This left me with this:

...which was thankfully good enough to pass as well as turning out okay when displayed on the Amazon site:

So there you have it - less of an excuse and more an acknowledgement of me and my brother being giant idiots.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the scenes of the publishing process.  Thankfully, there is a happy ending.  As I posted on Monday, the print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now available to buy on either Amazon, or directly from CreateSpace.  Sorry for making you all wait so long!

Print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is finally here!

A little (lot!) later than planned, I can finally say the paperback version of Succubus Summoning 201 is available to buy.  This continues Phil's sexy (mis)adventures with Verdé, Rosa and friends as the hapless warlock tries to learn magic while surviving the amorous advances of various seductive succubi and monster girls.

You can get it from Amazon here, or directly from my publisher, eXcessica here.  I get more money from the second link, but sales from Amazon bump up the book's rating and make it easier for new readers to find, so I don't mind where you get it from.  Go to whoever suits you best.

Here are some 'inside-baseball' answers to a couple of questions I imagine people will have.

Why is it so expensive for a paperback book?

POD (Print on Demand), I'm afraid.  This is the reality of being a quasi-independent author.  Mass-market paperbacks have print runs in the thousands to keep the costs down (with the downside that the publisher ends up out of pocket if the book turns out to be a dud).  I'm below that level, so the only way to produce paperback versions is as a speciality item with prices to match.  On the flip side, independents can price their ebooks lower as they don't have to worry about cannibalising their print market.

Why did it take so freaking long to get the print version done?

Um, yeah.

The tl;dr version is my cover artist and I managed to get horribly mixed up on what was meant by bleed area on the cover template and mistakes were made... over and over.

The even shorter version - see those metallic embellishments on the corners of the book, don't do this on your book designs.

I'll go into the full sorry saga tomorrow as it might be of interest to other self-published (quasi or otherwise) writers looking to put out print versions of their books through CreateSpace.

But back to our regular scheduled content...

The print version of Succubus Summoning 201 is now out.  Sorry for making you all wait so long.  I hope you all enjoy it and find a place for it on your bookshelves.  Although you might want to put it somewhere where innocent neighbours don't pick it up and flick through by accident.  Or maybe you do... 😈

This should have been when I tell you about a hot new story, but...

This week didn't exactly go to plan.  Actually the whole of August didn't exactly go to plan, considering I was too ill to do anything for half of it.

I did have a good idea for a (loosely) summer themed story for Literotica's current story contest.  It was last minute, but I reckoned I might be able to finish it this week and get it out before the deadline of Saturday midnight.  (This is also why the Violated Hero 5 updates have been absent this week).

Then I got distracted by the #GamerGate stuff and had to hack up one of those mental hairballs just to get rid of it.

Even then I thought I might make it, until I realised how long the story wanted to be.  By Friday I had typed up 7,500 words and just needed to finish the 1st draft, type up the rest, edit it and then get it in before midnight.  Didn't seem so bad, except the rest of the story ended up running to 21 pages.  The succubus decided she was going to give someone a thorough sexual working over in this story.  It's a new succubus character, but I think people will like her.  It's also a really steamy story.  Plenty of hot succubus sex in this tale.

You won't have to wait too long to read it.  I didn't make this deadline, but Literotica's Halloween contest isn't far off and pretty much all of my stories are appropriate for that theme.  It will give me a chance to properly edit it so I don't embarrass myself with tons of typos and grammar errors.  I'll let you all know as soon as it's posted.

On the positive side, as soon as I realised I wasn't going to make it I switched back to Succubus Summoning and finished typing 210 up.  I'll edit that over the next couple of days and it should be up next week sometime.

As for Violated Hero 5, I'll get back to that tomorrow.

And for me:

Stop getting distracted by political things...
Stop getting distracted by political things...
Stop getting distracted by political things...

Succubus Summoning 208 is up (finally...)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

So Whatever Happened to Succubus Summoning?

“When are you getting back to the Succubus Summoning series?”

I get asked this question a lot.  Rather than continue to reply to individual comments and emails I’ll answer it here.

First, some history.  A while back, when I was only writing the short horror-porn one-shots, I wrote a little HarryPotter-esque parody where two students at a college for warlocks summoned succubi for some “adult entertainment” and it went horribly wrong.  In a rare twist for me, that story ended with one of the protagonists still alive and facing an uncertain fate at the pussies of two sexy succubi.  Rather than leave it to the imagination of the reader, I returned to that story and wrote some follow-up chapters, which then became a series, and then a book.

I started a sequel (Succubus Summoning 201) and posted a few chapters online before putting it on hiatus while I untangled some of the plot developments in my head.  Back then I planned to write the whole thing as a novel, which would have the advantage of allowing me to go back and fix any obvious screw-ups if I changed my mind on the story.  Unfortunately this resulted in Succubus Summoning constantly sitting on the backburner because my novel-writing discipline is abject to say the least.

Last year I figured out where I wanted the plot to go and brought it back off hiatus with the addition of some new chapters.  I thought the monthly schedule would give me the push to keep the thing going until completion.

And then A Succubus for Remembrance got in the way.  Or rather that and the stories for the forthcoming collection (which I originally planned to put out first, but couldn’t finish in time for its release date).  Originally I was hoping to work on both simultaneously, but then time pressure started, deadlines loomed, and Succubus Summoning 201 had to go back on the backburner.  That’s the problem with naming collections after certain days of the year – they have to be out by that date.  Unfortunately I still have a full-time job eating up my day and I don’t write quickly enough to be able to work on both.

(really I should favour Succubus Summoning, as it sells more than the collections, but I’m a little stupid at these things)

Anyway, to cut a long story short:

I haven’t lost interest in the series, or enthusiasm.  I’m not going to abandon it.  As soon as I’m done with the next collection I intend going back to Succubus Summoning and working on that until the current arc (201) is finished (there will be future arcs).  After that there are some new Jackson in HRPG-World sections I want to write.

I’ll keep working on short stories (my ideas file grows at the rate of two new ideas for every story completed!), but I’m going to wait until I’ve built up a nice stockpile again before I put out another collection as writing specifically for a collection seems to slow me down more than just writing the short stories/chapters that feel like fun to write at the time.

I’m far more productive when I fully embrace ChaosWriting, but that does occasionally fuck up deadlines and the orderly production of new series chapters.

Apologies for the delays for fans of the series.  With a bit of luck Phil and his succubi’s adventures will restart Mar/Apr.

"Streetwalking with a Succubus" takes 3rd place in Literotica Halloween Story Contest

Literotica's Halloween contest results are in and "Streetwalking with a Succubus" took 3rd place:
http://www.literotica.com/stories/contest.php/halloween-2013

This is a nice boost before I enter the formatting hell of getting A Succubus for Remembrance ready for publication.  It's also quite hard for the shorter stories to place in Literotica's contests, so thanks to everyone who voted and I hope you enjoyed the story.

I'm now ineligible to place for the next couple of contests.  Anyone that's been following my writing for long enough will know this usually means an excuse to let Horror-head out of the cage and enter the nastiest story I have lying around.  I don't have anything for Lit's Winter contest, but I can promise something really dark and sexy for the Valentine's Day contest next year (and - shock horror! - succubus-on-girl action).

Before then I'll be putting out the A Succubus for Remembrance collection (there will be another new excerpt posted tomorrow) and then getting Phil's misadventures back on track.  It's annoying the Succubus Summoning series has slipped off its monthly schedule and I'll try to fix that.  Unfortunately I still haven't mastered the art of not falling to gibbering bits every time a publishing deadline comes around.

Succubus Summoning 207 and Plot vs Porn

It wasn't quite the first week of July as I was hoping, but I did finally manage to post Succubus Summoning 207 up on Literotica last week.  It was an awkward chapter to write as it features the reality-bending, fourth-wall-breaking Cέrμləa and her mind-melting description of how the universe of Succubus Summoning works (and also a few oblique hints to my other stories as well).

I was curious to see how this chapter would be received.

Anonymous - "this shit sucks!  THis is so fucking boring. Wheres all the fucking? I went fucking limp during this"

:(

Um, yeah...well...

To be fair, I'm highlighting one negative comment when most of them have been positive (thanks for those!).  Quite a few people were asking for more plot and background and I hope 207 delivered on that.

Plot versus porn is an interesting discussion.  I find a lot of modern porn a little dull and mechanical because it's completely stripped down to only the sucky-fucky.  On the other hand, in adding plot/characterization/background/etc it's easy to lose sight of what an erotica/porn story should do - arouse.  Water down the sexy bits too much and you end up with a tasteless gruel no one is going to find appetizing.  That's why I tend to stick to the classic erotica rule: Every Chapter Must Have A Sex Scene.

In this case Cέrμləa was going to provide the exposition and Ab'ĝalga the sex scene.  And then the sex scene came out...weird.  Don't get me wrong, I like how it turned out, but I'm fully aware it won't be everyone's cup of tea.  Then, given my other stories, this probably isn't much of a surprise.

The tl;dr version - this chapter was long and weird, normal succubus fucking will resume next month(ish).

And because this is probably the best place for it, here's some clarification for points raised in the Lit comments.

First off an important point on source reliability.  If you're a fan of Doctor Who you'll be aware of Moffat's "The Doctor lies" whenever a retcon is required.  Cέrμləa is a daemon.  Daemons lie.

On the inevitability of hell reabsorbing worlds - Cέrμləa perceives time very differently.  Many inevitable things take a very long time to occur.  (no one sweats that much about the sun going supernova and turning the Earth into a cinder even though this is part of the inevitable life cycle of a star)

Ab'ĝalga would have dissolved Phil if she'd decided he was too 'ordinary' (and Cέrμləa was aware of this).

Yes, there was a nod to the hell-space series of stories.

207 is at the upper range for chapter length.  It's easy for some fantasy series to get longer and longer as the writer gets more into it.  Personally I think this is a warning sign the writer is losing control of their story.  I'll be trying to get future chapters down to a more manageable 5,000 words or so (plus, I have to keep some stuff back for the inevitable ebook).

If you have any more questions/feedback feel free to put them in the comments below.

I'm aiming for first week of September for 208, although this will probably slip given my usual slowness.  It will feature Cέrμləa - or rather a facet of Cέrμləa we haven't seen before - and will see Phil visiting another dominion.

Oh, and if you ended up here because Google told you I like to blog about certain types of games and none of this post makes any sense.  Please feel free to start with this:

Available as an ebook from Amazon.  If you like games like Monster Girl Quest and Violated Hero, this book is perfect for you.

Succubus Summoning 206 posted

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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!

Rosa and Verdé need your votes!

It's the 11th Annual Literotica Reader's Choice Awards and Succubus Summoning is up in the Erotic Horror category. Actually, two chapters of Succubus Summoning (113 and 114) are up, which is a little awkward.

If you like the series and want to show your appreciation, then please vote here. 114 is probably the best choice to avoid splitting the vote as it's the end of the first story arc.

I haven't forgotten the 201 arc. It's just that pesky real life thing gobbling up my time. Must write faster!

The Dilemma with Verdé

She's sweet, nice, warm-hearted...and she kills people.

As a writer it creates a dilemma for me. Verdé is liked because she appears nice and good-natured, and seems to care for Phil rather than wanting to suck out his soul at the first opportunity. She isn’t a Nicole or Amanda though. She’s still a succubus, which means some of what she does is going to be unpalatable to most readers.

Now I could hide those aspects of her character off-screen, or try to justify them with plenty of they-had-it-coming’s, but that would feel like a lame cop-out. As much as I don’t want to prick the fantasy, I don’t want to shy away from what she is either.

The end of 202 was intended as a gentle reminder. She’s not quite as nice as you think.

If the lovely Verdé was on a bed in front of you in all her seductive glory and there was an open door behind you, the sensible thing – for a long and hearty life – might be to run for that door. Fast!

Maybe.

Maybe she might decide she likes you. Maybe she won’t kill you. She’s not Rosa after all. She’s capable of having some feelings towards her human ‘snacks’. It might be worth the risk...

It's those contradictions which I hope make her character complex, intriguing and appealing.