Monday, March 25, 2013

New Title: The Summoner and the Satyr

****Update---->Now live on Amazon! Clicky click!

I wrote this story a while ago.  It's a PWP (porn without plot) set in a fantasy school for magic (a grown-up Hogwarts if you'd like) called the Dracon School of Magicks.  The plan was to write 2 or 3 more of these, bundle them together, and sell it for the more lucrative $2.99.

Then I got depressed, and I've barely written anything since finishing The Red Shoes. So I'm bringing it out now and will list it as a stand-alone.  Hopefully I will get around to writing more porn in this universe, and maybe sell a nice fat omnibus style collection.

This is porn.  There are zero romantic elements to it and the sex is kinda rough.  If you're squeamish about lots of cum you probably won't like it much.  It also has sex with a non-human (though he is sentient).

Description:
Asyra is a summoner of beings from other worlds. She is a new professor at the Dracon School of Magic, and has been without a man for six months. Her needs are becoming so urgent she is beginning to lust after her students.  To sate her lust she summons the most sexual of beings--a satyr. Can she control this epitome of masculinity, or will she loose control completely?

3,000 words. Contains: rough sex, fantasy elements, oral and anal sex.

Excerpt:


Her voice was low and quiet with building force as she felt the portal to the otherworld open in her heart. The pain of the crossing was sharp but brief, sending her tumbling and forcing her to her knees. The candles in the circle had gone out, but the other candles and the fire lit the room. She looked up—the object of her summons towered over her.

“Creature of the dark world,” she said, getting to her feet. “I bind you to my circle. I call you to do my bidding.”

The Satyr was massive. His cloven legs were covered in a thick pelt, the brown skin of his broad chest thick with hair as well. He had a not quite handsome but very human face, except for his yellow eyes and large, curling horns. He wore no clothes. His large cock and heavy balls hung between his powerful thighs. Asyra breathed in the heady scent of musky masculinity, strong and potent. It was easy to forget her young, inexperienced students.

“Your bidding.” The Satyr’s voice boomed through the small room. “You expect me to answer the summons of a female?”

“I command you,” she said, unsure. Even the angriest of entities had never questioned being fairly caught.

“I reject your command,” he growled, and with his cloven hoof he scraped across the chalk line of her circle, smudging her hastily scrawled runes. There was a mistake in the runes, rendering the circle worthless and broken. There was nothing to contain this powerful beast.

“Oh, don’t,” she moaned.

A muscular arm shot out and grabbed her by the throat, squeezing hard enough to cause alarm. “No female controls me,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please.” Oh, this was bad. Very, very bad. A wild satyr loose in the halls would wreak havoc on the school. No woman would be safe. She would be sacked for sure and there would be no tenure, no comfortable retirement in her future. “I offer sacrifice,” she said quickly. “Take me in any way you see fit, and I will send you back home.”

He loosened his grip on her and Asyra dropped to the floor, taking in deep gasps of air. “I accept your sacrifice,” he said. “Though you may not survive it.”

“I’m tougher than I look,” she assured. “And if you kill me, I can’t send you home.” Only the original Summoner could do so much, and she hoped her remembered that. There were all manner of magical creatures wandering the world thanks to incompetent Summoners.

“We shall see. Get on your knees,” he commanded, and Asyra obeyed, the stone floor uncomfortable. “I think I shall enjoy breaking you.” He didn’t have to command her to do anything. She knew what he wanted. His cock hung half-hard in front of her face. As she watched it seemed to urge forward towards her.


Rant: The Language of Breasts

There is nothing I hate more than describing breasts in a sex scene.  It's the language that is the problem, not the organs themselves (which are lovely).  There just aren't any good words for them. You end up sounding crass, or technical, or stupid, or like a 10 year old boy.

"Bubbies"
"Breasts" for example. Makes you think of chicken or breast exams. It's technical but when you get right down to it, better than the alternatives.  You could go with "tits", which depending on the tone of the story, I might use, but I feel like an asshole when I use the term.  It's harsh, unfeeling, objectifying.

After that things just get ridiculous yabbos, fun-bags, cans, bajongas...I don't need to go on. Words for a conversation between two men oogling at a woman without her knowledge.  Definitely can't use these. The hero isn't allowed to talk about the heroine that way anyway.

Women usually use the word "boobs" when discussing them with their friends. It's soft, innocuous, safe.  But stick it in a sentence ("He touched her boobs with gentle caresses, taking one boob into his mouth while he teased the other with deft fingers.") Uh...no.

We could go the old-fashioned route, and use the word "bosom" but you can really only get away with that in a historical.  I once read a 19th century pornographic novel (almost all sex in those are date-rape situations, btw) and the author used the word "bubbies."  I can only assume that it was pronounced the same way children say "boobies" now, but the alternative spelling makes the word a lot more attractive, at least on the page. But see if your spell check and editor will let you get away with that.

Then there are the tacky romance words (which I've never experienced first-hand because I have taste) like "mounds" and "orbs."  Freaking orbs? Do I have a pair of disco balls on my chest? (You do if you a Meyer vampire chick I guess.)

So if "tender breasts" equal KFC and "sweet bubbies" equal a dyslexic 10 year old...what the hell am I supposed to do?

Switch to "udders"?

Saturday, March 16, 2013

A ramble on offering stories for free

Back in November I released "Saturday Night" for free on Smashwords.com.  It's had over a thousand downloads since then.  In fact, all of my "Free" reads are doing incredibly well when it comes down to the number of people who have downloaded them.  Most of them have a small handful of good reviews too, which makes me very happy.  The whole idea is to give everyone a taste, and hope they will come back for more.  
The problem is, no one wants to buy from Smashwords because while it is author friendly (high royalties, the ability to give discounts or offer a book for free at any time, multiple formats) its not so reader friendly.  Amazon is awesome because the reader pushes one button and the book is in their cloud, immediately available on their computer or kindle. Because I always visit Smashwords on my computer and I read on my kindle...the files never get transferred (there's never a sync cord when you need one) and they never get read.

Amazon has only two ways you can post for free. KDP Select or price matching.  Select is lame because you only get 5 free days every quarter and you can't offer your book anywhere else while its listed. And price matching is almost impossible unless you have a bunch of people telling Amazon they're getting your work free somewhere else.  As a writer with less than 100 sales on Amazon a month, that doesn't really happen for me.

Right now I have 4 stories up for free on Smashwords. "Saturday Night", "In the Dark", "Boy" and "Drain Me Dry." I write all over the board, so I wanted to have a het, gay, and a lesbian story available for free to cover all my bases. I also figure that if I offer "Drain Me Dry" for free more people will buy the sequel, which is priced at $1.49 instead of $0.99.  So far this has been true.

By not listing these works on Amazon I'm missing out on visibility and offering my readers variety. "Drain Me Dry" seems to springboard people into not only "Addicted to the Bite" but also my less popular "Brian is Gay."  "Saturday Night" is a good, strong short.  The sex is hot, the story around it is engaging, and if someone reads it first they're likely to come back for more. I don't like charging for it, but more people shop on Amazon than Smashwords, and over-all I just want people to read my work and enjoy it.  So "Saturday Night" just went up for 99 cents on Amazon.  (They tried to accuse me of stealing it since it was already online.)  "In the Dark" has been there a while. Its not very long so it doesnt get many sales. (Also my gay stories sell better than anything else.)  I've only sold two copies of Saturday Night so far, but I have a feeling it's going to be a strong, steady seller because like I said, it's good. 

Eventually all of the free stories are going to be stuck into collections when I have more to publish, but they will still be listed for free individually.  You just wont know about it unless you read this blog or follow me on twitter.

Saturday Night on Smashwords
Saturday Night on Amazon.


Monday, March 11, 2013

Cover Design

It's been a slow, slow month. I have depression. Sometimes its just a vague discontentment, and sometimes it shuts me down and the best I can hope for is to stare at the wall without crying. The end of winter is always the worst, and it was no different this year. I'm trying really hard to get a new story out. I have a pile of half or more than half finished manuscripts in my files, but every time I look at them the despair starts to take over...

I have been able to design covers though. I made up the cover for Club Midnight (scroll down, it's on your left), I created several covers for some of those 1/2 finished books, and I re-designed the cover for The Beauty and the Beast, which you may have noticed, sucked.

A bad cover does not sell books. It can actually deter people from buying them. The whole "never judge a book by its cover" thing is total BS. People are attracted to pleasing images--there's no getting around that. Sometimes I can't believe what people stick on their book as a cover. I just stare and cringe, and I definitely walk away from the book. If a writer doesn't have the artistic sense to know a terrible cover when they see it, how can they have the artistic sense to write a not-terrible book? Maybe this isn't fair (maybe the author is blind, or @ the least, color blind), but when the cover is some 1990's clip art with the title written in Comic Sans, can you really expect me to take someone seriously?

 Of course, a lot of us indie writers can't afford a to buy a good cover and we have to make them ourselves. If you don't know what you're doing, simply find a nice stock image (don't try to take the pic yourself if you're not a photographer) and do not use Comic Sans to write the title across it. (I'd avoid Times New Roman, Arial, Impact, and Courier as well. And Papyrus. Don't use Papyrus.) Keep it readable, keep it simple.

Anyway, the Beauty and the Beast cover.  The old, ugly one is on the right. The new, pretty one is on top. See the difference? The new one is much better. It's more personable and it has a few more elements of the story in it.  Also the font is less corny.  A lot of my covers are kinda dark, so I'm trying to lighten things up a bit, and I think this did a good job.  It was a bitch to manipulate into a properly sized format because I try not to show the whole faces of the models on my books (considering they may have never had any intention of their face showing up on an erotica piece). But here it is, all pretty and shiny and new. The new cover is up on Smashwords, but still waiting for the transfer on Amazon.