My First eBook!

Hello, everyone! I've been keeping this fairly quiet, but you may have heard I'm taking a crack at publishing my erotic stories on the Kindle Marketplace. I'm planning on selling a mixture of my old stories, polished and sometimes expanded, and new stories as I manage to put them together. Today, I just published my very first! And I'm exceedingly nervous.

For my first story, I've gone with a very short but intense story of mine that I've always been rather proud of, titled Night Visitor. I've deleted the original from my archive, and the edited version is now proudly on sale for 2.99 USD! I would be immensely flattered if any of you were interested enough to purchase a copy, but I'm also offering, for all my existing fans, a one-day extension, so to speak: you can download the Kindle version, which should be easy to read on any mobile device, right here for the next 24 hours. Sadly, formatting doesn't seem to be retained very well in some cases, but the content, sans cover, should be intact.

If you have any problems, criticisms, or suggestions upon looking over the eBook, they would be of penultimate interest to me and you can feel free to comment here, note me, email me at Lithiers@gmail.com, or huck words at me any other way you see fit. Should you find this little story enjoyable and well made, however, I would be absolutely delighted if you deigned to leave a review on the Amazon page for my book.

Which isn't to say I only want positive things said about my book! A stack of overly positive reviews can do more harm than good at times, so I would beg you to be nothing but honest if you did find the time to review my eBook. Did I mention I'm a bit nervous?

Too Long, Didn't Read!: Free eBook! 24 Hours! Buy and/or review honestly here! Thank you all so much!

Actually, I don't think that was in the Sufficiently Short, Read Successfully, so let me say: thank you, everyone, for taking the time to read my work, and putting up with my constant delays, and in advance should you choose to peruse my new eBook and/or act upon your perusal! Some vague, vain vision of someday sustaining myself on the proceeds from such written works and actually becoming a full, proper "writer" hangs before me, a strange and ephemeral concept that I dare not reach out for lest it evaporate in an instant. But here I am, reaching, ever so tentatively.

Been reading some Asimov. I think it's showing.

Also! Speaking of commenting, I've relaxed the requirements to comment on the blog. I'd been hearing a few people say they would have commented but for the restrictions on accounts and such, so you should now be able to comment anonymously. I'm hoping this doesn't bring a plague of spammers down on our heads, or I may be forced to find some way to restrict them again.

Also also: QR Codes! Because I guess that's popular.

Night Visitor on Dropbox!

Night Visitor on Amazon!

Games That Could Be: Virus - Concept

Out of the three game concepts I've played with most, this one has stolen the most hours from me when I should be sleeping. I don't have any real title for it, so for now, let's call it Virus.

The concept is that you are --in your own opinion-- an ancient, freshly awakening god. Your dominion is centered on sexual pleasure. Your opponent, however, sees you as a long-buried demon, an embodiment of sins of the flesh, that has been foolishly released from its prison. In practice, over the course of this game, you act as something closer to a psychic venereal disease.

The game begins with your waking, bodiless, to find a small team of miners that have broken into your sanctum. You choose one of them to possess-- not assuming direct control, but simply pouring your existence into his or her body. When they return to their secluded mining outpost, it becomes your goal to claim every last one of the miners, workers, and overseers as your worshipers. When the spring comes and the workers are free to leave, you will spread throughout the world once more, and all life shall be reunited in a glorious, everlasting orgy.

But first, you must find ways to spread your influence. You are very weak as you are at the beginning, but every follower you claim will be your eyes into the world, and by inflaming their lust and forcing them to pleasure themselves in worship to you, you will gain power to better influence your followers and awaken your many ancient and fearsome abilities. To spread your influence, though, one of your followers must join a non-believer in the holy ritual: shared orgasms, of course.

So depending on who you first infect, your follower might go home to his wife, and give you a second follower within a few days. From there, perhaps you could turn her temptation to cheat with the neighbor into a lustful passion, and you can spread to a third. Or if you first infect a great thug of a man, you might try going to the bar and scoring, or taking a rather more forceful approach. You must be careful, though-- if you're spotted acting strangely, others may grow suspicious. And when your opponent comes to hunt you down, suspicions will quickly become deadly. If all of your followers are cleansed, you will lose grasp on this world altogether and fall into oblivion.

Obviously, this theme would offer a lot of room for interpretation-- you could see yourself as a holy being, spreading enlightenment to a world that has become too stiff and distant from its own desires, or as a devil hungry to corrupt as many as possible, or simply as a creature trying to survive the only way it knows how. The people you manipulate would all have individual personalities, quirks, secret desires, and various relationships with those around them. How you interact with this social ecosystem could destroy lives or bring everyone together in a way they may never have thought possible. It's my hope that I could infuse these people with enough life that many of you would earnestly want to make their lives better, in a similar fashion to your affection for Lith.

That roughly covers the high concept of the game as a story. Next time, I'll talk about the gameplay that you'd be working with, exactly what sort of game you'd be playing. Hope this intrigues folks!

Games That Could Be

One of the funny parts of being a writer is that you get a lot of people offering you ideas. At least, it's funny to me-- I know some writers can have trouble coming up with something to write about, but for me, it's never been a problem. If anything, I often feel like I've become a writer primarily to express the endless series of ideas that swirl endlessly in my head-- to try to render them in perfect clarity such that others might enjoy them as much I have, and so that I can finally put that great mess of thoughts to rest, satisfied.

For every story I write, there are probably five waiting to be written. Similarly, as I've worked on My Very Own Lith, a broad array of ideas for other games have come to me, some of which I have, in my spare time, refined into full-fleshed concepts. Sometimes I find myself working out endless details against my own will, especially when I should be sleeping.

So I thought to myself, perhaps I should put some of these ideas "to paper," both to ease my mind and to see what others think of them. And as luck would have it, my poor blog is in need of content when I find myself falling into the miserable silence of the creator struggling with his work and his own self. This seems a natural place to share my concepts for games that I might make someday, perhaps after MVOL is complete, or perhaps as a side project, if others were interested in helping out. So keep an eye out, keen readers, for posts in the future discussing my ideas for Games that Could Be!

And we have our answer!

After almost two weeks and 364 votes, the players have offered a pretty resounding answer to my question! Thank you all for taking the time to offer your feedback!

I'm pretty happy with how it came out, honestly-- this is a very clear response, and it doesn't look like, besides these two sore spots, things are necessarily too frustrating in the game. I've also gotten a lot of interesting feedback, I'm very happy to see people taking advantage of the comments section on the survey and here on the blog.

One of the trickier parts of designing the game for me is that it's pretty hard for me to "see it as it is." When I open MVOL, I hardly see what it says, how it presents itself, for everything that I intend for it-- I know the intention behind every design choice, which is a crucial piece of information anybody else playing won't have, so I see the entire thing in a different context. I barely have to read any of the screens when playing to just kind of speed down the trees and get to this or that scene I want to check. I doubt I'll ever be able to really enjoy the game like others do ^.^;

So outside feedback and impressions can really be invaluable here. I get folks telling me they really like this or that aspect of the game, and I definitely appreciate that, but surprisingly enough, I don't get much hate mail. Not that that would be very helpful-- it's hard to nail exactly what aspects I need to hear most about. I try to encourage open and frank discussion of my game, but the forums don't see much activity these days, sadly. So at this point, the responses I've been seeing have certainly helped me get a bit of a better picture of how the game "works" for people! So, all that said, thanks for your feedback, guys!

As far as the results themselves: I'm actually a little surprised the pink collar got a much stronger response than either of the others. I'd guess that the blue collar would have outstripped it entirely before [Hug] was added, however. I'll definitely be looking into making the pink collar more accessible. I've been considering ways to make the collars more naturally attainable so that people don't have to go looking for guides to get at them, while still making them a fairly noteworthy achievement.

As for dominance, this is a bit trickier. On one hand, Lith as a character is slow to take an assertive role, and really won't try to retain dominance if challenged. On the other, I don't want to make it too hard to get into that side of things, especially if you're committed to that style of gameplay. And the more I've thought about it, the less it seems like a very problematic system to abuse-- I worry about folks being able to "max out" this or that too easily or too quickly, but that's not as much of an issue here, with how Dom Lith has unfolded. So I expect I'll be fiddling with both these systems-- I have a peculiar idea in my pocket that may just do the trick for making Dom Lith stick around a bit better.

So, overall I'd say this poll worked out well! Now, if I could just kick the habit of delaying and overinflating my blog posts, we'd be set :p More later, folks. Thanks for reading!