Hey, folks! Lots of bits and pieces of news for you today. If you're already poking around the right circles, you may have already heard the first big thing. I've actually been holding off on making this announcement for quite a while, waiting for the right time, but it looks like I'm going public just a little early.
I don't know if you ever heard of a little Japanese 3D porn game company called Illusion, but I really liked their work. I couldn't usually understand much of it (even with fan translations squeezed in) but being able to see and control 3D models as they do the naughty, directing the action and swinging around to the perfect, sometimes impossible angle for the best view, was a pornographic triumph in my book.
So when
Wolvalix from the development team for
The Cathouse Tale approached me to take full control of the story, characters, and writing for their game, I was more than interested. A furry, English version of those 3D porn games, complete with story and full-on gameplay? Hell yes, I said! Well, I don't think I literally said that, but it was my general attitude!
Now, I wanted to wait to reveal this until there was actually... well, something to reveal. Unfortunately, the team ran into some trouble just as I came on board-- they wanted to make a big upgrade to how the game animates characters, but it took much longer to get together than they'd hoped, and things like setting up a proper dialogue system for me to overload with rambling, eccentric characters got pushed down the priority list. So right now, there isn't really anything new from me over there to check out.
But the team is turning things around and getting ready to put out a new release (hopefully) soon, and it's going to (hopefully) have at least a little of my writing in it! And besides that, it's just a pretty cool new game that I think will be a real asset for the furry community once it's really up and running. I recently stepped into a sort of Communications Manager role over there to help take some pressure off the guys handling programming and such, so I decided it was high time I make the announcement! If things go well, you'll be able to enjoy at least a little of my work over there soon, and a whole lot of the other guys', if you haven't already! I'll keep you posted!
And I know some of you will be concerned that this will eat into my time for MVOL. The short response is: Don't be. The longer response is that, while I may have some ambitious plans for the story side of CHT, the simple fact is that their dialogue system consists of little speech bubbles. I'm gonna be using lots and lots of them, but you can't really write all that much in a format like that, and you don't want to bore the players to death reading it all, flipping through too many of them. So there's not THAT much writing for me to do, and for that matter, it will take the rest of the team much, much longer to do all the work that goes into creating scenes and content than it will take me to write up the conversations that set up the content. I don't expect this project to eat into my time in any noticeable way-- rather, I think it may make one more nice little complement to my other work. I've enjoyed having my other stories to work on when I'm not in the mood to talk about Lith, but this should make a much better bit of variety, I think. MVOL isn't exactly very dialogue intensive, in comparison!
So that's one piece of news! Next up, something good, and something bad.
You may be familiar with my eBooks. I announced on here as I edited, polished, and published the first five Parts of To Own a Wolf on
Amazon. Well, I've been getting ready to publish my first brand new story on there, and there have been a few different steps to that process. First, I've expanded my reach to publish my eBooks on multiple platforms. As of today, part five of To Own a Wolf is up on
Smashwords, a site which, in turn, publishes to many other eBook sites on my behalf. At least, that's the theory. I've confirmed that my work is up on
Barnes & Noble,
Inktera, and
iTunes, though some may be slower than others to get all five Parts, and SW claims that they're also going up on Kobo, Baker & Taylor Blio, txtr, and Scribd, but I haven't been able to confirm that. If you guys are more familiar with/subscribed to these services, I'd be interested to hear if you can find my work! Either way, if for any reason you prefer another service for procuring your eBooks, chances just got much better that you can read my work by your channel of choice!
With that said, Amazon recently gave us a reason to be glad for the alternatives. Another step in my preparing to publish a new eBook was to go back and edit all my old eBooks to update a few small things in formatting and add some new links to the back. What I did not realize is that every time you make even the smallest edit, Amazon has a specialized reviewer look over your submission to make sure the work still meets their requirements before it's published. I went through this same process for each eBook when I first submitted them. What I also did not realize is that they would reject half of my work-- which didn't just reject the edits, but permanently banned the books from being sold on their site.
To be honest, I was a little shocked. I was a little... angry. I contacted them, and received a form letter reiterating that the books did not meet their content guidelines. Their content guidelines, as far as I can find, are about as vague as humanly possible, by the way. But I've found circles that discuss these things and have felt out exactly what Amazon does and doesn't allow, and to be honest, after I found out how Amazon usually handles this stuff, I was a little surprised that my books had made it through in the first place.
Not that Amazon doesn't do erotica, or furry erotica, or things much, much worse (both in quality and in offensiveness) than my work. There are a few large issues you have to understand. One is that they don't actually read... basically any of the work that's submitted. Oh, they might run it through a spell check and maaaybe a filter or two for real red flags, but mostly they judge by the title, the cover, and the description. My original description had been very open about what's going on in the book, even going out of its way to be helpful and explicit about how sexual things are going to be, and what the reader could expect.
This set off a lot of red flags. Hell, putting "wolf" in the title was a red flag. They don't like bestiality, and if you mention animals in a story tagged as erotica, they don't like you. So throw in words like "slave" and "snake," not to mention that I literally gave tags for sexual activities when they don't like you spelling things out too much, and it's easy enough to see how this happened. They do things their own way, and you have to play by their rules to get in.
Now, they did say that I could resubmit the story if I edited it to better meet their content guidelines. So I edited the forematter of the book a little and trimmed down the description to be a deal less offensive. I wasn't ready to take "wolf" out of the title, but I hoped for the best. They rejected it. I got a little frustrated.
Third time was the charm, though. I submitted it with a two-line description, and one line was a disclaimer that none of the offensive things I thought they might be worried about were going on here. I'm happy to say that the book went through, and I'm breathing a little easier.
So, what now? I'll be publishing them, again, once a week. I have two more to go, and I'll be experimenting a little bit to see how helpful and informative I can make the descriptions without being "too informative." And when that's done, hopefully, I'll finally be publishing my new eBook, a rather longer entry that's an all-new story, never before published in any part, any draft, anywhere. It's going to be a little weird, since I probably won't get much feedback on it, but hopefully folks will like it!
And on a last note, if any of you purchased To Own a Wolf Parts 3, 4, or 5 before all this went down, could you drop me a line? I want to know how the ban panned out on your side. Can you still read the copies you've downloaded? Can you still download it again? I'm hoping they're not being too... unpleasant about it on the customer's side.
Those were the two big events I wanted to cover today. Now, two smaller notes before we wrap this up!
To follow up on the text formatting issue in MVOL: I still don't know why this is happening :/ On the other hand, I've found that it actually isn't exclusive to v0.18-- at least for me, it seems to do this for old copies as well, going way back. I couldn't find another game with justified text fields like mine to see if it was doing the same, but at this point, I think the most likely cause is that Flash itself has screwed something up with one of its recent updates. So maybe they'll fix it at some point and this will just go away, or maybe I'll have to leave it left-aligned from here on and just grin and bear it. The main alternative I can see is to try and find another way to present text-- I'll be looking into my options for that shortly, but I don't think there are very many. It's true I've been dissatisfied with the text box and the scroll bar in a few ways, so maybe I can find a way to improve the whole experience while I'm at it, if I'm lucky.
And lastly, I know I talked about setting up some kind of feedback discussion for MVOL's scenes, which still sounds awesome, but with everything else going on, it got pushed off a ways. But I'm gonna try and get started on that this coming week, so keep an eye on the blog for news on that!
Phew. I probably could have broken that up into a few smaller posts, but honestly, it's all kind of "current news!" I've covered a lot, and probably forgotten some details, so hit me up with comments or questions! And as always, if you want the very latest about how MVOL is coming on,
my Twitter is rolling along, and I report every time I get more writing in, occasionally with little teasers of what's to come. Thanks for reading, folks!
