The Misty Vixen Newsletter (March 2023)

A lot happened in February. Let’s address that first.

 
 

February was a very busy month. Information on all of these:

  • First and foremost: Raw V. I finally got it out, and for reasons I’ll go into below, I had to swap the cover art out. That’s why there’s several different links.

  • Monster Girl Inn - The Complete Trilogy: This has no new content, it simply collects all three novels. I’ve dropped the price to 2.99$ and there it will likely stay.

  • Sci-Fi Shared Universe Collection - Volume 01: I’ll talk more about this below.

  • Dragons & Damsels: This is out. I’ve got a short story in this collection that is completely stand alone. Characters, setting, and plot are all self contained. That being said, if you liked any of my fantasy stuff, you’ll like this. I was in mind of Monster Girl Inn somewhat when I wrote it, so similar vibes.

  • Audiobooks

Now let’s talk about my Sci-Fi Collection.

I made a blog post explaining the reasoning for this happening. You can read it here. The short of it is: It really bothered me not having those books where my main market is anymore, and also taking down two and a half million words worth of content hurt my wallet more than I thought it would. So I decided to repackage them into cheap, better-formatted Collections.

This also means I’ll get the opportunity to write new content for series I thought were finished. Not all of them, as some of them I’m finding that I really have nothing further to add, but some. I’m basically examining each one as I come to them and see if anything comes to mind.

That being said, it does mean that I’ll finally be writing a proper epilogue to Like A Fine Wine in the form of a novelette. The same is true for Sex & Survival.

Here’s a quick rundown of what each Collection will contain.

  • SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE - VOLUME 01: HELLCATS | MY UNDEAD LOVER | ALIEN HAREM | AMAZONIAN’S LOVE + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for Hellcats & Amazonian’s Love

  • FANTASY SHARED UNIVERSE: WANDERLUST | MY UNDEAD LOVER | LARGE & LOVELY | ROYAL LUST | LUST & ADVENTURE | LAY OF THE LAND | SNAKESKIN | ADVENTUROUS + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for Wanderlust, Lust & Adventure, and Adventurous for sure.

  • PARANORMAL SHARED UNIVERSE: PARANORMAL PASSIONS | PINK | ROOMMATES WITH BENEFITS | PARASEXUAL + All Associated Shorts & a new short for Parasexual for sure.

  • POST-APOCALYPTIC SHARED UNIVERSE: Sex & Survival | The Pale Redhead | A New World + All Associated Shorts & new shorts for all three of them. Really looking forward to writing The Pale Redhead 4.

  • SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE - VOLUME 02: DESIRE | BLIND DATE | LIKE A SEX TOY | LIKE A FINE WINE + All Associated Shorts & a new epilogue for Like A Fine Wine, & probably new shorts for all three of the others.

Each collection will be 99 cents and in the Kindle Unlimited, meaning that I’ll need to be removing all my novels and shorts and collections from all other places on the internet, most notably here on my own website.

Some things will not be going in the collections. Valkyries, Demoness, & Women of the Wild will all remain for free on my website.

I’ll be releasing these as I get to them, (it takes a bit of time to format 2.5M words), but I’m intending to have them all out before May. And yes, each of them will get sexy new covers, with sexy new alternate nudes.

I have to admit, it’s been fun writing the newer content, and it’s reminding me why I liked writing bonus shorts in the first place. I can’t be positive, but I might bring them back in some capacity for future titles.

Real quick, we’ll talk about what’s coming up this month, so that I can then get to the unhappy part.

Honestly? Not much. I’m hoping to bust my ass and possibly get Raw VI out before the end of the month. Besides the pair of audiobooks, it’s all I’ve got in terms of announcements.

Now, let’s talk about the unhappy future.

Raw V sort of scared the shit out of me. You know how in movies there comes that scene where someone gets a gun shoved in their face and all other sound drops away as the camera zooms slowly in on them and you can just see the sheer terror on their face? That’s kind of what I felt like when it seemed like Raw V, and thus Raw as a series, was dead in the water.

I had a lot of troubles at the end of 2022, and have spent the first two months of this year trying to get my shit back in order. I mostly feel better, and I’ve been a lot more consistently productive.

However, there was a six month gap between the release of Raw IV and Raw V. Which is an ESPECIALLY long time in the harem genre. Obviously, this wasn’t on purpose. I fully intended to have Raw V written and released sometime last November. But I had something of a breakdown when I tried writing it back in October, and I was forced to put it aside.

There’s little in the way of hard evidence when it comes to determining or predicting the success of a given title, but this many years into the game, I’ve gotten better about learning to read the algorithm, and it was looking like Raw V was dead on arrival. That was my ‘staring down the barrel of a gun’ moment. Because Raw V flopping doesn’t just mean a book I wrote flopped. It means that the next four novels that I have planned, the next four novels in my most successful series EVER written, are now virtually meaningless, and would in fact be a bad decision to write.

This is precisely why so many authors drop series abruptly. Because writing a sequel to a dead series isn’t simply writing a book that won’t sell, it’s also not writing a book that will sell. Every time we choose to write something, we also choose not to write everything else. That’s part of the reason this job is so fucking stressful.

So, with that happening, I did the only thing I could think to do, and I swapped covers. I have personally seen this move take a book that was failing to sell and send it into the top 1,000, which is insane. THAT is the power of cover art. Literally the exact same book, and yet suddenly it’s selling 20x as much.

Yeah, it really bothers me, too.

I wanted to put Zora on the cover because she’s a main character in this one, but I knew it was a risk because too many people hate anthro characters on their covers. I figured this late into the series it wouldn’t matter, but apparently I was wrong. After I swapped out a drawing of Rylee I was going to save for the next collection (a drawing that is admittedly much more visually appealing), it immediately started selling better. Although I can tell that damage was definitely done, it hasn’t done as well as it could have. Which, in a way, is sort of my fault, but also…I wouldn’t have had a mental breakdown if I could have avoided it? I don’t really know what else to say there. The dice just landed against me.

That alone was frightening enough, but I’ve faced it down before. No, what is really freaking me out is Artificial Intelligence. It’s become clear that 2023 is the year of AI. Right now, there are discussions in this fandom, and certainly all others, over the validity, legality, and morality of using AI-generated cover art. Speaking for myself: I have not, nor do I intend to, used AI. But something that people also aren’t realizing is that whatever fucking exponential breakthrough AI has experienced has also resulted in commensurate advancement of book-writing AI.

Yeah, that’s fucking frightening.

Given the fact that this genre is led by four ghost farm pen names who pump out works as quickly as they possibly can, I have no doubt that haremlit will eventually begin to fill up with AI-produced content. We won’t be looking at dozens of releases a month, we’ll be looking at hundreds. I don’t know when this will happen, but unless there is some massive change, and soon, it’s going to happen. There are some other people in the industry claiming we will see it begin before the year is out.

Which means my job is being threatened. Which means, functionally speaking, my life is being threatened. Because my job is basically my life. For better or for worse, that is the position I find myself in.

I might be wrong about all this. I hope I am. In either case, since I have no intention on integrating AI with my work in any capacity, it means that I need to assume the worst and shore up my library while I still can. In short, it’s caused me to reassess my current plan.

In the most immediate sense, that means nothing will change, because writing Raw novels as quickly as possible remains my most logical next step.

But beyond that? I’m still reassessing. At the moment, Raw gives me some time to think, and that is what I’ll be spending March doing: writing Raw and thinking and reasoning out my next project. I believe I may already know what it will be, but the past several months have taught me one thing: I need to shut the fuck up more and let time pass.

So, a month from now, I should have a clearer image of what’s coming after Raw. If it is what I currently believe it to be, it will make many people happy, at least.

Wish me luck.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (February 2023)

So, here we are at the beginning of the second month of 2023. In my opinion, January tends to be worst month of the year. It’s the darkest, coldest, most miserable time. So it’s nice that it’s passed.

I didn’t get as much done last month as I’d hoped, but considering where I was mentally this time last year? I will absolutely take a lazy January over a mentally broken one.

So, things that have happened since last I updated.

I’m intending February will be a little more productive.

I intend to have Raw V published somewhere in mid-late February. I’m feeling some pressure to get this done as while getting Monster Girl Inn III did help the overall state of my authorship, it’s clear that it wasn’t enough to sort of kickstart it back to full life. Which made enough sense, given it was the third book in a trilogy that is not all that popular. I need to get the next Raw novel out and hope that it breathes more life into my library.

I’ve been getting some work done on my cougar harem. It’s definitely weird to try and fit what I would normally make a longer series into a trilogy. That being said, I do now have a skeletal outline for the entire trilogy, the first piece of artwork, a rough idea of how I want the first book to go, and the first couple of chapters for the first book written. I’m still kind of flipflopping on how I want to handle it. I would like to get as much written as possible while finishing writing Raw, and then post the first book after Raw is finished. But I am very bad about waiting. Once a book is done, I want it out. And I think most of my readers do as well. The thing is, I’m not even sure if it makes more sense to wait at this point, or if I should just get it out. Data and numbers in this job are often complicated and even conflicting. That being said, I intend to take a little bit of time off between Raw V and Raw VI to get some work done on the cougar harem.

Other than that, the only other thing I have to update is my horror harem. At this point I feel like I should just shut the fuck up about it, because every time I open my mouth, it seems like reality is dead set on proving me wrong. The Sci-Fi/Horror harem did not work out for reasons that basically boil down to, every time I went to work on it, I kept feeling like I was not writing a harem. So I finally set it aside. I have shifted focus to my submarine horror harem. I have the cover art for it and it is the story and universe that is speaking most strongly to me.

I don’t want to talk about it TOO much, but it’s post-apocalyptic survival and, because some people seemed a little confused, for the record, the entire thing will not be taking place on a single submarine. It will have a lot of locations and situations. I really like what I’ve come up with so far for it, and I’ve gotten some written, and I feel like it has a lot of potential. I’ll speak more on it when I’ve made more progress. Really, I feel like if you liked the general vibe of A Warm Place or Haven, you will like this one. It’s just a bit grimmer.

Oh yeah, last thing, Like A Fine Wine is coming down at the end of the month. All of them are still 99 cents, including the Complete Collection, so if you want to grab it, do so. It’ll be going up on Smashwords and other outlets eventually, and the Complete Collection will also be available for free download directly from my website later.

That’s about all I’ve got for now. Now I’m going back to playing the Dead Space remake.

Looking Forward At 2023

Here we are, at the beginning of another year.

2022 was an interesting year for me, in a number of ways, not all of them good.

I’ve got a lot I want to talk about in this post, as a few things have changed. Let’s get started.

WHAT I GOT DONE IN 2022

  • I wrapped up the freebies trilogies, and finally wrote the Epilogue to Lust & Adventure.

  • I completed A Warm Place.

  • I completed Our Own Way.

  • I got three Raw novels out.

  • I finally started doing audiobooks!

  • I launched and almost finished the Monster Girl Inn Trilogy.

  • I took down my entire backlog and posted it to Smashwords and to this website as free downloads.

  • I wrote a short story that will be in a haremlit anthology called Damsels & Dragons. You can contribute to the Kickstarter here!

  • I managed to get at least some work done on my mysterious Horror Harem project.

And that’s it. In early 2022, I decided I needed to take a more relaxed stance on my expectations and prioritize my mental health. Obviously, not only did my productivity take a hit, but I didn’t really stick to it, as more than once I hit really bad, really hardcore burnout and misery. This is why I didn’t produce all that much this year. I’m hoping to correct this in 2023.

WHAT I HOPE TO GET DONE IN 2023

  • Finish Monster Girl Inn. I’m intending to finish up the third book soon, within the next week or two.

  • Finish Raw. This is sort of my big project for the year. I have 5 more novels to write in this series and I’m really aiming to get them done sooner rather than later.

  • Write a cougar harem trilogy. I’ll speak more about it later, but basically, I’m finally going all-in on a modern day, genuine cougar harem story. It’s going to be pure slice-of-life.

  • Get at least one horror harem novel written. I had a LOT of false starts on this one, but I feel pretty good about the current project.

  • I’ll be removing Like A Fine Wine in February. I’ll talk about it more below for the curious.

  • Get a lot more audiobooks out, although I don’t really have any control over this. It’s all in RGP’s hands, and so far they’re handling it very well.

  • I added an exhaustive bibliography that chronicles everything I have ever written. I’ll probably make a self-indulgent post talking about some of the titles I’ve never spoken of before that have been acknowledged by this bibliography.

  • I have released all of my backlog (save for Parasexual, but it is coming very soon) on my website as free, kindle-friendly files. You can download them all here! (Like A Fine Wine will be added after it comes down.)

  • I’m also hoping to get a bit more work done on my incest erotica and Dragon Age fan fiction, but obviously these are rather low priority at the moment.

You may have been looking for the rewrite of Our Own Way and the near-future sci-fi slice-of-life I mentioned in previous updates on the list, and if that is the case, don’t worry, they are not abandoned, they have just been pushed down the line. I will explain the reason for this below.

REFLECTIONS & REVELATIONS

A bit dramatic, but that’s what I do sometimes. I made references to the fact that I had been spending the final portion of 2022 reflecting on, well, just about everything. That, combined with a few other things, has caused me to reconsider my overall approach to my writing career. I’ll go over these changes and my reasonings behind them below.

  • Here was the biggest thing that I realized, and it sort of hit me like a truck: my haremlit offerings are severely depleted. Removing most of my backlog left my library anemic, and when I made the call to remove Parasexual & Like A Fine Wine, that was sort of a ‘holy shit’ moment. At present, I have 5 haremlit series on offer. While two of them are finished and series I still feel pretty good about, two of them aren’t yet finished, and one of those two unfinished series is a trilogy that did not do very well. The final series, while finished, also suffers from a triple threat of being A) novellas, B) poorly covered, and C) labeled as erotica. Our Own Way’s potential was mangled beyond hope of salvation without a full-fledged rewrite by my handling of it. But in my defense, it was just a little side project to help keep my sanity, I had no idea people would respond to it so strongly, nor that I would come up with so many extra ideas after the fact. Because of having such a depleted library, I realized, I need not just more titles, but more series, and quickly. This has led me to the decision of creating a few trilogies (like the upcoming cougar harem).

  • This leads into my next revelation: I really need to stop writing nine novel epics. It’s causing problems, and kind of on almost every front. Creatively, financially, from the reader’s side of things, just all around, problems. I’ve ultimately determined that series consisting of fewer, but longer, novels will ultimately be better for everyone. They’ll be better for me, because I can go through a series more quickly and effectively and stave off burnout, and they’ll be better for you as I feel like I’ll be able to deliver a better-told narrative. So instead of nine 60,000 word novels, I’ll be aiming for something closer to 5-6 80-90,000 word novels.

  • Next: I can lean more into the slice-of-life aspects of my work. From my perspective, my works fall onto a spectrum where one end reads SURVIVAL and the other reads SLICE-OF-LIFE. Obviously, Monster Girl Inn leans more towards slice-of-life, while A Warm Place and Raw lean more towards survival. The truth of the matter is that while I enjoy writing both, on the whole, I’m finding that I enjoy writing slice-of-life stuff more. Our Own Way was something of a revelation. I didn’t know people were so interested in something where the stakes were so low, comparatively speaking. I have a number of ideas that are more about slice-of-life stuff and relationship building, as opposed to fighting monsters and fleeing disaster. Though I still want to write about that stuff, too. So more of my content is going to be more Our Own Way and less Raw. Hell, I may even take a shot at writing a shorter, more slice-of-life trilogy or quadrilogy set in the Raw universe with new characters. Maybe. I liked that early-narrative feel book one had.

  • Final thing I realized: My pen name. I’ve been talking about launching a pen name for literal years now. A lot goes into the consideration of a pen name, at least for me. I don’t want to half-ass anything. The fact that I’ve been considering it for actual years is a testament to this. The thing is, this whole pen name thing has been kind of like a scale. One side of the scale is negatives, one is positive. For a long time, the positives outweighed the negatives. But as time has gone on, the negatives have begun to outweigh the positives. And this is now where I find myself. So, basically, I’ve decided that, and I want to clarify, when it comes to haremlit, it makes the most sense to just stick with Misty Vixen. If anyone is truly curious, I can go into detail, but the short of it is: it makes more sense to keep my works in one place, so long as those works are all haremlit. The reason I’m specifying this is because, in the future, I may want to write something that isn’t haremlit, but still let my haremlit readers know about it, and that would make sense to start a new name for. So, in short: I’ll be posting my horror harem to Misty Vixen.

  • Last thing I want to touch on: why did I decide to pull down Parasexual & Like A Fine Wine?

    • For Parasexual, I originally had intended to pull it down, but ultimately decided it was close enough to haremlit to work. But then, as time went on, I became less certain, even going so far as to pair it with a warning that it might not be for everyone. In the end, I realized that my initial conclusion that it should be pulled down was the right conclusion.

    • For Like A Fine Wine, it came as something of a surprise to me when I reread the first novel late last year that it wasn’t really a true haremlit novel. While it doesn’t actually break any of the rules, I realized that the relationships are too casual, and half the harem leaves at the end. Now, this would have been rectified with a sequel series, but as time has gone on, I’ve ultimately had to admit to myself that I do not want to write a sequel series and, overall, it would be a really bad idea to try it. For those of you who were looking forward to this, I apologize. I genuinely did intend to write it when I finished Like A Fine Wine, but as time has gone on, I’ve felt worse about the idea rather than better. So, again, I am sorry about that.

A LOOK AT MY LIBRARY’S FUTURE

Now comes my favorite part! The part where I get to explain how I feel about my works right now, and speculate about how I’ll feel about them in the future. If you’re looking for information on something from the past, the present, or the future that I have mentioned at some point before now, this is where you want to check.

  • THE OLD STUFF

    • PARANORMAL SHARED UNIVERSE: This includes PARANORMAL PASSIONS, PINK, ROOMMATES WITH BENEFITS, & PARASEXUAL. I’m still pretty confident that this one is dead, and I will write nothing in it again. The only spark of hope I have for those holding out is that I could possible envision myself writing something that’s basically Our Own Way, but with paranormal girls. If I do, I will have to determine if it makes more sense to create a new universe, or set it in this one. But I would say, for safety’s sake, consider this universe dead.

    • POST-APOCALYPTIC SHARED UNIVERSE: This includes SEX & SURVIVAL, THE PALE REDHEAD, A NEW WORLD, & HAVEN. I feel roughly the same about this one. However, I would say that the chances of my writing something set in this universe is significantly higher. I still like this universe, and in my quest to produce more series quickly, I may explore a trilogy set here. If I do, I’ll definitely ensure to involve cameos from Haven.

    • SCI-FI SHARED UNIVERSE: This includes HELLCATS, EXPLORATION, ALIEN HAREM, VALKYRIES, DESIRE, AMAZONIAN’S LOVE, LIKE A SEX TOY, BLIND DATE, & LIKE A FINE WINE. I think this universe is also probably dead. Although I have a few ideas that might make sense to set in it, it will ultimately come down to an in-the-moment decision whether or not to do something unique or revisit this universe. The more times goes on, the more I feel that the correct decision is to leave my old erotica days behind me.

    • FANTASY SHARED UNIVERSE: This includes WANDERLUST, LARGE & LOVELY, MY UNDEAD LOVER, ROYAL LUST, LUST & ADVENTURE, LAY OF THE LAND, SNAKESKIN, ADVENTUROUS & DEMONESS. This is the only one I’m confident that will have one more series, the DEMONESS reboot. I originally had a much larger, interconnected, and honestly epic storyline in mind for this universe, and as time has gone on, I’ve ultimately decided that Demoness will serve well as a vehicle for this storyline.

      • DEMONESS: I’m making a notation here. At the moment, I’m giving serious consideration to converting Demoness into haremlit. Now, I know some people will have an instant knee-jerk reaction to this, but hear me out. I began running into a problem around Demoness V, one that I knew would only get worse as time went on. John and Yelena’s relationship is really the greatest part of the series, but the thing was, I was running out of ways to make it interesting. A lot of the unique emotional difficulties that arose over the course of the first four novels made for some very interesting writing. But if the series had gone on, I would have run out of natural ideas. Adding in even just two other girls into the mix would solve this, and give me a lot more opportunities for interesting and unique interactions. It would also give me a chance to make an actual slow-burn harem, something a lot of people have asked me about and I’ve never really been able to deliver on. I’m still batting the idea around, and I’m open to hearing your thoughts, but I figured I owed fans of the series a heads up, as that would be a significant change.

    • A WARM PLACE: Technically not old, but it is finished. I’m happy with where it ended, consider it done. At most, I may set one or two of my incest eroticas in this universe.

  • THE CURRENT STUFF

    • MONSTER GIRL INN: This is getting wrapped up very soon and then that will be the end of it. In truth, I don’t really see much in the way of a future there, primarily because it feels like the story failed to really catch and hold both me and the readership.

    • RAW: So, I’ve got five novels left to go here. The story is pretty locked in, including the broad strokes of the novels. I’m hoping to have this wrapped up by June, but, uh…we’ll see how that turns out. As I mentioned above, a trilogy set in this universe with some more relationship/slice-of-life focus with new characters may not be out of the question. I’ve got an idea I’ve been toying with for awhile, but ultimately we’ll see.

    • OUR OWN WAY: I will rewrite this. I’ve got a LOT of ideas and want to make this like 5-6 long novels, expanding greatly on the characters and their plans and their attempt to set up a life for themselves. In truth, though, we probably won’t see this until 2024. I want to finish Raw, and then get at least a few trilogies under my belt. Once I feel comfortable, Our Own Way should be my next big project.

  • THE FUTURE STUFF

    • QUITE UNLADYLIKE: This is the short I wrote for the haremlit fantasy anthology. It has no connection to any other universe, though if you liked Monster Girl Inn or any of my old fantasy stuff, you’ll probably like it. I doubt I’m going to write anything else related to this. I wanted to write something that was encapsulated.

    • MODERN COUGAR/MILF HAREM: My next serious project after Raw. Basically, imagine Our Own Way vibes, but all older women. I’m feeling good about this one. I’m looking at this to be a trilogy of longer novels. I’m really hoping people like this one, as it’s something I’ve been talking about for years, and also people have been asking about for years.

    • UNTITLED SCI-FI SLICE-OF-LIFE: I mentioned this earlier. I’m still gonna do this. Still feel good about it. I like the characters, the setting, the general vibe of it. I’m also very curious to see how people react to it because it’s a bit different than a lot of stuff I’ve written.

    • UNTITLED POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL TRILOGY: A while ago, I mentioned somewhere possibly doing a simple, shorter series set in A Warm Place, that focused on a small group of people just trying to fix up a house and make a life for themselves. That was the seed of this idea. It’s an original universe, and focuses on a guy and a few women he runs into trying to fix up a shelter in the middle of nowhere with monsters and dangerous people around. This is probably what I’ll be writing after the cougar harem, as it’s the next in my trilogies ideas.

    • HORROR HAREM: Whew boy. It’s been up and down, side to side, thither and fucking yon with this one. I’ve had half a dozen false starts. But now, finally, I do feel like I’ve decided what I’m going to be writing first. I’ll be working on this one in the background where I can find time, since it’s going to be a gamble. I will speak more on this when I have news, but what I can say now is: It looks like I’ll be going with a Sci-Fi Survival/Horror. It’s going to have a video-gamey type feel (not LitRPG). Think sort of Doom 3 and Dead Space vibes.

  • OTHER STUFF

    • INCEST EROTICA: So I’d really like to make some headway on this. Get SOMETHING off the ground beyond just Kyra’s Game. I’m still going to take a shot at making Kyra’s Game a trilogy of shorts, and I’ve got a ton of ideas beyond that. Basically, I’m just going to be writing shorts for awhile. I’ve got a mom-son idea set in the A Warm Place universe, another mom-son idea set in my shared Fantasy Universe, a brother-sister story I wrote a few years back and never really did anything with, a mom-son series I wrote on the down-low under another name to test the waters and now want to re-release and finish. I know at some point I want to go big with one, huge incest harem series. Like, the production level of the other stuff, with full-on covers and full-length novels, stuff like that. Imagine basically Our Own Way type story/setting, but with incest. Really, it’s just a matter of finding/making time for this to happen.

    • FAN FICTION: The Dragon Age fan fic, THE MATCHMAKER OF SKYHOLD, has been talking to me recently. Enough that I did take it out, dust it off, and write a few more chapters near the end of the year. If I make much more progress, I’ll have to put it back up on the site. Otherwise, I don’t have any other fan fiction in mind.

    • LARA X. LUST: For the sake of clarity, and in case anyone was wondering otherwise, I had a heavy hand in writing the first three Desperate Times novels. However, I have had zero involvement in any other projects, including the fourth Desperate Times. It’s all Lara now, and I doubt that’s going to change.

    • CRYSTAL CANDY STUFF: Wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t cover this. Obviously A Warm Place was already covered. Maidens & Mayhem and Planet of the Bugs are both dead and they’ll stay dead. Refuge…I still want to do something with this, but I’m a lot less sure now how exactly it will manifest. Enough time has passed that at this point there’s significant overlap between this and another story idea, and I may just combine the two. But in either scenario, it’s still a long way off.

    • OTHER: I’ve got some farther out, more ambitious ideas up my sleeve. I’ve got a sci-fi/horror/adventure epic planned that’s been brewing for a long time now and I’m sure will brew for a long time yet. It won’t be like other series in that it will go on for quite awhile. I’ve got a sort of sci-fi/espionage blended with horror (and obviously harem) idea that’s also fairly ambitious and I think would be REALLY kickass to write and to read, but it’s also over the horizon. I’ve definitely got some more gritty survival stuff. But I don’t want to get too ahead of myself there. I’ve got more than enough to carry me through 2024 with what I’ve spoken of just in this post alone. Beyond that? Probably got enough stuff to carry me through to 2030.

    • FINAL THING: The last thing I want to talk about is that I’ve noticed a rise in Romance For Men, (there’s even a SubReddit for it now), and honestly I’d call a lot of what I write men’s romance. I gotta admit, the idea of writing a romance between one guy and one woman, or maybe one guy and two women, is really appealing. I’m currently considering putting together a new pen name (which was why I was so specific above) to experiment with Men’s Romance, as, although it won’t break any of the rules of haremlit, I can’t really call it haremlit (not enough ladies), and thus wouldn’t feel safe releasing it as Misty Vixen. Though I would publicly acknowledge that I wrote it. I dunno, let me know what you think of this idea.

I think that’s it. I hope everyone has a good 2023. I know for myself personally, my new year’s resolution is to find a way to balance my work against my mental health more successfully.

Good luck out there.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (December 2022)

Time for some updates.

I’ve got a lot on my mind and because I’m still ruminating on it, I’ll keep this update short. I’m having to reevaluate how I’ve been going about things, but I don’t want to really go in-depth with it until January.

So we’ll go with my favorite method of the bullet-point list to get the pertinent information across.

  • In case you missed it, I made a blog post detailing why I needed to step back for a bit and take a break. About two weeks later, I can say that I do feel a bit better. I feel at least well enough to go back to what I’m calling light duty for December.

  • That light duty is: writing Monster Girl Inn III. I doubt it will be finished by the end of the month, but I’m hoping for an early January release. I have it planned out, I have the cover, and I’ve written a few chapters so far. I will begin posting those chapters on Patreon next Monday, ideally moving at about a chapter a day pace Monday - Friday, until completion.

  • Raw III Audio is officially out.

  • A Reminder: A Warm Place audio is launching on December 5th.

  • Monster Girl Inn II Audio is now up for pre-order. It launches December 14th.

  • Haven 2 will be up for pre-order before long.

  • For reasons that I will get into in the next update, I have decided that I will be pulling down Parasexual, by the end of December, and Like A Fine Wine, by the end of February. They will be republished to Smashwords, and also offered for free as Kindle downloads from my site. At present, I have dropped the price of all of them, both the individual titles and the collections, to 99 cents. So if you missed any of them from the last sale, you can grab them for cheap. For the extremely curious who must know now, the short answer of why I’m doing this is the same reason I pulled down the rest of my backlog.

  • Making slow progress on my first horror harem project.

That’s basically it. I’ve got more reflecting to do on things and December has traditionally been the start of a bad time for me anyway, as I’ve got SAD on top of depression/anxiety, so you may see me try a side project or two. Which basically means: I might fire back up my Dragon Age fan fiction or I may start writing and posting new incest erotica.

Anyway, wish me luck, and I hope you all have a good month.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (November 2022)

First thing’s first, the first Haven audiobook is out!

 
 

October was definitely a bad month. I was hoping to be most of the way done with Raw V at this point, but I am nowhere near that. I’m not completely sure what happened. Mostly it was a combination of: actual responsibilities popped up a little unexpectedly, including a special writing opportunity that I was presented with and decided to take a shot at (that I will talk about later), and also I spent most of this month just tired. Like really tired. I keep just sleeping but like not really? I don’t know, lately it just feels like I sleep, but when I wake up, my body says ‘no that didn’t count’ and I feel like shit the entire day. I’m trying to get it sorted out. And this is on top of my usual levels of depression and anxiety, so…

Yeah, basically I didn’t get much of anything done. Really the biggest thing I managed to do was redesign all my covers because I do like the new look, so…yay.

Anyway, I’m intending to make November more productive. Here’s a list of shit that’s happening.

  • The preorder for the audiobook for RAW III is coming out extremely soon.

  • The preorder for the audiobook for A WARM PLACE 1 will be out sometime this month.

  • I am having a really big sale/giveaway starting November 3rd that will run for five days. So November 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, & 7th. Basically all of the titles from my completed series will be free, and the Complete Collections will be under 1$.

  • I am intending to get through most of Raw V this month, and may theoretically post it before month’s end.

Here’s the more nebulous stuff.

  • The immediate plan remains the same: after finishing Raw V, I’ll write Monster Girl Inn III.

  • I have finally settled on my horror harem title. It was…D: none of the above. A new idea hit me and it’s just working so far. Not sure when it’ll be done but trust me, when it’s getting close I won’t STFU about it.

  • After Monster Girl Inn I still intend to go hard on Raw and just write it until it’s done.

  • There’s been a change of plans with regards to what I’ll do after Raw. Instead of my slice-of-life sci-fi series, I have instead opted to do a full rewrite of Our Own Way. I’ll release a post about that soonish explaining what and why.

  • After Our Own Way I’ll hit the sci-fi slice-of-life. It’s occurred to me that I really should stop alternating titles and just work on a series until it’s done. This will cause some problems for my sanity (namely burnout), but I’ll work on other projects quietly in the background to help with that. I think the most logical solution would be to write whatever the next series is going to be in the background while I work on my primary one, so that once the primary one is done, I’ll have a jump on the new primary series. At present, there’s just too much time passing between releases, and it’s clearly negatively impacting sales.

  • My backlog. It’s available on Smashwords and a few other sites. I imagine the overlap between people who have already read or don’t care about my backlog and the people who are reading this/visit my site are basically a circle. However, sometimes new readers find these posts, so I figured it’s still worth it to mention. I’ll be making a post about it and creating a page dedicated to it. I have also decided that since my titles are no longer on the Kindle, I’ll just offer them as free downloadable Kindle files directly from this site, in case you missed some.

  • I’ll also be putting together another bibliography. I know there exist some fans who want to see EVERYTHING, because I am one of those people. It will include all my works, including stuff I wrote not as Misty Vixen, or at least everything I can remember. Some stuff is lost to time thanks to bad memory and swapping computers. There were definitely a few experiments I have the vaguest recollections of writing, but have since been removed and deleted, and the specifics of which have been scrubbed from my brain.

  • Among the background stuff I’m working on, I’ll try to find time for either fan fiction or incest fiction. I actually added a bit more to my Dragon Age fan fiction (don’t know if anyone remembers that) and I almost brought it back out, but ultimately put it away because it started feeling like a waste of time. Ideas for and about incest fiction still pop to the surface occasionally, but I pretty much always think ‘I want to, but I really need to get to work on finishing up this current novel…’.

That’s about it. If you’ve got any questions, ask away. I’m going to finish up my secret project and then get to work on Raw V.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (October 2022)

Monster Girl Inn II is out!

 
 
 
 

And we are very close to the audiobook release of Monster Girl Inn! It comes out on October 3rd.

From what I understand, the pre-order for the first Haven audiobook isn’t too far away.

This update will be pretty short. I’m tired. September extracted a heavy toll. I had what you might call a setback in my mental health. The only good thing about it is that I think my emotional stability has improved because it didn’t take me too long to get back to roughly normal after. But that’s why Monster Girl Inn II was a little late. The setback but also insomnia and just generally feeling worn down. I’m fucking tired.

I’m going to take a break, and then begin work on Raw V. Already got the cover for it, so that’s squared away. (I still look back in horror on the original cover situation. Let me tell you, bumping up against a finished novel with no cover art in sight is particularly miserable for an indie author). Given my current pace, I’ll likely get Raw V out sometime in early November.

After that, I’m thinking Monster Girl Inn III might be my last book for 2022. I’ve been needing, like, a real break for awhile now, and I know that this need will likely double or even triple in intensity once winter sets in.

I’ve been thinking about background projects still, something to work on more for fun and sanity’s sake, and although I keep messing around with horror ideas, I’ve run into some problems there. I want to make an actual blog post about the horror harem situation, because it’s surprisingly complicated for something that was supposed to be just a side project, and I’ll update this post once I write it. [UPDATE: Here is the post]. Should be a few days out. But I may actually take another shot at quietly producing some incest erotica. I might end up writing Kyra’s Game 2, or something else. I’ve got a lot of ideas.

Anyway, hope you enjoy Monster Girl Inn II.

The only other thing I have to say is that you might have noticed a small design change in the Monster Girl Inn covers. I’ve noticed that some of the bigger names in harem have taken to making their name small and tucked away in one corner. I’ve decided to take a shot at this new trend to see if it actually helps, but in truth, I may actually make the change to a few other series because the design really appeals to me on a personal level. It’s a clean, minimalist aesthetic, and that just does it for me. Like, I already really love the way the new MGI covers look. I dunno, we’ll see.

Let me know what you think.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (September 2022)

First thing’s first:

 
 

RAW IV is out and the pre-order for Raw II audiobook is also out! It drops September 8th.

At the moment, the other audiobooks are still being worked on behind the scenes. It’s looking like the audiobook for Monster Girl Inn is up next, the pre-order coming out this month. For the most immediate information on them as it becomes available, follow my Twitter.

I’ve officially begun working on Monster Girl Inn II. I’m going to start posting it as Early Access to my Patreon next week. At the moment it’s looking like a mid-to-late September release. The cover is done and it has a sexy dragoness on it.

At the moment, the only things that remain a certainty for me are that I am going to finish out the Monster Girl Inn trilogy this year, and that I intend to write at least two more Raw novels this year. And even that is a hope, as it means one book per month. I’m better now than I was before, mentally speaking, but I feel like I’m on unstable ground. The way ahead looks safe, but it could collapse out from under me at any moment, completely derailing my plans for at least a short period of time as I try to get back onto solid ground.

The only good news is that the collapses are less frequent.

Earlier, I said that I was going to try and switch back to working on two projects simultaneously. This has not gone as well as I had hoped, as it remains difficult enough as it is to hold onto a single project, let alone two. I’m holding out hope that this is still possible as I regain mental ground, as I’ve been able to make this work before.

Besides Raw and Monster Girl Inn, I believe I have zeroed in on my next project after MGI is wrapped up. Earlier I mentioned a sci-fi slice-of-life idea that had just sort of come to me. It’s stuck around and grown stronger since then, and I’m going to initiate it after MGI. I feel like it will have a stronger voice than MGI, which will make it easier to write. I’m not sure if that makes sense to readers, but it’s the best way I can put it. Not sure how long it will be, but probably on the shorter side in terms of number of books. I’m going to try experimenting with longer novels again, like with A Warm Place.

As for the rest of it? I’ve found myself pulling away from the outer space horror harem as it has grown in complexity and scope, and drawn towards a simpler, more grounded and modern narrative. A few years ago I began talking about a horror harem, Eyes in the Dark, and the idea has never fully left me. I may end up going with that one to launch the horror harem pen name, and do the outer space narrative later. We’ll see what happens.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (August 2022)

So, I’m feeling a bit better since last month, although it was at the cost of slower production. Which means I’m not as far along in Raw IV as I had hoped, but I still intend to get it out this month. Monster Girl Inn II is definitely looking like a September release.

The big news, though, is audiobooks.

I’d like to first thank everyone who bought, listened to, reviewed, and otherwise promoted or helped the Raw audiobook. This has had a very big impact, it seems.

Raw the Audiobook did, like, really well.

Consequently, I have now signed deals to have Haven, A Warm Place, & Monster Girl Inn turned into audiobooks by Royal Guard as well!

A Warm Place is going to be done by both Katana Jones and Gabriel Michael.

Monster Girl Inn is going to be done by William Windle and Raya Kane.

Haven will be done by Ellory Lane.

Release dates are still being nailed down but Book 1 of each of these should release sometime this Fall.

Also, Raw II is coming along.

I’ll let everyone know as each of these develop and I get more specific information.

That’s about it for this Newsletter. Raw IV coming out this month and then Monster Girl Inn II after that.

I’m still poking at my outer space horror harem, but it’s obvious now that it’s gonna be awhile on that. I thought I had something of an idea of what to do, but after struggling with it for most of July, I suddenly had the idea that I was going about it the wrong way and tried a different approach. It feels a lot better, but it’s still obvious that it needs a lot of work, and watching out for my mental health has meant that I’ve slowed down.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (July 2022)

First and foremost, I can finally talk about this: RAW HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN AUDIOBOOK! It is available for pre-order right now, and you can get it right here on Audible, and it is coming out July 17th.

 
 

This is the mysterious thing I’ve been referencing. Back in April I was approached by Royal Guard Publishing to produce audiobooks based off the Raw series. People have been asking me for audiobooks for years, and the primary thing that kept me from seriously pursuing them was the amount of bullshit and fuckery involved with the production of audiobooks, and all the outright horror stories I’ve heard from other authors. After talking with Royal Guard, we came to an agreement and they basically agreed to deal with all the hassle of producing and selling audiobooks, which was the only way I was ever going to do this.

As I understand it, Raw II is currently being produced, and we’re on course to produce the whole series.

As of right now, I’m still figuring out whether or not to pursue further audiobooks for other series, but if this one does well, I can’t really see a reason not to.

Really, the only bad news is that most of my backlog almost for sure isn’t going to become audiobooks. The main reason for this is erotica audiobooks are basically dead on arrival. Amazon hates erotica, but Audible ABHORS it. From what I understand, it’s far more difficult to make sales if an audiobook is slapped with the erotica label, and almost literally all of my backlog is already self-labeled erotica, and given the costs involved with producing a single audiobook, let alone dozens, I can’t see a scenario in which Hellcats and Wanderlust and pretty much everything before Haven gets turned into an audiobook. If you were holding out hope for that, sorry.

One final side note is, this is the reason for why I am producing triple packs again. Audiobook listeners really like package deals, so they like to produce triple packs if at all possible, and there needs to be a corresponding ebook version for there to be an Audible version (I think). Either way, that’s why.

Next thing: Monster Girl Inn.

 
 

It occurred to me a few months ago that I no longer have any straight-up monster girl stuff available, and that was essentially what my platform was in the beginning: inhuman women getting fucked by regular human dudes. I figured I should fix this with a trilogy dedicated just about entirely to monster girls. I’ve had an idea of characters building an inn or outpost in a dangerous fantasy forest for awhile, so I decided to give it a go.

The result is Monster Girl Inn.

I’m looking to get this trilogy written and out before 2023. So far I’m…not happy with how the launch has gone. I don’t know if I did a shit job writing the book, if it was bad luck, or whatever the hell was going on with Amazon’s backend (which of course shit itself the day I launched a brand new novel/series), but it just is not doing well. Which, like…I’m having a lot of trouble with. People are extremely vocal about cover art in harem and how good it should be. It’s why certain authors are as popular as they are, despite the common consensus being that they regularly produce mediocre content: they are able to afford 2,000$ covers on the reg. So I tried to lean hard into making this cover really harem-y and…no one cares? I don’t know.

Playing this harem author game has done a lot for my life, but it’s also deteriorated my mental health to the point where I’m no longer sure about whether or not I want to be alive. Like Hopsin once said: “Real artists get shelved while wack ones get famous” It’s not that I think really highly of myself or that I think I’m a great or even good writer, but it is me writing everything, and I am trying, and I do give a shit. Soulless ghost writer mills are rewarded with millions of dollars and a lot of the rest of us get a fraction of the success and attention. I thought I was onto something with Raw but the more time goes on, the more the first Raw novel feels like a fluke.

I made a blog post last month explaining why I’ve been so inconsistent over the past few years. My mental and emotional stability is unreliable, and this clearly interferes with my ability to reliably produce content. I think it would probably help if I was allowed to produce closer to 4-5 books a year, but that just isn’t my present reality.

I’m obviously not good enough to be like some authors, who can afford to release a few books a year.

I’m not as smart or focused as other authors and can reliably pump out solid content every month or two months without fail (and without the use of ghost writers).

I really don’t know why I can’t just get my shit together and keep it together and just write. I remember reading about John Romero, one of the guys who made DOOM, who was describing what it was like in the early 90s when they were making Wolfenstein and DOOM. He’d wake up, throw on heavy metal, and code for sixteen hours straight, every day, and he was thrilled to be doing so. I have no idea why I can’t be like that. There’s nothing actually stopping me from doing it. To be honest, I should producing a minimum of a new novel every 4 weeks. It’s entirely possible, but it’s like my brain just starts to misfire and I fucking hate whatever I’m working on and I’d rather eat a bullet than keep going some days. And I have no fucking idea why. I’m medicated, I’ve been in an out of therapy for a few years now, I don’t have much of a life outside of writing, so it’s not like shit is taking up time. I don’t have chronic pain, I don’t have any kind of illness. I wouldn’t say I’m healthy exactly, but certainly I don’t have anything that should prevent me from just sitting the fuck down and writing a dozen hours a day.

If it isn’t obvious, this really bothers me. A lot. And I can’t even enjoy the success really. After breaking the Top 500 for the first time ever with Raw, now I’m just disappointed and feeling like an absolute failure because I can’t do it again. Raw III barely broke the Top 1000, so obviously people are just dropping the series, and it’s like, WTF am I doing wrong? Why are these other series with 15 novels regularly hitting the Top 500? What am I missing? Because I’m obviously missing something or maybe it’s just as simple as I’m just not a good writer.

I’m ranting, sorry, this is meaningless.

Right now, I’m taking a break to try and get my head straight again and wrap up a few loose ends in my real life to help me focus. Soon, I will begin work on Raw IV. I already have the cover art for it, and the art for Raw V is being worked on at present, so cover art shouldn’t be a problem for the future. Once I start the actual writing, I’m going to try and go hard. I want to have this out in early or mid August.

In the background, when I can find time for it, I will be working on Monster Girl Inn II. The cover for that one is also already done, and the third cover is being worked on right now. Once Raw IV wraps, I’ll shift focus to finishing Monster Girl Inn II. At the moment, it’s looking like this is going to be a trilogy.

Finally, my horror harem. Production kind of stalled on this one. I fully intended to begin actual writing last month, but as I began planning it, I started running into problems. An outer space survival horror harem is not something I’m as familiar with, and I want to make sure I do it right. This, combined with the fact that I imagine horror harem is going to be niche anyway, means that it’s going to be a background project for the time being.

And that’s about it. Sorry for being a downer, I’m just in a bad place right now. I was really counting on Monster Girl Inn being a heavy hitter.

The Misty Vixen Newsletter (June 2022)

I finally got Raw III out!

Sorry for the delay, and also: The paperback version is out.

And here’s the nude version on Patreon. Also, you can see the nude version of Nessa in the original style, plus the nude versions in the new style art of Raw I & II on this page.

The last bit of Raw-related news is that I’m going back to releasing triple packs, but not with any new content (no bonus short). So sometime this month there’s going to be a Raw I - III Collected title released. The only new thing about it is that I got custom cover art done for it. So you get to see new Niri. I’m doing this for a reason, but I’m not ready to talk about the reason for it. Brand new things are happening behind the scenes and for a reason I will explain later this month, it makes sense to do this. If you don’t care about collections with no new material added, then you can safely ignore this.

So…things are happening.

After two months of trying to work on one thing at a time, and seeing how abysmal my output becomes when I do that, I’ve decided to switch back to working on more than one project at once.

The first thing I’m working on is a new, small fantasy series. At some point, while I was sorting through my work and analyzing everything as I continue to make the switch to being a full-on harem author, it occurred to me that I no longer have anything on offer that involves monster girl fucking. Nor alien girls, or paranormal girls. Nothing. Just humans, and the occasional non-human in Like A Fine Wine and Raw. And while I’ve definitely got more non-human girls coming up in Raw, I don’t have a series that’s dedicated to an entire harem of monster girls. And I should. Because to be honest, I got into this business to write about regular human dudes fucking monster girls and alien girls and other non-human types, and I’ve been away from that for too long.

This series is going to be a bit calmer, in terms of what the plot is about. It’s not going to be about building a whole town or saving a whole group of people. It’s really just going to focus on the protagonists: a human guy and his monster girl harem. And the other monster girls and non-human girls they fuck on the side, and their goals. I’ll talk more about it as I get closer to release, but I do want to say that I’m not going to be posting these chapters to my Patreon. I kind of want to keep it low-key until it’s actually ready to go.

The second thing I’m going to be working on is something I’ve been toying with for years now: horror harem.

I asked in a few places recently about the possibility of horror harem and the reaction I got was pretty good. People seem to want it and I definitely want to do it. I’ve got an idea for a sci-fi outer space horror harem. In a way, I’ve been flirting with horror for a long time. I like writing about monsters and scary situations, I’ve just never really leaned into it. Obviously, it’ll be kind of difficult, balancing horror with harem. They kind of clash, and something’s likely going to have to give, narratively speaking, and it’s going to be the horror, since I’m writing for a harem audience.

This will also give me a chance to test out how a new pen name gets received by Amazon, and also audiences, I guess, but it won’t be a secret that it’s me. I’ve got a name picked out and a rough sketch of the story. If this series does well, I have several other horror ideas that could easily fit here. And it’s going to be the same deal with this one in that I won’t be posting it as I write it, I’m just gonna write it and publish it when it’s ready. The sequels to these stories, however, will be on my Patreon in early access.

Aside from that I’ll be doing some preliminary work on Raw IV. I want to let some time go by so that I don’t burn myself out.

So, hopefully, I’ll have a breezy monster girl harem in a fantasy setting book out by the end of June, and then a horror harem novel out sometime after that, and then Raw IV sometime after that.