Potpourri

It's July 3rd which means tomorrow is July 4th (did I blow your mind?) and people who can afford it are probably going on vacation so fewer people than usual will notice this.  Maybe even the Google bots have the weekend off.  Anyway, I'm just going to mention a few things for the hell of it.

I haven't released an Eric Filler book since May 24th but I decided I'd try writing two other short books under two different names created by a name generator as a test to see what would sell better.

The first one was a gender swap age regression story by "Jessie Love" called A Change Will Do You Good.  Actually the title I came up with as the story was almost done because it went better with the story than the original working title.  It's a pretty simple story where a guy goes to a bar after not being able to get it up with his wife.  The bartender offers to make him a drink that is guaranteed to make him forget.  He drinks it and then passes out.

He wakes up in an alley as a little girl with no memory of how he got there.  Eventually he gets home and his wife starts mothering him.  She had had three miscarriages previously so for her it was finally a chance to be a mommy.  There's a guy who gave the main character a ride home who has a young daughter about the same age the main character becomes.  They become best friends and unbeknownst to her the girl's dad and the main character's wife are also becoming best friends..

Originally I was going to go all the way through to the wedding and then the bartender would show up at the reception and the main character would confront her.  But I got lazy and decided to take a shortcut by having the bartender show up as a babysitter.  Then she explains that she's an angel who's also the other little girl's mother and she decided to play matchmaker because really this situation is better for everyone.  Hooray.

The sales were about the same as recent Eric Filler ones.  But after a couple of weeks it got 4 reviews, three of them 5 stars.  Then there was one by "John Daniels" who's actually trolled all my other names except, ironically, my real/realish names.  He was pissed there wasn't enough "research" like this was an academic treatise or something.  And he whined that 8-year-olds don't need carried to the bathroom.  Which was taken out of context.  The girl didn't ask to be taken to the bathroom; her guardian picked her up to comfort her when she was feeling self-conscious.  Duh.  The other people liked that it ended happily ever after and one called it "G-rated" though I don't think the mentions of impotence and miscarriages are G rated material.

Anyway, I guess if I did another one with that name I'd have to make sure it ends happily ever after and crap.  Though I don't really have any ideas for that yet.

The other one I did was a short erotica story by "Naomi Caged" called Roomie Swap because I couldn't think of a better title.  It's only about 20 pages and tells the story of a loser in a college dorm who one night starts getting messages on his phone about some supplement to make him irresistible to women.  He finally takes it and turns into a gorgeous woman who then gets fucked by one of his roommates and the roommate's girlfriend.  Plus the other roommate.  So it's mostly sex.

The book was pretty much DOA on Amazon.  It's sold less than 10 copies and the KDP pages read aren't that great either.  I don't know if that proves anything or not.  Maybe I should try again and see if the same result happens or not.

Comparatively to other years I haven't really written all that much this year.  I haven't felt especially motivated.  And the last month I've really gotten into this game on my phone.  It's like an RPG thing called Empires and Puzzles that was advertised when I was playing another game.  It's one of those rare cases where advertising actually paid off in large part because there was a playable demo so I could try it before I downloaded it from the App Store.

Anyway, it's pretty fun as you build your town and build teams of characters.  There are five different colors:  red, blue, green, yellow, and purple and each color is a different class of character.  Then there are different rarities of characters from common up to ultra rare.  Obviously the more rare the character the more powerful they are.  Once you "summon" a character then you have to level them up.  Not by fighting in battles but basically by absorbing other characters, which costs food.

The annoying thing is this is the sort of game that has all these obstacles designed to make you want to spend real money so you can buy upgrades.  You need food and iron to upgrade your characters and build things and buy potions and special items and so on.  You need "world energy" to fight battles, raid other players, and fight "titans" (dragons) with your alliance.  The energy takes a while to build back up--unless you buy more.  Just like buildings take a while to build--unless you pay to bypass it.

Like most of these games it's not really a scam because you don't have to spend money.  And I try not to.  I've only done it a couple of times and not for a lot.  But of course it's better if you do spend money because you can do more and get better stuff.  Resisting the temptation can be hard sometimes, like when you get your butt kicked by someone else or get stuck on a mission.  Or just if you're bored and don't want to wait hours or even more than a day to get something upgraded.

That's how those games get you--if you let them.

There you go, just some random stuff.