Update 16th Nov '25

The book is out. Thanks to everyone that bought it and I hope you enjoyed it.

Unsurpisingly a fair bit of the week was taken up with promotion and similar things. That will extend into next week mainly for some maintenance things such as figuring out why I no longer have an author page on places like B & N and needing to merge my Smashwords and Draft2Digital accounts so all the books are under the same author page.

For House of Hellish Harlots I looked into adding animations. Results here were mixed.

Using Grok Imagine I was able to get a relatively nice animation of L'iaculatia spraying the viewer with silk, arachne-style. I thought that might be a nice animation to sneak into the game. I was hoping I could just switch the .jpg with the.mp4 on that particular passage, have it autoplay (mute for now), and it would be trivial.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple in the .html and CSS. After a bit of fiddling around I was able to make the switch from .jpg (picture) to .mp4 (animation) fairly seamless. It pretty much looks the same (as you can see above) apart from one really annoying difference...

It concerns the little background border to the picture. That was created by adding padding and making the background colour white with some transparency (same settings as the text box). I think it helps to make the art stand out from the background. You can't see it here, but if the screen is wider, the white background to the video expands to fill the space between it and the text box. This doesn't happen with the static art because the attributes (padding, border, background) are set in the <src> level for the .jpg, so the border stays nicely consistent no matter what the resolution of the screen is. Unfortunately, html doesn't allow me to set those attributes at the <src> level of <video>. I can set them for the <video> tag, but as it's the container, it will expand to fill the space, which then expands the background. I tried adding spacers to try and keep the container to the size of the video, but they're either ignored, or they squeeze the size of the video down.

Currently, I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm hoping one of you out there with more coding experience in html might have some helpful suggestions. For now I'm going to leave the code there to come back to, but leave it alone for now.

Animations are pretty much scope creep, so I don't want to go too deep into that unless it's relatively straightforward. AI tools such as Grok Imagine have opened up opportunities that were not there previously. Unfortunately, this is also reliant on Grok Imagine getting its fully NSFW "spicy" mode back. After a fairly wild first week, it seems like the creations were a little too "spicy" for the xAI people. Currently, Grok is nerfed fairly heavily and most attempts just end up in "Content Moderated". People are complaining and cancelling subscriptions over this, so I'm keeping one eye on it. If the chains are taken off again, I think having the ability to add animation to the H-scenes I'm having marwmellow draw for me would add a lot to the art version of HoHH.

And now back to regular writing. The latter half of the week was spent looking at formatting print books. Next week will be print book boot camp for me as I teach myself how to properly use the settings in MS Word to properly format the documents. I put it off after the last time I republished my ebooks, and it never got done. I don't want to repeat that mistake, so next week I'll do some research and hopefully end up with all the old manuscripts properly formatted so I can rerelease them as print books the moment the new cover art comes in.

Thanks for the interest and support.
- manyeyedhydra