Thoughts on "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House" (Patreon)

I sometimes like to do a follow-up, so here's some behind scenes stuff on the short story I put out a couple of days ago - "The Succubus in Mr Herbert's Summer House."  There will be spoilers, so please read the story first (it's an attachment in the previous post).

The inspiration was a Naglfar Sakura picture of a bound succubus sucking the onlooker off with her tail.  I was brainstorming how that scenario might have come about and then a complete story idea fell in my lap.  As Literotica's Summer contest was on the horizon, I thought I'd give it a summery setting and use some of the British mobster characters that have appeared in previous stories (Mr Herbert and Teddy Demme).

The execution wasn't as straightforward as I hoped.  It took a while for the Alex and Jimmy characters to differentiate themselves.  Early on I was writing dialogue for their responses to Teddy without knowing which of them was the more likely to have said it.  I had a similar problem with Teddy - in the first draft he bounced around a lot between ice-cool and obviously deeply shaken before I was able to clean that up with the 2nd draft type up.

The biggest decision point was around the introduction to the succubus.  Originally I was thinking of having Teddy tell them straight-up that she was a succubus with appropriately dire warnings of what would happen if they let her get smexy with them.  Then I decided it would be better to keep everything vague and have the clues be revealed during the story.  Alex and Jimmy do figure it out, but can't bring themselves to believe it.

I intentionally wanted a long lead-in before we get to the sex stuff.  This is following a typical horror trope where characters are placed in a setting and just chat about things while the reader/viewer senses the atmosphere steadily growing more and more tense in the background.  It's not the easiest to pull off, especially with erotic horror, and I'm not convinced I nailed it here.  If you found yourself skipping ahead or skim-reading to the naughty bits, then I failed.

I originally intended it to be a one-shot short story with the classic horror teaser at the end of Jimmy and friends walking back in on the succubus and leaving their fates unwritten.  That's fine for regular horror, but a little too much of a naughty tease for erotica.  Maybe I'll write that later.  The story does raise some interesting questions:

What did the succubus do with Jimmy, Gemma and the other girl?

Where did she go afterwards?

Who is the German?

What book did Mr Herbert's son-in-law 'borrow'?

How did a 'regular' mobster manage to bind the succubus in the first place?

Is there a novel here?  Maybe.  Letting a succubus loose on the underbelly of a sleazy British seaside town could be entertaining.  I'm pretty bad at writing novels as novels (I might post a few chapters from my failed or on-hiatus attempts at some point), but I could see this working as 5 or 6 scenes of a similar length bolted together (succubus with Jimmy, succubus at the Pink Orchid, another couple of succubus seduction stories, a big finish at the end).  That would be around 50-60K words (i.e. a novel).

A possibility for the next time I need to take a break from working on House of Hellish Harlots anyway.