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I learned a bit about yōkai from watching Rosario + Vampire. There was even a spider woman in one episode. I guess anime can be culturally enriching. IMO, looking at the obvious thing to do and then doing the opposite is often the key to great storytelling.

so just wondering whats everyones costume for Halloween/Samhain? I am going to be a crazy, old lady.

@GeorgeGlass reviews After Party! Cody enjoys the game sometimes. Like the story says, he’s glad they don’t do that every time they have sex, since he enjoys their more normal time in bed. He is naturally more gentle and submissive, though. The “Hollywood royalty” thing was me trying to find a good way to describe just how well she wears her (apparent) age. I’m glad it worked! The alien sense of morality is something from the myths I really wanted to incorporate. I never defined this term in-story, but yōkai is a word that describes a wide variety of magical creatures from Japanese mythology. The word is often translated into English as “demons”, but that’s horribly inaccurate. Yōkai come in many forms, but the closest western equivalent to them is probably the Fair Folk from European and Celtic myth, primarily because, like fairies, yōkai have a very strong sense of morality, but it’s different from the kind humans have. I was painfully aware of that stereotype, and definitely wanted to avoid it. It seems like in any story featuring a spider woman of some kind (jorōgumo or otherwise), she always has to be preparing to kill and/or eat the male character or something like that. Yes, sexual cannibalism (the technical term for when the female of a species eats the male during or after mating) is well-documented in spiders, to the point that several Latrodectus species have actually gotten their name from it (widow spiders), but even among those species it doesn’t occur 100% of the time. The frequency of sexual cannibalism depends on a number of factors, including how aggressive the female is, how well fed she is in general, specific nutrients in her diet and, I swear I’m not making this up, foreplay. So yeah, I got a little fed up with how ubiquitous this idea was, and wanted a story where the spider woman is genuinely threatening and creepy, but it turns out that while she’s a threat to other people, she isn’t one to the male lead, and that was the genesis of this couple. Yua is a jorōgumo just like you’d read about in the old tales, a seductive, flesh-eating monster...and yet in spite of everything you’d expect, she adores this boy she’s chosen as her mate. It makes her a somewhat more interesting character to me.

How is it 12 fucking months since last october? I demand something be done about the speeding up of time. Anyway, some ideas I’ll never get to use – A rookie Werewolf Hunter from a long line of ‘em advertises his services and is contacted by a young werewolf looking to get into porn who mistakingly thinks he’s doing a MILF Hunter rip off. ** A man’s toilet cistern becomes inhabited by a water spirit who refuses to flush unless he says nice things to it, and also reads his phone over his shoulder while he’s doing his business. ** A necrophile is just going to town on a corpse when the body’s ghost shows up to criticise his technique. ** Death loses a bet and has to do all the grim reaping wearing a Pink tutu ** A horny gay guy accepts an invite to a “total sausage fest” and finds out it’s actually a totally legitimate Bavarian Wurst Festival. But there’s a lot of guys in tight leather shorts so… ** A ragtag group of misfits team up to put an end to an Emerson Lake and Palmer show. ** And that’s it for this year. Been an idea free zone for me. Except for having a character do a “slutty weeping angel” cosplay that I then searched and discovered about 1000 people already had.

I’ve only got one more to read and review and I will absolutely be reading and reviewing it!

After Party gets another review! This one comes from the awesome @CloverReef This may sound a bit odd, but thank you for that! I definitely wanted sweet, but I was worried that I lost creepy in the process, so I’m glad to hear that I did get both feelings in the story. Don’t count on me to do that crafting thing as well in any other story! As for the brief glimpses, that was very much intentional. See, this was originally supposed to be a sequel. I mentioned this in my response to JayDee, but I have a planned story called The Spider House, which is going to be about how eighteen year old Cody is forced one day to go near the neighborhood haunted house. It’s covered in webs and the forest around it is crawling with spiders, so the local folks all just call it the Spider House. To Cody’s surprise, a beautiful woman named Yua lives in the Spider House, and the two begin to bond. After Party was originally just catching up with Yua and Cody two years later, but when I had the mad impulse to throw this into the Halloween Party, I realized I couldn’t depend on readers knowing who these characters were. Still, I didn’t want to spoil too much of The Spider House in the process. Obviously I spoiled that Yua is a creature from Japanese mythology, but aside from that I tried to keep things vague: that Cody had a rough life and that Yua rescued him, but not what was rough and how she did so. I’m glad that actually paid off. I loved writing that whole thing. I was shooting for fear of the unknown, and I felt like Yua was at her creepiest there in the beginning, when we know she’s some kind of spider-themed creature but we don’t yet know what she looks like, we can only hear her voice and see the web shift and hear the wood creak as she moves around. Hearing that you got so absorbed that you forgot to take notes is an amazing compliment. And this is also an amazing compliment! I was very nervous about the sex scene, as I always am when I write them. It’s only the third one I’ve ever written (well, the third one involving the main characters; there’s a tentacle scene involving a minor character in another story), and the first time I’ve ever written anything involving bondage. It’s also my first try at a dominant/submissive relationship, but given that Yua is a giant, intelligent spider, and given the (arachnophobe warning: link leads to spider pic) size and power difference between female spiders and their male counterparts (yes, those are N. clavata males and a female in that photo), female dominance seemed like the right way to go for the character. Tragically, “porn writing skillz” is not something I can tell my family about or put on a job application. As far as making Yua erotic and beautiful in her in-between form, it was sort of a balancing act. Jorōgumo (the specific type of yōkai that Yua is) have been depicted many different ways. One of the more common depictions is the “drider” type (like a centaur, but with a spider instead of a horse for the lower body), but I didn’t want to go that far in the monster direction. I liked the other common type of jorōgumo illustration, a woman with spider legs sprouting from her back, and used that as the base, adding a few more spider characteristics like the six eyes and the claws on her fingertips. I think the eyes were what I was most worried about turning people off, and JayDee does seem to have felt a little squirmy over those! I think something that helped was the sensory deprivation aspect of the bondage. Since the story is told from Cody’s PoV, once Yua webs over his eyes, we experience the world through what he can hear and feel, so it’s really just like he’s with a normal woman, with only occasional reminders that she’s anything else. The one idea that I came up with in the scene that I was kind of proud of was the idea of Yua talking while her lips were touching Cody. I thought the idea of feeling her lips brush against his skin as she spoke, or her, as I wrote it, caressing him with her breath, was kind of hot. Hey, the only part she destroyed was the shirt!

*nods* My work here is done. There is only one correct response to that. I like the thought process, and the end result almost has an Indiana Jones vibe, which is awesome. Oh, that wasn’t quite what I meant; I agree that F/F was the way to go there. It’s just that there’s a pair of siblings here bonded as intimately as possible during a sex scene. I personally wouldn’t know whether to add the incest tag or not. I think you made the right call, since the siblings aren’t having sex with each other, but I do go back and forth a little bit. No problem! I decided early on that I was going to review all the entries in this anthology (except mine, of course, as that would get harshly self-critical pretty fast), and as I worked my way through I was genuinely curious as to what your contribution would be. This was a nice surprise!

Re: “Day of the Deadly” From InBrightestDay on October 25, 2019 LOL! That may be the funniest first line of a review I’ve ever read. Turns out the underworld is a real sausage party. That was a spur-of-the-moment dialogue choice. I know that an expert can reload a bolt-action rifle in less than 3 seconds, but I wasn’t sure whether Enrique, who has presumably been practicing with semiautomatics, would actually be able to do it that fast. So I decided not to try to put a time frame on it. The whole “man in a woman’s body” thing was something I’d never written before, so a lot of amusing thoughts like that came up. It was still pretty awkward to write sometimes, because I was like, “Marta grabbed him...grabbed her...grabbed them?” I didn’t either. Ultimately, I just chose sex over gender. This being a Halloween/Day of the Dead story, I felt like I had to include at least one horror element. Thanks for reviewing it!