Welcome to the Art of Dina M!

…is finally up, illustrations and all! You can read it here.

Watch the Stone Shine is the longest Project Eryss novella to date, and one of the earliest ideas I had for the series. In the same way that Holly Blackthorne’s backstory is my deconstructive parody of a certain boy wizard and similar “Chosen One” narratives, Watch the Stone Shine is a deconstructive parody of the type of stories I’ve seen too many of on The Erotic Mind Control Story Archive and similar sites; some average dude finds a mind control trinket and uses it to get revenge on any woman who has treated him poorly by turning her into his hypnotized sex slave. I noticed that the average dude protagonists tended to be… pretty big douchebags, but the narrative and the authors clearly wanted me to root for them and cheer when the uppity women were turned into mindless whorish sluts because “bitch deserved it”.

I have mentioned once or twice that I don’t care for “bitch deserved it” narratives, and so in Watch the Stone Shine I made David, the protagonist, deliberately unlikeable, with a tendency to blame everyone else (especially if they’re women) for things that are pretty blatantly his own fault, and he justifies everything he does to the women in the story with “bitch deserved it”. Hopefully it doesn’t take too much effort to see that the women in the story are for the most part perfectly reasonable and David’s suspicions and thinking they’re all out to get him is more his own paranoia and ego than anything reflecting the reality he lives in. It’s the story of one man’s rapid descent into villainy… and the inevitable crash that happens because in a city like Paragon Bay someone like David is nowhere NEAR the top of the heap.

The story also features our favourite affably-evil Westwood Inc sorceress, Rosalyn Westwood… as well as Naiad, Magikitty and even me! Yes, my superhero persona Evenstar makes a cameo here. (David mostly notices my fat ass.)

In non-Eryss news, I’ve written some reviews of indie animated pilots, I’m working on a couple of short comics, including a hypnofetishy Spider-Verse gag comic that includes Petra Parker, from the currently pretty big meme about an AU Spider-Man who’s a trans woman… I just had an idea for a gag story and I haven’t done any fan comics in a while.

Oh, and I went to see Coyote VS Acme. Review of the movie pending, but for now I’ll say… it was good. It’s by far the best live-action/animation hybrid Looney Tunes movie and more than makes up for the atrocity that was Space Jam: A New Legacy.

The third Project Eryss story, Watch the Stone Shine, is fully written, and will be posted soon as I’m done with the illustrations and maybe polish up a few sentences. It’s another novella.(23847 words in its current form), making it the longest Project Eryss story so far. It’s also the first one with a male protagonist… for a given value of “protagonist”. See, the story is about a disgruntled retail worker and his spiral into villainy when he chances to find a magic ring that can turn anyone into his obedient hypno-slaves.

The fourth novella, Small Talk, will be a lot more lighthearted and feature a hopefully more likeable protagonist, as it’s essentially the origin story of Shortstack. Speaking of, you’ll notice a few more Project Eryss character profiles, for Ragamuffin and the DOLLS, who will be starring in an upcoming story. I’m also working on a bunch of new profiles, including a few more male characters and a few more villains. Here’s a list of characters you could expect to show up:

• Lee Vanderlee, Shortstack’s older brother and a member of the White Coven.
• Mickel, a genderfluid but mostly male-presenting fox spirit of magic (same type of spirit as the Familiar Four).
• Wild Lynx and Wildkitten, a lynx-girl and her daughter, both Project Eryss villainesses.
• Dormouse, a sleepy Project Eryss villainess.
• The GM, a reality-warping GM who traps people in her virtual RPGs.
• The Brute, the Brain and the Blonde, a trio of superheroes (one guy, two girls).
• Madam Malin, the mafia queen and head of the organized crime in the Warrens and Bayfront.

I don’t have stories for all of them; some of them are really just there to fill some minor roles in other characters’ stories, but I’m kind of like Drew Hayes (who wrote Super Powereds) in that I can never just leave a minor character alone but HAVE to try and figure out what their deal is.

I have a number of stories planned, some are half-written and some are just on the planning stage.

• A story about Ermine and the Super Chick Alliance investigating the disappearance of a college student who may have stumbled onto a secret about Project Eryss.
• A story starring Carrot Noir (mentioned in Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir, and slated to make a cameo in Watch the Stone Shine) and a look at life as a low-ranking supervillain.
• A story about Holly Blackthorne, Robyn and Harlan visiting Holly’s aunt and uncle, and uncovering some shady business in their supervillain-themed nightclub.
• A story focusing on the ragtag bunch of supers living in Aurora Roost, including Monkaya, Ragamuffin, and Mickel.
• A story focusing on some of the inmates in Nightfall Penetentially, the supervillain prison.
• A script for the pilot episode of The Adventures of Kaldor and the Heroes of Ecanria, an in-universe cartoon “based on historical events”. I’m pondering having an extra “bonus track” version with Seraphim and Paragon providing commentary.
• A story about Paradigm and trying to live up to the legacy of his predecessor Paragon. Probably it’ll also feature Lord Waric.

Whew! As you can see, I don’t lack for ideas. That’s the beauty of an ensemble cast… with so many characters, all of whom have their own stories to tell, it’s easy to find ideas and get in a lot of variety, even if I’m sticking to the overall theme of “superheroines and erotic mind control”.

Now I just have to WRITE the damn stories.

…to add to the “Site News and Updates” section. I need to figure out if there’s some sort of automatic process that could make it easier, like how the “Latest from the blog” is automatically showing the newest blog post.

Anyway, most of the news and updates are Project Eryss-related. The second draft of Watch the Stone Shine is done and has been available to Patrons for some time, and I’m done with the first draft of a new Project Eryss story, Small Talk. I’m also continuously updating the Project Eryss part of the site, like I’ve added some new character profiles (Shortstack AKA Dee Marie Vanderlee will be the main character of Small Talk, which will also co-star Seraphim. and have Monkaya and Ermine in important supporting roles.

And I’ve written a blog post about the development of Project Eryss.

In non-Project Eryss news, I’ve written a Dina Recommends of The Amazing Digital Circus, the most successful indie animation show of the age, of which the finale was recently released. I went to the theatre to see the finale, and caught it again on Youtube.

There’s a new Chibi-Dina comic up, featuring superhero cosplay. (Chibi-Dina actually looks really good as a redhead… I wonder if I should dye my hair red IRL?) And there’s a new Elkantar comic up… I’ve done a number of comics with her.

There are probably a few more updates that I’m forgetting about. I really need to look into that possibility of an automatic process.

The second Project Eryss story is finally up! It’s called Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir. I’ve also updated the profiles for the main characters of that story, Holly Blackthorne, Monkaya, Queen Vespara and The Silent Choir.

People who have followed my fanfics might have noticed that Holly Blackthorne is visually rather similar to an older Holly Potter from my still-on-hiatus Witching World project… and her backstory, which she shares with Monkaya in the story, might remind you slightly of a gender-flipped, horny parody/deconstruction of the story of a certain boy wizard who defeated a Dark Lord and afterwards spent his happily ever after being an enforcer for the system that had produced that Dark Lord to begin with.

It might not be strictly the “superhero” genre, but I always thought the world of Project Eryss was large enough to have some urban fantasy and some shameless critique of silly “Chosen One” stories. Besides, there’s quite a bit of erotic hypnosis here, so if you like that (and why are you even here if you don’t?) you should hopefully get something out of it.

The first draft of the third story, Watch the Stone Shine, is almost done too, by the way… I’ll start the second draft within the month.

December was an awful month, but January is a lot better, at least so far. It’s cold, but the fact that it’s an entire year until I have to think about Christmas again is a warming thought.

You’ll see that there are a few more comics up: Part eleven of Whatever Happened to Chibi-Dina? is finally here, continuing the quest too make it the longest comic on this site. In addition there’s also Dispatched Mainframe, a one-page Dispatch fancomic starring Coupe and Blonde Blazer.

In other news, Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir is almost done. The final draft only needs a bit of polish, plus I want to make another illustration for it, before I post it. The story is almost 21 000 words long, making it a proper novella, and it stars Holly Blackthorne and Monkaya. With any luck, the story’ll be up either this month or in February!

…no, wait, that should be the other way around. It’s September right now.

Sorry for the radio silence, but I’ve been around here and there… as you can see there’s new comics and a new blog post, and I’m currently about 70% done with the second draft of the second Project Eryss story, Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir. It’s currently about 20 000 words long… twice as long as Welcome to Paragon Bay! This is a full-fledged novella, even if much of it is dedicated to a long dialogue between Holly and Monkaya.

(I like novellas. They have more room to breathe than short stories, they can have more characters and more plot, but they’re still simpler and easier to finish than novels.)

Also, Amarys the computer is back with me, and has been back for a few weeks… after a very long and extended stay in the repair shop. I ended up having to rely on Lyra the Chromebook for a lot longer than anticipated… normally repairs are supposed to take a week or so, but after one week the repair shop sent me confirmation that they’d received my computer and started the repairs, but they didn’t have the right spare parts so they’d have to contact ASUS and send away for the parts.

Okay, I thought, it would take a little longer… but then, one week later, I got the updates: They had received the parts, but the they discovered that there were MORE spare parts that they didn’t have and needed to order from Asus, and they would get THOSE spare parts within the week.

OKAY, I thought, we’ll have to wait for another week. Now it had been three weeks. And on the fourth week, guess what happened? Yep! I got another message saying that they had to order yet MORE spare parts from Asus, and it would take another week.

By now I was slightly fed up, and I sent them a complaint e-mail asking just how many spare parts they needed and how much of the original computer was even left at this point. I got a message back with profound apologies, but with an assurance that I didn’t need to pay for any of this. And so FINALLY one week later I got the message that the parts from Asus had arrived… and while I was bracing myself for the follow-up, this time I got the message that the computer was all fixed, and they’d tested it thoroughly and everything was in perfect working order.

They’d replaced the motherboard, the screen, the keyboard, the LED cables, the LED lights and a few more things that I don’t remember. So it was basically a brand new Amarys that returned to me, more than five weeks after I’d sent her away.

I’ve taken some time to get her settled back in and see if she starts horsing around again, but she’s been working almost perfectly… there was ONE time when she BSOD’ed me for seemingly no reason but that appears to have been a one-time thing.

So, everything is in working order!

September 2023 I wrote about having just purchased a new laptop; an Asus TUF A16 that I named Amarys. She was a bit of a downgrade from my previous laptop, an Asus ROG named Valerie, but Valerie was nine years old at the time and couldn’t keep up anymore.

Almost two years on I realize just how spoiled I’d been with Valerie, who ran smoothly for six years before any problems hit her and even then it was just a battery issue. Right up until she gave out, she worked at near-peak performance, only starting to lag a little a few months before she finally threw in the towel. Amarys… hasn’t been as sure of herself. While she’s generally worked just fine, there have been some issues. A weird line of dead pixels on the screen that I didn’t do anything with because it was nearly unnoticeable… and occasionally, VERY occasionally, she just turned herself off with no warning.

For the longest time I thought these shut-downs were just me accidentally pushing the power button… the mechanical keyboard I use sometimes moves a little, and well… But in hindsight it was probably a sign that something else was going on. I noticed it after the clock set back after Daylight Savings Time; suddenly the shutdowns got more frequent. I was looking at several sudden shutdowns per week, and after a few of them it took nearly five minutes before the computer would respond to pushing the power button. As if that wasn’t enough, after some of the shutdowns the clock reset to midnight.

I checked official sites and message boards. I watched YouTube videos. I checked Asus customer service and even consulted a couple of AI chats. I tried several solutions, to no avail. It got clearer and clearer that we were looking at a hardware issue that I couldn’t take care of on my own. So finally I had to face facts: Amarys needed repairs.

And so, with a kiss and tons of well wishes I cleaned her screen, packed her down in her original box with lots of bubble wrap for protection, and sent her off to Asus for repairs. (She actually functioned great for an entire week before I sent her in… but then the night before she shut off an impressive four times in twenty minutes and then reset the clock and sulked for five minutes before I could coax her back for one final boot-up and a last session before her journey… yeah, she REALLY needs those repairs.)

So, now while she’s gone I’m without my main computer. Buuuuut that’s not the HUGEST problem, since I still have my Chromebook, an Acer Spin 314 that I mainly use at work and that I’ve affectionately named Lyra. Now, Lyra doesn’t have one-third of Amarys’s power or versatility, but as a temporary main computer she’ll at least keep me online. I can still write my Holly Blackthorne story, surf the web, keep up on social media, stream Netflix and Disney+, and even keep editing this website. And when it comes to drawing… luckily I still use my Wacom MobileStudio Pro for that.

No, I didn’t name my Wacom MobileStudio Pro. What am I, weird or something?

Happy Pride Month, everyone!

You know the big update I’ve been teasing for ever so long? Well, it’s finally here. This is the official launch of a new section on this website: Project Eryss!

Yep, the series of erotic superhero stories (with superheroines in distress and erotic mind control) has officially started. You’ll see that this new section has a slightly different look and design than the rest of the site. The theme is purple rather than pink, and the headlines and fonts are slightly more sci-fi inspired… this is really because I found the old pink theme didn’t work too well for a superhero theme, and this makes Project Eryss stand out a little.

(You might also notice a new background image for the rest of the site, with pink clouds and stars and spirals. It’s not that visible on the mobile version of the site, but desktoppers should see it. There’s no real reason for it other than I thought the solid pink got a little bland, especially compared to the purple cityscape in the Project Eryss section. Never one to do anything halfway, I also gave a new green background to the Seven Favours section.)

The main attraction of the update is the first Project Eryss story, Welcome to Paragon Bay! It’s a one-chapter novella of about 11 350 words, which should serve as a slight introduction to the setting of Paragon Bay. It takes place a couple of years before the next batch of stories and focuses on smalltown acting student Jenna Lee Foster as she visits Paragon Bay for the first time… and of course it ends with mind control and manipulation and lesbian sex. Mind you, this isn’t safe, sane and consensual… but then this genre never is, is it?

There’s also a Locations page, where you can read a little more about the city of Paragon Bay and its 14 districts. There’ll be more locations added later… you might have caught on by now that the Project Eryss stories don’t take place on our regular Earth, but a parallel world where continents, nations and brands are different. You won’t see Norway or England or the United States in this world… but you will see nations like Westhaven, Tir’Galdur and Tyrellan.

Project Eryss also has its own character page, where you can meet the heroines, heroes and villains of the upcoming story. There are 30+ characters on the page… only a handful of them appear in Welcome to Paragon Bay, and even then most of them are just cameos, but all of them are going to get more attention in later stories. Like I’ve said before, I’m envisioning Project Eryss as kind of an Astro City-like series of stories; there isn’t one central character or set of characters, but different stories will focus on different characters. (It’s a little like Metrobay Comix in this too, especially with the erotic mind control!) The first story focuses on Jenna and of course on Rosalyn Westwood AKA Dream Jewel… but the next story, Holly Blackthorne and the Silent Choir, is going to focus on the characters of Holly Blackthorne and Monkaya.

Finally, there’s a Glossary and a Timeline… though the Timeline isn’t quite ready for the public yet.

I think this should be fun. I’ve been wanting to do this project for years, and finally I’ve started up.

I’ll be back later with some more thoughts and behind-the-scenes peeks at Paragon Bay and the heroes and villains… and my thoughts on why I wanted to do a superheroines-in-distress series of prose stories that ended up kind of becoming something a little more… but for now, I hope you enjoy this new section of the site!

Happy Easter, people!

So, I haven’t updated a lot here, but a notable one is just around the corner. Because I’m just finishing cleaning up the first story in the Project Eryss collection, Welcome to Paragon Bay. The people on my Patreon have been able to read the story for a while now, but it’s almost ready to share with y’all lovely people.

I’m thinking Project Eryss will get its own section on this site, with links to the stories, character art and profiles, and a look at the timeline for the entire shared story universe… I really had fun with this worldbuilding. And it’s not even done yet…. though I have made a semi-detailed description of Paragon Bay and the Aurelia Islands where it’s located. I’ve also done quite a bit on the nations of Ecanria, New Westhaven and Tir’Galdur. all of whom play a certain part in Paragon Bay’s history.

In the meantime, here is a preview of the map of the Aurelia Islands and Paragon Bay, with its fourteen districts (colour-coded).

But there is more too! There IS a blog post up about my writing, where I rant about Youtube vids with bad author tips, and a Chibi-Dina comic. (Whatever Happened to Chibi-Dina isn’t done yet, it’s just that part eleven had to wait a little while I was doing other things,)

Part Seven of Whatever Happened to Chibi-Dina? is up. Part seven includes Yuna, the purple-haired telepath. She’s been around in the background for a while, and I’ve mentioned her a few times on my Patreon and the connected Discord, but this is actually the first time she has a speaking role in any of my actual comics. But seeing as how I’m planning on giving her a larger role in certain upcoming projects, I thought it was about time to give her her own entry on the character page.

Also, I wrote a review of the sitcom/crime drama Kevin Can Fuck Himself. Main takeaway: It was good but not great. Nice to see such a vicious takedown of the “boorish manchild husband with the nagging sensible wife” sitcom setup, but I think they could have done it more efficiently.