March $5 Short Story (DoL Short)

Whew! This thing seriously fought with me wayyyyy more than I expected. If you want to read my ramblings about why, check the next paragraph (which will also give you some hints about what the future of this short series would look like). Otherwise...the PDF is attached! Enjoy! :-)

Sooooooo...the ramblings about why it was fighting me. As any of you who've bothered to read much of my work have probably figured out (sub-consciously at least), I don't just write gratuitous sex. Even in throw-away shorts, I try to create characters with an actual personality, in worlds with actual depth, and the actual sex rarely makes up more than 50% of the text. Often it's considerably less than that.  I'm a story teller, not a pure smut/porn writer. I'd like to think that this is a positive thing, for the most part, which I hope all of you enjoy. 

However, in this case that bit me on the ass. I had a good idea what I wanted to do. I wrote the first 1500 words or so (and actually the 500 words so so as well) super quick... Then a hit the part where I actually had to tell what happened in The Dungeon of Lewdity itself and slammed face-first into a brick wall. The GAME is designed to be one sex-centered room after another, but for a STORY that would have resulted in a continuous gratuitous sex slide. I could have mitigated it a bit by writing Katrina's reactions to all of it...but then it would basically just be the GAME without the multiple choice options. I didn't want that. 

Which means that I had to come up with something different. That wasn't too terribly hard after some brainstorming. Believe it or not, The Dungeon of Lewdity actually has some honest-to-goodness world building behind it. As the game progresses, you'll end up seeing a lot of that come out, actually. So, I had some ideas to work with, and I ultimately decided to run with them. The truth is, my greatest specialty as a writer is creating characters not worlds or plots. So I decided to write in someone for Katrina to interact with throughout the short story. As first, I thought it would just be for one room. But as I hit 5k words and hadn't gotten OUT of that room, I realized that Nylara provided a good way to completely change up the story from the game, while keeping the same setting.

The result of that was making the choice to split this into a short story series, instead of just a single short. This first short clocks in at over 6,1000 words, which is right around the 4-6k I usually aim for. If more follow up shorts are voted for, we'll see more of Nylara and Katrina's interaction as Katrina works her way toward her dreams...and possibly towards a unique relationship with The Dungeon of Lewdity and its inhabitants...

Enjoy the first short of this new series!