Writer's Commentary: Damsels Anonymous Volume 1 Part 2

Hey everyone, I'm back with the second part of my Writer's Commentary on Damsels Anonymous Volume 1. Last week I went into the behind the scenes and early inspirations for what would eventually become the first in my ongoing series, and in this post I'm going to go more into the story and my inspirations for the situations my ladies found themselves in. 

So as I set out to write the first volume, I realized that I knew my main characters and supporting cast, but I didn't have much for the bad guys beyond being generic villains that caught the girls and tied them up. As I gave more thoughts to the villains, I realized that I could either just introduce new villains every story, or just have overarching bad guys for the ladies to fight. It didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to go with an overarching villain because it would save me time on having to introduce new bad guys and what their motivations were. I'm a big fan of "small towns with dark secrets" stories like TWIN PEAKS, and knew that I wanted to do a story about a seemingly idyllic town with a dark side. Seeing how I also wanted an excuse to put the girls in bikinis a lot, making it a beach town seemed appropriate.

I was inspired by the old "Spirit" comic books where his arch enemy is The Octopus, a bad guy that controls all crime in his city but is a villain you never see, which gave me the idea of a big bad Kingpin type villain that only operates from the shadows. As I tried to think of a gimmick for the villain, I realized that I had several scenarios in mind involving casinos and pool parties, which gave me the idea that the villain's base of operations would be a casino, and then I came up with the deck of cards motif.

Hence the mysterious arch-foe Ace was born. 

Most of the story of volume 1 revolves around Felicia's relationship with Janet, a bartender trying to fend off a hostile takeover of her business by Ace. I get asked a lot who Janet is based off of, and she's actually based off of a real bartender that used to work at a restaurant my friends and I frequent. She was an older woman who often wore extremely low-cut tops showing off her rather bountiful cleavage. Whenever she worked I always found it hard to take my eyes off of her wonderful breasts and soon found my mind wandering with fantasies about her. Those fantasies have pretty much been written fully intact in the first volume where Janet loses her clothes trying to escape her attackers and gets bound and gagged in the kitchen. 

Though I originally wanted to hint at a possible relationship between Felicia and Janet, I wasn't sure if I was going to go much further than just having some sexual tension between them. As I discussed publishing this book with my partner, she suggested adding sex scenes to it, saying that if I was going to market it as erotica then people were going to go in expecting sex. At first I was resistant to the idea, but as I wrote more of Felicia and Janet, I realized that it would seem like a tease not to have a sex scene, hence the shower moment. Of course, since I was marketing this as a bondage erotic story, I added a bdsm element to the shower scene as well. To this day I still get extremely positive feedback on the shower scene, which encouraged me to add more sex scenes to subsequent stories. 

When it came to writing the character of Felicia, I had a myriad of situations up my sleeve for her and knew which ones I wanted to include in this story. That, armed with the backstory I came up with of her kidnapping Gina, informed a lot of what I knew her character had to be. I already knew that I wanted Felicia to be a little cocky, headstrong, and stubborn, which would lead to her getting captured a bit. To me, there's nothing sexier than an overconfident damsel that gets cut down to size by bad guys. I also knew that since I wanted her running around in a bikini a lot, that there should be a degree of vanity and insecurity around her to which would also contribute to her state as a constant damsel.

Starting out, I knew this book would have a lot of set-up and character introductions before we got to the bondage. I start things off with a bang with the botched kidnapping of Gina/Felicia, but things slow a bit after with the introduction of Marston's Pointe and the side characters. I took a bit of a horror movie approach to writing where in a lot of horror almost every scene has a scare, even if it's a little one. I took that approach with writing where I wanted every scene of this to be sexy, hence little stuff like introducing Tanya in her thong or Janet's thong sticking out of her small shorts. This approach is what gave me the idea for Felicia to wear see-through tights and suffer an embarassing wardrobe malfunction just before her first capture (plus I just love wardrobe malfunctions).

Felicia's first capture, where she is taped up in the box, is inspired by a scene from an old show called Counterstrike. In the scene, a damsel is caught snooping by some bad guys and bound and gagged before being sealed in a box. Later, after the good guys stop the bad guys, they hear her muffled cries coming from the box. It's a great scene but the damsel is wearing the baggiest, least flattering clothes but I loved the scenario of a damsel being boxed up for shipment. Using this scene as inspiration, I came up with the scenario of the damsel being caught and forced to strip in front of all the bad guys before being taped up and sealed in crate. Furthermore, I loved the idea of rescue arriving and hearing her gag-talking and shaking around in the box. As I thought through this scenario, I came up with the idea of the added humiliation of the damsel getting her picture taken and printed in the newspaper and loved it, which would also add to the animosity between Felicia and Tanya.

The next scenario is another fan-favorite, where Felicia gets caught snooping outside the apartment in a bikini and then bound and gagged next to a bomb. My inspiration for this scene goes all the way back to my childhood and a film called Santa Clause: The Movie. At one point in the film, a boy is snooping on the bad guy and gets caught, hand-gagged, and dragged into a car where he is brought bound and gagged to the bad guy's hideout. I had always wanted to do something inspired by this but with an older damsel. At one point I came up with the image of Felicia snooping at a door in a tiny thong bikini and getting hand gagged and dragged off. Of course, I had to figure out why she was in a bikini and snooping and which is how I settled on the idea of Felicia being vain and how that would ultimately be her undoing. Then of course this leads to her being rescued by Janet and then the infamous shower sex scene. 

As I said, I knew that I wanted to end this story on a cliffhanger, with Felicia a prisoner in her own jail and Gina taking over as Sheriff. I had always wanted to write a scene with damsel giftwrapped, naked and bound and gagged with ribbon and loved the idea of Gina's henchmen delivering Felicia to her like that, though now on retrospect I'm not sure if it fits tonally with the rest of DA. Something like that would probably work better in a superheroine story than Damsels Anonymous, but then again my DA stories do tend to get over the top a lot. 

So that wraps up my commentary on DA volume 1. I hope you've been enjoying all of my Damsels Anonymous character models that I've been posting all week, and check back next month for the commentary on Volume 2!