Val's Kinky Column: The Ides of March!

Hello Patrons and happy March!

It's weird to find that it's March again, and almost a year after all of the lockdowns happened. So much has happened to me personally since then, so much has changed, but so much has also stayed the same. Another thing that occurred to me is that Damsels Anonymous Volume 4 has been going on for almost a year as well! I bet y'all thought I was exaggerating when I said that DA vol 4 would be the biggest one yet.

Looking back on last year, I remember when I started planning for the second annual Damsels in Distress March Madness tournament. I started it in 2019 thinking that it would be a fun way to try and capitalize on the March Madness tournament and get my name out there while having some fun with my readers and followers. Much to my surprise, the tournament took on a life of its own and my follower count and book sales skyrocketed. Needless to say, I fully intended to make it a yearly event, not knowing that one year later we would all be crippled by a pandemic. When the lockdown hit, my workplace announced would they thought would be a two week closure, and I was looking forward to getting two whole weeks to work on my writing. The closure turned into me being out of work for eight months. 

During the early days of the pandemic, I debated on if I wanted to do the Damsels in Distress March Madness tournament since the real March Madness had been cancelled. In the end, I decided that maybe doing a tournament would be a fun way to take people's minds off of the pandemic. I'm glad that I did end up going through with the tournament because the second annual Damsels in Distress March Madness was an even bigger success than the first, and once again I saw a spike in book sales. At the time I was debating on if I wanted to start releasing installments of DA vol 4 because I hadn't even finished writing it, but I decided that I should strike while the iron was hot and published the first part soon after Damsels in Distress March Madness finished.

Now here we are, almost a year later. I would say that we maybe have two or three more installments of volume 4 to go before we wrap this one up. I wrote a while back that DA vol 4 is a lot like a comic book or a season of a TV show in the sense that there's an overarching story, and several smaller "mini-arcs" as I call them. As I'm sure you've all figured out, the main overarching plot of vol 4 is Felicia's captivity at the hands of The Queen, with Shelly's ordeal at the farm being the first mini-arc, followed by Gina and Brad's arc, then the milf agents, and soon we'll be in the last mini-arc that wraps everything up. 

Destro and I concocted this story together way back in 2016 when I published the first Damsels Anonymous book. He had the idea for Felicia to find herself a long term prisoner of the bad guys, and I had the idea of introducing a domme villiainess, so we sort of worked out how it would unfold. As we swapped ideas, I started thinking of what the other characters would be up to while Felicia was being held prisoner. Originally, Gina and the other girls were meant to escape from their captors at the end of DA vol 3, but as I wrote that book, I decided to keep them as prisoners of Shelly and Lisa, which meant that I know had to figure out what to do with all of these characters in the next one. 

The story of DA volume 4 grew and mutated over time to this massive, sprawling epic filled with multiple damsels and multiple storylines. As I said before, the FBI agents, originally meant to be a separate story, became intertwined in the saga of Marston's Pointe. The interlude with Shelly on the farm was originally meant to be Felicia, but I decided that Felicia had endured enough punishment and that Shelly deserved some retribution for all that she had done. Originally I wasn't even sure if I was going to include the stuff on the farm or make it a separate story but I realized that volume 4 would feel incomplete if I just left off with Shelly falling out of a truck and never went back to it. 

So it's been one roller coaster of a year for us as well as our damsels, but hopefully 2021 is a much more stable year for you and continues to be perilous for the girls of Damsels Anonymous! I have some good stuff coming for you all this month, including another reposting of a Lara Croft story with a new introduction, the first chapters of Mystica, and the Mystica photo gallery! I'm going to be posting much more digital art over the next few months, including illustrations from Damsels Anonymous, and I have an idea for a short, digital Black Scorpion/Phantom Lady comic that will be a Patreon exclusive! So stay tuned true believers, I'll have plenty of goodies for all of you!