Quasirandom: Blog

I was an avid reader of alt.sex.stories.moderated when the Naked In School universe first developed, and the premise targets several of my reading kinks. It wasn't until I read Don Lockwood's stories, starting with Jared and Amanda NIS (available here on SOL), that I started writing my own.

Dana, Teri, and Mike Naked in School was my third NIS story, and it took several years to write as I tested out permutations of the main characters. It wasn't until I realized this was the story of the Dana from Intimacy going through the Program, that things finally clicked and flowed and finished.

This is a traditional iteration of an NIS story, with day-by-day chapters narrated by participants and no formal buddy system. It takes place about a decade after the NIS Movement started, looking at how an established Program might evolve. My real hooks, though, are the character relationships in an emotional hothouse and how getting stripped naked brings other secrets to light.

Because long chapters take a while to proofread and I just started a new day-job, posts won't be daily -- I'm aiming for every other day, but we'll see.

I have a strange writing quirk: the female lead in my original fiction is always named Dana Partlow. When writing for a commercial publisher I rename her in revisions, but in first drafts and for internet fiction, Dana she is. With one exception, in each story she's always a different character who happens to share the same name with all the others. If this confuses or puts you off, well, my apologies. It's just something I do that helps me keep writing.

(Okay, maybe "quirk" undersells that.)

I mention this now because the Dana Partlow of Intimacy is that exception -- this is the first of three stories about her and her partners.

For a long time, this was the story I was proudest of having written, under any handle.

And that's a wrap for Kiss the Girls. Yeah, it took a while for Dana to settle down and admit it, but she belongs with Nikki. But then, it took Nikki a while too, so they're even. At least they didn't hurt each other too much along the way.

FWIW, the setting is deliberately vague: the entirely fictional Riverton is somewhere in the intermountain west of the United States. The landscape best matches western Colorado, but really it could be anywhere from there through Wyoming, Idaho, to eastern Oregon (possibly also eastern Washington? --don't know, I've never been there).

Next up is a series of three connected stories, some short, some long. I should have the first one up in a couple days.

A short, shameful confession: my favorite line in Kiss the Girls is "Oh, Dana, you haven't fallen in love with a straight girl again, have you?"

That one sentence, including who says it, implies so, so much.

Kiss the Girls was my first completed novel-length story. The initial version was written in three days of white-hot daze, and had no chapters and only one scene break. It was, shall we say, a very rough draft.

At the time, gay male romcoms had recently become A Thing in YA novels, but lesbian equivalents were scarce-the few teen lesbian romances were played for the drama, if not outright problem novels. So I revised it into a teen romance, cleaned up the prose, toned down the smut (which actually strengthened the story), and sent it out to YA publishers. No one bit, which wasn't surprising given how whack the premise is, and so I trunked it.

Earlier this year, as I was putting off revising another YA novel, I pulled it up and still liked the story, and the protagonist, and the sheer doofy teenageness of it all. So I gave it another clean-up (including updating electronics to current technology) and heated up the remaining sex scenes that were necessary-to-the-story, and this version is what I'm posting.

I hope it gives you even a fraction of the fun it has given me.