My goal with the first "arc" of Saying Stay is to give each character a chapter to introduce themselves and let the reader know what they're all about. This time around it was Dawn's turn, which was a bit of a challenge, seeing as how she's seen quite a bit of action in the previous three chapters. As fun as it would be to write a chapter of athletic monkey sex between Mike and Dawn, my sex-writing-fu is not good enough to make that un-monotonous.
So I decided to really put Dawn's happy-go-lucky hedonist lifestyle under scrutiny. It's easy to embrace free love and following your bodily passions, and I think it's a good principle -- it's kind of what the whole story is based around -- but sometimes these actions and passions have consequences, and sometimes the progressive, liberated thing to do isn't so clear-cut. Dawn lives in more or less a state of bliss (or so it seems), but that bliss is dependent on a daily regiment several bouts of rigorous sex and a cocktail of chemicals. What I tried to hint at in this chapter is that the blind pursuit of pleasure can sometimes lead to dark places. That doesn't mean that the pursuit isn't worth it, just that we should go into it with our eyes open.
The scrambled, nonlinear format of this chapter is designed to make it better paced and to reflect Dawn's moment-to-moment frame of mind. I'm not entirely sure about this, and there's a voice in the back of my mind that tells me it's a gimmick, but I went with it anyway. Every once in a while it's nice to try new ways of telling stories.
Next up: A nice short story about two girls getting to know each other. Expect it out before the heat death of the universe.