Quasirandom: Blog

And that's Dana, Teri, and Mike's time in the NIS Program. I've one more story about the triad, set a couple weeks later -- and that's coming up next.

I mentioned before that I tried several times to write this, using various permutations of these characters. In the first attempt, the Mike character was the young Quaker. Another time, the Dana character was the oldest, dating a grad student, and trying out for the International Math Olympiad team. Sometimes the Teri character was in a band starting to break out on YouTube, and sometimes a star athlete much like Sam in this version.

In all versions, though, the story was built around the image of three naked students huddled together for comfort and warmth during a mid-week crisis -- an ice storm, a student riot, a zombie apocalypse. (Believe me, you do not want to face the zombie apocalypse during your Program week.) (If you want that plotbunny for your own use, go for it.)

Regardless, this is the version I finally finished. And I'm still pleased with it.

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.