A few years ago, I tried to write some fairly serious fantasy, and just got bogged down in it. Rather than struggling on, I decided to clean my palate (as it were) and do this instead. I make no bones that the result is hardly great literature, but it's not really intended to be. It's a bit of fun, written as en exercise in not worrying too much about a sophisticated plot and complex characterisation.
Although it has, in fact, ended up with rather more plot than I'd originally intended, that relaxed attitude does inevitably show in the result. Essentially, the plot is an excuse to hang a bunch of sex scenes together and, of course, that shows. Given that the point was not to try too hard, that doesn't really worry me… but, yeah, I'm not going to pretend that this is a great piece of fantasy fiction. It's been fun to write, and hopefully, it's fun to read, but it's not meant to be any more than that.
The episodic way that it's written works well for the purposes of the exercise, but it does probably mean that it's best read the way it was written – an episode at a time, with breaks in between. Trying to read the whole thing all the way through, like a novel, would, I suspect, get boring rather quickly. Indeed, my original intention was that this would be a more a set of short stories with ongoing characters than a single story with an over-arcing plot, but that's not quite how it turned out, and some things have developed rather more than I expected.
The setting, of course, is heavily based on the default assumptions of fantasy roleplaying, with more than a passing nod to D&D and its off-shoots (such as Pathfinder). The city of Haredil is my own creation, but much of the background of the world will be familiar to almost anyone who has tried pen and paper roleplaying.
It has long struck me that there are significant erotic possibilities in the D&D universe, at least, once one moves away from traditional dungeon exploration. Understandably, nothing much is made of that in the core publications of such games, although there are some fan supplements that have recognised the potential.
In part, that potential comes from the way that D&D divides characters up into clearly defined archetypes. There are the character classes: magicians, fighters, rogues, and so forth, each with obvious personality traits and qualities which can be combined in interesting ways. Then there are the different races, which provide yet more possibilities, easily understood by anyone familiar with the genre. By contrast, in science fiction (or less derivative fantasy, for that matter), alien races are often more varied, and require greater explanation, even if we have a plausible reason for them to experiment with one another.
In D&D, there's also alignment, providing a third layer of defined personality type, but that's harder to make sense of in fiction, rather than in a stat block, so it's not something I've actively referred to in Sarlene's Touch. For what it's worth, if I were to try to put an alignment to the characters in this, I suspect the only one that isn't represented is lawful neutral, although the chaotic good and lawful evil characters are all pretty minor.
The character classes of the central characters are all fairly obvious, I suspect, and the only core one not represented anywhere in the story is the ranger. That largely comes from the urban setting – the druid was hard enough to fit in!
If the world has any halflings in it, they're nowhere near Haredil, but the gnomes fill that role, perhaps more than they resemble the classic gnomes of D&D. Having just one race that was the wrong size to engage sexually with humans was, for the purposes of this story, sufficient.
If I've taken the D&D setting as a baseline for the purposes of familiarity and for the other reasons given above, I have not felt overly constrained by the rules. This is a story, not a game, and while it's usually possible to work out what the spells and monsters might be, that's not always the case, and I've been happy to bend or ignore things where necessary.
It's also worth noting that, because this is only being written for fun, not profit, it leaves out a lot of sexual activities that don't really interest me. I'm somewhat conscious that this has meant that the only characters indulging in anal sex are the villains. It wasn't particularly planned that way, but, since I wasn't interested, neither are the main characters, and that only leaves a few of the minor villains with the opportunity. So it goes.
As I write this, I have not yet finished the story, although there are not many episodes left to go. Looking back over what I've done so far, there are, naturally, things I would do differently, but, given the purpose of generally letting the story flow rather than worrying about it, doing so would be somewhat counter-productive for me, at least for the moment.
I'm not going to say which episodes I think worked least well; I'll leave that to the judgement of individual readers. It's hard to work out which are the most successful; I'm particularly pleased with 10, 20, and 25, but they don't seem to do especially well on the blog. The most popular with readers seems to be 19, with 23, 24, 26, and 33 also doing well, but it's hard to say how meaningful that is, and, in any event, people have such different tastes in such things that one person's preference says nothing about anyone else's.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the non-sexual episodes, such as 8 and 12, have done least well, although that may be as much due to the vagaries of internet search terms as anything else. They're necessary to keep the plot going, but that, in itself, means that they inevitably don't do well in isolation. On the plus side, the remaining non-sexual scenes (44 and 45, as I write this) will be strong on action, which should keep things moving, if nothing else.
Given that the original plan was for a meandering set of short stories, the fact that Sarlene's Touch will, in the none-too-distant future, reach a clear conclusion, is a change from my initial concept. At that point, the story, such as it is, will be told, and I probably won't revisit it, or produce any kind of sequel. It has been a few years, after all, and I'll probably turn to something more serious next, back to what I was doing before I started this.
But, in the meantime, it has been rather fun. Hopefully, whoever is reading this agrees.
Fuinimel
Posts
