Writer's Commentary: Damsels Anonymous Volume 1 Part 1 (Patreon)

Happy Friday Patrons! Let's start July off on a kinky note with a writer's commentary on Damsels Anonymous volume 1, the start on my ongoing, sprawling Damsels in Distress erotic saga! Normally I start the month off with one of my kinky columns, but I have a lot of writing on my plate this month, as well as not really knowing what to write about, so I decided to instead jump in with this behind the scenes look at the story that started it all. 

I get asked a lot where I came up with the idea for Damsels Anonymous and I'm never sure how to answer. Like a lot of things, there never was one thing that caused me to come up with the idea to write my own series, but rather several things that all converged in my brain. It was probably around 2012-2014 where I first started toying with the idea of starting my own bondage series with my own original character like Paula Peril that would get into bondage scrapes and then narrowly escape only to get caught again. Paula Peril was my chief inspiration though I knew that I wanted to make the character my own and wanted her to be extremely different. 

As you all know, I use real models as the physical inspiration for most of my characters, though I saw that Felicia Fetters, the main character of Damsels Anonymous, is purely a product of my imagination, which is a bit true and untrue. At one point, many moons ago when I was young and still lived with my parents, I walked into the room to find one of them watching the SyFy Channel. My parents for some reason are addicted to the SyFy Channel and the bad B-movies that play endlessly on that network, and those films had a huge influence on me. Oftentimes low budget and high on exploitation, the SyFy Channel original movies would usually feature extremely attractive actresses and use any excuse to get them out of their clothes. If you read my writer's commentary on "Lara Croft's Vacation", you'll know that a SyFy Channel film was a major influence on a certain piece of that story, and it influenced Damsels Anonymous in more ways than one, including giving me the idea for several key characters.

So anyway, I walked into the room and it was one of these terrible SyFy Channel monster movies, but this was a quiet scene in which a very attractive dark haired girl clad in a sports bra and tight running pants was talking to a guy in a kitchen. I wish I could tell you the name of the film or the actress but I cant, but I was struck at how sexy and incredibly fit this woman was. Soon, in my head I started concocting fantasies about this woman as a tough small town Sheriff that gets caught and bound and gagged by the bad guys, and from that seed, Damsels Anonymous was born. 

At this point I didn't have a character name or even a title, but the more I dreamed up scenarios for this Sheriff, the more I wanted to write about her. I liked the idea of a danger prone Sheriff because she would be a much tougher and feistier damsel than a reporter, and being a cop gave her plenty of excuses to go snooping and get caught. Originally I envisioned Damsels Anonymous as a sort of one woman show around this female cop. There would be a supporting cast featuring some male characters and eventually some other damsels, but the Sheriff would always be the one front and center.

So I kept this idea at the back of my head for years, telling myself that eventually I would write it. At first I was going to write these as short, one off stories on Deviantart where the Sheriff would get caught, placed in a death trap or something, and then escape. Rinse and repeat. 

Last month I wrote about my Red Sonja story and my idea for Gia Macool as an imposter, and that's ultimately what lead to Damsels Anonymous becoming as serialized as it is. I love "kidnapped and replaced by a double" situations, and had dreamed up one story for my sheriff where she is kidnapped and tied up in her own jail as an imposter poses as her. Several variations of these scenarios bounced around in my head but then one time I found myself fantasizing about Gia Macool as a small town Sheriff who gets bound and gagged. At first I considered these ideas as a separate story, Gia would be a different Sheriff in a different town, but then I came up with the idea that Gia's character would kidnap my main Sheriff and pose as her. Not only that, but I thought it would be even sexier if Gia's character herself picked up where the other Sheriff left off and kept getting caught by the bad guys.

The seed for Damsels Anonymous was sprouting. 

Not to get too ahead of myself, but eventually I came up with the idea of Gia's character then getting captured and imprisoned and replaced by yet another character (we'll get more into that in the coming months) and at some point realized that I had a three book arc planned out in my head. Originally the plan was that the original Sheriff would escape and take her rightful place at the end of the third book, but as we all know, that changed quite a bit...

I became enamored with this idea. As a big fan of serialized storytelling (LOST, a heavily serialized drama, is one of my favorite TV shows and a huge influence on me) I liked the idea of telling one long bondage story over three books. Another thing about me is that I get bored easily, and I realized that telling a formulaic story where every installment is just a character getting caught and then escaping would get old, and I would eventually lose interest. With an ongoing storyline, I could keep things fresh not only for myself, but for my readers as well. 

But things really heated up once I came up with a name for my Sheriff character. I knew it had to be something catchy that told readers exactly what this character was about and what kind of stories these were, and once again Paula Peril was my inspiration. You know exactly what a story about a character named Paula Perill is going to be, and wanted that feeling with my stories too. Plus I wanted an old school character name like Lois Lane, an alliteration that felt cheesy, so the audience knows not to take these stories too seriously. Once I came up with the name Felicia Fetters, I knew it was perfect, and at that point I couldn't wait to start writing. 

I still needed a name for the town that she lived in. Like the character name, I knew the town name had to be important, but I didn't want to be too obvious and call it "Bondage town" or something like that. I went a little more subtle with the town name and called it Marston's Pointe as a tribute to Wiliam Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman and a kinky fellow himself. As for the series title, I debated on that too. Seeing how two books in the series wouldn't feature her as a main character, I couldn't call it "The Perils of Felicia Fetters" or anything like that. I tossed around names that featured the town in some way or the Sheriff's Department since every character would be involved with that in some way, but I also wanted the series name to communicate that these were books about bondage and damsels in distress, and those titles would be too vague.

Eventually I got the idea after talking to my partner about my intentions to write this story. She laughed at the idea of a whole group of women that kept getting tied up and joked that they should have a support group for frequent damsels called Damsels Anonymous or something. My partner also suggested my pen name, Valereya James.

And there it was. 

I loved that name, and every now and then I consider putting in a line where a villain jokes that the girls get tied up so much they should start a support group called Damsels Anonymous, but so far I've restrained myself haha. 

I still was intending on publishing these stories for free on Deviantart. Most of my stories on that site were receiving great feedback, and I started wondering if writing erotic bondage stories was something that I could get paid to do, but I had no idea how to actually go about this. Then at one point I was talking to a co-worker who told me of someone she knew who self-published erotica for Amazon Kindle and made a good bit of money doing it. This immediately caught my attention and I started looking into publishing for Kindle and saw that other authors were making money by doing this. At that point I decided that if I was going to write the Felicia Fetters story, I may as well try it for Kindle since it was an original idea of mine.

I still sat on my idea though until necessity forced my hand. 2016 was a difficult time financially for me. My partner and I had just moved into a new home, but her hours at work had been cut, leaving me to support both of us. Desperate for quick cash, I decided to get to writing Damsels Anonymous and to self publish on Amazon as a way of hopefully improving our situation.

I wrote the entire first volume over the course of a few months, and at first intended to publish it all at one time, but the more I read about publishing erotica on Amazon, it seemed that the only way to make money was to publish shorter stories on a monthly basis. Since I had been posting stories in chapters on Deviantart, I decided to split Damsels Anonymous up into segments and publish each monthly. 

There were other logistics to deal with as well. I knew that I needed an eye-popping cover, something that would grab reader's attention, but I had no artistic skills and couldn't afford to commission one or hire a photographer to make one. Once again it was my partner who came to my rescue. The artistic one of us, at first I asked her if she would be willing to draw a cover but she was hesitant. Thankfully, a friend of hers did some modeling, including dabbling in a few fetish shoots, and we asked her if she would be willing to pose for some photos. 

So, what I thought would originally be a quick and easy way to make a buck turned into my partner and I buying props and a police costume and then heading to Ohio to do a bondage shoot with her friend for my book cover. Thankfully her friend agreed to pose for free and even let us stay with her for a few days. I am very proud of the cover photos that we got, and always intended to do more shoots for each subsequent volume, but we never could get our schedules to line up again to go do one. Even just a few months ago when I posted the full photo shoot on here, we spoke with her about doing another shoot, but alas that's life. 

So with the book written and now a cover shoot done, Damsels Anonymous was ready to go out into the world...

This post is getting a bit long, so I'm going to cut it off here and we'll have a part 2 next week where I go into the actual writing of the first volume and my inspirations for the characters and scenarios we saw in that. I've reposted DA volume 1 with this if you all want to read to refresh yourselves, enjoy!