Dungeon Mistress: Q&A and Wrap-Up Thoughts

THIS POST IS A WRAP UP FOR MY SERIES DUNGEON MISTRESS. IT CONTAINS A FEW SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS ABOUT THE SERIES. IF YOU HAVEN'T READ ALL FIVE CHAPTERS, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU GO BACK AND FINISH THE SERIES FIRST!

Greetings, intrepid heroes!

I've been meaning to do a little more reflection on my writing in general, especially as I wrap up series: thinking about how the process of writing them went, what worked and what didn't, what I might do differently next time, etc. I've also been mulling over putting Q&As out more generally. So I thought, with Dungeon Mistress wrapping up, why not do both? This series clocks in at over 70k words -- novella length, and really almost a novel -- so maybe other folks would like to read my reflections on it.

I'll probably do these as I wrap up other series (and maybe every 10-15 chapters or so for longer-running series like The Thaumaturge). If people don't engage, that's fine; it'll just serve as a public reflection from me that I can look back at a year from now.

Unless it becomes unmanageable, I'll probably also leave these posts open to comments (so if you're reading this like four months after it was posted and still have a question, feel free to drop it in the comments, I'll see it and will do my best to respond.)

Final note: I'm going to be honest below about what I feel like worked and didn't. I know that, for some people, hearing authors pull back the curtain and talk about what they themselves think could've worked better can spoil the story. If you'd like to avoid that, maybe skip over that section. :)

WHAT INSPIRED THIS SERIES?

I am, in case it hasn't become glaringly obvious by this point, an enormous sci-fi, fantasy, and D&D fan. I feel like I've read a number of erotica stories over the years that play with the idea of D&D as a veneer for sexy times, many of which are quite good. But near-zero of them (that I've read, to be clear! I'm sure they're out there) cast women in the role of Dungeon Master (or as the 'dominant' force in the interactions). So it felt like I had an opportunity to do something a little unique.

The most interesting angle about these stories from my perspective -- and what differentiates them from plain old fantasy erotica -- has always been when the lines between characters and players get blurry and become a pretext for the sex.

I wanted a way to dive right in on that. So was born the idea of Chris returning to his D&D group to find this hot new DM running a much sexier game than he had been, and immediately getting caught up in her manipulations and machinations, finding it all too much to handle, and getting in over his head. That first chapter practically wrote itself.

The first chapter was successful enough that it prompted me to think about what would happen next, and I really wanted to know two things: how were Liz, Mike, and Erin navigating Monica's game, and could Chris ever get a handle on the situation? So I wrote a bunch more to answer both questions.

WHAT WORKED WELL?

The different NPCs -- essentially letting Monica play a variety of roles, all of which were still ultimately letting her fuck with Chris and the group in different ways -- felt like an honest-to-god slam dunk, at least for me. And it was really fun to 'revisit' all of the characters in the finale session.

Expanding things from the Chris/Monica dynamics to the whole group was also real success, I feel like. It let me keep riffing on the same theme I started with -- blurry character/player lines -- with different people involved. That was super fun.

I liked the world that Monica and the players created. I feel like the 'game mechanics' were fun and let me riff on the sex scenes, creating different stakes, conditions, etc. in fun ways.

The secret admirer bit was a mixed success, IMO; I almost cut it at one point. But I feel like it kind of echoed the overarching blurry-lines theme reasonably well, it helped to explain why the other players might be going along with this (they're having fun teasing their friends, too!) and let me pull in Erin and Liz in different ways for the finale.

Speaking of which: endings are always hard to write satisfyingly. I know this ending doesn't wrap up everything tidily -- more on that in a moment -- but I do feel like I managed to land the plane reasonably well, here.

WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY?

The premise I started with at the beginning of the series was "one chapter = one session of D&D." That was a fun constraint to write under, but it rapidly became clear to me that it is a lot to try to cover this many characters all interacting in a single story.

I did my best to make it work, but that meant leaving a ton on the cutting room floor. I also wish I'd had more room to flesh out the D&D world the group created. And some of the sex scenes probably could've been fully-fleshed-out short stories in their own right -- but got used as foreplay to help tee up the 'main event' in one of these chapters where I wanted the focus to be on something else.

It also created an aggressive artificial writing deadline, especially for sessions four and five, when the relationships between characters really exploded, there's more voyeurism happening and two, three, four, or six people "on screen" at any given time. That all balloons the word count and thus the writing burden to finish a session each month.

So if I did it again, I'd free myself of that restriction. As an example, you can imagine how breaking the finale into 5.1 (Liz and Erin visit Mike), 5.2 (Cedwin and the Daughter), 5.3 (Meldrin and Diphylla), 5.4 (Enna and Cedwin, Meldrin and Fiona, Monica...'supervising'), and 5.5 (the final battle) would let me flesh each of those out more fully instead of trying to fit them all into a single release.

There also could've been lots more encounters involving all of these characters -- the mental struggle for Meldrin to regain consciousness and overcome the Night Queen's influence as a scene between Mike and Monica. Enna, finding some weird alchemist she has to convince to help her with the herbs she needs for the ritual. A much longer "Arcanatrix's sanctum" dungeon sequence, with more traps and riddles and the like. Perhaps more between-session stuff.

So I think it turned out well, but compressing it so much did make some of the story beats feel a little abrupt or rushed (in particular, more space to develop Liz and Erin would've been great to better set-up for the finale). This totally could've been its own 20- or 30-chapter series if I'd been willing to let it get more expansive.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Well, for starters, at some point I'm going to write a series about the campaign Liz runs, obviously.

How could I not? There's still so many unanswered questions! What's Monica like as a player? What about Fiona? What's Mike's relationship with the group like, in the wake of this? What's Chris's relationship with Erin like, now? What's Liz like as a DM? What characters do they all play? Maybe most importantly: how's the friend group even function, after all this? I want to know the answers to all those questions. :)

I do think I learned a lot from this, and -- as you might expect from reading above -- I'll probably abandon the one chapter/one session structure moving forward, in favor of giving myself a little more space to let things unfold more slowly.

I'm also considering a single-story in which Chris or someone else runs a one-shot game for the group (perhaps as an attempt to 'reset' the relationships with his friends, to try to 'fix' any of the broken relationship dynamics, to figure out what's going on with Erin, or more.)

But I'm not going to write either in the near-term soon. I've got Speedrunner to launch, The Therapist and A Hospital Stay to finish, and I want to take a break to let things ruminate and make sure I land on the right, appropriately-sexy story to tell.

In the meantime, I really liked the moments where the D&D mechanics influenced the sex scenes (charming the dryad, the Ceremonies of River and Grove, the transformation gem, and so on). And Speedrunner is going to have explicitly sex-focused LitRPG mechanics, so I'll definitely be taking what I learned from trying these out to that series.

GOT ANOTHER QUESTION?

Drop it in the comments and I'll answer it if I can. (Again, I'll keep comments unlocked on this for the foreseeable future, so if you're finishing the series weeks/months after this post and have a question, still feel free to ask!)