Daniella Revisited

No time to waste looking back. I’ve completed a first draft of my ‘Twenty-One’ Gavin McClain story, but it’s going to remain in its raw state for a while. The reason, already in my head, was reinforced by a tweet I received a couple of days back from one Daniel Q. Steele, urging me as follows: ‘keep turning out copy for readers to buy… prolific is profitable’. Thanks for the wisdom, my friend. Copy needs to be made available and soon. I’ve done plenty of bitching and moaning about the lack of time available to me to write, but it didn’t help a jot. Strange that. So here I am using my bitching-and-moaning-time to write.

It’ll be a while until I complete the Gavin quartet, but another set of stories—my ‘Daniella’ tales—is nearer completion and once it’s done, then the pool of Jake Malden titles available to buy will swell to four. Hoorah. Two ‘Daniella’ stories are completed, but they’ve always required a third to bring the eponymous heroine’s character arc to a satisfactory conclusion. So hello again feisty sub Daniella Blanchford and greetings also to her DIY bdsm-enthusiast-lover Eric Lehaine. Those surnames may change. 

Time management is the bane of this writer’s life, so indulge me if I use this blog entry as a way of getting my head back around the story-so-far and of working out its possible future direction. Then tomorrow I can dust down the first two stories and shape the third. Splendid.

Story one—‘Daniella Bound’. Starts with a naked girl tied to a chair and a suave male in charge of the remotely-controlled vibrator inside her. Point-of-view bounces back and forth between the two. Daniella is confused at how her initially tender lover is now tormenting her with control-and-denial games, simultaneously ‘pissed-off and turned-on’—I’m sure I used that phrase somewhere in the story. Eric has his own secret agenda for seducing and corrupting Daniella, connected to a business-deal-gone-wrong with her father and readers are soon complicit with him in his wickedness. He teases, dominates and fucks-with-extreme-raunchiness. 

However a turn-about occurs during the sexy proceedings. Eric is affected by the rapport established between himself and Daniella during the seduction and suffers an unexpected bout of post-coital guilt. Daniella has guessed at the reasons behind his ungentlemanly behaviour and calls him on it. She’s fuming at him, but inwardly acknowledges that she’s had two of the most intense orgasms of her young life. She’s also got a beef with her father, so doesn’t mind indulging Eric’s fantasy. Rather than walk out, she turns seductress and suggests that he spend the rest of the weekend making good on all his sexual big-talk while he was fucking her. Therefore…

Story two, ‘Daniella Defiled’, begins with the heroine having gained a psychological edge, one which Eric is eager to counter. The second story is more or less entirely based on the erotic events of a single Saturday and on Eric’s contract (I wrote this long before I knew of a similar contract drawn up by anyone called Christian Grey) with Daniella that she follows his instructions to the letter or forfeit the rest of their wicked weekend. It’s all highly explicit sub/dom stuff and full of naughty surprises, but is much more about an unspoken struggle between them for psychological supremacy. Eric’s war is more to do with his own unacknowledged feelings for Daniella; he is thrown off his game by the fact that she takes everything he metes out to her and owns it. I’ve always liked this girl from the first time Eric tied her up.

The chapter is all about the growing connection between these two and culminates in Daniella tearing up the contract; Eric must choose between kicking her out of his life or taking her on a proper date, thereby acknowledging that she’s more to him than a hot fuck. It’s a plot development which has proved divisive on one of the free sites. Many readers like that Eric has the balls to face up to his true feelings. Some, however, feel that he is emasculated by his response to her actions. Obviously I side with the former opinion, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read the stories, so I need to reacquaint myself with how it comes across. My guess is that reader most likely to be irritated by the story is a self-styled ‘dom’ suffering insecurity issues. Ha.

Over a year ago I scribbled down an A4 sheetful of ideas on how the final story would go, but right now I seem to have misplaced it. It was based around Eric being tied and teased and had lots of flashbacks to the intervening time between that encounter and the erotic Saturday. As I sit here I have no clear idea any more as to how the final section will pan out, other than that it should lead to an equilibrium between the characters and cement their feelings for each other. The tie-and-tease still strikes me as a good way to go, as both characters are feeling their way through the realm of sexual power-games, rather than either having any clear idea of what is going on. Ultimately Daniella will want to experience Eric’s physical control again, but being the independent young woman she is, has a need to address the fact that he fucked her over in the first story.

That’s as much as I can say about it right now. My immediate task is to review the first two stories with a mind to how these characters develop in the final one.

Expect an update next week on how Daniella, Eric and my writing efforts are proceeding. I’m putting that in print so that I have no choice but to provide one.