SitC: All Decked Out - Behind The Scenes

Now that I've been able to publish the character introductions for Sex In The Cards: All Decked Out (ADO), I wanted to share a little bit of the creative process that caused such a delay. With the series underway, I feel like this is less "an excuse" and more a "fun peak behind the curtain."

I loved writing the original SitC, but I started it so quickly that I never had the chance to create characters for the story. All their motivations were "mysterious" and they were all basically just canvases for transformations.

Not that such a setup isn't fun, but I do like to think I've evolved a little beyond that. It is why the edit of SitC I am working on establishes a little backstory and a protagonist to follow.

When it came to ADO, I wanted to be more prepared - a sequel should always be bigger, better, and fix the mistakes of the previous entry. I wanted to come up with an interesting setting that could allow for better character vignettes. And I wanted us to have some sense of the players before things got crazy. Every transformation story should be about the transformations, but a really good one is about more than JUST the transformations.

What held things up was an idea I had which I thought would allow for some really fun character sourcing. As you know, I love public domain works. I love reworking them for new purposes and plots. And I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be fun if I found some characters from public domain comics who would end up playing the card game? Then I could also put up the comics to give an extra deep insight into who these people were."

This was too big of an idea, for a number of reasons. It wasn't hard to find characters I thought would be interesting to play with, but some of them required dozens of pages of comics to read through to get their whole story, or they came from fantastical worlds that didn't easily line up with the timeline I wanted - like the 1950s! More legitimately, I mean it would require me to either say that superheroes are running around in the world of SitC, or that there's fantastical space travel, or that The Oasis exists at some nexus of realities, or...

It was all getting too far away from the "grounded" realism I prefer my stories to work within, where the impact of having one's body changed means something because they will have to exist in the real world with that outcome. It gives the consequences of playing the game weight and stakes.

So I scrapped the entire idea, along with everything I had been working on to mesh it together, and started over. But that doesn't mean nothing came of it.

Three characters in the current story have echoes of the public domain characters I had expected to work with. Cindi is based on a character who worked for the mob in that comic. Akari was based on a successful spy and saboteur in one comic. And the old Young Romance comics were the "inspiration" for who would become Cassidy. Daphne is not specifically based on anyone. That's all I will share because I don't want them compared to those other creations any more than that.

With that decision made I was able to roll back the scope of The Oasis to a gaudy, bright, overblown Las Vegas casino - only since I've never been to Vegas in my mind it is more like the big ridiculous Atlantic City casinos I visited in my youth. Maybe one day I'll go get that research done.

Anyway, now that I have a clear vision and plan for ADO I'm excited to finally be getting it under way. I'll be posting about how to continue submitting card ideas - the existing Google Sheet is getting a little overloaded - when I put up the usual PDF with more of the rough patches sanded down.

Thanks for your patience, and for reading,

~dS