Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 01 - Reflection

This is, unsurprisingly, where everything started. However, I mean that in a few different ways. Not only is this the start of Amara's journey, but it's also the start of mine. Before SaS, I'd never written anything before, other than the occasional recap of D&D sessions. For years, I'd tossed around the idea of writing smut, but I never gave it any serious thought until I happened across a story prompt on a community discord. My mind started racing, the story kept expanding, and before long I had a burning desire to get something written.

Going into Chapter 1 was really intimidating. As a new author, I struggled with a lot of basic questions. How long are my paragraphs? How descriptive should I be? Do I start worldbuilding?

In the end, I tried very hard to focus entirely on Amara. She's the main character, after all, so it's important to get her right. I purposely avoided going into detail on pretty much everything else. I don't describe her apartment, I don't name her college, I don't share what she's studying, etc. The focus is entirely on Amara and her panic over losing her virginity to Nick.

I will admit, I had a lot of conflicting emotions in starting the story the way I did. Would it have made more sense to start the story at the party where she loses her virginity? I certainly could have retooled her transformation to start after her first time, rather than the morning after, but for some reason that didn't feel right. It felt comfortable to start at Amara's home, where she's alone with her thoughts.

If she immediately gets her tail, there's no time to panic about the fact that she just slept with her best friend after years of agreeing they wouldn't. The panic we saw early in the chapter felt relatable, it built up Amara as a character so that we have a sense of who she was before the transformation started. Plus, on a meta level, I like jumping into things, and it was fun to write the first part of the story while being vague about what happened. It's entirely possibly to not realize she's panicking about losing her virginity, and that was a fun mystery to put together.

Most of the rest of the chapter focuses on her libido and her inability to satiate herself. It was important that she try over and over before resorting to asking Nick over, and it was a great way to slowly build to the first sex scene of the story. This was another advantage of delaying her transformation slightly - we get to see Nick when everything is still normal.

The sex itself was very fun to write. I initially had everything happen faster, but got some advice to draw things out a little, to emphasize that Amara is new at this. This made more sense with my particular goal in writing smut - I want the sex to feel queer. When I write sex, I'm pulling a lot of feelings from my own experience, which has changed a lot over the years. I've noticed a pretty drastic difference in my own sex life when it was more straight vs. when it was more queer. I'm certainly not here to talk about my own sex life, though, so I'll spare you the details.

The last chunk of Chapter 1 is an absolute delight, and honestly it's one of the reasons I wanted to delay her revelation until the morning after. The thought of Amara jumping around, thrilled at having a sex life, all while Nick is desperately trying to tell her something, is something I still giggle about today. I love that he's so shocked he can't even tell her what's up, he's just asking her to look in a mirror because he can barely believe it himself. 

The last line in particular delights me every time I revisit it. It's simple, it gets the point across, and it kicks off the entire story.

All in all, this first chapter is really something special. Pretty much no other chapter has such a singular focus on just one character. We spend so much time in Amara's head, seeing her wrestle with her thoughts, and it was nice to see everything unfold so slowly. There's always a chance that I write a prologue at some point, detailing the events of the party, but I might just as easily never do that. This feels like such a wonderful start to the story, and I'm so happy that so many people have enjoyed it.

Nyx <3