Side Characters

Side characters are one of the things I struggle the most with when it comes to telling a story.  There are so many things to consider - how much they effect the main characters, how much of their story I want to tell, how much time to spend on them, etc.  Some side characters become rather important, like Diana and Roger in Allison's New Life, some serve a purpose but we never see much of their story, like most of the characters in Sarah's Private Dick.

One thing that I've been trying to do lately is have more side characters. Venus School had Charity, Nick, Paul, Trina and Vanessa, even though I didn't spend a whole lot of time on any of them. Oh, and Mr. Winter (kinda love him a lot... he's back in Venus Aspiring by the way, which I'm really excited about). The various teachers, etc.  Some of them got more attention than others.  And for the rewrite that I did for Kindle, Hilary ended up getting some more air time.  Now that I'm working on Venus Aspiring, her side of the story is cropping up more and more as well.

Having side characters makes me want to explore their stories, which I can't always do.  I've been reading a lot of romance series lately where the first concentrates on a couple, but of course they have friends / family as side characters, and then the next book concentrates on a favorite side character from the first book - a friend, brother, sister, etc. And the series will go around through that entire group of friends or the entire family.  I'm planning on doing that eventually with Venus School in two ways. One will be through the school group of friends - I definitely want to write a novella for Nick and Fiona and one for Charity and Paul as well. The other will be through the Justin and Chris' group of friends at home, which is a bunch of yummy Doms that I started writing about while I've been working on the book this week. That will be a separate series and the first one will be available on Literotica, although it won't be out for awhile obviously, since I'm concentrating on these other stories first =)

Sometimes I skip the side characters, because I want to just concentrate on the two main ones.  I think it makes it... not unrealistic, but less complete.  Consequences is like that right now. I've had requests for something to happen between Dana and Jenny. One thing about writing erotica is that people tend to want all the characters to be getting it on with each other, but that was never my intention with this particular story. Dana serves a very small purpose and we won't be seeing much of her now that Jenny's had the push into depravity that Dana was trying to nudge her towards.

I submitted another chapter for Consequences yesterday, and I believe Chapter 7 came out on Lit today.  I'm still working on the next chapter for Sarah's Private Dick. I've been rather distracted from those two series the past couple of days because I've been really into writing Venus Aspiring and I like to use the creative juices while they're flowing! I'm hoping to have the next chapter of Sarah's Private Dick submitted by the end of the weekend.  Another thing about side characters is that having them tends to slow down the writing process because they sometimes have a different agenda from the main characters. Patricia decided she wanted dinner with Sarah and Derrick and WHOOPS off we are on a tangent. I think I've gotten them back on track to the main story line though and that chapter should be finished soon.