Nyx Nyghtingale
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Blood & Chlorophyll Ch. 16 - Reflection
🕑 Added 2025-01-15 18:00:09 +0000 UTCOh boy, was this an exciting chapter.
It's not often I get to sit for prolonged periods of time in hyper-sexualized environments like this, and it made writing last chapter and this one a lot of fun. I've been trying my best to show how easily flustered Alicia gets when confronted with this stuff, and that's why switching the POV to Katrina made so much sense.
Kat has a lot to think about. She's trying to stay in control, she's thinking about about how she used to use sex to both hunt and change the flavor profile of her victims' blood, all sorts of juicy backstory stuff. Most importantly, though, she gets to observe just how much Alicia is enjoying herself, and making it clear that she's pretty dumbfounded for most of the dance.
As for writing the dance itself, I had a blast. There's a lot you can do with strip teases like this, and it was also a great chance to spend some time with Alouette. While she's not going to be much more than a minor character, she's still fun in her own right!
I like that both of them being Regen Bards gives them something to talk about, and that her specialty being dance means Katrina physically can't look away without losing the Inspiration.
I'm also particularly proud of how I used the dance to give us more insight into the main relationship of the story. Kat is clearly turned on by the dance, though she also seems pretty keen on watching Alicia just as much, if not more, than Alouette.
Sexuality is one of those tricky things that can be hard to really capture in a book. More often that not, I feel like a character's sexual personality boils down to a switch that's either "turned on" or "not turned on" but there's so much more going on. There are different ways to experience sexual attraction, and there are different ways to express it. If you're writing a non-erotic book, it can be difficult to really dig in and explore those nuances, other than perhaps which things turn someone on. If you ARE writing erotica, ironically, it can be just as hard. How many erotic stories have you read that basically just boil down to "Well, we haven't tried this position yet."
Something I've noticed with my other series, Suddenly A Succubus, is that having a sex-focused plot can sometimes detract from the subtleties and buildup of sexualization. When Amara wants sex, it kinda just happens. Sometimes it happens quickly and without much foreplay because plot needs to happen, or she desperately needs to feed.
Here, since I'm writing a much slower burn, I'm able to spend a bit more time on the sexual nuances of my characters, and I'm really happy I waited this long to introduce some spicy fun into the book.
I love showing how nervous Kat got, and building the tension as she undressed and tried to set the scene for her first time with Alicia. I love writing Alicia as a flustered mess, clearly yearning for some hot fun but also trying to be respectful of Kat's boundaries.
Honestly, writing the foreplay was almost more exciting than the sex itself. I love writing cute couple dialogue, and with how sexually charged this scene was, I was giggling the whole time.
The sex scene was also fun to write, don't get me wrong. It's just, at a certain point, I don't have as much to say. Really, the most exciting thing was how quiet and personal it was. I've had lots of opportunities to write big, exciting sex scenes with SaS, and this was a good excuse to write something soft and intimate. They laugh, they mess up, they're trying to figure out how everything works. I think I put together something really cute, and I hope you feel the same!
Nyx <3
