Plotting and World-Builiding are Interlinked And Can Help Avoid Cliches

Breaking News! "Road to Aquibonya" has been published on Amazon! It has already passed review and is being distirbute it on their sites, which can take hours. So ... maybe semi-breaking news ....


The Immortal slavegirls in “The Road to Aquibonya” are a great example of how plotting and world-building are interlinked, or can be interlinked, and how good world-building can help you enjoy cliched writing.

My original concept was to have a slavegirl who was magically cursed to be immortal and young, and to make any man she fucks revert to being physically 26years of age every time he fucks her. She's a practical source of immortality, so long as her owner keeps fucking her. Talk about a stable relationship.

But over time, as her qualities become known in the world, such a woman would inevitably become a commodity. She would be very attractive to rich and powerful men, who would probably do a lot of vile and despicable things, such as killing other rich and powerful men, to get their hands on her. And of course they'd keep her in chains once they got her, because they wouldn't want her to escape, and more to the point, would not want her stolen.

This implies a long and unhappy history for said Immortal slavegirl, kept in chains and raped a lot, because of course said rich and powerful men wouldn't care if she wanted to be fucked or not. That's why it's a curse.

Problem is, what we have there, despite the sexual element, is a pure MacGuffin plot, with the Immortal slavegirl serving as the MacGuffin that the good guy, the bad guy and everyone else wants to obtain/control. The story kind of writes itself, a pure damsel in distress line, and that's the problem. The stories that write themselves get written a lot, and are generally cliched and trite and dull because chances are, the reader has already read the story, or something much like it.

Then I thought, why not have a whole race of Immortal slavegirls? Instead of having just one rare slavegirl, have them be commonplace. Why not make them a part of their world, an element of society? They would be commodity, but a common commodity, hence not the MacGuffin that a single Immortal slavegirl would be. There would probably be an active trade in them.

I liked this because it led to some interesting world-building. How would having slavegirls that could make you immortal be a commonplace thing affect people and the nations around them? Especially if there were some places that had a lot more of them than others?

But with commonplace slavegirls that could make you immortal, and who really liked having sex, especially kinky sex … didn't just accept their lot in life as slavegirls, but absolutely loved it … I'd lose a lot of the dramatic tension I'd had with the single MacGuffin slavegirl. I had created the basis for an EXCELLENT party and an interesting world, but not much conflict.

Eventually, I figured that I could solve that problem by having a SORT of penalty element to their nature: make the slavegirls half succubi – hence their magical immortality power  – who have to be fucked every day before midnight or they turn into full succubi and they kill you by fucking you to death – yes, it's death by snu-snu! Even better, the slavegirl has to have an orgasm or she goes full succubus. It would make for a certain amount of difficulty in distributing them.

 This might not a problem with a single Immortal slavegirl, but what if you had a dozen of them?

Well that brings the dramatic tension right back into the story, and in an original way, I think. World-building avoids cliched plotting, for the win!

Is "Road to Aquibonya" a gamelit harem fantasy adventure?"

I pretty much finished the first draft of *Road to Aquibonya* yesterday. Just go a couple hundred words, maybe a thousand at most, to go on it. I never know exactly how long I have to go because I'm what writers call a "pantser" not an outliner. (A "pantser" is a writer who writes "by the seat of his (or her) pants" rather than doing an outline of the story and following the outline.) I actually do outlines of my novel length stuff, or stuff that looks like it will go novel length, nowadays, as it has certain advantages in plotting, but I'm still enough of a pantser that any outline I create changes as the work in progress progresses.

I have noticed that a lot of stories on Amazon are bieng sold as “gamelit harem” stories, or “gamelit reverse harem” stories. I am confident that Road to Aquibonya fills the bill as far as being a harem fantasy adventure erotica” story because damn: one magical guy, 13 half-succubus slavegirls, magical battles left and right, 8000-word sex scene, what the HELL else would it be?

But … is it gamelit? “Gamelit” seems fairly broadly defined: it is a story whose format fits fairly well with various tabletop and video games. Like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. I'm not sure EXACTLY what this means, that's the issue. I feel that my story's mythology fits fairly well into D&D and WoW, but it doesn't have exactly the same mechanics as WoW or D&D. But my character does collect mana throughout the story in order to have a shot at winning the battle with the Big Boss at the end …

..what the hell. It IS a gamelit story. Whaddya know. Sometimes just asking a question gets you your answer.