Main Characters #
Will Derrie, Hugh Reynolds, Truman Jennings
Secondary characters #
Lucy Martinez, Nick Why can’t I remember his last name, Adam Derrie
Places #
The House, Will and Adam’s rented room on Durant
Crossovers #
Inspiration & Notes #
I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll toss it out again because it’s a fun memory. I spent a lot of my teenage years building out the Derrie family, mostly the older kids (Carey, Frankie, Jeremy, and Jake, for those of you who have read the extended SMUverse book Kith and Kin). In the robust family tree of the early canon, Will was this adorable but quiet kid brother, the “still waters run deep” side to Adam’s joking and merriment. I knew he was kinky and hiding it from his family (and himself, for the most part, save for re-watching the Lady Heather CSI episodes a lot), but I hadn’t really thought about focusing a book on him until I got this flash image.
As a lot of folks know, I’m not an image kid. I don’t think in images. I don’t see stories in images. I would not recognize Hugh Reynolds if I ran into him on the street because my brain doesn’t really know what he looks like except that he’s got glasses. BUT I saw this vivid image of Will Derrie (a shadow I knew to be Will Derrie; Will doesn’t even have glasses to differentiate himself in my mental playground) standing on the front stoop of an old school East Bay house, terrified of knocking because as much as he wanted to actually experience submission, he was also completely freaked out by the entire idea. The exposure of it. The being-known that might follow.
I’d thought it might be Lucy on the other side (Lucy is a very old character, though I no longer remember her entry point to the Derrieverse), but then it occurred to me that it might be more fun if Lucy was having a bit of a laugh and setting him up with someone else. As with nearly all of Lucy’s jokes, this would have a low thread of sincere intent running beneath it. And so I considered just who Lucy would care about enough to set up like this and why. Which is how we came to Hugh Reynolds. And the rest, as we say, is history.
