I'm Lara, and so is the donkey you'll occasionally see here in commissioned works. Years ago, when it became clear to me that I needed to have an anthropomorphic character to represent myself, the choice of a donkey was an easy one. I wrote her a fictional backstory, based rather loosely off the ending to Syne Mitchell's novel The Changeling Plague (sorry if there's implied spoilers for a nearly 20 year old book!), and made it flexible enough that I could drop her into other worlds and other stories. But there was always more than a little of me in there.

Of course, it didn't take long before I allowed the jenny Lara's stories to be an outlet for more than just creativity. The donkey girl and I have spent a long while now exploring fantasy and sexuality together. Along the way, I've written a handful of supporting characters to fill roles and other points of view. The one you'll likely see here the most is Malakyp, a sort of shapechanging trickster entity that is absolutely not a demon. But Malakyp and the rest were always just that, supporting cast.

Looking back, what's funny is that I never would have expected the paths my created Lara would lead me down. As I've used her to explore fantasies and entertain ideas that I wouldn't have otherwise considered, I've gradually come to focus on the thin divide between humanity's civilized nature and the willful instinct of beasts. Lara -- the donkey -- is not a transformation fantasy, exactly. In her stories and my personal understanding of the part of my mind that births them, she's always been what she is. But that dividing line -- that boundary between man and animal -- how much would it blur for a person who is, in any real sense, both?

With encouragement over the years from a few others, including and especially the owners of a couple of rats (who know who they are, I think), I've gradually come to embrace the blurring of that line. We're all animals, deep down. And there is an undeniable power to giving the beast, the donkey, its say, especially at times and in ways that we hold ourselves up as the most civilized, the most human.

Which is a long way to say that Lara sometimes finds herself a very dirty donkey girl, and I'm all the gladder for it.