aroslav: Blog

This is number sixty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

LET ME START by saying: I know of no impending deaths, either of people I know or characters I write about. I am in good health and was given the all-clear by my cardiologist this week. Relax. A little.

What I am talking about is the death of a character in a story that so upsets readers that they have to sit back and decide whether they will continue reading the story (or watching the television series or movie). I know many people, for instance, who continued watching Game of Thrones, despite their favorite character having just been killed. I dealt with it in every season finale of NCIS in the first sixteen seasons. (Once they were no longer on Netflix, I quit watching.) At the end of each season, I had to decide whether the show was worth watching with so-and-so dead.

On the other hand, a typical response to a death in one of my stories—which are supposed to be entertaining erotica—is met with a lengthy rant and declaration that they will no longer be reading the story and have just voted it a one.

This has happened more than once. Deaths in my stories seem to happen out of the blue. Everyone is totting along joyfully and then all of a sudden X has been brutally murdered. It affects me as much as losing my closest friend would, because I have invested a part of myself in this character. I am so devastated that I cannot continue.

But we do.

Despite the number of people who write to me to tell me they read my stories to escape from reality, not to have their nose rubbed in it.

“I get enough of this on the daily news!”
“You’ve broken the contract with your readers!”
“At least I know how the story ends because for me, it ended today.”

And yet…

And yet, we are seemingly obsessed with having every mundane detail in a story the way it would be in real life. “That’s not how it would really happen.” I got that even in Devon Layne’s outer space fantasy story, The Assassin. “Actually, the tides would be so severe on such a planet that they would wipe out every living thing on dry ground daily.”

In my currently running serial, Follow Focus, there are many things to criticize. It's a historical novel, set in the early seventies. It cost me about five or six hours of research per hour of writing time. There were so many details about pay scales, cameras and film, open embassies, war, politics, and real estate that I was overwhelmed by the amount of research.

And what bit of the story was considered unbelievable?

“It’s called Toad in the Hole, not Toad in a Hole.”

A mistaken article.

But what no one is expecting in that story is for a character to die. And since the story is available for both online reading and eBook, I’ll give the spoiler: No one does.

Follow Focus and the entire Photo Finish series are available at Bookapy.

So, that all begs the question of why put a tragic death in my entertaining erotica stories at all?

The answer is simple. My characters become living breathing personalities that insinuate themselves into our hearts. I’ve sometimes told people that the characters I write are often more real to me than the people I meet. But as real people, I can’t write them without being real. And life contains those tragic moments just as it contains the first time making love to your one and only. Dealing with tragedy is a necessary step in becoming an adult.
I spend much more time exploring how the remaining characters deal with the death, are changed by it, and survive past it than I do describing the death itself.

It’s not always a death that drives this forward. It can be a loss, a breakup, a tornado, a failure. They all drive the characters forward.

And sometimes, they drive us forward as well.

We relive a similar incident in our lives and experience the emotions again. We gain the opportunity to deal with a life tragedy vicariously, through the experience of these characters.

I seldom set out to kill a character. I knew when I wrote Nathan Everett’s For Money or Mayhem that someone important to Dag was going to die. I didn’t know who or when, but that was the theme of the Seattle Digital Noir mysteries. When I realized who and how that character would die, I was devastated. It was a defining moment in my life. Everything I knew about life changed that day. My relationships changed. My lifestyle changed. My emotions changed. Nothing was ever the same again.

When an eleven-year-old little sister died in one of my Devon Layne series, I didn’t even know she’d died until the next chapter. I thought I’d saved her! And I was crushed when I found out I’d failed. That is as an author. I can only imagine that it also affected my readers, based on the number of emails I received.

Suddenly and unexpectedly.

The death of a fictional character opens both author and reader to forming a deeper relationship with other characters. It sucks us further into the story. We are either severed from it or we become part of it. We are emotionally invested in it.

Understand that I have no “justification” for the death of any character in any of my stories. Even in real life, justification of a death is trite and hollow.

“She was 96. She had a good life.”

No! She had a long life. She was miserable throughout. She was mean and heartless and no one was really that sad to see her go. Saying she had a good life is trite and meaningless. She left the world a better place because she was no longer in it.

There is no reason for a death in a story. It usually surprises me. It comes suddenly and unexpectedly and is a turning point for me as an author because I must give up or turn it into something that changes people. And no matter how entertaining my stories may be, how sexy the love scenes are, how successful the characters become… You do not read one of my stories exempt from being changed.

I’ve often read stories that have a depressed individual suddenly cured by having sex for the first time. Hah! It doesn’t work that way. Next week, “Dealing with the Incurable.”

This is number fifty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I ADMIT to being older than I was when I started writing erotica. I hate to say it, but if you’ve been reading my works of erotica since I released my first serial, The Art and Science of Love, back in 2011, you’ve gotten older, too. And as you get older, time starts to lose meaning. It might seem to move interminably slowly, or it might be racing past. 2024 is already a third over!

I find that I keep track of what day of the week it is by what is printed on my pill tray. Ah yes! It must be Friday and I’ve taken the morning dose.

I think just this short introduction answers the question, “Why don’t you write about people your own age?”

Monday, my houseguest left after a delightful ten-day visit. I don’t entertain house guests often. I looked at my calendar to try to figure out what all we did during that time. I guess I felt compelled to entertain her and my friends here in Vegas fell in line to help. If my count is correct, we saw six shows, had a champagne brunch, ate out for spaghetti and meatballs, sushi, and burgers, and toured Hoover Dam.

I struggled to get any writing done, even though I was uninterrupted all morning each day because she slept until at least noon. I have reached the undeniable conclusion that there is simply something about the presence of breasts in this bachelor pad that is very distracting to this old bachelor. Even if he is not actively engaged with them at the moment.

All the way back in the early days of my erotica career when I was working on the Model Student series, I recognized the distractibility of artists (including writers). By that time, I’d already published four mainstream novels by Nathan Everett and had discovered that when I was writing, I did not see or hear anything else around me. I was very much like Tony when he had earbuds in and a canvas in front of him.

In Diva, Model Student book three, Tony’s parents recite the story of his having been missing for an entire day back in Nebraska. When he finally came pedaling his bicycle into the yard, it was pastor Larsen who asked him what he’d been doing. Tony showed the preacher a sketchbook that was completely filled with the things he’d drawn that day. The entire concept of time had vanished. This theme recurs frequently in the series.

And it recurs frequently in my life.

The entire Model Student series is available as individual eBooks or as a six-book set from Bookapy. Paperback from other vendors.

It was a relatively new experience to be distracted from writing. In 2019, I wrote 1.14 million words. In 2021, 1.17 million words. In 2022, 1.39 million words! That’s well over 3,000 words a day for 365 days straight! My writing distracted me from all kinds of chaos around me. It was the only thing I could see or focus on.

This year, by the way, I’m averaging only slightly more than 1,700 words a day.

My word count fell off drastically during 2023. Not because I wasn’t distracted by my writing, but because the writing of Follow Focus, the sixth and final volume in the Photo Finish series, required five to six hours of research for every hour of writing I put in. And I know it’s not error-free. There were many things I remembered from my young adult years in the 1970s that I had to revise my understanding of in light of my research. Not everything was the way I remembered it.

It was also the 21-22 season, while I was working on the Team Manager series, that I became a fan of women’s college basketball—first of the American Rivers Conference and Simpson College in Iowa (NCAA Div III), and then of the remarkable Caitlyn Clark of the University of Iowa. (Not Iowa State as so many writers who don’t bother to research their stories have stated.) That made writing from November to March a little more difficult. I’d discovered a new distraction.

I’m determined not to let all the streaming service channels that I had to purchase for this year’s season control my life. I canceled all the subscriptions as soon as the tournament was over. Now I’m investigating which service I will have to subscribe to in order to watch some of the same players now that they are in the WNBA.

Um… Sorry. Got a little distracted there.

My point is… I think… that the older I get the more easily I become distracted. Especially by breasts inhabiting my trailer for a week. It did not require being actively engaged with said breasts to distract me—though that was also a distraction. Their mere presence in their unadorned glory (the typical state in the trailer) was enough to make me forget what I was working on.

Into the breach comes the outline. When I have two or three days in a row during which I am not writing, I have to spend half the next day reading at least the past two chapters or more and reconstructing my thought process regarding where I was going with this masterpiece. That happened with next Sunday’s release of Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. I followed my initial outline last November and had a draft of a little over 60,000 words. When I had to put it aside for a while, it was the outline I created that kept the book on track through an additional 30k.

Then I finished a draft of A Place Among Peers, which is still awaiting my attention to rewrite. A random comment by a reader of A Place at the Table showed me where I think I was still missing something in the current work and I’ll get back to it soon. Distracted. I started the next book in The Props Master Series, but about the time I received word in late December that I needed a few procedures on my heart, I was distracted from finishing it.

I determined to learn more about my craft—I’ve been doing this for forty years now—and become a better writer. So, when I started my current work in progress, I constructed a beat sheet outline that I revised and expanded regularly before I started writing the first draft, and have revised frequently since. I’ve found it extremely valuable, because while I was being distracted by breasts in my trailer, the beat sheet was steadily holding the story in line. Monday when my guest departed, I looked at the beat sheet and immediately wrote the next two chapters of The Strongman. I’m still only about halfway through the story, but I’m right on track with what I outlined as what I wanted the story to look like.

I don’t know if I’ll continue to do such elaborate pre-planning for future stories, but I feel that as I get older and more distractible by little things—well, not that little—a better and more complete outline will start to hold my stories together better than I can currently do when writing by the seat of my pants.

We shall see what comes next in May!

This is number fifty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I’VE BEEN MARRIED three times. That might not be the most bizarre thing I did for love, but it’s near.

No, as embarrassing as that fact is, I’m going for even more embarrassing. What could be more idiotic than a child’s imagined love? Let’s start with third grade, shall we? I was a less than popular kid, but I had a very active fantasy life. Playing a pretend game on the playground with my best friend Brian, in which we killed a huge whale, cleaned it out, and made it into a ship is just a sign that back in the fifties, we didn’t have cell phones. Inviting the cute preacher’s daughter to go for a ride in my whale-ship, though might have been taking it a step too far.

She thought I was weird. And she wasn’t the last girl who told me so.

You see, the weird, embarrassing, and totally off-the-wall parts of our lives are where creative writing is born. It is the author’s prerogative to ‘set things right’ in a story. This kid stumbles on an anomaly in the space-time continuum in which the space ships are actually living beings who could fly between worlds. He lives part time in the world of the space beings and part time in his third grade class at Kennedy Elementary and Junior High. That is until one day when he sees his crush, the preacher’s daughter, wander into that part of the playground and fall through the anomaly. Our hero jumps to rescue her, rallying his space beings to search for her and save her from an evil alien.

It’s no longer so weird that he could sail in a whale to the rescue of his would-be girlfriend.

Move forward to fourth grade—yes, same preacher’s daughter crush. I wrote my first novel for her. Must have been five or six thousand words. I called it Princes and Princesses. I don’t think it had much plot to it, but we were from different kingdoms attempting to find a way to marry and live happily ever after. Of course, friend Brian and a tall thin girl named Liz were the other prince and princess, so the solution had to work for all of us. I don’t recall there was much of a plot, other than the four of us riding through the forest on our horses.

Thirty years later, I turned that into a simple little fantasy story for my daughter, who loved to hear me tell her stories before bedtime. Oh, and the solution to the problem of how to be together came when they decided to build a castle at the four corners, where their kingdoms met. They could live there together and rule all four kingdoms from there.

The crush came to a slow end when she moved away after sixth grade. Being the naïve and religious boy I was, I said my prayers at night, pleading that my kisses would follow her and she would know I loved her.

Sigh.

Forty years later, she became Brian’s love interest and first girlfriend in Living Next Door to Heaven. The embarrassing crush of grade school was rewritten into a love story that kept the two together happily ever after.

This week, my new Nathan Everett contemporary romance, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, went on pre-sale at Bookapy and other vendors. It will release in eBook and paperback on May 5, when the serial will also begin posting at StoriesOnline.

Coworkers are a great source of embarrassing situations that are fodder for later literary endeavors. Of course, after about 1985, we started getting more aware of the perceived pressure of office romances and how we were contributing to a future “Me Too” movement. Office romance was often curtailed. I received a nice note from a website called Office Romance in 2003 that said one of my coworkers was interested in going out and to respond to this message if I was open to the possibility.

Nice. Neither person needed to feel pressured. The contact was completely anonymous. Neither party felt stalked. All I had to do was pay $50 for a membership to the site and they would pass on my message. Right.

I also had the experience of hiring my own boss. Or rather, I hired a co-worker who became my boss. That was a little awkward and I borrowed a great deal from the experience when I wrote The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. In this new book:

Erin is stranded in a new town after a short and bitter divorce and waits tables in a diner where she meets the man of her dreams; but Preston is a socially inept recluse constantly on guard against gold diggers. When Erin inadvertently becomes his personal assistant, a comedy of errors ensues that throws the two together—and threatens to tear them apart.

It’s not really erotica, but it is a nice contemporary romance with a little sex in it eventually. The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is available for pre-order now at Bookapy. Release date is 5 May 2024.

I was foolish enough to fall in love again—this time with an online friend. Now, the problem with me falling in love is that I always seem to attract women with "problems." Even my current houseguest is in the midst of a messy divorce. Not ideal circumstances.

Back about the time I started my travels with a truck and trailer, I met a woman online who was a fellow writer and invited me to join her online writing group. I did, and found her to be funny and charming. We both wrote erotica and shared bits back and forth. We even got into some role-playing of characters. All in the safety of our online relationship. And to the embarrassment of one of our group members who felt our role-playing was getting too explicit for the group forum.

But this Missouri backwoods girl’s life was becoming more and more complicated by the day. She had two daughters in high school and one married and pregnant. Her husband was a butcher and money was tight. She stayed home to take care of her ailing mother-in-law. Then there were problems with her teeth, a broken computer, trying to get her daughter a scholarship to a music school, a new granddaughter she couldn’t bear to be apart from, and a few arguments with her ex-husband over the married daughter and her family.

The times we had together online were great, but it became more and more evident that it would be a mistake to try to meet in person. But what fodder for a story! As yet it is unwritten, but I’m guessing there will be a story in which the obstacles are conquered, and we get together.

That’s what writing is about. Didn’t like the way the story ended? Write your own HEA ending!

Yes, if you have been following My Life in Erotica over the past 57 weeks, you'll notice that this week there is no new post about the writing life. I'm entertaining a guest this weekend and have simply not had time or mindshare to create a new chapter. On the other hand, I’m having a great mini vacation and plan a prime rib and mimosas Sunday brunch and a nice drive out to Hoover Dam/Lake Mead today. And there is other news!

Bedtime Stories for Grownups
Released today in eBook, only on Bookapy, Bedtime Stories for Grownups is a collection of Devon Layne’s short novellas that make great bedtime reading for couples. (Or more or fewer!) The four stories, between 12-16,000 words each, have been released individually on my website and at StoriesOnline, but this is the first time they’ve been collected together in an eBook. Here’s a summary:

100 V-Days
It’s a very bad day for Dallas. He’s been fired, smashes his cell phone, gets drunk, and then wakes up Valentine’s Day morning with the wrong woman in his bed. But that's only the set-up. He sees a bus accident and suicide, finds a distressed waitress who has been stiffed on a bill, finds a bag lady who has been beaten and robbed, and finally is jumped and mugged himself by two lowlifes in a truck stop.

And then he wakes up to do it all again! Valentine’s Day never ends—at least not until Dallas finally gets it right. 2015 Valentine’s Day Contest winner on SOL. 2015 Clitorides winner for Best Erotic Seasonal Story.

My Sex Slave
A long-haul truck driver with a few days off stops to see what a “bikini barista” coffee kiosk has to offer. What he sees is inspiring. He decides to role-play a pickup scene from his favorite science fiction erotica series, the SWARM Cycle. Surprisingly, the barista is willing to play along as his sex slave. For the long haul! This was originally released on SOL under the author name J-Hop, the writer name of a character in The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins.

Carousel
We’ve all heard of ‘seven degrees of separation.’ In this series of Valentine’s Day romances, we discover they are all just seven degrees from a Teddy bear. We also discover they are a bunch of cheaters when it comes to their relationships. Like on a carousel, what goes around comes around! This was my entry for the 2023 Valentine’s Day Contest on SOL.

My Brother Reads Incest Porn. zOMG! He Writes It!
Hillary discovers her twin brother Eric has been reading incest porn on the internet. But as if that wasn’t shock enough, she finds out he was the author of the hottest stories! What’s a sister to do? It starts out with her deciding to correct his misconceptions. “It would never happen like that. He’d actually have to... Well, like this.” Hillary has just stepped in over her head!

All four stories are available in one eBook. If you prefer to read online, they are still available here on SOL.

This is number fifty-seven in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“THIS WOULD BE BETTER if it had some ‘real’ sex in it.”

“We’d never let our daughters behave like that! What I want to know is, as parents, What Were They Thinking?”

“There’s way too much sex in this.”

“I can’t wait to see the coach get involved with Dennis.”

“What’s the message in this story?”

“It’s a bad title. It should be something like “Becoming the Assassin” instead of just The Assassin.”

“This story shouldn’t have a murder in it! You betray the author reader contract!”

“Brian should keep growing until he has about nine or ten inches.”

One old saying is “Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and they all stink.”

But sometimes we get really valuable advice—even when it’s unsolicited. How do you manage to sort through all the advice you get about writing erotica (or anything else) and separate the good from the bad? In my world, that has meant learning to listen—and then learning to ignore.

2016 had been an incredible year for me. I went around the world—in a literal rather than sexual way. My major opus, Living Next Door to Heaven was finished, as well as the Hero Lincoln stories in the Damsels in Distress universe. I was writing my travel memoir series Wonders of My World. I was looking through my lists of ideas of what to write next and none were exciting me. I decided to conduct a survey.

I didn’t have great expectations for the results of the survey, but I wanted to know my audience a little better. I used Survey Monkey to post a survey for free and announced it on SOL, where the majority of my readers were located. The free survey offer was for up to 100 responses. I had to purchase a subscription when I received 424 responses to my survey!

I was blown away. It was far more than I ever expected. It took all of September and October to begin to make sense of them all. But what I discovered brought me much closer to my readers. I found out how old they were, what gender they were, what they preferred to read, where they got reading material, and what kind of other erotica they liked.
An idea began to gel in my mind. Whatever I wrote next had to get me back to my roots on SOL. It had to be art something.

I put those words at the top of a page and let my mind run free. The narrator would be Art the artist whose last name was so strange that no one ever remembered it. In fact, it was French for ‘strange:’ Étrange.

I started writing.

The Strange Art series was only three short books starting with Art Something, but I felt I had really gotten back to what I loved about writing. And my readers seemed to think so, too.

I loved the whole concept - pictures rather than words but the words came. You painted Art’s surreal canvas with such flair and imagination. Morgan Le Fay, Arthur Pendragon and Annette as Lady of the Lake were bold characters but they had such a positive support structure around them. Parents and teachers – that’s how it’s supposed to work! –Cyssternius

Why?

I’d taken time to listen to my readers and discovered they liked what I wrote when I was writing what I really enjoyed.

Art Something and the entire Strange Art series is available on Bookapy and in paperback elsewhere.

I’d like to say all I have to do as an author is listen to what my readers want. I can’t. I have received some really poor advice from readers that I’ve followed—much to my detriment. The vast majority of my survey respondents (306) said they preferred stories rated as “Some Sex.” That’s what I felt I wrote. Typically, there was a long lead-up to getting to any “real sex” at all. In Living Next Door to Heaven, it was near the end of the fourth book, The Rock, before Brian and Whitney had intercourse. There had been an incredible amount of sex play before that, but according to some readers, it just wasn’t enough.

“This would be a lot better if it had some real sex in it,” was a common message I received, not only on that book, but on several that came after.

I listened—when I shouldn’t have.

Both the Team Manager series and the Photo Finish series have more sex in them than was needed. One of my editors, who I usually trust to be aware of when I stray, told me that Shutter Speed was approaching a stroke story! But did I listen? I lost a lot of readers because of the amount of sex in the series. Some of those now remaining might be disappointed that there is nowhere near the amount of sex in the last volume, Follow Focus.

So, how do you balance what advice to take with what not to take?

I return to Shakespeare’s sage advice. “This above all: to thine own self be true And it must follow, as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.”—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3. And yes, he put those sage words in the mouth of a pompous fool, showing good advice might come from any source.

First of all, listen to those you have asked for advice. Typically, they have nothing at stake in the advice they give. Nonetheless, weigh their advice against your intent. If they advise a different path than the story you want to write, think about what is leading them to that path. You may still need to clarify your ideas. You can’t really get good advice on topic A if you ask about topic B.

Second, identify your advisor’s triggers. I use the term much more loosely than popular culture does. Triggers can be both positive and negative. I’m reminded of the preacher who was asked about pills. He immediately jumped to the gos-pills and how the gospels talked about baptism. There was no subject that could have been addressed to him that didn’t end up being a conversation about baptism. This is just as important as a person who reading the word “abuse” assumes the entire story is about abuse and has specific issues already in mind when they first encounter the word.

Third, decide what’s in it for the person giving advice. On Thursday this week, the scores on six of my sixty-two stories went down by.01. Nothing improved. This is typically the sign of a reader who is upset about something I’ve written or implied. Therefore, without reading any further, assumes everything I write is similarly flawed and deserves his scorn—expressed by a low vote. You have to admire the person’s fortitude to open every story and vote it down, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. His vote, whether it changes the score or not, doesn’t matter. It is not a valid bit of advice for my writing.

You might assume from the above that I’m obsessed with scores, but part of my centering ritual each day is assessing all my statistics. I track the number of downloads, scores, and comments of each story, sales of each book, amount of money in each bank account and charges on each credit card. It’s a massive spreadsheet! But it doesn’t track “What I Did for Love.” Next week.