aroslav: Blog

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.

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

“I HATED THAT MOVIE so much I didn’t bother to see it,” said Grandma Sarah, to the consternation of the industry crowd around her.
Grandma Sarah worked as support staff in the industry in Hollywood for years. She typed scripts, wrote contracts, and generally ran errands for all the “important people.” Her sister, also in the industry, was the personal assistant to one of the top studio executives. Between the two of them, they saw a lot of movies.

It was the most quotable review of the year and drove many people to go see the movie in question to see if they agreed with her. And that shows the importance of reviews. It also shows that absolutely anyone can be a valid reviewer. It was not lost on any of her listeners that, even though she had not seen the movie, she had typed three drafts of the script. She knew what she was talking about.

Many people don’t review books or movies or TV shows or restaurants because they don’t believe anyone would be interested in what they have to say. That’s just not true. If a person has a reasonably intelligent means of expressing herself, people will read her review. They might not make a decision based on that one review, but it will go into the hopper as they determine whether or not to buy that product.

When I released my second long story on SOL, Mural, book one of the Model Student series, I was more than fortunate to have attracted some great reviewers who helped get me started on SOL. These people were known authors on SOL to start with, so just having their names associated with the story helped, but it doesn’t require a known personality to write a good review.

plus plus
A three-part longer story, the characters feel like real people even though they are in a pretty rare type of arrangement. They each struggle and fail and try again. Great long read with fantastic sex scenes throughout.

Let’s look at the elements of the review because it’s a good example of a short review that really means something. What is the story? A three-part longer story. What sets it apart? The characters feel like real people. What stands out? They each struggle and fail and try again. What’s my assessment? Great long read with fantastic sex scenes throughout.

If you followed that general outline when you reviewed a story, you could become a great reviewer.

awnlee jawking
An engaging and well-written story. But some of the writing, when describing Tony producing his masterpieces, is absolutely sublime.

This is a superb review that is even shorter, showing that you don’t need to write a whole novel in your review. This is the type of “blurb” I’d like to put on the back cover of the paperback—a well-known author giving his endorsement.

Of course, it’s great when a review goes a little more in depth and the reader gets the feeling the reviewer actually spent some time with this book.

Aaron Stone
Aroslav’s “Model Student” series is simply amazing. I selected “Mural” because it is the first story, but once you have read this amazing story, you should read the other five novels and novellas… Regardless, the adventures of Tony, Lissa, Melody, Kate, et al, are a wonderful marriage of art and racquetball and the story is a wonderful coming of age tale. There are good times and bad, but Aroslav has crafted a wonderful tale populated by compelling characters that are fun to root for and enjoyable relationships between these characters. High recommended.

Aaron digs a little deeper into the story by citing the entire six book series. He names characters who were important to him, the main features of art and racquetball, and the genre of a coming of age story. Any author would love to have a review like this.

Mural and the entire Model Student series is available on Bookapy and as a paperback elsewhere.

Why authors want reviews
If a book gets 10 reviews, the author receives a cryptic fragment of a treasure map.
If a book gets 30 reviews, the Bank of England will then accept copies of the book as legal tender.
If a book gets 50 reviews, Bookapy sends the author a free unicorn.
Why not help an author you love get a free unicorn by reviewing their book today!

Reviews have a direct impact on readership, sales, and reception. There is no question that one review affects another. Sometimes people want to jump on the wagon, and sometimes they want to show how different they are from others. Either way, the review is important.

An author can easily succumb to the feeling that he is just shouting into a void. There isn’t even an echo that returns to him. This is especially true on story sites like SOL where the author is not being paid. But even if the author is getting a royalty check every month, it’s difficult to know what people think of the book.

That’s not to say an author should obsess over reviews. Finding out what people think is one thing, but feeling defensive or as if he needs to change everything is not healthy. The opinion is that reviewer’s opinion, not universal, and not a judgment of the character of the author.

Which brings me to the next point about reviewing. In general, I think reviews should be positive, or at least positively phrased. And try not to be passive aggressive about it. I had a contest reviewer comment on The Art and Science of Love: “I suppose SOME people might like this kind of vulgarity.” That sounded like a comment from my ex-wife!

Having a review that is generally positive or positively phrased is not the same as lying about what you like and don’t like. You have to be honest in your review, but a short review along the lines of “This work did not fall within the range of topics I prefer to read. I’m simply not into bestiality and prefer a straightforward storyline,” is all that is needed. The reviewer doesn’t need to attack the character of the author, his parentage, his ignorance of fundamental biology, or his inability to spell. It makes it clear that this review is based on the reviewer’s preferences, not on some imagined objective standard.

By the same token, writing a review that just says, “This was great,” is uninformative, but still counts toward the author’s unicorn.

In your review, say what you are reviewing, whether you liked it or didn’t, what the outstanding items were that brought you to this decision, and whether you recommend the book to others or not. Keep politics, the ancestry of the author, race, religion, and random pet peeves out of it.

Write a review. You may become a reviewer on SOL by contacting the webmaster. You can review on Bookapy, Amazon, Goodreads, B&N, and other bookstores by simply writing your review and posting it. You can review on your social media outlets. You can even review in the comments section of a story, but those seldom get beyond the next person who is already reading the story. If you’ve got a review, consider putting it where people who aren’t already reading the story can see it.

Telling an author you like his work makes the author feel good. Telling the world you like his work will make a difference. Authors will silently or publicly thank you for taking the time and thought necessary to tell others about their work.

I mentioned briefly that authors shouldn’t obsess over reviews and feel that they should change something or that their work is of no value. I want to look at that aspect further next week: “Learning to Listen—and to Ignore.”

I'm aware that chapter 13 of Follow Focus has not posted yet. It is in the queue, but hasn't moved all morning. Might be a posting engine glitch, or it could be something else. As Rev. Mother Superior would say: "Possess your soul with patience."