aroslav: Blog

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

“WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?” asked the interviewer. I didn’t expect that one!

“I suppose because I haven’t died yet. I had a close call not that long ago, but I have a pacemaker now and it seems to be keeping me alive,” I said.

“No. Not why are you still alive, why are you still here writing this blog? This is the 100th posting. Haven’t you said it all yet?”

“Oh. I guess because two or three hundred people a week are still reading it. I kind of thrive on interaction with people and I use the blog as a means of hopefully sharing something worthwhile with readers.”

Last week, I had to learn how to use Zoom, so Mark Sawyer of “Twisted Vet USA” could interview me for his YouTube series. Normally, I sit in a relaxed gaming chair with a keyboard in my lap and a 32" monitor on the table in front of me. My computer generally stays closed and stuck a few feet away from me. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are all I ever see.

Learning to use Zoom involved detaching the laptop from my peripherals so I could open it and make use of the camera. That was a catastrophe. Behind me was my kitchen sink and stove—not an interesting background even if it was clean. I ended up getting a small camp table from my storeroom and setting the computer on it, facing the sofa and the blinds drawn across my front window.

But the interview was successful and the forty-two minutes are available at Twisted Vet USA.

There were a few things, though, Mark didn’t ask and a lot more I thought of later.

I mentioned the Model Student series last week as an example of my first erotica books made available in paperback. But I never mentioned the seventh volume, the Triptych Interviews. In fact, I’d pretty much forgotten about them. So much so, that even though they are found both on SOL and on my Devon Layne website, the book never showed up in my list of titles on my own site! I corrected that this week and all my patrons and the public will now find Triptych Interviews listed as part of the Model Student series.

I created the Triptych Interviews as a supplement to the fourth book in the series, Triptych, but it also parallels Odalisque. There are eighteen interviews, and they are each dated and noted with what chapter in the books they should be read after. It was a technique I used to get a better understanding of the characters I was writing about. It let me ask about things that wouldn’t appear in the story, but influenced how the character acted. I seldom conduct such detailed interviews, but in one way or another, I interview nearly every character I write about.

The Triptych Interviews can be found on SOL and on my Devon Layne website.

Questions no one asked of me yet.

I use the convention of having my alter ego Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) ask my alter ego Devon Layne (aroslav) questions. They are below as NE and DL.

NE: At what point do you think someone should call themselves a writer?

DL: Whenever they damn well please. The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits his butt in a chair and starts writing. I think it was Anne Lamott who said that if you wake up thinking about writing, go through your day making time to write, and go to sleep thinking about what you are writing, you are a writer.

NE: When did you start calling yourself a writer.

DL: That’s kind of a funny story. It was the first time I quit everything in my life and decided to start over—my job, my schooling, my marriage. I had to earn a living, though, and I could type 110 words per minute, so I applied to a temp agency and went to work as a secretary at a local home-building company. I’d been at my desk a week or two when one of the company execs passed. He turned around and stood in front of my desk.

“You aren’t really a secretary,” he said. “What are you really?”

I looked up rather surprised, and with all the courage I could muster, said, “I’m a writer.”

He nodded once and said, “See me in my office. I have a job for you.”

And just by declaring myself to be what I believed I was, I gained a very lucrative contract to write a programmed instruction course for new home sales people.

NE: You don’t think it was just because you were a man filling a typical woman’s role that he singled you out?

DL: No, I do think so. It was terribly chauvinistic. I took advantage of the opportunity, though. I was a convenient shortcut for management to avoid actually searching for a qualified training developer.

NE: That was back in…

DL: 1979.

NE: But it wasn’t fiction, right?

DL: No, I spent several years writing and publishing training and marketing materials, trade journals, software specifications, and articles. Most of that time, at least on and off, I was squeezing out time to write fiction but wasn’t focused on selling it.

NE: What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book?

DL: Think. Many writers don’t have a plan for what they write. They just write down an interesting plot point or character and then wait to see where it takes them. That’s okay to begin with, but you need to ask yourself, “Why am I writing this book? What do I want readers to get out of it?” Jot down where you think the story begins and what you want the outcome to be. Then write out the major steps to getting there. That’s all you need to start writing a reasonable draft.

You can follow the age-old advice: Write with your heart. Just let the words flow and check periodically to be sure the words are still flowing toward those steps you said had to be accomplished to get there.

Then, the second half of that advice is: Rewrite with your head. Never believe that your first draft is the best you can possibly do. Think. Think about the characters. Think about the story line. Think about the timeline and the crises, the obstacles that need to be overcome to get to where you want to go. Make pages filled with notes on how this is going to be different and how that book will change the world.

Then you’ll be ready to rewrite with your audience in mind. Be considerate of them. If you want readers, you need to provide something worth reading.

Finally, you’re ready for editors.

Don’t forget to watch the "Twisted Vet USA" interview on YouTube! Mark’s questions are all different than the ones I answered here. He did a good job as an interviewer. Next week, I’ll look at some of the questions that have been submitted and choose a topic to focus on!

A chapter of Soulmates posted this morning that wasn't supposed to post until 3/21 instead of 2/21. I have requested the webmaster to remove the chapter (which is actually chapter 23, not 14).
My apologies to readers who were rightly confused by having ten chapters missing between the previous and what was posted today. The correct chapter 14 is slated to post tomorrow.

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

SEVENTY-FOUR BOOKS. I recently compiled a folder of all the covers of my books and discovered there were a total of sixty Devon Layne titles and fourteen Nathan Everett titles. I only need one more to average a book a year over my life so far.

I was a pioneer in the world of eBooks, traveling to writer conferences and book conventions in 2000-2005 to convince writers, readers, and publishers that the future of books was digital. I’d already spent twenty-five years working in one way or another in the publishing industry. I was an early adopter of desktop computing technology for publishing.

I traveled around the United States training publishers and would-be publishers on the new and revolutionary desktop publishing technology, starting in 1986. My client list included major retailers, like Nordstrom, technology firms like Xerox, Intel, and Aldus, huge publishing operations like Hallmark Cards and USAA.

What a heady time!

And after fourteen years of that, I found myself working for a high tech giant promoting eBooks and eBook technology. I worked on the ePUB specification and was asked to finalize the spelling of eBook, with a lower case e and a capital B.

But through all that time and more, I’d considered myself primarily a writer. I wrote my first novel in 1979, but had hundreds of pages of other stories, plays, and non-fiction instructional books even before that.

Finally, in 2007, two partners and I created a boutique hybrid publishing company called Long Tale Press. As part of our launch, to show we were for real, we each contributed one of our own novels for editing and correction by the other two partners and published that book. So, my first paperback book, For Blood or Money by Nathan Everett, was released to the public. And it sold a few hundred copies!

All of my Nathan Everett novels since have been produced in paperback. No matter how much I promoted eBooks, people still considered real books to be printed on paper.

But people weren’t as willing to purchase paper versions of Devon Layne’s erotica. In fact, eBooks opened up a huge market for erotica (even among men) because readers no longer needed to hold a book with a bodice-ripper cover and let everyone know what they were reading! So most, though not all, of my Devon Layne books were produced only as eBooks. And all seventy-four titles are all still available as eBooks at Bookapy—both the Devon Layne and the Nathan Everett books.

After noting that the last couple of paperback erotica I created sold only the five or so that I ordered and gave to friends, I quit producing erotica in paper. But I’m seventy-five years old, and it bothers me that I don’t have a shelf that holds a copy of each of my books.

Yes, vanity, thy name is Author.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, the big business of vanity press became popular in the publishing industry. It had been around for some time with Vantage Press, Exposition Press, Dorrance Publishing, and Pageant Press making their mark as early as the mid-fifties. You might know I wrote my first full-length novel in 1979, and I was subscribing to everything I could get my hands on that would help me get published. The Writer’s Digest, Publisher’s Weekly, The Writer’s Market, and others as they crossed my path. Every issue had huge advertisements from vanity publishers.

“We can publish your 200-page manuscript for just $2,500! Become a published author today!”

The entire process was looked down upon by the ‘reputable publishing industry.’ It was considered the last resort of those whose work was not good enough to attract a ‘real’ publisher. But the process had been well-known for centuries! It might surprise you to discover Charles Dickens paid to have A Christmas Carol published in 1843. Walt Whitman paid to have Leaves of Grass published in 1855. Even the great patriot Thomas Paine paid to have Common Sense published in 1776.

The list goes on and on: The Joy of Cooking, Swan ‘s Way, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, To the Lighthouse, Gadsby. All proof that vanity press was used for more than the author’s vanity.

Of course, there is far less stigma attached to ‘self-publishing’ these days. In fact, the commercial publishing industry with names like Macmillan, Scholastic, Penguin, and Random House, has not grown significantly in the past twenty years, when compared to the number of books published in the US, topping two million a year. The vast majority of those books are self-published, usually in eBook form.

That brings me to my great vanity project. Over the next several years, I intend to release a “Signature Edition” of each of my books. Each of the paperback books will include a digitally signed photo of the author as well as an exclusive interview, found only in the Signature Edition. In the interview, Devon Layne describes what inspired the particular book, how it was developed, and background about the author’s life.

The first book in this Signature Collection released this week, appropriately on Valentine’s Day. You will be able to purchase the paperback on nearly any online platform for just $25. I’ve already bought my copy. So far, I can confirm the Soulmates paperback is available at Barnes and Noble. Amazon, in its usual obstructive way, released the eBook a day early, but held the paperback until the 14th. Nonetheless, you should be able to acquire Soulmates Signature Edition at most vendors in the world once they catch up with what has been released by Ingram. That means it can also be ordered from most brick and mortar bookstores, too.

Soulmates is a new release. I have a total of 74 Devon Layne and Nathan Everett titles so far and am continuing to write. All new paperback editions will be part of the Signature Collection. I will continue to release new editions of all my books at the rate of about one every other month. Sometimes more frequently if I’m inspired. For those books that have already been published in paperback, I’ll remove the previous version when the signature edition is released.

Is it vanity that leads me to make this new collection?

Absolutely. I invite you to purchase your favorites, but once my copy is on my shelf, I won’t be paying attention to other sales. I thank you for your continued support, whether through your comments and voting on SOL, through this new collection, through purchases from eBook retailers, or through patronage on Patreon.

Speaking of interviews, I was interviewed this past week by Mark Sawyer of "Twisted Vet USA" and that interview is up on YouTube now. Next week I’ll talk a little about the interview process and answer some of the questions Mark never got around to asking. If you have questions you'd like me to answer in an interview, please let me know what they are!

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

“ARE YOU STUPID?” she asked the cabinet nominee fiercely. Then, struck by contrition, she whispered, “I’m sorry. That was brutal, rude, and unkind. I shouldn’t have said it. You must get tired of people always asking that.”

I absolutely love this scene! And I have yet to use it in a story, though I’ve tried some variation or another several times. It’s clever, biting, witty… and wholly borrowed from an anime I once saw. I keep cutting it, even though it is one of my favorite lines of all time.

That’s what happens when I start rewriting and using my head instead of my heart. I have to ask if this is right for what I want to accomplish in the story. I could write another book with the scenes I’ve cut.

Sadly, it wouldn’t be a very good book.

In 1979, I started writing A Touch of Magic. I took my finished 120-page manuscript to another writer to read and he set it aside in about an hour. “Wow!” he said. “That’s really freeze-dried.” His assessment was that if I just added a little hot water to the story, it would be a whole novel.

I walked home, about two and a half miles in Minneapolis, thinking about what was going to happen in this story and how I could add some hot water. At a traffic light, a voice surprised me by saying, “If you’d just be quiet for a minute, I could tell you what it was like.” I almost stepped off the curb with the feeling of how close the voice was, only to see no one near me.

It was the first time a character talked to me. “Everything that exists has being only because someone has remembered it,” said J. Wesley Allen in my head. “Imagine all the things that have never existed because no one has remembered them. Yet.”

I’ve used that often as an example of a character becoming real enough for me to hear his voice in my head. But what it really resulted in was the prequel volume, Behind the Ivory Veil.

It was also the realization that writing the first draft was the easy part. My 120-page first draft flowed from my heart, just after the dissolution of my first marriage. I rewrote Behind the Ivory Veil thirteen times over the next ten years, then put it aside until after I’d published Ritual Reality in 2013. Then, like I’d done years before, I went back to Behind the Ivory Veil and rewrote it three more times before it was ready for editing and publishing in 2017. It took three more years before I was ready to finally edit and release A Touch of Magic, the story I thought I had written in 1979.

If you think I didn’t cut some of my favorite scenes in that process, you are sadly mistaken. I literally cut up the manuscript and pasted it back together in the days before computers. I pasted sections of the manuscript onto a yellow legal pad and wrote the new material between. Many of those cut-up portions of the manuscript never got pasted onto the yellow pad.

The entire Props Master series is available as either a collection or individual eBooks at Bookapy.

The ultimate cut: When I moved from a 2600 sq ft house to my 140 sq ft trailer, I had to reduce my life to less than 750 pounds. All those old drafts as well as countless others were on paper, and I recycled them all!

How does that relate to my current work in progress? As far as the timeline is concerned, after six chapters of Forever Yours, I’m at about the same place as I was in the first draft of “Sisyphus.” But I estimate that over fifty percent of the content is new. That means, of course, that I’ve cut half of what I originally wrote.

My favorite bits?

My original idea was to parallel the Sisyphus myth with occasional appearances by Greek gods, especially Aphrodite, the goddess of love. That in itself should inspire some pretty good love scenes between the goddess and my hero.

I decided the real story wasn’t the parallel with Sisyphus, but was the success story of a character and group working from high school forward to create a unique use and development of AI. The story really had nothing to do with Sisyphus.

Damn!

I really love working from myths to modern stories. The entire Props Master series, mentioned above, was based on creating a myth that would fit seamlessly with the existing body of Greek mythology.

I wrote an entire book of short works based on the myth of Pygmalion Revisited.

Bob’s Memoir is all about a demon named Bob who has lived for 4,000 years, and exposes his relationship to the gods of Greece, Mesopotamia, Israel, India, Indonesia, and China. Oh, with a stop at Easter Island, the Aztecs, and the Incas. I love working with mythology for my novels.

And I cut all that mythology from my rewrite of Forever Yours.

Some of the most notable and enjoyable parts I had to eliminate were the interaction with Greek gods, including the sexual dynamic of the goddess Aphrodite. I loved that stuff.

On an unrelated note, I have launched a project that will affect no one but myself. Next week, “Vanity, Thy Name is Author.”

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

“WRITE YOUR FIRST DRAFT with your heart. Rewrite with your head.”—Finding Forrester, 2000 film starring Rob Brown and Sean Connery.

Oh. Red Grange once said, “Writing is easy. You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.” That is writing with your heart. And, in much of the best work, it is what makes it flow and pulse with emotion. It is what I do when I sit down to write a new story draft in thirty or forty-five days. I bleed all over the page.

And then, I have this unholy mess to clean up!

Rewriting with my head is a bitch.

Traditional advice on rewriting a manuscript, I believe, doesn’t account for the complete change in focus of the story. You might find the following advice on any writing site or class.
1. Take time away.
2. Break your work and put it back together.
3. Pretend to be someone else.
4. Get feedback from an editor or writing partner.
5. Spend a limited amount of time working on problem areas.
6. Look for passages that need rephrasing.
7. Try color coding.
8. Ask lots of questions.
9. Read your manuscript aloud.
10. Print and read a hard copy.
From “How to Master the Rewriting Process” at "masterclass" online.

These are all really good steps that any manuscript should go through some form of. But they barely scratch the surface of what my rewriting process is.

My process starts with a blank sheet of paper (or Word document) and an outline of the high points of my new story. I find that the biggest problem most authors have is starting from the previous draft and trying to correct it. This assumes the basic structure and story are solid. Mine aren’t!

By starting with a blank document and literally typing in every new word I want in the new story, I have shed the skin of the first draft. I will read what I had before and write what I want now. Typically, the wording will be clearer, the draft will be shorter, and massive sections will be cut because they are suddenly irrelevant.

That includes my wonderful scenes of the goddess Aphrodite coming to Henry in the night to teach him about love and about the condition of the ancient gods. As Lyndsy told me in her notes: “I can see what you mean about removing the Goddess storyline. It may just be cluttering things up.”
I’ve removed it.

This rewriting with my head is hard work. It requires not getting caught up in side-trips I took in the original manuscript. It won’t be as fast a process as writing the first draft. I actually have to think about things pretty thoroughly.

Here’s hoping!

Of course, my Sausage Grinder patrons get weekly updates on the manuscript process, reading along and commenting as I write it.

Since I’m so heavily focused at the moment on the rewrite of Forever Yours, and just finished the rewrite and publication of Soulmates, I’ll continue with this topic next week, this time focusing on “Cutting Your Favorite Scene.”