The Clitorides are open for voting. [ Dismiss ]

aroslav: Blog

3750 Followers

Another birthday

Posted at
 

There is some wisdom that I have gained through the years. I feel it is really incumbent upon me to share some of this knowledge. You don’t have to read it, though.
1. Never trust a fart.
2. See the doctor.
3. All the things they told you to slow down when you were young, you should now speed up and get on with it. Walking, talking, driving, sex. Would you just finish, please?
4. Yes, you need to brush your teeth. Again.
5. Plumbing leaks and repairs are costly. Keep the pipes flushed and in good repair. That refers to your biological pipes as well as the copper ones.
6. The pretend lover is every bit as real as the real lover.
7. When a woman says she likes older men, she doesn’t mean OLD men.
8. Use it or lose it.
It’s amazing that I’ve lived 74 years and have collected no more wisdom than this.

When is it done?

Posted at Updated:
 

This is number twenty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.


WHEN MY SECOND MARRIAGE went down in flames, so did my finances. That was back in 1986. My business was bankrupt, I was bankrupt, and she took all the artwork. I was recruited to bring my clientele with me and join another firm.

We were on the bleeding edge of publishing technology and I was the bleeding expert in the field. We went straight to work doing advertising and corporate communications for a number of Minneapolis area businesses.

I learned two valuable lessons from my four-year association with that company. The first, and possibly most important, was to never work for a crook. That was almost as bad as the second marriage that brought me to the company. An employer who withholds taxes from employee paychecks is supposed to pay that money to the Federal Government. When one discovers the taxes withheld were not paid, there is hell to pay—in the form of the IRS.

Ah well. We live and we learn.

The second most important lesson I learned from this venture was that there comes a time when a project must be considered finished.

The end.

I was working on a four-page corporate newsletter for one of our clients and was determined that it would be perfect when I released it. I adjusted the type, worked on the image positioning, and cross-checked the spelling with a dictionary in my hand. (This was long before ‘spellcheck’.)

My boss leaned over my shoulder to look at the computer screen and asked how long I’d been working on that project.

“A day and a half is all,” I said. Subtext: twelve hours on a four-page newsletter=three hours per page.

“It takes two people to paint a masterpiece,” my boss said. “One to put paint on the canvas, and the other to hang the artist. This project is finished. Now.”

Well, he didn’t hang me, but he did stop the constant cross-checking and trying out different layouts. In my mind, the project wasn’t perfect, but the client was absolutely thrilled with it. They gave us rave reviews and the business took off based on that project.


It was a lot simpler to call it quits on a corporate newsletter than it was on a book. My first serious attempt at writing a novel was Behind the Ivory Veil (available on Bookapy), the prequel to “The Props Master” series. I remember how incredibly proud I was when I typed “The End” on page 120 of my great American novel. I packaged it up and took it to a friend who was an experienced novelist.

He read it.

While I waited. It took about half an hour, at which time he said, “Wow! That’s really freeze-dried. If you added some hot water to it, it would be a whole book.”

I went home having my first real dialog with a character. And I started rewriting.

When I shelved the project some thirty-five years ago, it was in the fifteenth draft. It wasn’t until I returned to writing and started publishing my novels that I decided to dust off the draft and ‘finish’ it. Seventeen complete rewrites before I was ready to turn it over to my editors.

And it still wasn’t perfect.

I could probably have worked on that book for another five years and it still wouldn’t be perfect. But it was finished.

One of the problems authors face constantly is knowing when a book, a story, or a series is done. Some authors simply get worn down by their work in progress and quit. Others write the same story over and over. And a few just never get to the place where the story is finished.

That is one of the great parts of writing during NaNoWriMo. When I participated the first time in 2004, my only goal was to finish a book of 50,000 words in thirty days. And I did it. I also accepted the challenge by Google Blogger to write the book online. I blogged that first story, posting the material live each day. It was crazy, but it worked. I finished my story in thirty days. It was done.

You can still read Willow Mills on my Nathan Everett website, though it has never been published as a book.

I did my undergraduate and graduate work in technical theatre. I was a designer and technical director, and in 1976-78, I designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months before I got hit with my first life burnout. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.

The more I learned about the publishing industry, though, the more I discovered similarities between it and theatre. In theatre, a season is announced with dates and show times. Some amount of marketing is done before the show is ever cast or a set is designed. Then people are brought in to design, direct, act, and manage the production. Tickets are sold. And if you are lucky, an audience shows up.

The one constant thing about theatre is that on Friday night at 8:00, the curtain goes up. It goes up whether the lines are all memorized, whether the costumes are finished, whether the paint is dry, and whether there is an audience. The curtain goes up.

Eventually, I learned to equate my crooked boss’s line about hanging the artist with the curtain going up. You have to have a point at which the project is finished. That is as true of a book as it is of a play or a newsletter.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should rush to the finish just to have the project done. Even after that first draft is finished, there are necessary rewrites and edits. But it helps not to become obsessed with making the project “perfect” when what you really want is the project released. My editors and I take great care in putting out quality work, but we aren’t pedantic about it. As Pixel has told me, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

When I worked in computer software at an industry behemoth, I learned the rating system for ‘bugs.’ Severity 1 was a bug that stopped shipment. It was a crashing bug that made the software unusable. If it only crashed five percent of the time, it might be a Sev 2. And of course, there were bugs that were simply irritants and they were called Sev 3. Within each of the severity levels, there were priority levels 1, 2, and 3. They ranked the order in which bugs of that severity would be fixed.

In the same way, there are editing errors that stop shipment. By the time a book has made it through my editors, though, I consider remaining bugs to be Sev 3/Pri 3. They won’t cause me to stop shipment.

The project is done.


I know authors who carefully plan out what they are going to write with what amounts to a chapter-by-chapter outline of the entire story. Some of my stories have been planned with that amount of detail. On the other hand, there are authors who simply fly by the seat of their pants and don’t know what the next word will be until they have written the current word. Next week I’ll talk about “Planner vs. Pantser.”

Writer’s Block

Posted at
 

This is number twenty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.


“WHERE IS MY MUSE? I know she was here not long ago. She whispered to me in my dreams last night. But now, when I’m ready for her, I can’t find her anywhere. Where is she? Where is my muse?”

Starting back in 1987, I wrote a Christmas story for my wife every year. It was a gift she expected and that I delivered. Until one year I didn’t. It had been a difficult year and I was pretty stressed. My wife was heartbroken that I failed to give her the one thing I’d given her every year since we started dating.

The following year, I began my Christmas story with the words above, then wrote about frantically running about searching high and low for my muse, only to look into my wife’s eyes and see that she was there all along.

Aww. Romantic.

But I listen to writers frequently bemoaning that their muse has taken a vacation, abandoned them, or was giving them the silent treatment, and I think back on that time when life seemed too much for me to possibly put pen to paper. But it turned out my muse was right there where I left her.

Which brings me to the question of inspiration.

Simply because the muse is always present, doesn’t mean I’m always listening. We get in the habit of ignoring her. I think that’s what most people experience when they complain of writer’s block. They have not put themselves into a position where they can hear their muse.

Let me mention something else I think we’ve convinced ourselves fails with age. Yep, I’m talking about libido and the ancient quest for a solid erection. There are pills for it, chews, psychological counseling, and God-knows what else. Older folks mourn the passing of their hard-ons. But it does not need to be so.

It is far more likely that the dear old tallywhacker—or whatever cute equivalent name you ladies have for the pleasure garden below—will atrophy than that it will wear out. Yes, we get caught up in the issues of life—making a living, raising the family, paying the bills, pursuing the ten-point buck, or drinking all the whiskey under the bar. And the more we do that, the less we use the greatest source of pleasure known to humanity.

And it atrophies. Suddenly, we realize that those feelings we once had when a beautiful woman (or any woman for that matter) walked into a room are no longer there. The stirring in the groin is oddly absent.

In the same way, writers get in the habit of ignoring the muse. Then when they want her, they find her sluggish and unresponsive.

My own means of tapping into the muse is to drive. As I write this, I’ve just completed my annual migration from Seattle to Las Vegas. It took four weeks! It’s merely 1250 miles, so why did it take so long? Because I was listening to my characters talking. I would drive for two to four hours in a day, then camp for two or three days while I wrote down all the characters said. When I drive, my characters take over my mind and all I need to do is listen.

It doesn’t always work the way I expect it to. In the summer of 2021, I was busy writing Team Manager SPRINT and took a drive to let the characters talk. Oh, they talked, but it wasn’t anyone I recognized!

“Hi. My name is Bob. I’ll be your demon this evening.”

What???

Suddenly, I had a character I had never heard of before occupying mindshare that I thought was reserved for Dennis and his crew. And he was insanely funny. I couldn’t just start writing down the story when I got home because I had to get SPRINT written. But I started taking down notes as Bob kept talking.

I talked to my story consultant, Doug—the last story we were able to work on together before our camp in Idaho closed and he moved to Texas. We came up with all the different situations that Bob would find himself in over the course of 4,000 years. Doug came up with the tag line: “Bob’s just a happy-go lucky—mostly lucky—demon.” I wrote down all the notes while I was still writing the Team Manager series and in November, for 2021 NaNoWriMo, I sat down to write Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. The story became so compelling to me that I ended up having to write three volumes of Bob’s Memoirs. My 50,000-word goal for November ended up at 150,157 words. And that was just the first volume. All three volumes are now available as a collection by Devon Layne on Bookapy.

The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits his butt in a chair and writes. That’s it. It isn’t the degree of inspiration. As sports writer and columnist Red Smith is credited with saying, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” (Quoted by Walter Winchell in 1949.)

But the brilliance of National Novel Writing Month is that it gives over 400,000 people a year permission to make contact with their muse. And remarkably, nearly ten percent succeed in squeezing out the 50,000 words it takes to ‘win.’

Even if they don’t make the goal, they still have written more than they would have otherwise.

As I like to say, it gives them permission to stick a hand in their pants and play with themselves.

Do I ever get writer’s block? Yeah, I guess I do. Sometimes it’s because I’m looking for the perfect way to word something or I’m spending hours researching the mythology of an ancient Mesopotamian god and the building of his temple so I can place my demon in the right context. Most commonly, however, it is because I have a logjam of ideas and need to clear them so just one comes through at a time. Should I write story A or story B?

I often have a huge amount of storyline ready to write, but I need to set it up first and that could take days while I’m just bursting to write the exciting part.

Or, like with Bob, I have a whole story waiting to be told, but I have to discipline myself to finish what I’m working on before I start the next project.


Oh, I’m not finished with this subject. I think next week I’ll look at the question, “When is it done?”

Enjoy!

No Plot, No Problem

Posted at
 

This is number twenty-seven in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.


NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH (NaNoWriMo) is nearly upon us. This event started in 1999 when Chris Baty challenged twenty friends to create a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Six of the twenty-one writers succeeded. Since that time, the event has grown to more than 400,000 participants worldwide each year.

It’s a simple challenge. Write at least 50,000 words of a new novel during the month of November. It was so successful that Baty wrote an “instruction book” in 2003 titled No Plot, No Problem. Baty offers the following advice for would-be novelists.

1. Just write. You can edit a bad book into a good book, but you can’t edit a blank page.
2. Tell people. It’s about accountability. It’s hard to quit if your family, friends, and the local barista all know what you are doing.
3. Do 40-20s. Write for forty minutes and take a break to caffeinate for twenty minutes.
4. Work through the wall, like a marathon runner. It comes in week two or three, but if you push through, there is nothing like the exhilaration of week four.
5. Seek out other writers for camaraderie and support. Write where others are writing.

I found out about NaNoWriMo in 2004 and have ‘won’ every year since. This will be my twentieth year.

It took me a couple of years before I came up with a volume that I felt I could publish. I wrote the first draft of Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money in November of 2006. It was published in a paperback anthology the fall of 2007 and as a stand-alone paperback in 2008. It’s now (finally) available on Bookapy (and is also included in the Seattle Noir collection on Bookapy).

But when November approaches each year, I’m once again faced with the dilemma of what to write this year. I’m a little beyond “No plot.” I keep seeing the big “Problem.”

The big problem I have this year is that I have no idea what I’m going to write. This could be as simple as my April 2017 project. I’d just finished the last volume of the Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures and was feeling like I needed to get back to my roots, which included stories about artists. “I don’t know what I’ll write, but it will be art something.” That became the title.

The problem isn’t in having an idea, it’s about having an idea that will spark the level of interest that some of my current works have. I even sent some ideas to my editors and they were somewhat cooly received. So, why not open it up to you, my readers?

Strongman: A weak and not particularly clever kid decides to build his body in an attempt to stop the bullying. As a result, he becomes a gymnast with a strong body that he finds intimidates girls as much as it attracts them.

Take My Wife, Please: A kind of do-over, but before he accepts the deal, our hero insists that his wife be brought along with him, only to discover that in their teens they don’t get along that well.

Time Traveler: Guy walks out of class on the last day of college, finally free and is sucked into a time vortex of some sort, plopped down in a different time near the same location. He survives and manages to progress in his new time—possibly even finding love—only to be sucked back into the vortex and plopped down in another era. Over the course of several such adventures, he starts seeing a pattern of where he’s been, what he’s accomplished, and who he has loved.

Switching Places: Girl in 1969 bemoans having been born fifty years too soon and not being one of The Jetsons. Girl in 2019 bemoans having been born fifty years too late to be part of the revolutionary generation of the hippies. Somehow, they switch places and discover the era they wanted to be part of isn’t as great as they thought it would be.

Means, Motive, and Opportunity: Not a mystery like it sounds, but a MILF story. Writer in his forties meets and falls in love with a woman in her sixties. It’s a slow-blossoming romance as both are cautious, having been burned before.

Immortal Eternal: People suddenly stop dying. They don’t become miraculously young and healthy; they just don’t die. They try lots of ways to kill themselves, to no avail.

From Birth: Child grows up believing he is unloved and a bad child because no one will answer him when he speaks in their head, like he hears them. When he finally speaks out loud for the first time, his mother faints and cuts herself on a broken glass, dying. He vows never to speak aloud again.

And then there are stories that “I should write.” I’ve even started some of them. But I ran out of steam with most of them. These include the long-awaited sequel to A Place at the Table, the sequel to Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain, the fourth book in "The Props Master" series, Child of Earth, the original story I started writing when I was writing The Art and Science of Love, called Double Down, Pussy Pirates 2, continuing the SWARM Cycle saga of porn stars defending the earth. And one just suggested to me this week by a reader, a continuation of the "Model Student" series with the next level of Tony’s art and his family.

Have I run out of ideas yet?

Let’s not forget the number of requests I’ve had for a continuation of the “Team Manager” saga, for another sequel to City Limits and Wild Woods, another “Deb Riley Cyber Mystery,” the fourth volume of “The Hero Lincoln Trilogy,” the fourth volume of “Strange Art,” a continuation of “The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins,” or a novel length continuation of “The Burgundy Chamber.”

Or, perhaps it is the second generation of “Living Next Door to Heaven,” narrated by Brian and Danielle’s empathic daughter Xan.

Or maybe you have the perfect idea that I simply have never thought about! What I know is that I’ll be spending a lot more time working on an idea for November’s NaNoWriMo than I will be drinking pumpkin spice anythings. (I just love the fact there a fruit with an entire season devoted to hating it.)

Let me know what you think of these ideas!


I’ll be returning to the idea of NaNoWriMo in the coming weeks as November approaches. Next week, I think we’ll discuss “Writer’s Block.”

Writing Smut

Posted at
 

This is number twenty-six in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.


This entry of My Life in Erotica marks the completion of six months of weekly posts! When I started, you couldn’t have convinced me that it would go on more than a few weeks. And who knows how long it may yet go. I’m just glad you are along for the ride.

As most people who follow me know, I am an avid participant in National Novel Writing Month, or as it is popularly known, NaNoWriMo. I have been participating since 2004! Yes, this November, I’ll be participating in my twentieth NaNoWriMo with a record of “wins” (meaning I wrote over 50,000 words in each) every year.

But that doesn’t really indicate the scope of my participation. On two different occasions, I wrote more than one book during the month. I have participated in ten ‘off-season’ Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July. I wrote a play during NaNoWriMo’s Script Frenzy. And I’ve never missed finishing the goal, often many times over. The NaNoWriMo statistics page says that I’ve written 2,538,717 words during those events.

My own stats show that from January 2019 to today, I’ve written 4,624,445 words. My currently running “Photo Finish” series of six novels is more than 1.3 million. And more are coming.

Since it is September, that means it’s almost October and that’s NaNoWriMo planning month! Yes, for some of us, NaNoWriMo is the pumpkin spice of the writing year.

What does that have to do with smut? Over the past twenty years, I’ve taken part in many ‘write-ins’ and have joined several writing groups. One of the most common things I hear when I’m in a group is that when someone is stuck, they start writing smut. So, I asked a few what that means.

To me, smut is like… steamy? If that makes sense? It’s something written to get you hot and bothered maybe? The presence of actual sex is usually there but not necessarily. And I can’t remember what my original answer was gonna be but I write it cuz it’s fun. haha

Writers are pretty forthcoming that they write smut (even non-erotica writers), but this response shows that they aren’t that sure what it actually is. What’s more, I find a remarkable degree of innocence and naïveté among the writers of smut. It more closely approaches being defined as “naughty.” As you can tell by the quote above, there’s a hint of blushing when talking about it.

“The Hero Lincoln Trilogy” is now available as a collected set on Bookapy.com

I think when I started the Hero Lincoln Trilogy in Lazlo Zalezac’s Damsel’s in Distress universe, I was thinking of exactly that kind of smut. Lincoln was inexperienced in the ways of love, but had intense feelings for his sister-in-law and niece. They were the kind of things that were embarrassing because he couldn’t do anything about them. Getting him to the point where he could actually make love to one of them was filled with naughty acts and blushing. Making love in the first book is something that is a long time coming—so to speak.

A favorite convention in smut is to interrupt the process as much as possible. Each time the couple are about to get carried away, little brother interrupts, the phone rings, a man with a gun enters, or they suddenly realize what they were about to do and make excuses for it: "I didn’t mean to kiss you like that." "I just got a little carried away." "It didn’t mean anything."

In fact, one of the most fun aspects of writing a sexual relationship is building tension and frustration between the characters. By the time they actually get together, they are bursting. It requires very little actual description of sex to accomplish the arousal of the characters or of the reader.

A ‘friend’ many years ago was talking to my fiancée and me a few weeks before our planned wedding. She (being single) said that she knew of a couple who denied themselves all forms of sexual contact with each other for thirty days before their wedding. They were so hot for each other you could see it in their eyes as they said their vows. My fiancée thought that would be a great way to start our marriage: frustrated. I mean, so hot for each other we couldn’t wait to get alone.

I never did forgive that ‘friend.’

Another reason writers who don’t consider themselves erotica authors write smut is because it is easy. During NaNoWriMo, writers are driven by daily word count goals. It takes 1,667 words per day in November to make the 50,000-word goal for the month. I have often been with writers when one snarls in frustration, “I’m 300 words short! What am I going to do?”

The answer is inevitably, smut. Write a sex scene. It’s a middle grade fantasy story? No problem. You can cut it when you rewrite and edit. Sex is an easy 300 words.

I admit that I have used sex as an extender in a story on occasion. I know that readers build an expectation for their stories. With some stories on SOL, there is an expectation of a certain amount of sex. Why else would you be releasing the story on a sex stories platform? But the other two major expectations on that platform are frequency and length of postings. I can establish whatever frequency I want to, as long as it is regular. If readers expect a chapter to be posted every Sunday morning at 8:30, they will become upset if it isn’t there when they sit down with their coffee and Post Toasties Sunday morning.

I speak from experience. A chapter of mine got held up in the posting queue a few weeks ago. I don’t know why. It was in line and the status indicator said ‘Processing,’ but it didn’t clear the queue until half past noon instead of half past eight (Eastern Time). I received half a dozen messages before it posted asking me if I’d forgotten to post the chapter.

In fairness, the site does not guarantee a posting time. In scheduling posts, the choice is “Not before x time on y date.” It is not ‘at’ a specific time. It happened that day there was a hiccup and the posting was delayed. No big deal. Unless you were a reader expecting it promptly at 8:30 Sunday morning!

Readers also expect a consistent length for chapters. I will receive email from readers if a chapter of 6,500 words posts in a story that usually has chapters over 7,000 words. Yes. Really. What is the time-honored extender for a story? Smut! I can get those extra 500 words with a quickie in the backseat of the car if I need them.

So, according to my informal polling, writers write smut because it’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s quick. None of those things make it good, erotic, or an integral part of the story. For many young authors—and some older authors—however, it’s also a little embarrassing.


With NaNoWriMo synonymous with pumpkin spice season beginning, many authors are trying desperately to come up with an idea for their 50,000-word stories. Me too. So next week, I’ll talk about a credo of NaNoWriMo: “No Plot, No Problem.”

Close
 

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...

Storiesonline is for adult entertainment only. By accessing this site you declare that you are of legal age and that you agree with our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.