aroslav: Blog

When The Strongman ended last week, I kind of lied and said there wouldn't be another story until after New Year's. Rules dictate that we don't talk about contest entries.

But I'm happy to say that in a blind taste test, my story The Key to Eve was voted in third place, behind two great stories by fine SOL authors. So, thank you for reading and voting!

The story is appropriately 13 chapters. It has 26,000 words. Witches, vampires, ghosts, shape shifters, and an animal talker. This is a fantasy you won't want to miss!

As a contest winner, the story can be accessed only by premier members of SOL for the next six months.

If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

Yes, The Strongman comes to an end this morning. Some of you are applauding the story and some of you are applauding that it's over. That's life.

I this story, I tried to paint a picture of what it is genuinely like to be an elite level athlete struggling to reach the top of his sport. We seem to have the impression that all a person needs is talent and hard work to succeed. But that is not the case. No matter what a person sacrifices, there is no guarantee he will rise to the top.

But those people do succeed, often in ways they least expected or even rejected. Perhaps they will become wildly popular on Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent. They might become "Rookie of the Year" even without a national championship. They might be loved in "Gold Over America."

Or they might become an accountant.

Success in their field, even for the dedicated and talented, is not assured. Not unlike authors. Paul sacrificed relationships, family, and even love to pursue his dream. In the end, he found success where he tried most to avoid it.

He just isn't the superstar charismatic champion we expect our novel heroes to be or become. It seemed important, somehow, to tell that story.

What's next? I have two new stories, but they are not yet ready for release. One is in the hands of my frontline editor to get it ready for rewriting. The other is in the writing process during November Noveling. I don't expect either story to be ready for release on SOL until 2025, though my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon have access to first drafts as they are written.

I wish I could say I'm taking a long winter's nap, but I'm working my tush off, trying to get the next book finished. See you later.

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

DIDN’T I JUST SAY sitting down to an empty page was the hardest thing a writer does?

Well, sort of. It’s the hardest part of writing. A first draft. Any published author will tell you that between the first draft and a published book, there are many very hard stages.

For the most part, first drafts are garbage. Even if an author starts with a detailed outline or beat sheet, the product that results is far from ready to publish. I have said in jest on occasion that many things I have read on SOL look like the author spewed out the words and never went back to actually read what he’d written. Thankfully those stories are fewer and further between these days. Nonetheless, you may have read a book purchased in a bookstore or for an eReader that made you think this as well.

Over the past years, the role of an editor has changed, both professionally and in popular view. At one time, an editor guided the author in the creation of his work, all the way from concept to market. If there were areas of expertise the editor did not have, he hired people who had those skills. But the editor was the manager of the book from start to finish.

In a conference I attended fifteen years ago, though, it was obvious that the roles had changed. An editor (at a major publishing house) I spoke to said she didn’t want to see a manuscript that hadn’t already been looked at by “the book doctor” and had been cleaned and proofread. Her role was taking in a manuscript at the publishing house and ‘selling’ it to the rest of the staff. She had to show that it was marketable, there was sufficient demand, and that the author was dependable for a second and third book when this one was successful. Then she guided the book through the publishing company, including layout, reviews, design of covers and marketing materials, and budgeting for release.

When I wrote The Strongman, just last winter, I had a detailed beat sheet that showed exactly how the story would progress and how the characters would develop. But the first draft was still a disaster. So was the second.

The story still didn’t develop well. But I rewrote and carefully followed my beat sheet. I frequently stumbled with what should happen in the next beat and how to get to it.

Then in the third draft, I still found I was losing character development for the sake of the plot. When I finished that draft, I needed to send it to my editors for comment and proofreading. Sometimes editors disagree with each other regarding how things develop. Getting a final draft ready involved looking at and comparing all their notes. Some spellings for words and punctuation even differed.

Of course, having a ‘polished and finished’ manuscript still wasn’t the end of the path. I recently guided another author through the process of getting her book in the market. At one point she exclaimed, I thought writing was supposed to be the hard part. That’s when I responded, “No, writing was the easy part.”

The Strongman has just completed pre-release serialization and is now available as an eBook at Bookapy, and in paperback from most online retailers.

Ah for the days when a perceptive story editor could delve into a new manuscript and give the author a piece of her mind. What would that look like?

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I’m currently writing my November Novel, temporarily titled “Sisyphus, a modern myth.” Temporarily, because though the story is inspired by the Myth of Sisyphus, it is not a retelling, and using the name in the title of the actual book would be misleading.

I’m now some 32,000 words and eleven chapters into the new story, being read as we speak by my Sausage Grinder Patrons on Patreon. But what is happening in the background is a treasure that is difficult to share. I have a story editor who was willing to take on this project.

There are fifteen pages annotated in detail as she asks me what I'm trying to accomplish at every step of the way!

She points out contradictions, inconsistencies, questionable actions, lack of detail, lacking transitions, unclear timelines, character questions, and sex positions that were impossible to get into.

I’d finished nine chapters when I received and read her notes on the first chapter. How do I proceed? It’s necessary to continue the story from where I am, but having her early guidance will help me straighten out and clarify things as I progress.

At the same time, I’ll start cleaning up the first chapter and rewriting the scenes, taking into consideration what she has said in her notes.

Yes, “taking into consideration.” Even though I have a terrific story editor in Lyndsy, the story is still mine. I can’t just blindly do whatever she suggests. She is seeing the story one chapter at a time. I am seeing the whole story in my head at once. Some of her suggestions might lead me astray for what I want to accomplish further down the road. But they will still enlighten me regarding what a reader will see when he opens the book for the first time.

Rewriting and editing can be a major challenge. Sometimes, the editor will point out the inappropriateness of a line or phrase that just doesn’t fit. And it might be a line or phrase that I am particularly fond of. At that point, I need to decide if the line is so important to my ego that I’ll sacrifice that part of the story for it.

I’ve had some incredible story editors over my years as an author. Sadly, even when I’ve rewritten 90% of a story, as I did with popular books like A Place at the Table, City Limits, and The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality, there are miles to go before I sleep.

I have been a book designer for many years and still offer that service to select clients, in addition to myself. Making the book, whether paper or electronic, look good when it is opened is a skill most authors don’t have. Then there is the process of creating accounts for distribution, creating cover art, looking at the best distribution models, and setting up pricing, marketing, and even royalties. Perhaps these tasks do not carry the same fulfillment as writing chapters and concluding with “The End,” but they are necessary in the long run.

I’m barely getting blog posts ready by the weekend as I’m so single-mindedly focused on my new creative work, but I’ll come up with something new for next week. It may have to do with writing through depression. We’ll see.

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

THE HARDEST THING I DO is sit down in front of an empty page. From my conversations with other authors, I’m not unusual in that. We get this great idea for a story—maybe even draft an outline, but then we have to sit in front of a blank page and actually write the damn story.

Oh! Forget about the story! I just need to get the first sentence out! In fact, it would be helpful if I had a title. Just so I could write something at the top of the page.

When I talk to fans and readers, I often hear, “I’ve got a great idea for a story!” When I suggest they write it, it’s typically followed by, “I just don’t have any inspiration when I sit down to write.”

Wrong word. You have the inspiration. You simply aren’t willing to do the actual hard work of writing. When I talk about how many books I’ve written or how many words a year I write, people often give a little snort and say, “Yeah, but you don’t have a life.”

Maybe that’s true. I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I don’t feel right if I’m not working on a project.

In November of 2019, I wrote the first draft of A Place at the Table for my November novel. I was pretty pleased, though I knew it would be one of the books that would require a 90% rewrite from the original draft. I tried to enjoy the holiday season, even heading down to Oklahoma to see a woman I thought was my girlfriend. She said she liked older guys, but when she came to visit me up north, I nearly died. I don’t think she was thinking about that old! So, by Christmas, I was sitting in my trailer in an RV park near Tulsa, thinking about life and funny things that had happened.

During the summer, I’d been sitting with friends at the weekly social hour at Sun Meadow Family Nudist Park when the subject of how we became nudists came up. My friend Doug started in on a tale about freedom and lack of body shaming, then suddenly quieted and said, “The truth is, I just like boobs. Don’t tell my wife I said that.”

Next to him, his wife lifted her prodigious boobs and said, “As if I didn’t know.”

I started thinking that if Doug hadn’t told his wife that little bit of information, what else might a guy never tell his wife? And the title Things I Never Told My Wife crept into my mind. I set it aside as I worked on my November novel, but as Christmas came and went, I started toying with it more seriously, making a list of things he might never mention.

But there I was, sitting in front of a blank page with just a title in front of me. And then it came to me:

I met my soulmate when I was sixteen years old.
Of course, I never told my wife about that.

I ‘broke the page’ and was off and running. I pounded out the 82,000 words in thirty days. My editors were apparently as hungry for something to work on as I was because they shoveled the chapters back to me as fast as I could get them rewritten and sent off. I released the book on February 10, 2020 on SOL and on the 16th on Bookapy.

According to my logs, I was spending eight to ten hours a day most days in front of my computer writing, editing, rewriting, and getting the story ready. That was while I was traveling for four weeks through Oklahoma and Texas.

No life? Who says?

Things I Never Told My Wife is available as an eBook on Bookapy.

In talks I’ve given at writing events and conferences, I’ve often told aspiring novelists that the difference between a writer and a non-writer is that writers sit their butts in a seat and write.

Or as Red Grange reportedly said in the 1940s, “Writing is simple. You just sit at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Indeed, I’ve bled on a number of pages, and the results weren’t always pretty. Somehow, I keep getting excited about the next project.

Which brings me to the next project I’m working on—my November novel for 2024.

Getting the idea to write a modern take on the myth of Sisyphus was truly the easy part. I’ve always enjoyed mythology and have riffed on different themes in other works. They always require a fair amount of research and preparation, so I’ve been working on this for the better part of a month. But my first outline missed the mark significantly. That’s because I didn’t really understand who the
mythical character of Sisyphus was. My editor, Old Rotorhead, was not impressed with the outline and said my character sounded like a narcissistic sociopath.

Definitely not fun to write or read about.

So, I went back to the myths to try to compile a good picture of what this Greek anti-hero was really like. Most of us know that Sisyphus was condemned to push a rock up a mountain, but every time he neared the top, the rock would break loose and roll back to the bottom. He had to start over. But why?

As Rotorhead told me, the Olympian gods didn’t punish people for being bad, but for hubris, acting or presuming above their station. Indeed, I found evidence of multiple instances in which Sisyphus—apparently acting in the best interest of his city—went up against Zeus. He was known to have murdered guests, in contradiction to Zeus’s law of hospitality. That got Zeus mad, but not quite enough to punish Sisyphus.

But Zeus had a wandering eye, and when he abducted the nymph Aegina and had his way with her, her father, the river god Asopus, came hunting for her. Sisyphus was attempting to build a temple and fortress at the top of the Corinthian acropolis, but there was no water there. He traded the information of where Zeus had taken Aegina in return for Asopus creating a spring on top of the acropolis so it would have water.

That really pissed Zeus off and after chasing Asopus back where he came from, he ordered Death to take Sisyphus to Tartarus and chain him there forever.

Quick-thinking Sisyphus tricked Death into showing him how the chains worked by chaining Death to the rock. Then Sisyphus returned to the living. That was an affront to both Zeus and to Hades.

Years later, when Sisyphus once again died, he tricked Persephone into letting him return to the land of the living to remind his wife of her duties to her dead husband. Let’s say Sisyphus seduced Hades’ wife, which really ticked off the god of the underworld.

When it finally came to the attention of the gods that Sisyphus was still running around in the land of the living, Hermes was sent to drag him before Hades and Zeus for judgment. That’s what resulted in the punishment.

I’ve followed the writings of Albert Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” and have interpreted his punishment as living life over and over again, but always dying in the end.

The first line to break the page was “Another day, the same old rock.”

Now to write the rest of the book.

You can join my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon for just $10 per month. These patrons receive daily updates on the progress of this story as I write it. The updates are raw and unedited, and allow the patrons to read the story as it unfolds from my mind. It’s not always pretty, but it’s fun. Next week: “Writing Was the Easy Part.”

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

“WHERE DO YOU GET IDEAS? I just have no inspiration!”

I’ve published seventy books to date. I’ve never completely run out of ideas. But much better authors than I have attempted to answer or not answer the question regarding where ideas come from.

Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote: “It is different in every writer, and in many of us it is different every time.” –Dancing at the Edge of the World.

Neil Gaiman in a Q&A following his 2011 Interview at the Wheeler Center said, “For me, inspiration comes from a bunch of places: desperation, deadlines… A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together.”

In an interview at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, host Paul Holdengraber asked Director David Lynch where ideas come from. Lynch was far more vague: “An idea comes — and you see it, and you hear it, and you know it…”

Musician-songwriter Leonard Cohen in Song-Writers on Song-Writing had a great answer to the question: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.”

Of course, my own answer to the question is “All of the above.” I find ideas absolutely everywhere.

When I was searching for an idea for Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) November novel in 2007, inspiration came in the form of a five-year-old girl at a health club. I’d finished my workout and was waiting for my wife and daughter to emerge. That day, I was wearing a sweatshirt with a very stylized greyhound graphic, in honor of Valsora, our rescued greyhound. The little girl in the lobby was fascinated by the graphic and continually pointed at it.

“This is a greyhound dog,” I said. “They are very nice dogs and I own one.”

The little girl’s face fell.

“Oh. I thought it was a dragon,” she said.

Inspiration hit me square in the face. How about if I wrote a story about a hapless dragonslayer who didn’t know what a dragon looked like, where it lived, or how to slay it? Like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, my dragonslayer would constantly mistake a duck, a melon farmer’s bag, a tinker’s cart, and others for a dragon, always excusing himself from the damage he did by saying, “I thought it was a dragon.”

Who would make a good dragonslayer? The only one most people have heard of by name is St. George. I won’t write about the saint, but it’s possible that if people saw the name Steven abbreviated Stn. George, they would mistake Steven for Saint.

Thus, the initial concept for Steven George and The Dragon was born.

At that point, I needed a story to go with the concept. Inspiration is never enough. It needs to be followed with the work of actually writing the book. I’ll talk about that next week.

Steven George and The Dragon and the sequel, Steven George and the Terror, are available as a set or individual eBooks on Bookapy.

Inspiration for stories has come from many sources, not all as glamorous as being mistaken for a dragon. In 2013, I was working with a committee organizing the entries into the PNWA Writer’s Competition. We were talking about how people had a difficult time deciding what genre they were writing in, and often mashing two or more together.

As a joke, I said, “Next year I think I’ll write an Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventure.” The words were no sooner spoken than the idea sprang full grown from the head of Zeus. I began writing Redtail. It would be the story of a contemporary teenage cowboy who travels back in time to become his own ancestor and solve a 20th century mystery with information from the past.

It was not the first time I was hit by inspiration. Sometimes it was intentional.

I’d gone through a particularly dark period of my life and the response of my readers at SOL had pulled me out of the depression, encouraging me to keep writing. I decided I wanted to write something especially for those readers and assembled a list of characteristics they seemed to like. Things other than just sex. I found they wanted a long story—I am still getting comments regarding some of my stories not being long enough. They wanted a strong, heroic lead, but he needed to be an underdog of sorts. He needed to have a gift—preferably some kind of artistry—and some athletic ability. He would have multiple girlfriends who all loved each other as much as they loved him. And he must be willing to lay his life on the line to protect them.

Easy. I had all the elements, but no story.

I was driving along the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama listening to 60s and 70s music, as I often did, when I heard the 1975 hit by Smokie play: “Living Next Door to Alice.” My hearing was already starting to fail by that time of my life and I often misunderstood lyrics anyway, but I heard the title Living Next Door to Heaven.

Thus, was born my longest work to date at ten volumes and over two million words. (Three volumes on SOL.) The story was my top downloaded and top scoring story on SOL, thanks to those same readers who had buoyed me up when I’d been depressed.

Inspiration is all around us. It is nearly time for me to start my next November novel. I’ve been looking for a subject or title. I happen to like mythology, especially where I can add my own twist. I’ve done it with the book Pygmalion Revisited and The Props Master Series. I even made a list of myths that I’d like to address at one point or another. Prometheus, Cupid and Psyche, The Golden Fleece, Persephone and Hades, to name a few.

As I was looking at that list recently, I came across the "Myth of Sisyphus." Interestingly, Albert Camus wrote an essay about the myth and his existentialist assessment that lost hope led to despair, which led to suicide. It is only when people realize the absurdity of life that they are content to live, go to work, follow the same routine, accomplish the same amount, and commute home to the same life, day after day, that they are freed from the hopelessness of living. It is simply an absurdity.

And thus, the idea for my November novel this year was born. I will be writing about a reincarnation of Sisyphus, interpreting his rock as being daily life in an absurd world. Oddly enough, happy about it.

You can follow the development of the story with daily posts in the month of November by becoming a Sausage Grinder Patron of Devon Layne. And I will continue regular posts until the story is finished, should I not reach the end by November 30. Yes, there will be sex in the story, but the story of Sisyphus is not about the sex. It boldly declares: "Life is not a punishment; it is the reward."

Next week, my blog post will be about what goes on after the inspiration has hit. That’s when the real work begins and the “Perspiration.”