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This is number 115 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I GET UP AT 5:00 AM. I’m usually down for my first nap by 8:00.
Naps are usually only an hour, but occasionally, I crash at 11:00 and don’t wake up until 1:00. And, of course, then I can’t get to sleep at night because there is so much going on in my head.
What’s more, I’m seeing this all around me—and not only in the septuagenarians and up. Young people look exhausted. Baristas look exhausted. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and policemen look exhausted. The grocery store clerk even looks tired.
Oh. I used self-checkout. Maybe that isn’t a fair observation.
But wherever I look, I see people drained of the will to carry on. I took the title of this from a post regarding the WNBA and everyone’s concern that Caitlin Clark has only made one of her last twenty-three 3-point attempts! What’s wrong with her.
The list of women's basketball greats who are usually 3-point sharpshooters but are currently hitting less than 30% is extensive: Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Marina Mabry, Kelsey Plum, Arika Ogunbowale... The poster of the list on WNBA Threads says, "All the WNBA is in a slump!"
It was Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks that summed it up: “’Cause we’re tired.”
I had lunch this week with my alpha reader Les and his wife, Marianne. We had a great and lengthy conversation inspired by an artificial intelligence character in my next novel, Forever Yours. Pythia engages in a conversation regarding the meaning of life. Les thinks I’m brilliant for thinking up the artificial intelligence and her answers to questions, by the way.
Marianne said she always wanted to write, but her life is made up of lists of things she needs to do. Empty the dishwasher, grocery shopping, laundry, answering a letter, visiting a son and grandson and great grandson. She felt the meaning of life was just her lists, and every time she scratches something off, she adds three more things to the list.
She expressed a moderate amount of envy that I ‘have time’ to write.
I’m not married. I have no pets. I have no debts and no job. I don’t have a collection of knickknacks I need to dust or display. While I’m in the Pacific Northwest for most of the summer, my routines are interrupted by visits with my friends and family, buying groceries and taking my turn cooking meals, walking the dogs, eating out, preparing dinner parties. I’m cooking Greek pastitsio for seven Monday, partly because I don’t have the opportunity to cook that often back in Vegas.
Otherwise, my life continues to be: wake up, write, nap, repeat.
I don't write for a living. I write to live.
The life can be exhausting, but I don’t think that is what has cut my productivity from a new chapter or more a day to about two new chapters a week. Something else is tiring us out.
I think one of the things writers—especially of thrillers—fail to take into consideration when they are writing about their heroes who are constantly on the go, is the effect of exhaustion on how a person thinks and how well he or she can perform. It’s as if all spies, detectives, agents, and politicians don’t need restful sleep.
Oh, but heroes are supposed to be perfect. No! They are supposed to be flawed.
What is more heroic than a newborn’s mother who has not slept in three weeks, is depressed, thinks her husband doesn’t love her, regrets ever having had a child, but who gets up in the middle of the night because the baby needs to be fed and changed? When the hero is too tired to climb to the top of the stairs, but does so anyway, that is working through exhaustion in a way that exhausts the reader as well.
El Rancho del Corazón, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven collection are available at ZBookStore. It is also the first part of LNDtH2 on SOL.
This is number 114 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
One of the biggest dangers of using slang, even when a character would normally use it, is misusing a term. I’m reminded of the woman who received notice that an acquaintance had died and sent her condolences via text to all the friends, ending the text with ‘LOL.’ She thought the text slang meant Lots Of Love instead of Laughing Out Loud.
Another problem is overusing the terms. In a draft of one book I wrote—Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose) Jackie the Beanstalk—two girls camping had received a couple of marijuana cigarettes from another camper. My first editor asked if I’d intentionally tried to use every term for cannabis I could find. I had used nearly all of them: joint, blunt, MaryJane, 420, doobie, ganja, weed, roach, and grass, among others. One problem was that most of those weren’t commonly in use by the generation of my characters. Not only had I overused slang in describing cannabis, it wasn’t even the right slang!
I corrected it, by the way.
Trying to make things proper when they should be eliminated altogether is another problem. According to a popular meme:
Quick question: Is it "for fuck sake" or "for fucks sake"? It's for a work email, so it has to sound professional.
I’ve been writing this blog for a little over two years now. It might be time to take a break, or at least not pretend to post weekly. I’ve missed posts in January, May, and June this year. It's also become difficult to estimate readership on SOL since the server move. This past week, with no post, I had a record number of blog views recorded. I’m guessing we’re subject to a robot invasion.
So, I’ll say the posts will be irregular this summer. I have no idea what will catch my eye as I’m traveling, but when something does, I’ll tell you all about it.
In the meantime, I’m working hard at finishing a couple of books and plotting my Halloween story for this year. I’d like to get those under control as my writing priority instead of procrastinating by writing clever blogs.
This is number 113 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
IF I’D KNOWN it would end so soon, I’d have started earlier and done it more often with more people. That was the story of my sex life. It’s incredibly difficult to find potential partners at 75 compared to 25. But I waited, was mostly faithful, and didn’t ask much of my partners.
If that sounds like an odd way to start talking about delayed gratification, I guess every coin has two sides.
The problem as I see it wasn’t in delaying fulfillment of a consuming goal, but of being oblivious to my own needs and those of my partners. I was the one who let work, hobbies, projects, and other people take precedence over the relationship I had at home. And so were my partners.
Back 40 or 45 years ago, I read a book called The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. The title comes from a famous poem by the poet laureate of my youth, Robert Frost, titled ‘The Road Not Taken.’ While the poem actually describes two roads that to all appearances are equal, the narrator eventually chooses one and abandons the other.
The book by Peck, however, describes two very different paths, one of immediate gratification and one that delays fulfilling one’s desires. When I read the book—and don’t ask me to quote anything specific from it because it was a long time ago and I don’t presently have a copy—I realized that this had been drilled into me from a very early age.
“You have to finish your homework before you can go out to play.”
“If you want that so badly, you’ll need to earn the money for it.”
“Dessert comes after you eat your vegetables.”
But nowhere in any of those adages did it teach the value of delayed gratification. Homework was not as important to me as playing with my friends. My father took out loans to buy a car. Why suffer through filling my belly with something I didn’t like and then not having room to enjoy what I did like? As an adult, I can place values on each of these things, but the principle was not what was taught as a child.
In Peck’s book, he attempts to teach that anticipation of the goal and putting in the effort to achieve it enhanced the pleasure derived from it.
Of course, in my youth and my adolescent drive for sex, it meant saving it for marriage. That actually transferred the desire from finding a sex partner to finding a marriage partner.
I’m not going to evaluate the choice, only to say that perhaps I’d have taken the ‘road not taken.’
I have mentioned the Living Next Door to Heaven series in several posts. It is my longest series at ten volumes, and 1,572,854 words. For this post, I decided to focus on the second book in the series, The Agreement. In this book, a group of freshmen in high school band together for safety and protection from themselves.
Everyone worried that as they started to date, they would lose control, as a couple already had to some extent. They create an agreement among them that places specific limits on what they can and can’t do until they reach a certain age. Those limits, while protecting them from actually having sex all at once, prove to be a testing ground for how much they can do without breaching the agreement.
There was a lot of sex in that book—just no penetration. They agreed to delay that gratification until later. In fact, there is no ‘actual sex,’ as my critics said, until book four, Deadly Chemistry, discussed in my previous post.
The delay served to enhance the anticipation and to some degree the enjoyment of the act itself for the characters.
The Agreement and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series is available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.
I’m aware that one-handed readers might get frustrated by not having a particular sex act depicted in a story, a chapter, or even on the current page. It seems the readers themselves read for more immediate gratification rather than a long build-up, which is a feature of most of my stories.
But a lack of sexual penetration is not the only thing that readers become impatient over. What I really want to talk about is more fundamental to writing compelling stories that keep people wanting more.
Some of you will recall a television series that ran from 1978 to 1991 called Dallas. In the spring of 1980, the most popular and most hated character in the show, J.R. Ewing (played by Larry Hagman) was shot. That’s it. That’s how the episode ended. Viewers had to wait until November to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” It was a major advertising campaign and ended in the second-highest-rated television episode of all time!
The cliffhanger ending was a hallmark of the fourteen seasons of Dallas. Even the final season ended with a cliffhanger, never to be resolved.
Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who passed away in 1959, is still quoted as saying, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Then start the next chapter.
“I was on edge while they were walking back and forth, waiting for the attack and kidnaping... knowing this was the last chapter and fearing an awful cliffhanger.”
“I hate cliffhangers! I’m not reading any more!”
“At least I know how the story ends. For me it ended today!”
“If you think I’m going to wait to find out…”
“Horrible cliffhanger. I might stop reading cause of this. Certainly not going to buy it now. You don't usually do this.”
“AAAKKKK! A Cliff Hanger! I hope it's not more than three days! Just Kidding. I was weaned on monthly S.F. Pulps so used to waiting a month. I'd detour 6 extra blocks walking the mile home from school hoping the next issue was in.”
“Oh wow, what a cliffhanger!”
If I took the time to sort through the 3,500 public comments I’ve received on my stories and the thousand emails I get every few months, I could come up with dozens of other comments decrying the use of cliffhangers. Even my alpha reader, Les, sent me a message that said, “Wow! Big bang-up chapter ending,” in reference to a cliffhanger in my current work in progress.
The truth is cliffhangers are pretty common. Authors try to keep people interested in turning to the next page or reading the next chapter. I hold that the cliffhanger is simply a facet of delayed gratification. Anticipation heightens the enjoyment when the next chapter comes.
What I have seen, however, is a lot of readers who can’t delay their gratification long enough to wait three days for the next chapter. Yes! Three days! That’s the posting schedule I have for most of my stories. A chapter every three days. And I don’t begin posting the story until it is finished, so the chapter loads in three days until the story has ended.
My advice: If you must have immediate gratification and cannot possibly wait three days for a cliffhanger to be resolved, wait three months until the story has finished posting and then gobble it up in a weekend. You’ll only need to wait another three months for the next story.
Or buy the book.
This is number 112 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I THOUGHT it would be quite clever to follow up May 11th’s post about lying to my editors with one about lying to my readers. The problem is I couldn’t think up an example of lying to my readers, except this one of saying I would talk about lying to my readers and then not doing it.
So, I guess I did.
Then last Sunday came and I realized I didn’t have this blog post ready for you! I guess I lied again. Is there any end to it?
Of course these were both rather accidental lies. I meant to write the blog. I meant to post it last week. I really didn’t mean to lie. I find, however, that I sympathize with some of my characters, and as a result with some people in real life, who think the lie is their only recourse.
The following section contains spoilers.
Sometimes, my own deep-seated anger and impotence leads me to transfer an irrational mindset to my characters. They act in ways that are not legal, ethical, or moral. Such was the case when Denise was murdered in Deadly Chemistry, the fourth book of the ten-volume Living Next Door to Heaven saga. (Living Next Door to Heaven 1, Part IV on SOL)
I was extremely angry about the loss of this sweet and loving character. I knew that the story and the development of the entire clan depended on the murder and Brian’s reaction to it. But did he have to kill the murderer?
People don’t realize that it was Brian’s action that actually was the point of the story, not Denise’s death. When he found out who the perpetrator was, he cold-bloodedly mixed the chemicals that would at least render the man unconscious, and then used his martial arts ability to dispatch him in a gruesome way.
It was an act that Brian could never admit to, and which would haunt him all his life. He lied about it to everyone. He lied directly to Hannah’s face when she confronted him. He feared the truth had come out when the next clan death occurred in Becoming the Storm (LNDtH 2, Part VIII). He was haunted by both his action and his lie for the rest of his life.
What really got to me, though, was that everyone in the clan knew or suspected the truth. And they all became complicit in his lie.
Just like we do when we hear a lie, know it’s a lie, and agree to the lie anyway, because it is what we want to believe.
Deadly Chemistry and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven eBook saga are available at ZBookStore.
I started this post thinking that I would be talking about my well-known tagline that “I lie for a living.” I write fiction. There are all kinds of comments we can make about fiction and truth. Steven King is purported to have said “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet last week. A cast that did a very credible job with the bard’s most famous work, putting their own stamp on it with a setting in a southern trailer park. The performance was in a huge tent and I was impressed with the way Hamlet’s two most famous soliloquys were accompanied by wind effects flapping the tent as if it would blow over. I later realized it was actually a wind storm that tore through Las Vegas that night. Good timing.
Hamlet, however, lays a trap for the king in a scene to be portrayed by a passing troupe of players.
I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.
In the fiction of the play, he plans to catch the conscience of the king. If you try this today, you might find the king has no conscience.
So, perhaps in the fiction I write, I might possibly expose some aspect of life or society that catches our consciences. Not that we are guilty of murder. Not really. We can turn a blind eye and accept that if we don’t see it, it never happened.
What gets me is that when the lie is exposed, we as often blame the one who revealed it rather than the perpetrator. I’m amazed at what vigorous opposition arose to fact checkers over the past few years. The fact checkers became the villains and the general public expended more energy attempting to discredit them than to investigate the truth or the lie.
I’ve been accused of a bias in my writing and I freely admit to it. I don’t know of an author whose opinions and life philosophy don’t creep into his work, even when he tries to be unbiased. The venom that has been spewed at me for this bias—which I even get in response to some of these blog posts—has prompted me to put a disclaimer at the beginning of each of my stories.
This book contains content of an adult nature. This includes explicit sexual content and characters whose beliefs may be contrary to your religious, political, or world view. The content is inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal for readers under the age of 18.
I consider it a mark of being an adult to be able to read material of opposing views and philosophies without becoming unhinged. I have to do it every day.
A scene I recently wrote for my work in progress talks about a pastor of a megachurch who has been preaching against the AI my hero is developing. Henry, in looking at the evidence before him, says,
This isn’t about God. It’s all about an egotistical sermonizer who whips people into a frenzy over things and then professes ignorance of why they would ever act like they do. Next thing you know, he’ll want to run for president.
Well, I couldn’t resist a little snide comment in his remarks. The thing is there will be as many people on all sides of this statement who come after me. It won’t make a difference whether they are religious or non-religious, left or right, rich or poor. They will all assume I am attacking their side of the very ill-defined issue.
Is it a lie? Well, it is certainly fiction. But the sad side-effect of our growing ability to accept lies that agree with what we want to believe is that we gradually lose the ability to recognize they are lies at all.
When I started my journey as a vagabond twelve years ago, I was planning to pull a trailer behind a pickup truck. I looked at all the available models and evaluated their pluses and minuses.
In the end, I determined that since I was going to be pulling a trailer on roads of unknown condition, I needed something that was built tough. Like a Ford.
I was on the road for over a year before I realized that I’d fallen for the company’s advertising slogan! By then, I had to defend it as being the truth, whether it was or not. I fell for the lie.
I can’t possibly predict what the next blog post will be about, or even if it will be in one week or two or more. I’m working hard, but sometimes the chaos is overwhelming. Until next time…
This isn't my usual Sunday blog post talking about the life of an erotic author. Not exactly. I only got about two paragraphs of that blog post written. In the meantime, I got four chapters of my new work in progress written. That's nice.
But I also realized that a story few of you knew about was ready for everyone to read. Back in October, I entered The Key to Eve in the 2024 Halloween contest. Readers voted it in third place! Unfortunately, that meant that the story was bound for six months behind the premium paywall. Now it's out of the closet! I mean... available for free.
Witches, vampires, dire wolves, a gryphon, a shapeshifter, an animal talker, villains, and heroes all meet in this fantasy. The one who captures the key from around the cat's neck will win the heart and home of the fair maiden. The race is on!
I don't often write in the fantasy genre, but as usual, you'll find this one a little different. Hope you enjoy it!
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