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Apparently a glitch?

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

Life as I Would Have Lived It

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


“I READ YOUR BOOK and I could tell it was about you,” said one of the nice church ladies that Sunday morning. I was shocked. Not that she’d read the book—it was Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money, not erotica—but rather that she thought I was Dag Hamar!

I was in my fifties and worked at the tech giant, but I had no real experience with computer security, was happily (at the time) married, and was healthy as a horse! My heart problems, which were reminiscent of Dag’s, didn’t manifest until I was seventy! I didn’t consider myself anything like my unlucky computer forensics detective.

But that was not the only time I was accused of writing about myself.



“WE HAVE TO TALK!” my older sister said as soon as I got off the plane in Lubbock. I barely got my seatbelt fastened when I got in her car before she started in. “We obviously had different fathers. My father was nothing like that.”
It took me a minute to catch up to the fact she had read my just-released Nathan Everett novel, The Volunteer. I have to give her credit for having read it. By that time, I figured all ten people likely to ever read the book to have already done so. I wrote it because it needed to be written, not to make a fortune. And if for no other reason than my daughter’s assessment that it was the best thing I’d ever written, I was satisfied.

The Volunteer is about a successful young college grad who, on a dare, volunteers to trade places with a homeless man, believing he will be able to work his way out of the situation in no time. It is written as a journey inside the head of this chronically homeless man, not following any consistent timeline, but jumping to wherever his mind or memories jump.

“Um… That’s not about our dad,” I said. “It’s a character.”

“But I recognized things,” she insisted. “I recognized the house and the car and that time when… And… you’re homeless and living on the road like G2.”

“I’m not homeless,” I protested. “I live in a travel trailer and I… travel.”

I had actually struggled with the concept of being homeless when I discovered I couldn’t get a driver’s license, vote, or get health insurance or social security without a valid street address. Think about that when you are touting the utter fairness of requiring ID in order to vote. There is an annual counting of people living on the street each January, and 2023’s count was 650,000. The actual number without a permanent address may be three times that.

The Unitarian Church I attended had joined a ten-year commitment to end homelessness in King County (WA) and we were over halfway through. I carefully prepared a message for the church, which I delivered on Sunday morning, that showed that the $1,000 a month they collected and distributed to various organizations devoted to helping the homeless had not actually reduced the number of homeless on our streets. In fact, the number had grown significantly. I wrote The Volunteer to address homelessness as something we would never put an end to, no matter how well-intentioned we were.

I had to explain all that in detail to my sister. Yes, descriptions and scenes are informed by my experience, but no, that wasn’t our father or our home or me standing on a street corner with a sign.

The Volunteer is available in eBook and paperback. Links at my website.

Wrote a Book. Please Help!


Several times, I’ve sat down to write my autobiography—or at least a memoir. Even this blog is supposed to be about “My Life in Erotica.” It seems I always reach a point where I’m thinking, “Oh, I should have…” or “If only she’d…” or “This is boring. I’ll add…” I end up writing Life as I Would Have Lived It.

In writing erotica, we have a commonly used term for it: Wish fulfillment. It’s the foundation of virtually all the “Do Over” stories, of which I’ve written a few. But it’s also fundamental when writing fiction based on actual life events. We write something that is “Just like when I was going steady with Bonnie in high school, except we have sex and don’t break up.”

Other than aroslav’s Wonders of My World series, the closest I’ve come to writing about my own life is my currently running Photo Finish series. The name of the leading male, Nate Hart, is the name I used as a pen name in high school to keep teachers from knowing the poetry I read in speech contests was my own. The little town of Tenbrook, Illinois is about the same size and shape as the little town in Indiana where my mother moved the family so she could begin her career as a Methodist minister. My dad worked at a filling station, in construction, building speaker systems, wiring travel trailers, and about anything else he could do in order to follow Mom to the various places she was assigned.

I have four sisters. It was too complicated to get a fourth sister into the mix in the story, so I consolidated the older three into two. And that, I might think, was the beginning of divergence from my autobiography. I’ve always been a writer—and though I won a photography contest in 4H, I did not pursue it as a career. I had multiple girlfriends, but they were in different cities. I even went so far once as to make carbon copies of a letter I wrote them.

Though there was a fair amount of petting and dry humping, none of my girlfriends slept with me. I was technically a virgin when I married the first time. All of the things that actually made my autobiography interesting were wish fulfillment. They were Life as I Would Have Lived It.

And somewhere, buried among ancient manuscripts that I’ve lost track of and didn’t scan, there is a manuscript I titled Life as I Would Have Lived It, a Pseudo Autobiography. I’m pretty sure that most of what was in that manuscript forty years ago has already been included in my literary and erotic writings.

If one was truly a literary forensic investigator, perhaps one could reconstruct my actual life from the pieces found among the lies in my books!


The average income from books of a professional author in the US in 2023 was less than $5,000. Even when we sell our work, we’re making little from it. Consider that twenty authors in 2023 made well over two billion dollars combined! How do the ‘less than minimum wage’ authors make any money at all? Next week: “Reviews.”

Are These Real?

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


“…THERE’S NO SKIN between them and the words you write.” I’ve treasured that review of Model Student: Mural since the day it was written in 2012. The author of this comment questioned whether the characters were real or not, but surmised, “They for sure exist inside you.”

I used to tell people that my stories were mostly true in that they were certainly true, but mostly only in my head.

Still, for nearly every character you find in one of my stories, you could find a real-life inspiration. Only the names, descriptions, and events have been changed to protect me. I mean the innocent.

In fact, aroslav’s "Wonders of My World" series has more real characters in it than any of my other books and I’ll tell you a little about why. When I started this series, I intended it to be about my world travels—the amazing nine months I spent traveling around the world. But if I was telling that story, why not tell the story of my other travels, as I went solo around the country in my truck and travel trailer for a few years?

The first book of the series, US Highways, was set when I began my big adventure in August of 2013 and extended to the end of my first full circuit around the United States, in the winter of 2014. American Backroads was set from 2015 through February 2016. Then there’s the book I actually wrote first, Border Crossings. It was first released on SOL as "Seven Wonders of the World." I’ve released a couple of short stories in the series since then, but soon, I hope to release a fourth book in the series I’m working on under the title Lay of the Land.

The pattern of the stories is that I have an adventure in the present in each chapter, but I keep jumping back to an adventure sometime in the past. What most people don’t think about is the names of the characters of the past nearly all happen to coincide with names of characters in my other books. In fact, I’ve written a little about the person who inspired the character in that other book. You’ll read about Cassie, Samantha, Hannah, Dee, Shannon, Carly, Whitney, Kate, Paula, and Belle. Each was at one time or another a real person in my life with whom I’d either had an interesting erotic adventure, or a favorite fantasy.

The entire "Wonders of My World" series is available as a collection at Bookapy. The series is richly illustrated with photos from my travels.


How does one manage writing about sex with a real woman when one never actually had sex with that woman?

Very carefully. I’ve made mistakes before. I try to avoid them now.

The first rule, of course, is not to use their real name. Either first or last. This gets a little tricky because the older you get, the fewer names you haven’t heard. You have to have names for your characters, but you have to be careful what the name is. If you don’t associate the name with the original person and mix and match first and last names, you can get away pretty cleanly. If a character is based on Susan Lancaster, though—even if in a fantasy—you can’t use either Susan or Lancaster in her name. Much better to call her Beth Williams, because Susan won’t recognize herself in that.

You might keep in mind, that all those really nice people you had fantasies about, who are now stalwart members of the church, and serve on the city council, are not likely to be reading your erotica stories. If they are, they are really unlikely to complain about recognizing themselves or admitting they were there in the first place.

Still, even my sister was convinced that she knew who everyone in one of my stories was and disagreed emphatically with how things were related—and that wasn’t even erotica. And she was wrong. I had to explain that characters might sound familiar because I borrowed characteristics from people, but the story was fiction! It seems people often forget that.

The second rule is to change something besides the name. Make your blonde a redhead. Change her eye color. Make her short and fat or tall and fat. Give her a southern accent. Change her race, religion, or politics. No matter if you are basing a character on a real person, you are writing fiction! You don’t have to be faithful to every detail in her description.

Third, remember that no matter what part of your story was based on a real person, you are writing fiction. Have I mentioned that? It’s important! You don’t need the whole character. Think about what attracted you so much to this person that you want to write about her. Maybe it was just a favorite expression. Perhaps it was just the size of her nipples. Do you associate a specific smell with her? Cardamom? Was there a memorable event? That time when you rode the log flume and discovered when you were both drenched that she wasn’t wearing a bra? Extract that detail and apply it to someone else.

In my initial version of Living Next Door to Heaven, I modeled a lot of characters after kids I knew when I was growing up. When I finished the story and decided to publish it in eBooks, I realized how much I’d duplicated their names and characteristics. The names were so close to the actual names of kids I knew that before I published the books, I changed all the names! That was not appreciated by people who read the first version and had become quite attached to some of those characters. And when, years later, I wrote a sequel and used all the new names, I still had people writing to me to complain about the names being different.

I was successful, though. One of my neighbors from that era got hold of the series and read it enthusiastically. But when I mentioned who some of the characters were, he looked at me blankly. “That was our Jessica?” He didn’t even recognize the description of his own house where the action took place. He recognized the names of the horses.

When I’m asked, as I am in many instances, whether these characters are real, I still respond “Mostly real.” They are real, but mostly only in my head. They are an amalgamation of memories of different people pressed together to create wholly unique individuals.

If you think you recognize someone in my books, remember:

“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and probably mildly insulting. Please don’t tell them.”


Basing fiction on reality is a pretty common theme in both literature and politics. Don’t like the way something happened? Rewrite it. It gets a lot more complicated, though, if you are basing your fiction on your autobiography. Next week: “Life as I Would Have Lived It.”

What? Another Edit?

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


I WENT TO GRAD SCHOOL in 1976 to study Design and Technical Theatre. By the end of 1978, I’d designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months. I was utterly burned out. I quit my job in a small college theatre department, quit my marriage, and quit just about everything else in my life. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.

I spent five years working inside a couple of different companies to produce their newsletters and marketing materials. Then the desktop publishing revolution occurred and I started my first business as an independent publisher. I had corporate contracts to publish trade journals, tabloids, and newsletters under my new business name, The Wordsmythe.

For the past forty years, I’ve been involved one way or another in publishing—everything from writing and editing to layout and design to publishing technology and training. It’s been a heady trip, that put me in front of hundreds of industry professionals. We changed an industry.

Back in the early stages of desktop publishing, Robin Williams—the author, not the comedian—wrote a ground-breaking book titled The Mac is Not a Typewriter. It was the first treatise I’m aware of that defined the differences between writing and publishing, and between word processing and typesetting.

One of her first rules was “No double spaces after punctuation!” That had been a principle in typesetting for four hundred years, but typing teachers on typewriters had been teaching double-space after a period since the typewriter was invented in 1868. The difference was that typewriters were monospaced and typesetters had variable spacing.

My 2010 award winning Nathan Everett novel, The Gutenberg Rubric, was the culmination of twenty years of research and teaching printing and publishing. I have previously mentioned the extent of editing this book went through. Developmental editing was provided by The Book Doctor, Jason Black. Line editing was by Michele Palmer. Proofreading was handled by a crew of volunteer editors who each brought a unique perspective to the process. And every native German speaker who has read the book has corrected something different in my German phrasing.

But when it was finally time to produce a book that was print worthy, it came back to me—not as author, but as book designer.

The Gutenberg Rubric was offered in print long before it made its eBook appearance in 2011. But the editing process was far from over when it reached me. I still had to do a mechanical edit.

The Gutenberg Rubric is available in both print and eBook for all formats.

Before I actually produce a book, it goes through at least two and often three levels of mechanical edit.

The first level is done in the word processing program. (MS Word for me.) I am astounded to know how many people who consider themselves experts in using Word have no concept of how to use styles. I have my own Word manuscript template that I immediately copy any received manuscript into before I go through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph to apply appropriate styles to it. The styles are named simple things like “ChapterHead,” “ChapterFirst,” “Body,” “Break,” “BreakFirst,” and “Quote.” There are others and I have a library of styles I can add for complex books.

When all the paragraphs have been properly tagged, I do global search and replace for double-spaces, double-returns, space before a return, space after a return, and many things that I might have noticed in the initial scan. There may be styles in the original manuscript that conflict with the layout styles. Perhaps I want some number of words at the beginning of the chapter to be in all caps. These are all mechanical editing decisions.

When the manuscript is truly clean, including not having stray fonts in it anywhere, I place the text in my layout program. I use Adobe InDesign for all my layout of both print and eBooks. MS Word is a word processing program. It is not a publishing program. Books in either eBook or print that are published from a word processing program are almost always identifiable as amateurish and poorly designed.

Once I set the specifications for the styles that I’ve defined, I go through the entire book line-by-line to make visual adjustments. If I’m laying out a print book, visual adjustments might be to fine-tune spacing or hyphenation for widow and orphan control. Widows and orphans are single words, syllables, or even lines of a paragraph that appear at the end or beginning of a page, or a single word or syllable on a line at the end of a paragraph. It’s one of the characteristics in books that can drive a reader crazy as they lose the train of thought from one page to another.

Setting up introductory paragraphs for chapters may involve a drop capital (first character of the paragraph that is two or three lines tall). In nearly every case, the spacing of those lines needs to be adjusted so the lines don’t all look like they start with the same letter.

I’ll check for hyphenation ladders—instances where a hyphen ends two or more consecutive lines. I’ll check to be sure that all quotation marks and apostrophes have been converted to a curled mark instead of a straight mark, and ensure that inch and foot marks have not been converted to curly quotes. I will check all style overrides (italics, bold, etc.) and verify they are applied only to the word or words they were intended for, and to be sure the software has not aberrantly substituted a different font.

Preparing an eBook in InDesign requires different mechanics. No overriding spacing for widows and orphans or for drop caps. The book designer has limited control over what is seen in the eBook because the reader can change devices from small screens to large screens, can change typefaces to what they prefer, can change type size, and can even change background color. In the mechanical edit, I will test the eBook output on several device simulations to be sure nothing in the book creates a problem, like a static-size picture that won’t fit on some pages!

I will simply mention the third possible mechanical edit most of my own books go through is to convert the book to html and code all the entities in the book. On my own website, entities are correctly rendered, but there are some features that may have overrides in the layout engine for the site. For example, the apostrophe at the beginning of ’60s may be automatically changed to an open single quote, even if I have coded the correct entity in the html. I have had people point out “my error” on that one more than once. Intelligent software really isn’t.

So, yes. Even after the developmental edit, the rewrite, the structural edit, the copy edit, the line edit, and proofreading, a professionally published book still needs a mechanical edit and that is a completely different process.


Next week—let’s get off editing for a while. I recall Kenny Rogers being asked in an interview about his work with Dolly Parton, “Are they real?” He responded, “No. They’re all wigs.” Believe it or not, people ask me the same question—but it isn’t about Dolly! Next week: “Are They Real?”

That’s Not What I Meant!

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This is number fifty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing. Apparently, I did everything except Save this blog post yesterday. My apologies.
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“THIS HAS BEEN EDITED and proofread by three different people. Two of them are English teachers. All you need to do is format it for publication.”

That was literally a cover letter I received for a book I planned to publish. I responded by telling Mark that if it went out with my publishing company name on it, the least I would do was proofread it. He thought I was wasting my time and his money.

When I finished my read-through I wrote back to this fine author.

“Mark, I can’t guarantee I found every error in this manuscript, but there are 783 fewer now.”

English teachers are not the same as editors.

I’ve published a hundred books for different authors, and I have yet to see one that was ready when I received it. A top tier literary agent once sent me a manuscript and asked me to publish it because the author was dying and she didn’t feel she had time to put it through the traditional publishing process. The book was written by an English teacher and the manuscript had been sent to a highly recommended professional editor in New York who charged quite a lot to edit the book. I was shocked at the condition of the manuscript I received—things a competent editor should have corrected immediately.

This English teacher author had quoted an article from The New Yorker magazine. Not a sentence, but the entire article! I asked him if he had permission to use it. He said he didn’t think he needed permission because his book was educational. I suggested that he was publishing the book for profit and had plagiarized a very large and famous magazine. He checked with the publisher and after being told it would cost $500 to reprint the article, decided his book didn’t really need that. What he didn’t realize was that it could have cost ten to a hundred times that if he had published the article without permission!

Most of us don’t even know what to look for in an editor or what kind of editor we need. There are many different kinds of editing, and they will all play a part in your successful story.

I’ve mentioned the role of a developmental editor as fundamental to getting a book written in the first place. I’ll come back to that in a future post. Today, I’d like to focus on the line editor and the proofreader.

A line editor will look at each line of your manuscript and examine it for syntax, grammar, understanding, and accuracy. Imagine going through a manuscript line-by-line. The biggest problem many amateur (as in unpaid) editors have is becoming involved in the story and forgetting to edit. That’s one of the problems with alpha readers I could have mentioned in my previous post. They become so caught up in reading the story, they forget to edit it.

Some of the things a line editor will look for include misuse of words like homonyms—their there they’re, your you’re, than then, by buy, to two too, and many more—words that don’t actually mean what the author intended, and words that are used too frequently in a short span. If every story I’ve read had simply had a good line editor, the sum quality across the board would have gone up by fifty percent.

A really good line editor will also spot inaccuracies in the manuscript, though down-and-dirty fact-checking should probably be done by a copy editor.

My recently published fifth book in the “Photo Finish” series contained an error that should have been caught in editing. In Over Exposure, two characters are arrested and charged in court. They post bail and then I made an off-hand comment that by four o’clock, they were released on their own recognizance. I received this immediate response by email when the chapter posted:

No!
Release on your own recognizance means you don't have to pay bail. Simply put, OR release is no-cost bail. Defendants released on their own recognizance need only sign a written promise to appear in court as required. No bail has to be paid, either to the court or to a bail bond seller.

Well, I’ve never been held for bail and didn’t know the distinction. My editor (the one who was a lawyer for forty years) should have! But I spelled it all correctly, so the proofreader didn’t catch it.

Over Exposure and all six of the Photo Finish books are now available on Bookapy.
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Line editing will reveal awkward sentences that just need to be rearranged. A good line editor will find inconsistencies in what has been said. I recently wrote about a four-and-a-half-year-old girl in one section of a chapter and just a few pages later talked about her upcoming fourth birthday. Line editing catches that kind of error.

But even though a line editor will correct spelling and punctuation, the final pass on that is done by the proofreader. On the surface, you’ll think the proofreader and the line editor do the same thing because they both look for syntax, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. They both have to read carefully, not for entertainment. The best distinction I can draw is that a line editor goes line-by-line through the manuscript and a proofreader goes word-by-word.

While a proofreader will also spot misuse of words, homonyms, and repeated words, most of those should already have been corrected. The proofreader will spot a missing closed quotation mark at the end of a paragraph. She’ll determine if the correct spelling of a word is transferal or transferral. (And probably note that the correct word would simply be transfer.) He’ll correctly note that an additional comma is needed in the statement, “I’d like to thank my parents, Paul McCartney and Martin Luther King Jr.” She’ll correct whether a closed quotation mark falls inside or outside the period in the sentence.

And sometimes the author will disagree with the editor. He will say, “That’s not what I meant!” In most cases, if the editor has tried to correct something to a statement the author didn’t mean, then the author should consider rewriting the entire sentence to be clearer. And there are differences of dialect, education, and even region. I have an editor who insisted that nearly every instance of the word “anymore” should be “any more.” I hold that it should only be two words if I can answer the question “more what?”

I, the author, got the last word on the matter, whether I was right or wrong!
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Really? You mean there is more editing to be done? When is the book ever finished? If your book is going to market for sale on any of the major websites in either eBook or print, then someone has to actually prepare it and lay it out. Next week, “Mechanical Editing.”

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