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This is number 107 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I WRITE OLD MEN’S EROTICA. That means that we have to stop and talk for half an hour about the weather and our latest surgery before we get to any of the fun stuff.
Is that what I mean by TMI (Too Much Information)? It’s a good example, but is far from the only thing. No doubt at any age, you have encountered a person who has to go into every detail of what happened and all the events leading up to it. By the time they get to the point (if they ever do), you’ve forgotten what they were starting to tell you.
Many of those people are called ‘wives.’
“You won’t believe what happened to Maribelle this afternoon!” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, this morning after I dropped the kids off at school… We were running late because that son of yours absolutely refused to put his shirt on right side out… So, I was in a hurry and didn’t notice that awful bully lurking beside the school, but Elmer and Elsie were already inside. I thought I’d make that pot roast you like so much… You remember the one my mother served you and you went ga-ga over? Well, SuperFoods had roasts on sale for just $6.99 a pound, so I headed over there, but Raygun Road was closed because of a fallen tree. You know that storm that came through last night? They were just getting around to clearing the road and instead of waiting in line to take the detour, I turned around and decided to go to Best Grocery to get the meat, even though it chapped my ass to have to pay 9.49 a pound for it when SuperFoods had exactly the same cuts for $6.99…”
Maybe in forty-five minutes or so, you will get the information of what happened to Maribelle this afternoon and maybe you won’t. But you will certainly get too much information!
When I started the Team Manager series early in 2021, I knew nothing about Iowa, basketball, farming, or teens. I researched. Every step of the way, I researched the history of girls’ basketball in Iowa, the top crops, the weather cycles, the high school classes that were typical in that area, the scores of basketball games, the terminology in use, and the operation of the ATF, FBI, and county law enforcement.
The problem with research is that an author wants to use all his new-found knowledge. By the time I reached the fourth book in the series, CHAMP!, I was having to research colleges, application processes, recruitment, college sports, and the effect of COVID on athletes.
By spring of 2022, I was a fan of Iowa basketball at all levels—yes, that included the incredible performances of one Caitlyn Clark at the University of Iowa. I knew the Division III schools of the American Rivers Conference, their mascots, and what each gym looked like from the inside. (I even visited several of them and verified I’d gotten it right the next year.) And I started plotting which of the schools my characters would go to.
And that’s where trouble really started for me.
I talked about characters being recruited and receiving scholarships, only to be informed (after publication) that it wasn’t how recruitment worked in Division III schools, that there were no athletic scholarships for those universities and colleges, that coaches weren’t allowed to talk to high school students, and that my general premise for getting the crew together in college was wrong!
But I’d described it all! The books were released in the market. There was little I could do but endure the comments from those fans who actually knew. And none of that information was really necessary. I’d become so enthused that I wanted to share all my (faulty) knowledge with everyone who read my story.
TMI. But it’s still a good story.
CHAMP! and the entire Team Manager series are available as eBooks on Bookapy.
I find this frequently when reading other people’s works. If something particularly interests the author, he feels it is incumbent upon him to share it with the world reading his novel. I think there is little that exemplifies this more than the description of weapons. For example:
Blaine recognized the Bolt X7 revolver in the assassin’s hand. It was the newest in the venerable line of Bolt handguns, known as the most lethal in the world. It weighed only twenty-eight ounces with a poly grip customized to the hand of the owner. It was a known competition single action pistol with a trigger pull weight of less than three pounds. Some competitors found the light weight resulted in too much kick from the high-caliber shells. He could see the six-inch barrel, equipped with a silencer, didn’t waver in the assassin’s hand. What Blaine didn’t know was the ten grains of powder propelling the flathead carbonite bullet toward Drake in front of him would leave an entry wound just a quarter of an inch across, but the exit wound would be two inches across, leaving enough power behind the deadly bullet to penetrate Blaine as well.
TMI!
And yes, I know much of the information in this that I made up on the fly is faulty. You can’t put a silencer on a revolver. Ten grains of powder could probably blow up the barrel of a lightweight gun. Etc. etc. But most of all, who cares?
I submit to the Congress of the United States that any gun control laws submitted henceforth should have a limit imposed of twenty words used to describe any weapon in fiction literature!
Yes, there is a small and vocal group of gun enthusiasts who want to read all this and contest any inaccuracy they find in the information ad nauseam, even down to whether or not the gun in question would have a kick. But who cares? Not the average reader of even the most intense thriller. In fact, the information creates such a large interruption in the flow of the story that most readers will have forgotten who the characters were and why they were being shot at.
Without going into detail, I will say that the biggest flaw in erotica is sex scenes with too much information. The more information included in a sex scene, the more likely readers are to be distracted by things like whether or not the position is even possible, how many hands are doing what, and the probability that these two or ten characters would ever allow themselves to be in this situation at all.
And all that, after we’ve endured half an hour of talk about the weather and the latest surgery.
It seems there are no end of writing issues to write about. Next week, I’m going to discuss comments, email and criticism: “Room to Respond.”
This is number 106 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“…MAN DO I DISLIKE the tired ‘someone misinterprets something innocent and gets mad/heartbroken at the other person’ trope.” So, commented a reader of Soulmates recently.
I understand. It happens in almost every book and every movie, whether you are watching action and adventure, romance, or anime. Someone always gets misunderstood. Someone always misinterprets something. Even James Bond. It’s a staple of keeping a story tense and making interpersonal relationships real.
It’s a ‘trope’ I’ve used frequently. A trope, by the way, is a recurring character type or plot device that appears repeatedly in literature or art. The innocent misunderstanding is only one of many that recur. There are dozens that you would recognize in everything you read once they were pointed out.
The Chosen One. The Mistaken Identity. The Love Triangle. The MacGuffin (a thing that appears to push the plot forward, like a secret letter, an amulet, a key, a sacred book, etc.). Inconvenient Prophecies. Impending Apocalypse. Enemies to Lovers. Only One Space (one bed in a room, one elevator, one available rental car, etc.). The All-Night Diner. The Grizzled Detective. The Treasure Hunt. The Double Agent. Self-Sacrifice. The Underdog Hero.
One of the most fun books I’ve ever written was the three-volume set of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. The idea came to me as I was driving north toward Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, supposedly thinking about the Team Manager series. Suddenly, I heard a voice in my head say, “Hello. My name’s Bob. I’ll be your demon tonight.”
I told my friend and story consultant, Doug, about the weird idea for a demon who was unattached to any person or purpose, but had merrily gone about his way for several thousand years. Doug nodded and said, “Bob is just a happy-go-lucky—mostly lucky—demon.”
But how did this demon get into the world?
By way of one of the oldest tropes in the book: The Drunken Summoning Spell.
Bob’s inept adept, Pinaruti, drunkenly thinks he is summoning Beelzebub, but slurs the words to Beetlebob. When Bob appears, Pinaruti is so surprised at the success of the spell that he dies of heart failure, forming a bridge out of the warded circle for Bob to cross into the real world.
Of course, Bob inherits his ability to cast spells from his would-be master, so even without being drunk, most of his spells go awry. It is the beginning of a 4,000-year adventure.
Why does the trope work? Because it has an unexpected outcome. The whole concept of ‘demon’ is rife with horror overtones, but Bob is a lovable and happy being who stumbles into the presence of Zeus, has a conflict with Poseidon, is Caesar’s sidekick, travels with Jesus, is the architect for Kubli Khan, combats piracy and slave trading across the Pacific, and ends up launching his own spaceship.
And, of course, his summoner imagined him as irresistible to females—some of whom ask him to possess them!
The entire three-volume set of Bob’s Memoir is available as individual eBooks or as a collection at Bookapy.
So, first of all, why are tropes so common? These things don’t come about out of the blue. I believe the reason the “someone misinterprets something innocent and gets a broken heart” trope referred to at the beginning of this post is so often included in works—especially of romance—is because it’s common in real life. I’ve personally been a victim of it on several occasions—some for which I wish I could go back and hit “undo.”
Sometimes these situations get cleared up, and sometimes they end up in divorce. That’s life.
In Soulmates, there is the unique solution in that the couple can communicate mentally and can share exactly what was going on with each other. It resolves the situation quickly, but it’s necessary to show a new level of growth and trust in the relationship.
An author can’t avoid every trope because tropes arise from common life events. What the author does with the trope will determine its success or failure. One thing is to avoid such overworked tropes that they have become clichés. A cliché is a trope that has been overused and trivialized to the point of being two-dimensional. The ditzy blonde and the dumb jock are two examples.
One way to make use of a trope is to subvert expectations. In Bob’s Memoir, the demon is not an embodiment of evil, but a happy and somewhat beneficent being. Perhaps the detective of a mystery actually is as incompetent as he appears and the mystery solves itself in spite of him. (The Pink Panther.) The blue-haired old lady solving a cozy mystery is actually a spy who has done her share of killing.
In my short story, “Before the Fire,” a man is reading in front the cozy fireplace in his sitting room when a ghostly woman substantiates in the chair next to him. They talk, he gives her a blanket, and eventually they make love. But then it is revealed that it is the man who is not real, but is merely a character in a book the woman is reading. That is a subverted trope.
One of the traps authors fall into is having two-dimensional characters. They depend on a trope to carry the story, but somehow it rings hollow, almost becoming a cliché. The remedy for this is to fully explore the character and fully develop it.
I have written characters that fell short of being fully developed, which irritates me because I pride myself in well-developed characters. It happens most often with the ‘occasional villain.’ This is a villain who only appears for a specific occasion. He’s there to pull the trigger and then disappear, so to speak. We don’t really know anything about him. We don’t know what motivates his action, what he believes, or often even what he looks like. Or that he’s a she.
When writing a limited viewpoint story, it’s difficult to fully develop characters other than the narrator. The hero’s only interaction with the villain is that villainous act that defines him in relationship to the hero. But that is never a complete view of the character.
In the Team Manager series, the bullies of the first book are slowly revealed through other interactions, their history with the hero, the police investigation, and the testimony of relatives—sisters, parents, business partners, and lovers. The action is consistent with how the characters develop.
Combining the character development with a surprising twist on the trope can also provide something fresh. Imagine, for example, a flamboyant gay hairdresser who turns out to be a family man who lives in the suburbs and only puts on the act for his clientele.
Keeping things new is always a challenge for the author—especially in erotica. It has been said that there are only so many ways for Tab A to fit in Slot B. It is only the depth of the characters, their relationship, and their emotions that set one act apart from another. Next week, “Too Much Information (TMI).”
This is number 105 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location. Of course, that was back in the days when an average single income for a family of four could buy a nice house in a good location. Was that ever even possible?
I’m not going to get into property values or the relative ability of families to afford safe and comfortable living spaces. When I was 23 years old, my wife and I bought a house in a small town, four miles from a larger town with a university, for $10,000. I had a ten-year mortgage at $100 per month. I was the only wage-earner. My, how times have changed. The property is valued at $39,000 today, but there is no longer a house on the lot.
What does that have to do with writing?
Understanding the area I’m writing about is extremely important to the stories I write. Even when I am disguising the exact location by using different place names and business names, I need to understand the location. Can Gee walk from his home to work in ten minutes? How long is Brian’s paper route? How present a threat is the SWARM when they invade the southern continent of Tara?
I love reading books that have maps in them. I believe The Hobbit was the first book I read that had a map in it. My daughter has a wall-size map of Middle Earth hanging in her study! But I recall some books from childhood that were so descriptive of their location that I still see it in my mind’s eye—like The Boxcar Children, which, when I read it in about 1959, was just three or four books. It’s now a series of over 160 titles.
One of the most detailed maps I’ve ever composed was for Wayzgoose's two “Man Without a Memory” novels, City Limits and Wild Woods. It was a complex setting that included the entire town of Rosebud Falls. It had a few unique features. The east side of the river was almost entirely occupied by The Forest, a carefully maintained rare hickory forest that provided much of the city’s livelihood.
A second feature was that it had been divided up by the seven founding families. They no longer owned all the property within the old family estates, but the districts of town were still very much present. Then, of course, there was the Wild Woods, fenced away from the Forest. Every street had a name. Every shop had a location on the map. Even the homes of specific individuals were marked out.
City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks at Bookapy and in paperback at online bookstores.
Writers talk a lot about world-building when they are preparing to write. I suppose one of the most critical times to do that is when you are literally going to a different world, as in outer space. The temptation is always to simply make it ‘like earth.’ But the space opera version of other worlds is a little boring.
When I wrote The Assassin in Thinking Horndog’s SWARM Cycle Universe, I tried hard to imagine a world that was inhabitable by humans, but substantially different. Inhabitability is always the result of terraforming. Otherwise, humans wouldn’t survive except in isolated enclosed spaces, and many SWARM authors have done a fantastic job of creating different worlds.
When I created Tara, I needed to make it simple. It would be mostly a shallow ocean with three continents. I was told by learned people in the SWARM authors’ collective, that there were many reasons the layout wouldn’t work, that it was too sparse as far as land masses were concerned, and that the oceans would have tidal waves all the time.
For me, however, I figured what I had was the equivalent of Amerigo Vespucci drawing a map of the new world. The proportions weren’t necessarily right and people in the future would ultimately realize it wasn’t flat, that there were more undiscovered lands, and we would all shrug at the ignorance of the original mapmakers.
I had a planet with three continents, a big ocean, and enough information to start working on things like length of day, length of year, climate, topography, and wildlife. I’m sure one could devote one’s life to developing the world, but for me, it was good enough.
And as long as I stayed consistent with the map I’d drawn, people would accept the story as taking place on that distant planet.
The Assassin is available as an eBook on Bookapy.
One of my favorite maps seems to be missing from my files. The first story I wrote as a part of NaNoWriMo in November of 2004 was called Willow Mills. It’s really a collection of stories, character studies, and newspaper articles from a small town in Indiana that “has no corollary in the real world. In fact, it intersects with the real world in only one place—a rock about three feet across out in the middle of the Eel River within six or seven miles of North Manchester, Indiana. It’s a rock on which I sat some years ago writing poetry and dreaming of what I would do with my life.”
I suggested that it was a small town in Indiana that might have existed or might even have been all of them.
In order to create this village, though, I needed a detailed map. I knew exactly where on a real map the town would be if it existed, so I plotted roads and businesses, areas of town, and the stories of some of its population of about 400 souls. One day, I hope to locate that map, which I printed on a large sheet of paper, so I can share it and the story with you.
I find it hard to believe we are on the doorstep of April 2025. The world that will open to us next month will be as new as the one that opened to us this morning. And that is the subject of next week’s post: “Making it New.”
This is number 104 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
AGE DOES NASTY THINGS to one’s mind and body. I’ve gone through periods of moderate memory loss, most of which were either intentional or caused by my heart problems a few years ago.
In the intentional column, I blanked out nearly all my childhood up until my mid-teens. I simply refused to acknowledge anything that existed back at that time. As a result, when I write nostalgic stories about life in Indiana, they are mostly about the life I imagined rather than the one I had. When I remember something from that time, I don’t trust the memory. It might have been or it might not have been.
During the four years I was fighting a battle against a-fib, which ended fifteen months ago when I got a pacemaker implanted, I often just missed days. I couldn’t remember what happened when. I missed a dental appointment I was sure I had gone to, for example.
And I’ve often empathized with the meme that says I don’t forget things; I’ve just reached capacity in my head to store anything new without deleting something old. I think that as a writer, the problem is multiplied. I’ve often woken up in the morning and needed to go straight to my computer to write down what I had thought of in my dreams.
A few days ago, I went out to a late breakfast, as I do several times a week. I’m not sure of the specific circumstances when I got home, but I believe it was a mixture of needing to use the bathroom and needing to get ideas I thought of at breakfast down in a document. I rushed into the trailer, did what was necessary and started writing non-stop for the next couple of hours.
Cut to the next morning. I decided once again that the yoghurt in the fridge was not going to cut it for breakfast, so I dressed to head out. I couldn’t find the key to my truck. I searched through all my pants pockets, including going through the laundry. Nothing. I searched all the flat surfaces and under the edge of furniture that didn’t quite sit flush to the floor. Nothing. I decided I must have dropped the key outside, so I went out to search around the trailer and the path from the truck to my door.
When I reached the truck, I tested the door to make sure I locked it. It was unlocked.
I opened the door and checked inside to see if I’d dropped the key before I got out. It was still in the ignition. I reached to take it out and discovered the truck was still running!
I now know that in 24 hours, my truck will use about a quarter of a tank of gas while idling and will reduce my average mileage per gallon by two miles!
How on earth am I supposed to keep track of all these things in my head?
I’ve told in other blog posts about my time developing Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric. (By Wayzgoose on SOL.) With my occupation as a designer of books and teaching the history of print, as well as all the then-current tools used in publishing, I’d been keeping notes on things I considered odd about Gutenberg’s history as it has been passed down. I was also fascinated by the inventions of movable lead type and printer’s ink. And what ever happened to the Library of Alexandria? Was it really burned entirely?
Just so many questions and notes that I’d jotted in various places over the years. So, I began collecting the thoughts in 2008 and keeping a record of them.
Hundreds of pages of scrawls regarding what the times were like, the history of the library, the composition of ink, the uniqueness of dimensionally stable lead type, the politics of the archbishopric of Mainz, the battles of Romans in Turkey, the various questionable histories of Muslim occupation of Egypt, the distance and sailing times around the Mediterranean Sea… Twenty years of my questions and conjectures about what happened in that era.
But when I sat down to write, all that information was at my fingertips when I needed to refresh my memory.
The Gutenberg Rubric is available as an eBook from Bookapy and in paperback from online resellers.
Bound books of pencil scratches are not the only method I’ve employed to keep track of important things I’m writing about. When I prepared to write Nathan Everett’s City Limits, I spent two months creating and organizing hundreds of color-coded 3x5 index cards. Red cards were what I considered episodes as if I were plotting a television series. Pink cards were scenes that would take place in the episode. It wasn’t unusual for me to rearrange these and move a scene from one episode to another.
Yellow cards were people. I even downloaded photos I found that reminded me of people I wanted in the story and put them on a web page. There were green cards for places and blue cards for businesses. Each card had a description of the salient points and as I wrote, I arranged and rearranged them on a cork board so I would remember all the things I wanted to put up there.
Some fun, huh?
City Limits and the sequel Wild Woods are available as eBooks on Bookapy and in paperback from online resellers.
What was I working on so intently that I forgot to turn off my truck? Well, that would be the notes for my current work in progress, Forever Yours. I carry a 3.5x5-inch notebook around with me nearly everywhere I go. And a pen. My step-husband introduced me to them and keeps me supplied. I’ve filled a couple of the 64-page books with notes ranging from the next plot point in the story to my grocery list and list of things I need to do in the next 24 hours.
If one could possibly read my handwriting, it is still unlikely they could piece together my life from the scratches on these pages, but they are just enough for me to keep track of what is happening.
With a complex story like Forever Yours, the notebooks are not enough. I keep an Outlook calendar for the story on my computer so I can check dates and make sure my timing and sequence are kept straight. The actual year of the calendar is insignificant as long as it is consistent all the way through the book. I transfer onto the calendar holidays, character birthdays, and even the school calendar so I know when breaks, exams, and semester beginnings and endings are. Then I write events in the story on the appropriate days.
Unfortunately, that calendar is only one of three that are open on my desktop. I have one for my personal life and one for my publishing life.
There’s just so much to keep track of!
I try to stay a week ahead on my blog posts, both for my personal sanity and the benefit of my editor. I often don’t know that far in advance what I will write about next, though. So, here’s guessing next week will be all about “Maps.”
This is number 103 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I’VE OFTEN TALKED about my disdain for organized religion. I promote individual responsibility and acting because something is simply the right thing to do. Deep down, though, what is it that I believe?
There are obvious answers to that. Love. Humanity. Good and Evil. I’ve talked about believing that all living things and some (or all???) inanimate things have the ability to communicate and an intelligence that we simply do not understand. They—that is all of earth—deserve our respect, even if we don’t understand them.
I wrote what I thought was the last volume of the Living Next Door to Heaven saga between December 2015 and February 2016. Two years later, I decided to add volume 10, but it didn’t change what I’d written in Heaven’s Gate.
In the story, we see the main character/narrator of the series, Brian Frost, as he is ready to wind up his television career and simply become the bread baker he found was his real occupational love. This was a story I poured my heart into and many things in it struck a resonating note within me.
In the previous eight volumes, Brian built a community, had a dozen intimate partners, battled against forces he could not control, and went from a cooking show host on television to a talk show host. And then, at the ripe old age of 30, he ‘retires’ from television to follow his real passion: baking.
Oh, for such success that we could all just retire at thirty and follow our life passion, yes? But Brian was also a leader in his community and his farewell speech in the television series came straight from my heart.
When asked what he believed, he answered, “I believe in stones.”
Heaven’s Gate and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series are available as a collection or individual eBooks on Bookapy.
I believe in stones.
Look around you. There is ample evidence that stones exist. We even classify them. Igneous. Sedimentary. Metamorphic. We name certain kinds of rocks. Marble. Granite. Limestone. A’a lava. Sandstone. Quartz. Basalt. Slate. Coal. We assign value to particular kinds of stones. Diamonds. Rubies. Opal. Emerald.
They are all just stones. We go through our lives mostly ignoring them. Even if we chose not to believe in stones, we might still trip over them. We might hit our heads on them.
But think of all the things we can do with stones. We can build bridges, palaces, cathedrals, skyscrapers, castles, and shops. We can carve them in to timeless statues that outlive both artist and subject. We can make them into memorials to great achievements and to great tragedies. We can mark the corners of our property, build fences and walls, and make dividing lines between our countries. We can crush them to provide a paving bed for our roads and highways. We mold them and bind them together into bricks to protect our homes from the heat of the fireplace. We bake those bricks and build with them. We take ground up rocks and blend the aggregate with cement, which is itself just more fluid rock, and make blocks to build bunkers or the foundations of our homes.
You can grind up certain stones into silica sand, heat them up, melt them, and when they cool you can see through them. Did you know the windows that we look out of, that keep the heat in and the cold out in the winter, that protect us when we are driving our cars are just stones?
If we go back in history, we find incredible structures like the pyramids of Egypt, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Edinburgh Castle. All made out of stones. And in the same period of time, we find huge siege engines capable of hurling rocks into the air with such force that they can break those walls down. We’re told that the earliest weapons man used were no more than stones, thrown at their prey or at their enemies.
Yet they are tools, as well. We use the miller’s grist stone or the peasant’s mortar and pestle to grind grain into flour and feed ourselves. Stones can be used to pound and shape other things. Just strike the stone flint against steel and it creates the spark that will light our fires to heat our homes and cook our food.
Or you can lie in wait for your enemy and tumble big boulders on his head. You can set a stone in a sling and, like David, hurl it at Goliath and bring him to his knees.
Or on your knees you can present a stone in a golden ring to your loved one and ask her to marry you.
And at the end of your life, you can engrave a stone to mark where your remains are buried, returning to the soil, becoming minerals, absorbed into stone. Or you can create a river of pebbles in which to scatter ashes of your loved ones and rake them until you and they are at peace.
Stones simply are.
They have never asked me to believe in them. No stone has ever sent me to war against people who differ from me. No stone has ever demanded that I believe in no other stones, that I not take its name in vain, or that I bow down and worship it. No stone has enslaved people. No stone has considered one person chosen and another damned. No stone has subjugated a woman or made chattel of her children.
Stones are not capricious. They don’t treat one person differently than another. They don’t honor one race or nationality above all others. They don’t give blessings to one person and curses to another. Stones obey the laws of nature. They fall to the ground because of gravity. If you hit your head on one, it hurts because it is what it is. It is nothing more nor less than a stone.
What do I believe in? Don’t get me wrong. I believe my daughter loves me like I love her. I believe in the brotherhood and goodness of all mankind. I believe in Mom, apple pie, and the American way.
But when it comes down to it? When I need to depend on something constant?
I believe in stones.
I have a lot of ideas. I have folders filled with story ideas. Notebooks that I carry around with me. And even 3x5 index cards that I rearrange. The things in my head often overflow my memory allotment. Next week, “Keeping Track.”
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