aroslav: Blog

Remember when I said I was taking the month of July off? Crap! It's August 10th!

Well, here's the good news. Even though the eBook is not yet ready for release, my newest story, Forever Yours, will start posting here on SOL next Sunday with the first two chapters. Six long months in the making. It will continue to post a chapter every three days until it ends in mid-March. Yeah. It will be running for even longer than it took to write it! So, get ready for a read that tantalizes and captures you from day one.

However, there is one thing I need to warn you about. If you are one of those people who can't wait three days for a cliff hanger to be resolved, wait until March to start reading, or buy the eBook when it comes out in September. Most chapters don't end with a cliff hanger, but some do. It's where the action best pauses and is a natural chapter break. It will be resolved in three days when the next chapter posts.

I can't believe I need to make that announcement, but too many people have had their feelings hurt because they couldn't wait three days for the resolution. I just want you to know it's going to be there, so don't start if you can't stand it.

Here's the summary:

Henry Pascal, a high school senior at the beginning of our tale, started building his own computers when he was eight years old. He was heavily influenced by his mother's complaints that every time a system or application was updated by the manufacturer, they broke something. He set about first manually and then automatically seeking out what was worthless in updates as far as his mother was concerned, so he could block those features without hurting the functionality of the system or app.

That led to Henry exploring the use of AI to manage the process and once he became proficient in developing and using artificial intelligence, a world of opportunities opened up to him. With his three closest friends from high school, Henry starts a company to develop AI-powered applications that served the user rather than attempting to control them. The business attracted investors and customers so quickly that before they were out of college, the business was profitable and nearing its first public offering.

Artificial Intelligence, AI, is a contentious subject, but Henry didn't realize that it would attract so many malicious hackers and even physical attacks on his partners and him. Even the Pentagon attempts to use eminent domain to grab the technology and even the company. When Henry develops a way to upload life data into an AI, creating a singularity, the opposition gets even closer to home.

Minimal sex, mostly in the first half of the story as the teens are exploring and discovering. While there are elements of computer science that are not yet fully developed in our society, they are near enough that it wouldn't be right to call this science fiction. And it's not really coming-of-age either. The characters are young adults determined to make both a personal and a professional success of their lives.

It all starts next Sunday, August 17, 2025.

This is number 118 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

OF COURSE I need a vacation! We all need a vacation now and then, just to recharge our batteries and refresh our spirits. It’s only—hmm—eleven months until my next vacation.

Yes, I just had a vacation. In addition to spending the summer with family and friends in Seattle, I took a week to go to Stratford, Ontario to watch six plays. And last weekend, I saw two more plays in the Northwest. I had breakfast out with one friend and lunch with another. I celebrated my sister’s birthday and my daughter’s anniversary. It’s been a great summer.

I’m going home to Las Vegas tomorrow. I need a break!

Isn’t that often the way we end a vacation? We get home and need to rest up.

For me, getting rested up means getting back in the groove of my typical and unexciting routines. In other words, getting focused on writing again.

The past few weeks, I’ve been staying up until midnight (mostly watching silly videos I would normally just skip over), getting up sometime after seven or eight o’clock, and spending hours reading, listening to audio books, doomscrolling, and—yes—writing. My writing pace significantly slowed.

I did manage to get three chapters of my newest WIP, Forever Yours, finished this week. But as I look at my statistics sheet for this year, I find I am twenty-four words a day short of my goal for the year. I set my goal as 2,000 words a day on the average. I’m at 1,976 per day. Not bad, right? Except this is day 221 of the year. That means I’m 5,304 words short for the year. That is quite a bit to catch up on!

Please don’t send me missives regarding the quality of the words vs. the quantity, avoiding burnout, pacing myself, and not being too hard on myself. I know. That’s like my dental hygienist lecturing me each time I have my teeth cleaned on the proper way I should be flossing. I’m almost 76 years old. I know. Her condescending lecture is not going to miraculously change my behavior.

The point is that I accomplish a lot when I have an established rhythm in my life. Vacations are specifically intended to disrupt that rhythm—to get one out of the groove. And thus, they require a period of adjustment when they are over as we try to get back in the groove.

In the midst of my final week in Seattle for the time being, I managed to get three new chapters of one work in progress completed and half a chapter of my top secret work written. Can’t talk about or share that project because of contest rules. But there is so much more that I’ve not gotten back to yet. I need to get back in the groove, and getting back to my trailer in Vegas will help.

My typical day in Vegas will begin around 6:30 or 7:00 when I get up. I’ll fix my morning brew and spend half an hour on my statistics and social media. Then I’ll start writing. I’ve always been extremely productive first thing in the morning. I’ll work until about ten and then dress to go out for breakfast. I have six breakfast spots that I rotate among, trying something different at each meal. I don’t go out every morning. I do cook breakfast on many occasions, but sometimes the groove can be oppressive. I only ever make one thing for breakfast when I cook at home.

While I’m out, I’ll run any errands I need to make, like grocery shopping, laundry, buying water, etc. Then I’ll return to my trailer and work on client projects for a couple of hours. I still edit and design books for several clients and the little added supplement to my social security is appreciated. That’s not my full-time job, though, so I strictly limit the number of projects I take on.

Sometime between four and five, I stop for dinner. Occasionally, I go out with friends for a burger. Usually, I’m back in the saddle by six to continue writing for two or three hours. Then I’ll watch a women’s basketball game and go to bed by ten.

In those four to five hours of writing time, I’ll pump out between 2,000 and 3,000 words! That’s the benefit of a rhythm.

When I don’t have a client project in the afternoon, I work on editing, designing, and releasing my own books. That’s part of my ‘job’ as well.

Doesn’t a routine like this get boring?

Of course. That’s why we have vacations!

Part of getting in the groove is writing this blog. I’ll try to keep regular postings now. Next week, “Tab, you’re it!”

This is number 117 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“YOU ARE REMEMBERED for the rules you break,” supposedly said General Douglas MacArthur, according to a quote in a 1996 issue of Press of Atlantic City newspaper. Unfortunately, there’s no concrete evidence that he said that, but with his nature and character, it certainly seems reasonable that he might have. The same is true of the more recently popularized quote, “Rules are made to be broken.”

My editors often point out things that are incorrect in my books. Of course, readers are always happy to point them out, as well, but I generally listen to my editors. Generally. I often get comments from them that are along the lines of “This isn’t technically correct, but it’s in dialog, so if that’s consistent with the way the person would talk, it would be okay.” We hedge around on it a lot.

Of course, many rule infractions are of the sort that do drive people crazy. Words that sound similar, are spelled similarly, or are simply easily confused. We all have pet-peeves, I’m sure. Mine is the confusion of ‘then’ and ‘than’ in other’s writing. It drives me crazy. I wish they’d just learn to follow the rules!

And that’s the big problem. When people break the rules because it’s a play on words or a character trait or a significant plot point, I have no problem with it. But I find most infractions are simply because people don’t know the rules in the first place. Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

That’s why editors are so important to me. I know and understand most of the rules of grammar and spelling, but I make mistakes. Editors correct me. I try to provide a few mistakes in each chapter so they will feel useful.

There is absolutely no purpose in breaking the rules if one is ignorant of them.

Let me go back to MacArthur again. In the 1962 book MacArthur Close-Up author William Addleman Ganoe retells an anecdote regarding MacArthur having to discipline a sergeant for a rule infraction. At one point, MacArthur gets frustrated and states, “Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind…. Instead of mending the situation on the spot, we make a rule.”

MacArthur is sometimes praised and sometimes vilified, but I have to agree with this point. The reason we have thousands of pages—perhaps millions of pages—of laws in this country is because we couldn’t actually deal with a situation in the first place. The same is true of hundreds of executive orders, pages of court opinions, and countless books of religious doctrine. We hide behind the rules. If the rule says I can’t go beyond the fence, I can safely close my eyes to the horrors that are on the other side.

Most English speakers know the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition.

“Where y’all from?” asked the belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” answered the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?” asked the belle.

She sure got around that one. And followed the rules while doing it! Grammatical rules are not supposed to be a barrier to communication. Winston Churchill once famously responded to an editor of his speech, “This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put!”

It was so witty! But it had nothing to do with the rule. Yes, when on its own, ‘with’ is a preposition. But ‘put up with’ is a compound verb. In that instance, ‘with’ doesn’t stand alone as a preposition. Now, did Churchill not know the proper grammar. Or his editor?

Regardless, it was funny!

My daughter came up with a witticism when she was in high school. We’d started reading the Harry Potter stories when she was just four years old. The whole family loved them. Then a series of stories about vampires and werewolves called the Twilight Saga came out. My daughter read it.

When I asked how she liked the series, she said, “The difference between JK Rowling (HP) and Stephenie Meyer (TS) is that Rowling learned how to write before she published a book.”

Ouch! Nothing like getting criticized by an eighteen-year-old English major. Of course, in the past fifteen years, she’s found much to criticize in her idol’s politics and humanity, just as she’s found much to criticize in my writing.

In summary, it is important to know the rules if you are going to break them. Take the time to learn to write. Everyone will enjoy it more.

Ah. The first of August already. Happy Lugnasad, everyone! For me, it means I’m preparing to return home to Las Vegas, even though the temperatures there have not really started down yet. It will still be about 110 degrees when I get there, but I’ll survive. And, with luck, I’ll start making regular blog posts again. Next week, I’ll talk about establishing a rhythm to your writing: “In the Groove.”

This is number 116 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

…UNLESS YOU’RE SHAKESPEARE.

I’ve just returned from a refreshing and inspiring theatre tour to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. I saw six shows while I was there. Three were among the Shakespearean greats, including one I’d never seen in production before. The latter was The Winter’s Tale, the most famous was Macbeth, and the funniest was As You Like It.

It is a Shakespeare Festival, but the other three shows I saw were by other playwrights: Sense and Sensibility, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Forgiveness. In addition to being good theatre, there was something to be learned from each of the shows.

I was impressed first of all by The Winter’s Tale, a play that vacillated between being a horrendous tragedy and a ridiculous comedy. I’d read the script a couple of years ago when writing the Photo Finish series of books, but all I remembered was the most famous stage direction of all time: Exit pursued by a bear.

In this series of books, Nate Hart and his girlfriends acquire property in Stratford where he becomes a popular photographer among the actresses there. I did a lot of research on the plays produced at the Festival during the years 1969-1976, keeping the season the same, but putting in my own staging and inventing the actors, directors, and technical people. Suffice it to say that I read a lot of plays and play synopses during the writing of those books.

For three acts in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicily, proceeds to destroy his family, his friendships, and his kingdom through petty and foundless jealousy, causing his closest advisor to flee, causing the deaths of his son and his wife, and ordering his infant daughter abandoned to wild animals on a distant hillside. At the peak of the action with all things set in motion, he receives a message from the Oracle of Delphi declaring his wife innocent and Leontes a tyrant. He repents, but it is too late. All is lost.

The final two acts are a pastoral comedy in which the infant daughter, rescued by a shepherd, has grown to a beautiful young woman and falls in love with a young man who just happens to be the son of Polixenes, the king Leontes accused of adultery with his wife.

Through comic trials, the Prince and Princess are revealed and their wedding is celebrated. But none of that is shown. Instead, three soldiers appear with the play’s clown to tell about how the princess was revealed to be Leontes’ daughter, how Polixenes arrived and was reunited with his former friend, how the couple was married, and how the shepherd and his son were rewarded.
A clear case of telling, not showing!

I showed considerably more in the books of the Photo Finish series! They are available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a similar situation occurs. Just before the denouement, the mysteriously transformed elder brother who has been hunting his youngest brother (to kill him) arrives to tell the disguised Rosalind that as he was sleeping, a lion attacked him. His younger brother—who had every right to hate his older brother—could have left him to die, but instead attacked and subdued the lion, rescuing the older brother, but being severely injured. Now the older brother is in the younger brother’s debt and is carrying out his errand, during which he also falls in love with the disguised Duke’s daughter, Celia.

To simplify matters further, the middle brother, heretofore absent, shows up in the Forest of Arden to tell that the evil Duke, bent on hunting down the exiled Duchess, encountered a monk in the forest and was converted from his evil ways, abdicating his throne to his sister and forgiving all those who had been exiled.

Clearly, there was just too much to wrap up for Shakespeare to handle it in the last act.

I’m reminded of an old movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald—I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Last of the Belles.’ In the scene I am thinking of, Fitzgerald is going over his movie script with a movie mogul (again, I think it was Sam Goldwyn), when Goldwyn asks him, pointing at the script,

“What are they doing?”
“They are talking,” Fitzgerald responds.
“But what are they doing?”
“Talking.”
“Doing! What are they doing?” Goldwyn says in frustration.

The obvious intent was to point out that two talking heads on the movie screen were boring, no matter what they were saying. In the movie business there needed to be movement. They needed to be doing something. In Fitzgerald’s lexicon, ‘talking’ was ‘doing.’ His books have a lot of dialog.

The only movie I ever saw that successfully portrayed people talking without doing something else was Woody Allen’s Interiors. The movie was a critical success, but sadly was not popular. By its successful use of dialog, though, it truly highlights the problem many authors have with telling instead of showing.

In many works, authors take the shortcut of having a character tell the story on behalf of the author. Sometimes that works and sometimes it is simply putting narrative in the mouth of a character.

What the author might narrate with a simple sentence like, “A three-car pile-up on I-5 delayed Sylvia by half an hour,” is turned into an ‘exciting’ scene:

Sylvia burst through the door and fell into Ryan’s arms, sobbing.
“It was terrible!” she gasped. “Right ahead of me, a car cut into the left lane right ahead of a truck carrying cement blocks. The truck driver lost control and the truck rolled to the right, dumping his load of blocks onto a car next to him!”
“How terrible!” Ryan said. “Are you okay?”
“Shaken. Just seeing those poor people lying beside the road. I barely managed to squeak by when the dust settled. Traffic was stopped before and after the roll-over. I just gave my name to the driver and took the next exit.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“I need a drink!”

Did this particularly add anything to the narration? As far as the story goes, did it make a difference? She was half an hour late. But this does expose more of the character of the two main actors. We get a glimpse of Ryan’s care, and of Sylvia’s self-absorption as she left the scene of the accident.

It is up to the author now to make this meaningful rather than just a substitute for a fourteen-word narrative.

This may not have been an exciting discussion and you might still not know the difference between showing and telling, but it was a realization that occurred to me as I was watching Shakespeare navigate between the two. Now it is time to get back to writing.

I didn't prepare a blog post for today, but thought I'd jot off a couple of notes.

I'm headed out to Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival this week. I'll get to see six shows!

Unfortunately, that means my productivity will be a little low for a bit as I'm not carrying a computer with me and will have limited internet access. But I'll still get some writing done.

My general blog post on Facebook and Patreon was all about why July was a good month to become a Devon Layne (aroslav) patron. Even though I'm not posting pre-release content in July, I'm offering all seven of the Special Patrons Edition eBooks I've released this year. They are available for all my paid patrons. I'm also pausing collections for August, so new annual subscribers this month will get thirteen months for the price of eleven instead of twelve.

But the bottom line is that I'm not going to be pre-releasing Forever Yours until August. It should be available here on SOL before the end of that month. I'm still very enthused about the book, even though it is nearly twice as long as I thought it would be. Editors and alpha readers have been enthusiastic.

I'm also looking to release Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain by the end of September if all goes well. October if it's slow. First drafts are available for my Sausage Grinder patrons.

So, I'll be offline for the next couple of weeks. Hope to be back refreshed, inspired, and ready to work soon.