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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.”
This is number 102 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“AS A WRITER, what would you choose as your spirit animal?”
An interesting question, but I’m not sure you get a choice in the matter. I’ve always had the impression that a spirit animal chooses the person, and I have some evidence to that effect.
Let me start by saying, I don’t set much store in any religious belief system. However, I do believe there are things we do not fully comprehend and that we give too little credit to the intelligence and communication afforded by all living things. So, I tend to gently touch trees and thank the dryads who live there. Even if I don’t understand precisely what a dryad is, I believe the tree has some essence that is beyond what I know.
I might even say the same of some (all?) non-living things, like stones. I believe in stones.
I don’t fully comprehend the full nature and impact of a spirit animal, other than to say it seems to appear when we need love, strength, support, inspiration, or guidance. It is up to the animal to make the first move.
The Old English, or perhaps Welsh origin of my birth surname is Eoferheard. Broken down ‘eofer’ means wild boar and ‘heard’ relates to the heart, strength, bravery. BoarHeart. I could have adopted that as a pseudonym! Back in the early 80s, I was exploring a number of mythologies and was into men’s groups where we sat around drumming and telling stories.
You might recall a men’s awakening leader of that era by the name of Robert Bly. I was at a retreat with him back in the early 80s. At one point, my group worked on making masks. It was an involved process that included using plaster of Paris to mold our own faces and then when it was dry, building it up, painting it, and establishing a being.
I really had no idea what I was creating, but an image of a boar appeared beneath my fingers. I added tusks and painted it mostly gray. I referred to it as “Grandfather BoarHeart.”
In 2016, when I was traveling around the world, I came upon the bronze image of a boar in Munich. The snout and tusks are shiny gold where people touching it have worn off the patina. I touched it as well.
I carried the mask until it basically fell apart and then didn’t really think about a spirit animal again.
When I wrote the first volume of my Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures, Redtail, I didn’t have a concept of continuing the story. But I’d never been to Laramie, Wyoming, where the story took place, so I took the opportunity to visit as I went through Wyoming in 2014. I visited the Coe Library on the UWyo campus to see if I could find a place in it where I could see the Green Hill Cemetery, a scene I had written in the book. I ventured into the rare books room and looked out the window. A librarian asked if she could help me, and I told her what I was looking for. She said that until a couple of years previously, I could have seen the cemetery from that window but then they built the new business building.
We talked and I told her about my writing. She asked the name of the book, and I told her. She went to her computer and in a few seconds said, “Yes, we have a copy here in the library.” That might be the only one of my erotica books to make it into a college library! Then she asked a question that changed the course of my next few months: “Do you plan to write a sequel? If you do, please come back and I’ll help you research anything you need.”
The idea took root, and I decided I’d write about the next generation of the Bell family. But I was missing a key ingredient. What animal would be the trigger to get my new main characters to time travel? I thought about calling it Graywolf or perhaps Wapiti (Cheyene for Elk). Enter ‘The Book Doctor,’ Sonja, who said, “Think of the title Redtail as more than a specific type of hawk or name of an animal, but rather as a description as well.” I started thinking of descriptors for different animals.
I went back to Laramie to research the sequel and as soon as I parked my trailer, saw a raven sitting on the picnic table in my campsite. The name Blackfeather came immediately to mind. I would call the book Blackfeather and the raven would be the trigger animal for Kyle and Ramie’s time travel.
As soon as I had the name, I began seeing ravens everywhere. When I’d finished my research in Laramie—with a huge thank you to the librarians there, who provided plat maps of the town, biographies, and even a history assembled just five years after the town was formed—I headed south, trying to beat the early-November weather. Along Interstate 25, I continued to see ravens, usually standing beside the highway about every five miles or so, as if they were sentinels guarding my path. I saw them at my campsites and outside my window.
Ravens continue to be a presence in my life and I have accepted them as my spirit animal.
The Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures, including Redtail, Blackfeather, and Yelloweye, are available as eBooks from Bookapy.
When a Raven has flown into your life, it signifies that magic is at play. Raven ignites the energies of magic allowing it to become one with our intentions and will. The Raven will show you how to walk into the dark corners of your inner conflicts buried deep within, opening the doors to the deepest power of healing to be within our grasp.
Raven is assuring you of the impending change. He brings with him the ability to bend time and space for the perfect moment at the right time. He signifies rebirth, renewal, reflection, creativity, and healing.
When the Raven enters into your life, human and animal spirits intermingle. It is in the blackness that the Raven symbolizes that everything mingles until it is brought forth into the light.
Do you need some inspiration in these trying times? Hmm. Did I mention that “I Believe in Stones?” Next week.
This is number one hundred one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHANGES in life go unnoticed. I am not even including in that a spouse’s new haircut, glasses, or weight. There are just things that people don’t notice, no matter how modest or life-changing they might be.
Take this blog, for example. This is the eighth posting of 2025. Yet no one noticed that the date of the previous seven was listed on my site as 2024! Not even my very careful editor, even though it was at the top of every draft I sent him! It was simple to re-upload all the posts this morning with the corrected date, but if I hadn’t just called attention to it, no one would have noticed that, either.
In fact, several of my books, both by Devon Layne and Nathan Everett, have had characters who swore they would pay more attention. Tony Ames in the Model Student series constantly fought to be more aware of what was going on around him. Brian Frost of Living Next Door to Heaven constantly struggled to even remember what day it was or the names of all his girlfriends. Wayne Hamel in The Props Master had a constantly muddled mind, kept that way by the witches who were ‘training’ him.
I think the most obvious of these was probably Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits and Wild Woods. Gee Evars, suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, stumbles into Rosebud Falls just in time to dive in a rushing river and save the life of a drowning toddler. And to lose his memory.
In this duology, I had to consider what memory loss meant. I didn’t deal with a deterioration like dementia or Alzheimer’s, but rather with the instant erasure of his past. And one of the things I think no one who read the book noticed was that he lost his memory when he crossed the city limits into town, not when he dove in the river.
So, what did he actually lose? He still had good language skills. He had good math skills. He could work in a variety of settings. He was a natural philosopher whose question was always whether a decision or an action would make him a better person.
After saving his nemesis, a preacher who attempted to have the town rally to drive Gee out, Gee is asked why he didn’t just let the man drown in the river that attempted to claim him. He asks, “If I had left him… had let him drown, would that have made me a better person?”
When children who had been drugged, brainwashed, and sold into slavery in the Wild Woods began showing up in the town, it was only a man with no memory of his own who could reach them and could understand the pain they were going through.
City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks on Bookapy, and in paperback at other online bookstores.
I forget things, too. And I fail to notice things. So, I was a little taken aback when I was asked, “Has writing and publishing a book changed the way you see yourself?”
In a mirror?
Like several characters I’ve written about in the past—notably Art in Art Critic and Trayce in Soulmates—I avoid looking at myself in a mirror as much as possible. What I see in a mirror does not at all match what I see in my head.
I don’t think there is anyone of my generation who hasn’t met a high school classmate or walked into a class reunion and stopped to wonder where all those old people came from.
So, when you ask how writing has changed my life, I struggle to remember what life was like before publishing and what it is like now. The obvious answer is that I am older now.
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