aroslav: Blog

This is number 113 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

IF I’D KNOWN it would end so soon, I’d have started earlier and done it more often with more people. That was the story of my sex life. It’s incredibly difficult to find potential partners at 75 compared to 25. But I waited, was mostly faithful, and didn’t ask much of my partners.

If that sounds like an odd way to start talking about delayed gratification, I guess every coin has two sides.

The problem as I see it wasn’t in delaying fulfillment of a consuming goal, but of being oblivious to my own needs and those of my partners. I was the one who let work, hobbies, projects, and other people take precedence over the relationship I had at home. And so were my partners.

Back 40 or 45 years ago, I read a book called The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. The title comes from a famous poem by the poet laureate of my youth, Robert Frost, titled ‘The Road Not Taken.’ While the poem actually describes two roads that to all appearances are equal, the narrator eventually chooses one and abandons the other.

The book by Peck, however, describes two very different paths, one of immediate gratification and one that delays fulfilling one’s desires. When I read the book—and don’t ask me to quote anything specific from it because it was a long time ago and I don’t presently have a copy—I realized that this had been drilled into me from a very early age.

“You have to finish your homework before you can go out to play.”
“If you want that so badly, you’ll need to earn the money for it.”
“Dessert comes after you eat your vegetables.”

But nowhere in any of those adages did it teach the value of delayed gratification. Homework was not as important to me as playing with my friends. My father took out loans to buy a car. Why suffer through filling my belly with something I didn’t like and then not having room to enjoy what I did like? As an adult, I can place values on each of these things, but the principle was not what was taught as a child.

In Peck’s book, he attempts to teach that anticipation of the goal and putting in the effort to achieve it enhanced the pleasure derived from it.

Of course, in my youth and my adolescent drive for sex, it meant saving it for marriage. That actually transferred the desire from finding a sex partner to finding a marriage partner.
I’m not going to evaluate the choice, only to say that perhaps I’d have taken the ‘road not taken.’

I have mentioned the Living Next Door to Heaven series in several posts. It is my longest series at ten volumes, and 1,572,854 words. For this post, I decided to focus on the second book in the series, The Agreement. In this book, a group of freshmen in high school band together for safety and protection from themselves.

Everyone worried that as they started to date, they would lose control, as a couple already had to some extent. They create an agreement among them that places specific limits on what they can and can’t do until they reach a certain age. Those limits, while protecting them from actually having sex all at once, prove to be a testing ground for how much they can do without breaching the agreement.

There was a lot of sex in that book—just no penetration. They agreed to delay that gratification until later. In fact, there is no ‘actual sex,’ as my critics said, until book four, Deadly Chemistry, discussed in my previous post.

The delay served to enhance the anticipation and to some degree the enjoyment of the act itself for the characters.

The Agreement and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series is available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.

I’m aware that one-handed readers might get frustrated by not having a particular sex act depicted in a story, a chapter, or even on the current page. It seems the readers themselves read for more immediate gratification rather than a long build-up, which is a feature of most of my stories.

But a lack of sexual penetration is not the only thing that readers become impatient over. What I really want to talk about is more fundamental to writing compelling stories that keep people wanting more.

Some of you will recall a television series that ran from 1978 to 1991 called Dallas. In the spring of 1980, the most popular and most hated character in the show, J.R. Ewing (played by Larry Hagman) was shot. That’s it. That’s how the episode ended. Viewers had to wait until November to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” It was a major advertising campaign and ended in the second-highest-rated television episode of all time!

The cliffhanger ending was a hallmark of the fourteen seasons of Dallas. Even the final season ended with a cliffhanger, never to be resolved.

Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who passed away in 1959, is still quoted as saying, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Then start the next chapter.

“I was on edge while they were walking back and forth, waiting for the attack and kidnaping... knowing this was the last chapter and fearing an awful cliffhanger.”
“I hate cliffhangers! I’m not reading any more!”
“At least I know how the story ends. For me it ended today!”
“If you think I’m going to wait to find out…”
“Horrible cliffhanger. I might stop reading cause of this. Certainly not going to buy it now. You don't usually do this.”
“AAAKKKK! A Cliff Hanger! I hope it's not more than three days! Just Kidding. I was weaned on monthly S.F. Pulps so used to waiting a month. I'd detour 6 extra blocks walking the mile home from school hoping the next issue was in.”
“Oh wow, what a cliffhanger!”

If I took the time to sort through the 3,500 public comments I’ve received on my stories and the thousand emails I get every few months, I could come up with dozens of other comments decrying the use of cliffhangers. Even my alpha reader, Les, sent me a message that said, “Wow! Big bang-up chapter ending,” in reference to a cliffhanger in my current work in progress.

The truth is cliffhangers are pretty common. Authors try to keep people interested in turning to the next page or reading the next chapter. I hold that the cliffhanger is simply a facet of delayed gratification. Anticipation heightens the enjoyment when the next chapter comes.

What I have seen, however, is a lot of readers who can’t delay their gratification long enough to wait three days for the next chapter. Yes! Three days! That’s the posting schedule I have for most of my stories. A chapter every three days. And I don’t begin posting the story until it is finished, so the chapter loads in three days until the story has ended.

My advice: If you must have immediate gratification and cannot possibly wait three days for a cliffhanger to be resolved, wait three months until the story has finished posting and then gobble it up in a weekend. You’ll only need to wait another three months for the next story.

Or buy the book.

This is number 112 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I THOUGHT it would be quite clever to follow up May 11th’s post about lying to my editors with one about lying to my readers. The problem is I couldn’t think up an example of lying to my readers, except this one of saying I would talk about lying to my readers and then not doing it.

So, I guess I did.

Then last Sunday came and I realized I didn’t have this blog post ready for you! I guess I lied again. Is there any end to it?

Of course these were both rather accidental lies. I meant to write the blog. I meant to post it last week. I really didn’t mean to lie. I find, however, that I sympathize with some of my characters, and as a result with some people in real life, who think the lie is their only recourse.

The following section contains spoilers.

Sometimes, my own deep-seated anger and impotence leads me to transfer an irrational mindset to my characters. They act in ways that are not legal, ethical, or moral. Such was the case when Denise was murdered in Deadly Chemistry, the fourth book of the ten-volume Living Next Door to Heaven saga. (Living Next Door to Heaven 1, Part IV on SOL)

I was extremely angry about the loss of this sweet and loving character. I knew that the story and the development of the entire clan depended on the murder and Brian’s reaction to it. But did he have to kill the murderer?

People don’t realize that it was Brian’s action that actually was the point of the story, not Denise’s death. When he found out who the perpetrator was, he cold-bloodedly mixed the chemicals that would at least render the man unconscious, and then used his martial arts ability to dispatch him in a gruesome way.

It was an act that Brian could never admit to, and which would haunt him all his life. He lied about it to everyone. He lied directly to Hannah’s face when she confronted him. He feared the truth had come out when the next clan death occurred in Becoming the Storm (LNDtH 2, Part VIII). He was haunted by both his action and his lie for the rest of his life.

What really got to me, though, was that everyone in the clan knew or suspected the truth. And they all became complicit in his lie.

Just like we do when we hear a lie, know it’s a lie, and agree to the lie anyway, because it is what we want to believe.

Deadly Chemistry and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven eBook saga are available at ZBookStore.

I started this post thinking that I would be talking about my well-known tagline that “I lie for a living.” I write fiction. There are all kinds of comments we can make about fiction and truth. Steven King is purported to have said “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

I saw a performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet last week. A cast that did a very credible job with the bard’s most famous work, putting their own stamp on it with a setting in a southern trailer park. The performance was in a huge tent and I was impressed with the way Hamlet’s two most famous soliloquys were accompanied by wind effects flapping the tent as if it would blow over. I later realized it was actually a wind storm that tore through Las Vegas that night. Good timing.

Hamlet, however, lays a trap for the king in a scene to be portrayed by a passing troupe of players.

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

In the fiction of the play, he plans to catch the conscience of the king. If you try this today, you might find the king has no conscience.

So, perhaps in the fiction I write, I might possibly expose some aspect of life or society that catches our consciences. Not that we are guilty of murder. Not really. We can turn a blind eye and accept that if we don’t see it, it never happened.

What gets me is that when the lie is exposed, we as often blame the one who revealed it rather than the perpetrator. I’m amazed at what vigorous opposition arose to fact checkers over the past few years. The fact checkers became the villains and the general public expended more energy attempting to discredit them than to investigate the truth or the lie.

I’ve been accused of a bias in my writing and I freely admit to it. I don’t know of an author whose opinions and life philosophy don’t creep into his work, even when he tries to be unbiased. The venom that has been spewed at me for this bias—which I even get in response to some of these blog posts—has prompted me to put a disclaimer at the beginning of each of my stories.

This book contains content of an adult nature. This includes explicit sexual content and characters whose beliefs may be contrary to your religious, political, or world view. The content is inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal for readers under the age of 18.

I consider it a mark of being an adult to be able to read material of opposing views and philosophies without becoming unhinged. I have to do it every day.

A scene I recently wrote for my work in progress talks about a pastor of a megachurch who has been preaching against the AI my hero is developing. Henry, in looking at the evidence before him, says,

This isn’t about God. It’s all about an egotistical sermonizer who whips people into a frenzy over things and then professes ignorance of why they would ever act like they do. Next thing you know, he’ll want to run for president.

Well, I couldn’t resist a little snide comment in his remarks. The thing is there will be as many people on all sides of this statement who come after me. It won’t make a difference whether they are religious or non-religious, left or right, rich or poor. They will all assume I am attacking their side of the very ill-defined issue.

Is it a lie? Well, it is certainly fiction. But the sad side-effect of our growing ability to accept lies that agree with what we want to believe is that we gradually lose the ability to recognize they are lies at all.

When I started my journey as a vagabond twelve years ago, I was planning to pull a trailer behind a pickup truck. I looked at all the available models and evaluated their pluses and minuses.

In the end, I determined that since I was going to be pulling a trailer on roads of unknown condition, I needed something that was built tough. Like a Ford.

I was on the road for over a year before I realized that I’d fallen for the company’s advertising slogan! By then, I had to defend it as being the truth, whether it was or not. I fell for the lie.

I can’t possibly predict what the next blog post will be about, or even if it will be in one week or two or more. I’m working hard, but sometimes the chaos is overwhelming. Until next time…

This isn't my usual Sunday blog post talking about the life of an erotic author. Not exactly. I only got about two paragraphs of that blog post written. In the meantime, I got four chapters of my new work in progress written. That's nice.

But I also realized that a story few of you knew about was ready for everyone to read. Back in October, I entered The Key to Eve in the 2024 Halloween contest. Readers voted it in third place! Unfortunately, that meant that the story was bound for six months behind the premium paywall. Now it's out of the closet! I mean... available for free.

Witches, vampires, dire wolves, a gryphon, a shapeshifter, an animal talker, villains, and heroes all meet in this fantasy. The one who captures the key from around the cat's neck will win the heart and home of the fair maiden. The race is on!

I don't often write in the fantasy genre, but as usual, you'll find this one a little different. Hope you enjoy it!

Maybe even a relief if you're tired of hearing from me. Soulmates finished serialization this week. Now the entire 40 chapters are available on SOL and the eBook is available on ZBookStore, the rebranding of Bookapy for adult content. And here I am with nothing new ready to release. So I won't be posting anything new for at least a couple of months before Forever Yours is finished and edited.

Thank you to those of you who reached out to tell me you enjoyed Soulmates. Several of you asked about a sequel. There is nothing currently on the horizon. I anticipated returning to the characters for further adventures, but the reception of Soulmates was kind of lukewarm. I have other stories that people liked a lot better and are waiting for sequels to, so I'll be focusing my energy on those stories for the foreseeable future. I'm spending more time writing and editing my future stories and less relying on inspiration.

It's getting hot here in Las Vegas. 98 degrees at the moment. That means it's time for me to head north soon. I expect to have things closed up here by the end of the month and will be flying up to Seattle the first week of June. My daughter is in a production of Once Upon a Mattress and I want to get there before it closes. I'll be spending most of the summer in the Seattle area except a week-long trip I'm making to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario in late July. I'm definitely enjoying my summer forays into Shakespeare and this summer will include Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and As You Like It. Non-Shakespearean shows will include Sense and Sensibility, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Forgiveness.

I expect to return to Vegas in mid-August, but if it is unbearably hot, I might drive up into the mountains and just hide for a couple of weeks. Amidst all the travel, I intend to be writing and finishing both Forever Yours and Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain. Three other projects are vying for my attention when those two are completed. We'll see which one wins. They include a rewrite of Bob's Memoir, Volume 3 that extends the story considerably and will be available when I release the Signature Edition hardcover of the trilogy in December. I've opened my files for A Place Among Peers and will rewrite the draft of that sequel to A Place at the Table. It might be time to write a fourth volume of Wonders of My World, the travelog of erotic adventures I've had while on the road since my round-the-world trip (Seven Wonders of the World on SOL or Border Crossings on ZBookStore). While I slowed down some, I found some pretty wild adventures that I'm sure I can exaggerate.

I'll try to continue my weekly blog, but that might take a break this summer, too. We'll see.

Don't panic! I'm not dead! I'm just being quiet for a while.

This is number 111 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I DIDN’T MEAN TO LIE. Honest. I made the statement in good faith, but things didn’t work out that way. I know. This is, like, the 5,000th time, but I promise, I’ll do better next time. Please forgive me.

Of course, I’m not talking about the words of a famous politician. I’m counting the number of times I’ve told my editors, “One more chapter. Maybe two.” Eight, ten, or twenty chapters later, I’m asking if they think I should divide the story into two volumes and go back to where I originally thought it would end.

I’m really terrible at this!

If I recall correctly, that’s exactly what happened when I started writing aroslav’s Team Manager series. I intended it to be three volumes, covering Dennis’s sophomore, junior, and senior years in high school. It was all going to be about basketball.

Then, I reached the end of basketball season in the crew’s sophomore year (SWISH!) and it was only March! I couldn’t just skip over the next six months until basketball season started again. I continued the story of their sophomore year with SPRINT! This went into track season and through the summer following. I managed to rein in the story line so that COACH! and CHAMP! wrapped up each of the following two years, even though technicalities of what was legal forced the last volume out until September.

The thing is, when I said it was almost finished and wrapped up SWISH!, I really thought I was ready to start COACH!, not another entire book before I got there. I just lied a little.

SPRINT! and the entire Team Manager eBook collection are available on ZBookStore. This was formerly Bookapy, but the previous incarnation has been split so that adult-oriented books are offered only through ZBookStore. At the same time, all my Devon Layne and Nathan Everett books are offered through ZBookStore, even though the Nathan Everett books are not ‘adult’ titles.

What brought the whole discussion of lying to my editors to the forefront was a recent question from my number one editor, Pixel the Cat, regarding how long my current work in progress would be. I’d just sent him a batch of chapters through chapter 32 of Forever Yours.

“Do these complete it?” he asked.
“No,” I responded. “There will be another eight or ten chapters.”

I lied.

I didn’t know I was lying at the time. I had a synopsis and a list of things to be done in those eight or ten chapters, but as I kept writing and plotting out the timeline, I realized I could make it to the end of Part III of the story in eight or ten chapters, but not to the end of the story. I’m now expecting a Part IV of another fourteen or fifteen chapters! If it’s longer than that, it will be more than one book. Am I looking at another SWISH!/SPRINT! split?

I don’t know, but I hope not.

This is actually a symptom of a very real writing problem. I could finish the story in the originally predicted eight or ten chapters. But the last part would feel compressed and rushed. I would get unlimited comments about not tying up all the loose ends, not knowing how to end a story, and general disappointment. Not that I wouldn’t get the same comments if I wrote thirty-two more chapters and tied up everything neatly. I would still get those comments, but perhaps fewer of them.

It’s a two-edged blade. Part of the responsibility is on the author. The other is on the unwillingness of readers to let go of their favorite characters or storyline. When I finished the fourth volume of Team Manager: CHAMP!, I ended the entire storyline that I planned for the main character and his girlfriends. They were in a good place together, ready to face life after high school supporting each other. But I started receiving requests and demands for a continuation of the story. What happened then? How did they continue to make their sextet work? What happened in college?

Those are all interesting questions on the surface, but they aren’t part of the story. For example, Dennis is no longer a team manager. It would be silly to continue a story called Team Manager. Is there another possible story featuring the same characters? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What’s the end-point? Where does the story go? Do I have to keep writing the story until they all die?

The same is true of any lengthy story that captures the interest and hearts of readers. People are still clamoring for a continuation of Harry Potter as an adult after school. Fewer these days since the author proved to be an asshole to a substantial part of her readership. But what would the story be? The characters have proven their worth. They have defeated the primary evil in their world. They have paired up as couples. If there was another story, it would need to be substantially different, more sedate, and frankly boring.

This was supposed to be about lying to my editors.

I have a second work in progress called Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain. I find it is helpful for me to work on two projects at once because I need to change focus occasionally, so I don’t get bogged down in one or the other.

I haven’t even told my editors about this project. That’s not lying, is it? It’s currently eighteen chapters and nearly 60,000 words. According to my story notes, I’m about halfway through the story. But am I really? Each time I open the file I realize the story is progressing faster than I thought it would. Do I dare tell my editors I have a new story of thirty-six to forty chapters and then wrap it up in thirty? Or twenty-eight? Or fifty?

So, I hold that information close to my chest (except for the world who reads this blog and the Sausage Grinder patrons who read the story as I write it), and find I am only lying to myself when I look at what comes next and how long it will be.

But there are other little lies I tell about my stories—mostly to myself.

Those lies are called my story outline and synopsis. I start with the idea and intend to write it, but then I discover that a different character has become more interesting than I gave her credit for. I don’t want to focus the story on someone else. Or I discover a timeline flaw and don’t want to backtrack. The story changes subtly from its intended direction.

According to my plot outline, Couple A-B will break up and character C will come into A’s life, bonding in ways no one else has. They marry and have a family. Then A gets killed by a jealous former lover.

But in reality, relationship A-B grows much deeper than I intended. I don’t want them to break up. They are a perfect pair. Scratch C from the story altogether and forget about the jealous former lover.

Now I have a very different ending to the story! How much of what I have told that should lead up to the first ending is now a lie? How much of the total story do I need to change? I want to be honest in how I deal with it, but can I be?

I have sometimes used the introductory tagline “I lie for a living.” I mean, if you read my books everything is fiction. None of it is ‘true.’ Except, as Steven King is purported to have said, “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” I would add that non-fiction is learning through information. Fiction is learning through imagination. Next week: “Lying to My Readers.”