aroslav: Blog

This is number thirty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.

NANOWRIMO PREP MONTH continues. Already I’m feeling the pressure to have my idea for what to write in November solidified. So far, I haven’t even decided whether I’m writing erotica or some other literary genre. Fortunately, many if not most of the steps in preparing to write are the same.

The logline is a one-sentence statement that reveals the premise of the story, but also adds an emotional aspect that hooks the reader. (studiobinder.com) Think of the one-line summary in a television directory like TV Guide. Here’s a sample I saw in today’s TV Guide:

A former war veteran storms Afghanistan to rescue his old CO from the Soviets.

Can you guess the movie? How about this one:

A young woman living in an old apartment building becomes pregnant following a horrible nightmare, and begins to fear the worst for her unborn child while suspecting that she is surrounded by evil.

Many writing teachers will say that the logline is created after you’ve written the book or screenplay and need to sell it. But I believe it is a valuable tool to include on the front end of the development cycle. In Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book Save the Cat, he summarizes the logline as simply the answer to “What is it?”

Actor, director, and admitted cad, Terry leads a life filled with colorful and beautiful women: from actresses to students, from stage crew to strangers—Terry never meets a woman he isn’t interested in taking to the next level.

When I first conceived of Things I Never Told My Wife (available on Bookapy), it was a tongue-in-cheek memoir of a Shakespearean player. My 2019 NaNoWriMo project had been called American Royalty, which later became Nathan Everett’s novel A Place at the Table. I needed something more lighthearted and fun to write, so near the end of December I started writing TINTMW.

I didn’t have much of a plan other than that logline. What were some of the things a cad like Terry might do that he’d never tell his wife? I just made a list of them and wrote an episode about each.

I met my soulmate when I was sixteen years old.
Of course, I never told my wife about that.

And that started the adventure. So, here we are preparing for NaNoWriMo 2023—my twentieth! I’ve been looking at storylines that include replotting a fairytale into modern times. Or perhaps a classical narrative poem. I’ve tried to reduce them to a logline to see if I’d buy that. Here are a few ideas:

1. Frustrated father marries off overly-picky daughter to first beggar he sees.
2. Girl escapes from father’s incestuous intentions, taking a few precious items, and finding work in a neighboring city as a housekeeper, until the owner of the house falls in love.
3. Young woman is caught in a lust-inflamed dream, not realizing her dream-lover is the flesh-and-blood enemy her family has sworn to kill.
4. Youngest son stumbles through a quest, succeeding where his older and smarter brothers failed, arousing jealousy and treachery as they attempt to take what he has won.

Notice that in each of these, there is an inciting incident, a protagonist, action, and an antagonist. It is not necessary to name them. Names in most instances don’t add anything to the logline—unless the named character is already known to the reader.

Computer forensics detective Dag Hamar is on the loose again; this time contracted by FinCEN to find and neutralize a computer hacker creating havoc with national security.

Presumably, in this logline for Nathan Everett’s For Mayhem or Madness, readers are already familiar with the previous adventures of Dag Hamar. The name means something.

Alternatively, we have loglines that include more informative elements: Protagonist, action, antagonist, goal, stake.

I created a logline for Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric before I started writing the book. I had it memorized and told it to everyone I met, honing it more finely until I was ready to write.

Two rare-book librarians are unlikely heroes as they race time, biblio-terrorists, and Homeland Security across three continents to find and preserve a legendary ‘other book’ printed by Johann Gutenberg.

I have to say, that term ‘biblio-terrorists’ got more attention from agents than anything else in the pitch. The original title I had for the book, however, changed to make it more mysterious. The original title was Gutenberg’s Other Book. While that is a key element, discovering what The Gutenberg Rubric is, drives our heroes on.

Here are a few possible loglines for NaNoWriMo this year that follow this pattern more closely.

5. OSHA inspector accuses contractor of bad wiring, but a short circuit transports the two into an alternate reality where they must battle each other for the hand of a king’s daughter and the safety of the nation.
6. Woman’s wedding is canceled when a rival claims to already be the fiancé’s wife.
7. Man interprets a woman’s romantic attention as a thinly-veiled attempt to gain control of his business, but his attempts to rebuff her constantly lead them closer to each other.
8. Socially awkward genius inventor hides behind his CEO’s charisma to manage his company, all the while being ridiculed for his stupidity and incompetence.

In either logline format, we have the basis to create a story. The premise of the story (in some instances only the setting) is always coupled with an emotional hook. It is the hook that will draw an audience in and make them consider reading a book that they normally wouldn’t because they ‘don’t read that type of topic.’

The next question the author needs to consider is how deep the hook can be set. Is there a whole novel behind the single sentence or is it just a part of the story? (Hopefully, the exciting part.) At this stage you may consider some other aspects of the story.

That inventor in #8 above is just a Sad Sack being taken advantage of by the CEO until it is revealed that both are vying for the same girl’s love. Well, then, should that be included in the logline to set the hook a little deeper or can it wait until we reach the next level of description?

The logline isn’t the end of the planning process. Next week, let’s look at the next level of the description: “The Pitch,” and start eliminating storylines from consideration.

This is number thirty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.

AS OF TODAY, October 1, 2023, it is officially NaNoWriMo prep month. Even though participants are supposed to start a new work with a blank sheet of paper, various degrees of preparation are allowed and encouraged. This preparation often reveals two different kinds of writers who participate in National Novel Writing Month: Those who plan their work and those who write by the seat of their pants.

I decided that I should look up the definition of the oft-used phrase “by the seat of one’s pants.” It was enlightening. Its first known usage was in 1942 by WWII pilots. It referred to situations in which the aircraft lost its navigation instrumentation and the pilot had to fly by instinct and experience.

Interestingly, I found two subtly different definitions: one was to do something based on personal experience, judgment, and effort, rather than relying on technological aids or formal theory. In flying circles, I believe this is closely related to ‘dead reckoning:’ Navigators using a previous known position to estimate current location based on speed and flight time. The other, and more common in my opinion, definition is to proceed based on intuition or improvisation, without a clear plan or direction.

When NaNoWriMo participants use the term, it is usually the latter definition. They sit down on November 1 and start typing, hoping a story will eventually emerge, but without knowing the path it will take.

Am I a planner or a pantser?

Yes. I have been known to employ both methods. Since I depend largely on my character development driving the story, sometimes it goes in directions I hadn’t imagined. The storyline develops as I type. Character-driven development. At other times, my planning is so extensive, writing is almost easy!

There is some wisdom that I have gained through the years. I feel it is really incumbent upon me to share some of this knowledge. You don’t have to read it, though.
1. Never trust a fart.
2. See the doctor.
3. All the things they told you to slow down when you were young, you should now speed up and get on with it. Walking, talking, driving, sex. Would you just finish, please?
4. Yes, you need to brush your teeth. Again.
5. Plumbing leaks and repairs are costly. Keep the pipes flushed and in good repair. That refers to your biological pipes as well as the copper ones.
6. The pretend lover is every bit as real as the real lover.
7. When a woman says she likes older men, she doesn’t mean OLD men.
8. Use it or lose it.
It’s amazing that I’ve lived 74 years and have collected no more wisdom than this.

This is number twenty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.

WHEN MY SECOND MARRIAGE went down in flames, so did my finances. That was back in 1986. My business was bankrupt, I was bankrupt, and she took all the artwork. I was recruited to bring my clientele with me and join another firm.

We were on the bleeding edge of publishing technology and I was the bleeding expert in the field. We went straight to work doing advertising and corporate communications for a number of Minneapolis area businesses.

I learned two valuable lessons from my four-year association with that company. The first, and possibly most important, was to never work for a crook. That was almost as bad as the second marriage that brought me to the company. An employer who withholds taxes from employee paychecks is supposed to pay that money to the Federal Government. When one discovers the taxes withheld were not paid, there is hell to pay—in the form of the IRS.

Ah well. We live and we learn.

The second most important lesson I learned from this venture was that there comes a time when a project must be considered finished.

The end.

I was working on a four-page corporate newsletter for one of our clients and was determined that it would be perfect when I released it. I adjusted the type, worked on the image positioning, and cross-checked the spelling with a dictionary in my hand. (This was long before ‘spellcheck’.)

My boss leaned over my shoulder to look at the computer screen and asked how long I’d been working on that project.

“A day and a half is all,” I said. Subtext: twelve hours on a four-page newsletter=three hours per page.

“It takes two people to paint a masterpiece,” my boss said. “One to put paint on the canvas, and the other to hang the artist. This project is finished. Now.”

Well, he didn’t hang me, but he did stop the constant cross-checking and trying out different layouts. In my mind, the project wasn’t perfect, but the client was absolutely thrilled with it. They gave us rave reviews and the business took off based on that project.

It was a lot simpler to call it quits on a corporate newsletter than it was on a book. My first serious attempt at writing a novel was Behind the Ivory Veil (available on Bookapy), the prequel to “The Props Master” series. I remember how incredibly proud I was when I typed “The End” on page 120 of my great American novel. I packaged it up and took it to a friend who was an experienced novelist.

He read it.

While I waited. It took about half an hour, at which time he said, “Wow! That’s really freeze-dried. If you added some hot water to it, it would be a whole book.”

I went home having my first real dialog with a character. And I started rewriting.

When I shelved the project some thirty-five years ago, it was in the fifteenth draft. It wasn’t until I returned to writing and started publishing my novels that I decided to dust off the draft and ‘finish’ it. Seventeen complete rewrites before I was ready to turn it over to my editors.

And it still wasn’t perfect.

I could probably have worked on that book for another five years and it still wouldn’t be perfect. But it was finished.

One of the problems authors face constantly is knowing when a book, a story, or a series is done. Some authors simply get worn down by their work in progress and quit. Others write the same story over and over. And a few just never get to the place where the story is finished.

That is one of the great parts of writing during NaNoWriMo. When I participated the first time in 2004, my only goal was to finish a book of 50,000 words in thirty days. And I did it. I also accepted the challenge by Google Blogger to write the book online. I blogged that first story, posting the material live each day. It was crazy, but it worked. I finished my story in thirty days. It was done.

You can still read Willow Mills on my Nathan Everett website, though it has never been published as a book.

I did my undergraduate and graduate work in technical theatre. I was a designer and technical director, and in 1976-78, I designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months before I got hit with my first life burnout. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.

The more I learned about the publishing industry, though, the more I discovered similarities between it and theatre. In theatre, a season is announced with dates and show times. Some amount of marketing is done before the show is ever cast or a set is designed. Then people are brought in to design, direct, act, and manage the production. Tickets are sold. And if you are lucky, an audience shows up.

The one constant thing about theatre is that on Friday night at 8:00, the curtain goes up. It goes up whether the lines are all memorized, whether the costumes are finished, whether the paint is dry, and whether there is an audience. The curtain goes up.

Eventually, I learned to equate my crooked boss’s line about hanging the artist with the curtain going up. You have to have a point at which the project is finished. That is as true of a book as it is of a play or a newsletter.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should rush to the finish just to have the project done. Even after that first draft is finished, there are necessary rewrites and edits. But it helps not to become obsessed with making the project “perfect” when what you really want is the project released. My editors and I take great care in putting out quality work, but we aren’t pedantic about it. As Pixel has told me, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

When I worked in computer software at an industry behemoth, I learned the rating system for ‘bugs.’ Severity 1 was a bug that stopped shipment. It was a crashing bug that made the software unusable. If it only crashed five percent of the time, it might be a Sev 2. And of course, there were bugs that were simply irritants and they were called Sev 3. Within each of the severity levels, there were priority levels 1, 2, and 3. They ranked the order in which bugs of that severity would be fixed.

In the same way, there are editing errors that stop shipment. By the time a book has made it through my editors, though, I consider remaining bugs to be Sev 3/Pri 3. They won’t cause me to stop shipment.

The project is done.

I know authors who carefully plan out what they are going to write with what amounts to a chapter-by-chapter outline of the entire story. Some of my stories have been planned with that amount of detail. On the other hand, there are authors who simply fly by the seat of their pants and don’t know what the next word will be until they have written the current word. Next week I’ll talk about “Planner vs. Pantser.”

This is number twenty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.

“WHERE IS MY MUSE? I know she was here not long ago. She whispered to me in my dreams last night. But now, when I’m ready for her, I can’t find her anywhere. Where is she? Where is my muse?”

Starting back in 1987, I wrote a Christmas story for my wife every year. It was a gift she expected and that I delivered. Until one year I didn’t. It had been a difficult year and I was pretty stressed. My wife was heartbroken that I failed to give her the one thing I’d given her every year since we started dating.

The following year, I began my Christmas story with the words above, then wrote about frantically running about searching high and low for my muse, only to look into my wife’s eyes and see that she was there all along.

Aww. Romantic.

But I listen to writers frequently bemoaning that their muse has taken a vacation, abandoned them, or was giving them the silent treatment, and I think back on that time when life seemed too much for me to possibly put pen to paper. But it turned out my muse was right there where I left her.

Which brings me to the question of inspiration.

Simply because the muse is always present, doesn’t mean I’m always listening. We get in the habit of ignoring her. I think that’s what most people experience when they complain of writer’s block. They have not put themselves into a position where they can hear their muse.

Let me mention something else I think we’ve convinced ourselves fails with age. Yep, I’m talking about libido and the ancient quest for a solid erection. There are pills for it, chews, psychological counseling, and God-knows what else. Older folks mourn the passing of their hard-ons. But it does not need to be so.

It is far more likely that the dear old tallywhacker—or whatever cute equivalent name you ladies have for the pleasure garden below—will atrophy than that it will wear out. Yes, we get caught up in the issues of life—making a living, raising the family, paying the bills, pursuing the ten-point buck, or drinking all the whiskey under the bar. And the more we do that, the less we use the greatest source of pleasure known to humanity.

And it atrophies. Suddenly, we realize that those feelings we once had when a beautiful woman (or any woman for that matter) walked into a room are no longer there. The stirring in the groin is oddly absent.

In the same way, writers get in the habit of ignoring the muse. Then when they want her, they find her sluggish and unresponsive.

My own means of tapping into the muse is to drive. As I write this, I’ve just completed my annual migration from Seattle to Las Vegas. It took four weeks! It’s merely 1250 miles, so why did it take so long? Because I was listening to my characters talking. I would drive for two to four hours in a day, then camp for two or three days while I wrote down all the characters said. When I drive, my characters take over my mind and all I need to do is listen.

It doesn’t always work the way I expect it to. In the summer of 2021, I was busy writing Team Manager SPRINT and took a drive to let the characters talk. Oh, they talked, but it wasn’t anyone I recognized!

“Hi. My name is Bob. I’ll be your demon this evening.”

What???

Suddenly, I had a character I had never heard of before occupying mindshare that I thought was reserved for Dennis and his crew. And he was insanely funny. I couldn’t just start writing down the story when I got home because I had to get SPRINT written. But I started taking down notes as Bob kept talking.

I talked to my story consultant, Doug—the last story we were able to work on together before our camp in Idaho closed and he moved to Texas. We came up with all the different situations that Bob would find himself in over the course of 4,000 years. Doug came up with the tag line: “Bob’s just a happy-go lucky—mostly lucky—demon.” I wrote down all the notes while I was still writing the Team Manager series and in November, for 2021 NaNoWriMo, I sat down to write Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. The story became so compelling to me that I ended up having to write three volumes of Bob’s Memoirs. My 50,000-word goal for November ended up at 150,157 words. And that was just the first volume. All three volumes are now available as a collection by Devon Layne on Bookapy.

The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits his butt in a chair and writes. That’s it. It isn’t the degree of inspiration. As sports writer and columnist Red Smith is credited with saying, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” (Quoted by Walter Winchell in 1949.)

But the brilliance of National Novel Writing Month is that it gives over 400,000 people a year permission to make contact with their muse. And remarkably, nearly ten percent succeed in squeezing out the 50,000 words it takes to ‘win.’

Even if they don’t make the goal, they still have written more than they would have otherwise.

As I like to say, it gives them permission to stick a hand in their pants and play with themselves.

Do I ever get writer’s block? Yeah, I guess I do. Sometimes it’s because I’m looking for the perfect way to word something or I’m spending hours researching the mythology of an ancient Mesopotamian god and the building of his temple so I can place my demon in the right context. Most commonly, however, it is because I have a logjam of ideas and need to clear them so just one comes through at a time. Should I write story A or story B?

I often have a huge amount of storyline ready to write, but I need to set it up first and that could take days while I’m just bursting to write the exciting part.

Or, like with Bob, I have a whole story waiting to be told, but I have to discipline myself to finish what I’m working on before I start the next project.

Oh, I’m not finished with this subject. I think next week I’ll look at the question, “When is it done?”

Enjoy!