aroslav: Blog

Over Exposure comes to an end with this morning's chapter. Don't worry, though. The last book in what was supposed to be a trilogy (book 6) is Follow Focus and is available for presale. It will release and start posting on Thursday.

In my own opinion, Follow Focus is the best of the six books in the Photo Finish Series. It covers three years, starting when Nate graduates from college in May of 1972. Post-college life is much different than high school and college. The family has to survive in a whole new world.

Enjoy!

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

“YOU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL,” commiserated Gayle Lynds as we sat together at a writer’s conference back in 2008.

Lynds is the best selling author of spy thrillers, including Mosaic, The Last Spymaster, and Library of Gold. Great reads from a superb author. She was a collaborator on several Robert Ludlum books, Don Pendleton books, and others. She was kindly sharing some of her wisdom with me as I prepared my first intellectual thriller, The Gutenberg Rubric.

“In my last book, I inadvertently said the villain attached a silencer to his revolver,” Lynds said. “Oh, my! We got hundreds of letters telling me what an idiot I was and all the people at my publisher who didn’t know you can’t put a silencer on a revolver! You’d think I said the earth was flat. We all knew you couldn’t put a silencer on a revolver, but somehow, I missed it and all my editors missed it. We had to do a new release with the correction in it.”

Believe me, you don’t want to screw up anything with a firearm in it. People take it as a personal offense. I’ve done it a couple of times and now simply avoid any mention of a firearm of any kind in any of my stories.

“What difference does it make?” Indeed.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing voice and character. What makes a woman different than a man? Do you have to describe every detail of appearance or action?

This week I received an email from OddManOut that listed two of the reasons he considers my erotica to be among the best on the internet. “One, you don’t tell me the bra size of the women in your story. Two, you never tell me that he puts his left hand on her right breast, or the like.” He says that level of over-specificity is like having to slow down for an unnecessary speed bump.

It doesn’t help, I suppose, that the writers who use that level of specificity often get it wrong. The hypothetical writer above has already indicated that he had a hand on the girl’s butt and one behind her head, so he was putting his other left hand on her breast. Oh, yeah?

When I wrote Border Crossings, originally released as a serial on SOL as Seven Wonders of the World, I used it as a stepping off point for recalling a whole bunch of stuff from my life. It was to be ‘the memoir of the avatar of the pseudonym of the alter ego of the author.’ I figured I could arrange things however I wished from there.

But the truth was that the women I wrote about were very much the women that I fantasized about as a man. They were adventurous, sexually liberated, looking for fun, and finding me attractive. And that included both the women I wrote about on my trip around the world as well as the women I wrote about from my sixty-five years of life before that. They were very much the women I wanted to remember, not the women I actually remembered.

Border Crossings and the whole Wonders of My World series are available on Bookapy. Illustrated with photos from my trip!

So, the philosophical question arises: If what people want to read about is (like my fanciful memoir) the image they want to see, what difference does all this trying to capture voice and character make?

Even if they aren’t factual, readers do want realistic characters. And this is where authors find themselves walking a fine line. Or ignoring it altogether and wandering all over every place. It’s the plausibility aspect of the story. No one starts reading an outer space adventure assuming it is all real. They suspend their disbelief in the fiction as long as it seems plausible within the world that is being described.

A reader recently commented on Over Exposure,

I just take it for granted that they [your stories] exist in parallel universes that might closely mirror ours. So, to readers, if things seem slightly off…, that's why. Almost always, it’s something inconsequential to the story anyway.

But it still has to sound right. Which is why misrepresenting a firearm, for example, is such a red flag to so many people who are devoted to knowing firearms, and are highly defensive of their position of knowledge.

So, when I write a female character, she has to sound like the majority of my readers believe that woman will sound. It’s not a case of actually being the way a woman thinks or acts as it is a case of how the majority of readers (in my case, older men) want to believe they would think or act.

Much to my detriment, I’m not content to leave it at that. Not always, at least. I have this thing about being honest in my portrayals. I want the highly competent female lead in my upcoming work by Nathan Everett, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, to be a genuinely competent female who lives in a business world generally dominated by men. And that means she has to sound real to women, not just to men.

One of the ways I do that is to include several women of different ages as my alpha readers. These women are not afraid to call bullshit when they read something that doesn’t ring true to them. After I’ve rewritten the entire story to correct the errors they point out to me, then it goes through my typical editing cycle of three proofreaders and line editors. That’s more for technical stuff.

I can still guarantee that the story will be jumped on by one or more people for some inaccuracy or another. In this story, it will probably be in the process for land development. Or it could be in the progress of the railroad in the 1800s. Maybe it will be in how a Rubik’s Cube works! Of course, there is the ever popular “This is woke garbage,” meaning it just doesn’t match that reader’s personal world view.

In general, developing characters who are genuine and who behave according their internal character may not make a difference to many readers, but it makes a difference to me. I wouldn’t feel I had done my best if it didn’t.

I’ve been asked if I would consider organizing the posts according to my own logic rather than simply by date, and then publishing them as a single book or story. I’m looking at the possibility of doing so after I’ve finished 52 posts (a year’s worth). Next week, I’ll talk about ‘Isms.’

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

“CAN YOU SAY ‘DEVON LAYNE?’” I asked Alluring Allie at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo a few years ago. It wasn’t quite as out of the blue as it sounds beginning a blog post. We’d been talking for a few minutes and it was near the end of the day. She’d told me she loved to read—especially erotica.

“Devon Layne?” she said.

“That’s me and you just won a free signed copy of my book, Art Something.”

“Are you kidding? For me? You can so touch my tits!”

That was an offer I could not turn down. It was one she repeated the next day so we could get a picture.
To me, that’s ‘primary research.’ When I write erotica, I describe a lot about the females of the story. Remember my comment about ‘old men’s erotica?’ They need detailed descriptions. So, I consider it a duty to my art to collect research that will help me describe a variety of women. One of my favorite places to investigate is at the annual Adult Entertainment Expo, and it seems appropriate to mention that on the weekend it is in Las Vegas.

Sadly, I’m not. I planned to attend this year, but have been held up in Seattle having a pacemaker installed in my heart. Part two of that procedure was on Friday when I should have been chatting up my favorite porn stars on the show floor. Well, next time.

I have collected tactile experiences at the show from a variety of sources and I try to jot down something about the experience soon afterward so I can describe what this boob felt like or looked like. What is Alex’s ass like when I hold it in hand as she embraces me for a photo? What scent was Aimee wearing when she rubbed her butt against me at the firepit? How slim is Kendra with my arm wrapped around her waist and my hand all the way onto her stomach? How hard is Molly’s body, towering over me?

“Aro, you’re here!” Casey said, rushing around the counter so she could hug me against her thin 6'2" frame with my face tucked between her modest breasts so I could kiss the rise of them.

The “Wonders of My World” series is a highly exaggerated record of my travels around the United States in a pickup truck pulling a travel trailer. That’s an adventure I started in 2013 and am still on today, though I’m putting on fewer miles each year, it seems. In US Highways, I record the meeting with my muse, Alice. Alice is a composite of several women I met in various strip clubs around the country. But I owe most to Mia.

I met Mia at the Los Angeles Sex Expo in 2015. A chain of strip clubs in the area had a space set up with couches and half a dozen poles. Dancers were performing on the poles and others were inviting onlookers for lap dances on the sofas.

I was standing near the fringe of the onlookers when one of the performers stalked across the dance area, out into the crowd, that parted before her like the waters before Moses, and put her arms around me.

“I’ve been waiting to dance for you,” she whispered.

I have been around enough to recognize that this was one of the smoothest professionals I’d ever encountered. I never deceive myself into thinking an approach by an exotic dancer is about anything but the money. If you listen to her, she’ll make that clear. But as long as you have the money, she will be anything you want her to be.

In this case, for $10. In addition to two dances at $10 each that were as intimate as a sneaky performer could be in a public room, Mia offered me a pass to get into the club she danced at without a cover charge. She gave me the hours she worked and asked me to please get to the club when she was working so she could dance for me.

Mia taught me a lot in my quest for primary research. I learned how stiff her nipples got when I sucked on them. I learned how she liked the little barbell piercing through her clit hood twisted. I learned the flavor of her lubrication. Yes, Mia was a font of intimate knowledge.

She also taught me how to approach dancers in clubs to further my investigation, something I have continued to do to this day.

US Highways is available with the rest of the Wonders of My World series on Bookapy.

It’s fairly easy to get primary research on physical attributes of young women if you can afford a moderate fee. And if you are respectful and abide by her boundaries and expectations. (In that, it’s sort of like dating.) But how do you get a look inside the mind of a woman?

I don’t profess to be an expert on this subject. I’ve been married three times, and if I were an expert on what women want and how they think, it would have either been married only once or not at all.

I found a fairly new resource that at least helps.
OMGyes is a research-based collection of women’s thoughts about sex that covers a wide range of topics from foreplay to faking to rhythm, layering, and surprising. It is women discussing sex with other women. As a primary source, it might be considered secondary. There are written pieces and video segments of the women talking, but it doesn’t (like most secondary research) try to encapsulate the results in a series of graphs and tables. It is almost unfiltered women of all shapes, sizes, races, and ages, talking about their sexual experience.
Don’t think that you’ll go to this site to get off. That’s not going to happen. What you will find here is information that might make you—or at least make your characters in erotica—a better lover or a more genuine person.

For the experience that will get you over the edge as well as inform you, try the series of videos called ‘Get Up Close’ from Girlsway and Adulttime founder Bree Mills. In this series of fifteen- to thirty-minute videos, Bree interviews women on what their sexual journey has been and then films them masturbating to orgasm.

Okay, that’s very entertaining, and several of the women will give genuine insights about their sexual journey. But understand that these women are all industry professionals. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the language of the porn industry is male-based. The women use male terms when discussing body parts and their feelings. They are performers and there is a bias toward performing in what they say.

This month, I’ve talked about the difference between men and women, building a character of the opposite sex, and research on sex attitudes and physical characteristics. The very real question is ‘What difference does it make?’ Next week I’ll delve into that.

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

“IF YOU ARE A MAN, you know women better than most women do.”

My response to that reader fan mail from a few years ago was “If you are a woman, thank you.”

Sadly, I believe the writer was a man and knew women even less well than I did—which was often somewhere between puzzlement and wonder. Nonetheless, since I don’t write army war dramas or cowboy operas, my books all involve characters of both sexes. The real question is not so much how well I know women, but how well I know my characters.

When I’m reading, I often come across phrases or comments that make me stop and wonder who this author was writing about. It seems so out of character for the person who was described that I wonder how well the author really knows his characters.

And that, I believe is the first criterion to writing engaging fiction of any type, but especially of erotica.

My third year participating in NaNoWriMo, I set myself a unique challenge. My mystery novel would take place on the literal thirty days of November 2006. As a result, I watched the weather and events occurring wherever the characters were at the time and wrapped up Wayzgoose's For Blood or Money in exactly 30 days.

But, for me, the significant thing that was happening was preparing to continue the story from a different character’s perspective on the 31 days of December. That story, Municipal Blondes, did not have the external pressure of NaNoWriMo to govern its development, but was definitely a work of passion.

What most people didn’t know was that beginning in September, I created blogs for both Dag Hamar (hero of For Blood or Money) and Deb Riley (hero of Municipal Blondes). The Dag Hamar blog was simply a run-up to the adventure in November, but the Deb Riley blog was a concerted attempt to capture the voice and style of my twenty-five-year-old female protagonist.

I started Deb’s blog on September 25th with this statement:

This site is written and maintained by Wayzgoose a 57-year-old male, not by Deb Riley, a 25-year-old female. Deb Riley is a fictional character in the upcoming NaNoWriMo book For Blood or Money. But For Blood or Money is written from the viewpoint of Dag Hamar. Deb Riley is his associate. I thought it would be fun to let Riley (as Dag calls her) comment on the action, and even on some of the daily life around the office leading up to November 1. She'll also be commenting through the month of November on the story from her viewpoint. Then on December 1, the intention is to let her pick up the narration.

The only problem is that Wayzgoose doesn't really know how to write like a 25-year-old woman. So, he's using this site during the warm-up to find her voice. We (Deb & Wayzgoose) have friended a lot of people who have contributed to her character in the period of time leading up to Nano. Hopefully those people will friend her back and comment on what she is seeing and how the case is going during the month. If you know someone else who would like to be friends with a character from a fiction that is about to be written, please invite them along. The journal is open. Feel free to join.

The response was pretty phenomenal, with a number of young women (in their twenties) friending Deb and interacting with her. They sent me quizzes, games, puzzles, and interview questions. And I had to respond to each in character. I’m sure my wife and daughter questioned me pacing around my basement office reading my posts aloud in as softened and feminine a tone as I could to see if it sounded like a young woman.

The result was that some of my female followers for that blog intentionally forgot that I was an old man imitating a young woman. They responded with suggestions and comments for Deb Riley, not for me.

When November ended and I continued the story from Deb’s perspective, my followers stuck with me. I continued the adventure taking place on the thirty-one days of December. But there’s a holiday in there and I got a little bogged down with family duties, so took a break for a few days.

I got a panicked email message:
Deb, We haven’t heard anything from you since you got in the car with that Ray fellow. I hope you can trust him. Please post something so we know you’re okay!

I knew at that point that I had a female character who was believable.

Municipal Blondes is available on Bookapy. Also available at other sites in eBook and paperback.

In order to write from the perspective of a person of the opposite sex, you need to suspend your own sense of disbelief. The natural perspective of a 57-year-old man in looking at the 25-year-old woman was “I can’t believe she’d say a thing like that.” But that was the old man’s perspective, not the young woman’s.

I will say that the same is true about women writing about men.

I was surprised to discover some years ago how many straight women were writing M/M gay erotica. A great deal of fan fiction called ‘shipping’ is based around gay relationships. Shipping is derived from the concept of ‘relationshipping’ or writing a relationship between two characters in a popular story. I recall a number of young writers talking about ‘shipping a Harry/Draco’ story, pairing up the male archrivals of the Harry Potter stories.

I had a publishing business at the time and also offered some critique and editing services. I was asked to read and critique a male/male spy love story. Not my usual cup of tea, but I took the job.

My principal critique revolved around the characterization of the two men in this bizarre relationship. They were enemies, but in love with each other. At one point they fought, beating the tar out of each other while they talked about their feelings and how much the other had hurt them.

The critique I sent to the author was that I didn’t believe that gay men were just chicks with dicks. What I was reading was basically a story about a conflict between two women, escalated by the masculine abilities of the men. Instead of scratching at each other and pulling hair, they were punching and trying to strangle each other.

To the straight young woman who wrote this, however, this was the essence of gay erotica. On further investigation, I discovered a large segment of the readership for gay erotica is female. Just as a large segment of the viewership for lesbian porn is male. The story didn’t need to be based in how two gay men would actually deal with each other as much as it needed to be what women wanted to see in men’s relationships.

That was a sobering revelation.

There is no shortage of ideas on this topic, so I’ll figure out another segment to deal with in the next installment. Possibly, where I get my research for female characters. We’ll see next week.

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

WHEN I STARTED writing this blog in March of 2023, I was reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s book How to Write Erotica. At the time, I accepted her definition of erotica: Writing that is intended to arouse. Now, I think it’s time to refine the definition.

First, there is such a wide range of material that is intended to arouse that the definition loses impact. Pornography is intended to arouse. Soft romantic poetry is intended to arouse. Fiery political speeches are intended to arouse. There are different kinds of arousal and we can start by refining the definition to ‘writing that is intended to sexually arouse the reader.’

Still not good enough, because readers become aroused by different things. For one person it might be a description of a woman’s breasts rising and falling with each breath as she talks about the love of her life. Another person might only be aroused by explicit descriptions of what is felt as the penis slowly enters the receptive folds of a woman’s vagina. Others might not be aroused by any written words, but instead require pictures. The intent to arouse is important, but not exclusive.

In this post, I’m interested in the difference between pornography and erotica. Many sources attempt to define that difference with varying degrees of success. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, “The distinction between pornography (illicit and condemned material) and erotica (which is broadly tolerated) is largely subjective and reflects changing community standards.”

In the Britannica’s terms, the sexual element in erotica is part of the larger aesthetic element. It is recognized as art, where in pornography, sexual arousal is its main purpose, even if it has some literary merit.

In last week’s blog, I hit on one of the differences between men’s and women’s outlook on the subject and I realized I’d really identified my own aesthetic. In erotica, we deal with the people involved. In pornography, we deal with the body parts involved.

I understand that might realign the definition of some of my own writing from erotic to pornographic. I’m sure I’ll come up with ways to justify it, but for now, I’d like to explore the distinction and see if it holds together.

Sex is a normal part of relational development. When the story is about that relationship, the sex—even when it is explicit—tends to be more erotic. It embraces the emotional, mental, and physical experience of the people involved. The sexual activity is a part of the relationship, but is not the exclusive focal point.

A story that is ‘about sex,’ however ignores the relationship perspective. It embraces the physical experience without paying more than peripheral attention to the emotional or mental experience. In porn, we are focused on the body parts involved in reaching an orgasm. We tend to treat them as separate from the whole person.

I believe this is a significant feature of pornographic video. There is usually very little story development. The pizza delivery guy shows up and the customer confesses she has no money, but suggests she could pay with her body. It takes about six lines of dialog before the two are naked and fucking. The camera focuses on her breasts, her mouth as she fellates him, her vagina as he penetrates her. Then it’s all about changing positions so the camera can get a better view. In each position, the participants will make sure the hair is out of the way, the hands don’t block the camera, and an ‘open’ position is maintained. Finally, the come will be sprayed where it is visible. The intent is not the pleasure of the actors, but the pleasure of the viewer.

When it comes down to it, erotica gives a much more realistic view of life, because it deals with the whole relationship. I’m not saying that the pizza delivery guy never tags the customer, but if the frequency were anything like what is portrayed in porn, there would be lines of males waiting to become pizza delivery guys. The number of stepbrothers and stepsisters who get involved with each other is nowhere near what is portrayed in porn. How many women in real life kiss another woman and suddenly realize they’re lesbians?

The focus on the genitals in porn makes the situations much less common than they are portrayed. Whereas every developing relationship has erotic elements that strike home with the reader. He’s so sweet to help her like that and take care of her. Of course she’ll become attracted to him! Maybe he’d like cookies.

Pornography includes stories intended to arouse by focusing on sex acts and genitalia. Erotica includes stories intended to arouse by focusing on relationships that may include sex as a part of the development.

Now, if I could apply that to what I’m writing, I’d be much better off!

An editor’s note to me after reviewing this post: “You know, this topic could easily fill a couple large books, right?”

My response was: “Yes. They're called The United States Statutes at Large.”

I’m not through dealing with pornography vs. erotica, but I don’t plan to attempt to redefine the legal code or thousands of pages of judicial rulings. We’ll get a little deeper each time.

I was asked this week about writing from the perspective of the opposite gender. Yes, I have written books with a female protagonist rather than a male, and it is very difficult. Next week, I’ll deal with “Capturing the Character.” I’ll especially deal with capturing the character of a person of the opposite sex.