aroslav: Blog

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

WE'VE ALL HEARD the writing advice ‘show, don’t tell.’ But what the hell does it mean. I started writing to tell a story. Now you’re telling me I can’t tell it? WTF?

I’m one of a hundred thousand writers who can’t define exactly what that means, but I can give countless examples. I’ll start with, “She was so funny we laughed our asses off.” That was an actual line I wrote in LNDtH6 El Rancho del Corazón. And then I reread the chapter, as I always do. Groan! I’d spent an entire chapter telling about how funny Elaine was, but nowhere in the chapter was she actually funny.

This presented a real challenge. How do I write a funny twenty-three-year-old woman in 1991? I am an avid observer of people, and especially enjoy observing young women. I found what comediennes were enjoyed by my daughter and ex-wife. When I was writing the story in 2014-2015, many comediennes were making a name for themselves on Comedy Central and HBO. I watched them all. I noted their mannerisms. I noted their language. And I set about writing a comedy monologue for Elaine to give and Rhonda to film. It wasn’t only the words that were to be used, it was the expressions, the camera angles, the intonation. I had to capture all that in a monologue that was actually funny.

After I wrote the monologue—and I thought it was pretty funny—I sent it to several trusted women and asked if they thought it was age appropriate and 23yo female appropriate. Even my ex-wife said I should consider writing comedy routines for comediennes. That was just the first. I had to maintain the conceit that Elaine was truly funny in her television show, Chick Chat. I ended up writing a dozen monologues for her.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with the issue, and certainly not the last. This is where research can only take you so far. Sometimes you have to become the character, at least in your head.

When I wrote Nathan Everett’s The Volunteer (Wayzgoose on SOL), I had to put myself in the head of a chronically homeless man. I began drinking wine—a little too much wine, but carefully rationed out because I couldn’t afford to over indulge. I went hunting for scraps of cardboard boxes and scrawled signs on them. I even considered standing on a street corner with a pile of book boxes and a sign that said, “Wrote a book. Please Help.”

I had to get inside the head and thoughts of the homeless man I was portraying in the book, and it nearly drove me crazy. I couldn’t just say, “And then he stood on a street corner panhandling.” What was going through his mind? What was his reality? How did he respond to the dollar dropped in his hat? And then, I needed to express it as G2 experienced it. I couldn’t just tell his story. I had to bring the reader inside that chaotic mind of this homeless man.

I’m pretty sure that all ten or twelve copies of the book that will ever sell, already have, though I’ve just released it on bookapy, ten years after it was first published. Once I was inside the mind of that man, I couldn’t write a happily ever after ending. I didn’t kill him off, but he ended the story much as he began it: alone and empty.

The Unitarian church I attended didn’t appreciate my telling them that their efforts to end homelessness were failing. They were doing good, but they weren’t ending homelessness, which was even on the rise in our county. What’s more, I told them there were people who would always be homeless. Some were even phobic when it came to houses. That’s a hard thing to consider when you just want to do the best for everyone and have defined ‘the best’ as being a roof overhead.

I never got closer to actually being homeless than having a sixteen-foot travel trailer pulled behind a pickup truck from campground to campground, wherever I found was cheapest. I have a bigger trailer now and don't move around quite as much, but that's still the way I live.

One of the things I have discovered as I attempt to show and not just tell—notice I’ve put a modifier in now because you will always ‘tell’ part of the story—is that it prevents me from taking the easy route out. I can’t say, “Every time anyone brought up the joke, they laughed.” In reality, I have to know what the joke was, what the environment was in which it became a standard of humor for this group, and what the key word was that caused people in this group to start laughing. Then I could set it in improbable situations.

The three stood looking at their departed friend in the funeral home, tears running from their eyes. “Royal flush,” one said, just loudly enough for his friends to hear. Sam covered his laughter with a renewed bout of noisy weeping as Lil dug her fingernails into Jack’s arm on one side and into her own palm on the other. Someone in the back of the chapel whispered, “They really loved that guy.”

When I wrote Devon Layne’s “Model Student” series, I thought of a character who became so obsessed when he was painting that everything else ceased to exist. He had a playlist that he listened to as he painted the Mural and each song led him into another part of the painting. You had to feel what he was feeling in order to see what he was painting.

That is showing, not telling.

Next week, let’s get into some of the nitty gritty: Talk Dirty to Me, Baby.

FOLLOW-UP
It was completely coincidental that today's chapter of Exposure also contained a female comedienne that I had to write a routine for. It was fun and challenging!

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

The first time my editor told me to ‘steal their shoes,’ I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. His comment was, “Everything is too easy for both the hero and the villain. There is no reason for them to fail. It’s a walk in the park. You need to steal their shoes.”

The reference was to that great Christmas movie, Die Hard. While sneaking around the building, trying to get to the hostages, McClane (played by Bruce Willis) is discovered while he’s barefoot and a bunch of windows are shot out. He has to run across the broken glass in his bare feet. That not only means he is injured and it is difficult to walk, but also he’s leaving a trail of blood, so the villains can track him.

In Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric, I rewrote the beginning to injure Keith in both his eyes and hands, two things critical to the success of his mission. But I’ve found I need to remember this advice over and over while writing.

Lazlo Zalezac, rest his soul, created a fun universe called “Damsels in Distress” and I decided to write a series of stories in it. They aren’t long stories, but were incredibly fun to write. I checked in with him before making my contribution to be sure my concept was in keeping with his vision for that universe. He said he liked it and to publish it.

I’d read all the stories in that universe and discovered how some authors had gotten around different strictures Lazlo had put on it. They were making firearms out of ceramics, having portals open directly between earth and Chaos, and developing technology that the medieval planet was not supposed to have. And, it seemed, all the heroes were military heroes and engineers. With their superior technology and experience, there was really no reason they shouldn’t succeed.

So, in Sleight of Hand, I took away their shoes. I first went back to the initial restrictions on the universe and abided by the rules that had been set up. Second, I started with a hero that was as far from being a military hero as I could make him. He was a theatre major who was paralyzed from the waist down in an auto hit-and-run while saving his sister-in-law and niece. In my book, he’d shown his heroism, but he was crippled. He had no engineering or military background. He had nothing but his wits, acting ability, and his sister-in-law to get him through.

He had every reason to fail and die on his first mission. He didn’t. He succeeded, was healed in the healing chamber, and brought back a damsel as well as his sister-in-law. Working within the increased restrictions of this universe challenged me to think of all kinds of ways that this hero could use the talents he had to accomplish things that were normally relegated to people who were fully able-bodied and had military and engineering backgrounds.
This was obviously not the only time. My heroes are often—maybe usually—underdogs. They don’t have the stature or physical capability of their contemporaries. They have to overcome a disability. And they have to solve problems that they don’t have the usual skillset to solve.

In Living Next Door to Heaven 6, El Rancho del Corazón, the euphoric beginning of the book is shattered by the news that the farmhouse where they were planning to live has burned to the ground—just before they were to move there. I mentioned in a previous post that I was close to 40,000 words into the story (that would eventually be 200,000 words) and I threw it all away to start over. Sometimes I’m slow at realizing things. It took me that long to realize that everything was too easy for the clan. I had to steal their shoes.

In my original draft the parents stepped in with an insurance settlement that rebuilt the house in time for the clan to start classes in the fall and get Brian’s TV show on the air. It was all too easy. The parents took care of everything. Not only was it too easy for the clan, it was boring. They didn’t need to work for their home. And rewriting it made a lot of things clearer in the conflicts that would drive the story later.

I often read stories and think, the main character is a superhero. There’s no reason for him to fail. There’s no real conflict in the story. Take The Da Vinci Code, for example. Robert Langdon, the hero played in the movies by Tom Hanks, was an expert in symbology, had an eidetic memory, could hold his breath as he swam multiple lengths of the pool, and had contacts all over the world. There was no reason for him to ever face failure, and so the conflict felt forced. You knew from the very beginning that he would walk in, solve the mystery, and walk out. By the time Langdon was immersed in a sensory deprivation chamber and presumed dead in The Lost Symbol, I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief that the guy was finally gone. And I simply couldn’t force myself to read Inferno or Origin. Give the guy amnesia and let him become the person who could figure things out instead of already knowing them. Take away his shoes.

There is a common theme in most do-over stories. An old guy gets electrocuted, struck by lightning, caught up in a wormhole, contacted by aliens, shot, or run over by a cement truck and then wakes up in his fourteen-year-old body to live his life over again. He has Wikipedic knowledge of everything that happened during his lifetime so he knows all the best bets, investments, or inventions to make in this lifetime that will make him rich. He understands all the things that went wrong in politics so he can save the world from the current moral collapse. And most of all, he has years of experience with women which he can put into play to seduce all the fourteen-year-old girls he wants and it’s okay because even though his head is 80, his body is only 14.

When I wrote Double Take in “The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins” series, I stole his shoes. Yes, he is sent back to his fourteen-year-old (almost fifteen) body, but he is in an alternate universe. It’s very much like what he grew up in, but he didn’t go back in time. The new timeline picks up at the same time his old body dies. So, all that perfect memory of the past sixty-five years is worthless, not to mention it’s not perfect. “So, I can’t beat the Koch Brothers in cornering silver?” Jacob asks. “That was the Hunts. The Kochs tried to corner the government. No billions for you,” responds the powers-that-be.

Without knowing what got him there, he has to deal with his new self’s history—the nightmares and desires that led him to attempt suicide. And he doesn’t know the history and society that resulted in this new world he’s living in. His old self is as much a stumbling block for him in the new world as he is a help.

There is so much more. Next week, I’ll talk a little about what it means to “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Enjoy!

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

I don’t make a secret of my multiple writing identities. I publish under the name of Devon Layne (aroslav) and as Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose). I consider them divided by the concept that Nathan Everett doesn’t write erotica. Although there are a few steamy scenes, I turn the head before the consummation most of the time. So, I’m going to use one of my Nathan Everett books as an illustration for this post.

The writing community often talks about an author needing to “kill his babies.” This has nothing at all to do with abortion, so step down off your soapbox and give a listen. It means that sometimes you have to edit or rewrite something in your story that you really really like, but it just doesn’t work for the story. Could be a scene, a sentence, a concept, a location. But you love it like a little baby. Whatever it is and no matter how much you like it, it deserves to have a red pencil mark drawn through it. You have to kill it.

Back around 2007 or 2008 when I was still getting my boutique publishing company (LongTale Press, now defunct) off the ground, I attended a writers’ conference in Seattle. There was a social time and I chose to sit at a table with a topic marker that said “Thriller.” For a while, I was the only person there, then one of the speakers came to the table to join me. It was my first encounter with spy thriller author Gayle Lynds. For the better part of an hour we discussed what made a thriller and what we were working on.

I’d recently started planning a novel I was calling “Gutenberg’s Other Book.” I said it would revolve around what happened to the Library of Alexandria. Gayle confided that she was also working on a spy thriller that included a secret library. Her book, Library of Gold, was published in 2010, just a little before mine was. Before her book had gotten very far, the title was changed to The Book of Spies. Mine was changed to The Gutenberg Rubric, and won the second prize in the thriller category at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association Literary Competition. It is now, finally, also available on Bookapy.

Gayle advised me to be very careful with my research because people were hyper-critical about any historic or even mechanical detail that was out of place in a thriller. I’d been researching Gutenberg and the Library of Alexandria for over twenty years, so I set about carefully constructing my story. I began writing on January 1, 2009. By August, I had 45,000 words, and hated most of them. I’d carefully plotted a plausible rescue of the library that moved it from location to location for several hundred years until it came to rest in a secret and mysterious location in Turkey.

I interspersed that tale with the story of a librarian who was drawn into the mystery of the location by a hint he’d found in an old manuscript. Of course, some wanted to find the secret location to preserve it, some to destroy it, and some to profit from it. It should have been exciting. But it wasn’t.

I sent my 45,000 words off to The Book Doctor, Jason Black, and asked him what was wrong with it. His words were disheartening.

“Start over. Cut all the stuff about where the library moved over the centuries. It’s stuff you need to know to write the book, but none of your readers need to know it. Then start with some action and steal their shoes!” I’ll talk about the last part next week. Where I got stuck was “Cut all the stuff about where the library…”

I’d spent years working out those details. I’d researched shipping routes, conquests, legends, and myths. I’d read a history of ink that spanned forty centuries! It was over half of what I’d written so far. It was my baby!

And I killed it.

The book turned out very successful, though every time a native German speaker reads it, I get a different set of corrections for the few German phrases included in the book. But there are only allusions to the long history of movement I’d researched and written. I needed to know all that in order to write the book with a realistic foundation. My readers didn’t need to know it at all.

It’s not the last time I scrapped major portions of something I’d written that I really liked. I was some 40,000 words into Devon Layne’s LNDtH6, El Rancho del Corazón when I scrapped the entire draft and started over. When I wrote Nathan Everett’s City Limits, I rewrote and changed over 80% of the book in the second draft—and believe me, some babies fell on the cutting room floor.

Those things are not all lost and gone forever. When I wrote Devon Layne’s Bob’s Memoir, 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, I resurrected some of the material I’d researched about the Library of Alexandria and made saving libraries a passion of Bob’s. I have one little interchange between two unnamed characters that’s just three sentences. I’ve been saving it for two years, waiting for a place that I could use it. Until I find that place, it stays in the nursery. I can’t force it into a story where it doesn’t fit, just because it’s clever.

Ultimately, the goal is to make the story a better read. It’s one of the reasons I don’t understand people who say they just write for themselves, but then subject readers to what they’ve written. If you are going to offer what you’ve written to people to read and enjoy, then someplace along the line, you’ll have to kill your babies.

I mentioned another bit of advice The Book Doctor gave me when writing The Gutenberg Rubric. Next week, I’ll investigate "Stealing Their Shoes."

This is number ten in my blog series about my life as an author of erotica. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. If you are able, I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.

From Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5:
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.

Why do I kill people in my stories? I know of authors who start off with hundreds of characters just so they will have another one to kill off in the next chapter. Game of Thrones comes to mind. Even when a favorite character was killed off, readers and viewers got to the point of just fast-forwarding past the event and continuing with the story. My instances are relatively few by comparison and I feel each one serves a purpose that shapes the story. But they are still hard to deal with.

Here is a quote from an irate reader of “Living Next Door to Heaven 4,” Deadly Chemistry, who swore to never read any of my work again because I couldn’t be trusted.

Between a writer and a reader, a trust, an expectation is established. I have enjoyed that relationship, until Denise. Violent and cruel death has not been a part of any of your work I have read. … I say, the writer/reader relationship has been broken.

I’m not going to justify myself on this. I will have to say that the kind of relationship this reader described was entered into by the reader without the author’s consent. My only contract with the reader is to write the best work I am capable of at the time. And if you must know, I hated myself for that murder and for the murder that comes in part eight, Becoming the Storm.

Denise’s death was a significant factor in the development of Brian’s character. Brian was the protector of his clan and he failed to protect her. He blames himself for her death. And when he exacts his vengeance, he ends up with an act on his conscience that he can never admit to. It shapes his future relationship with Rhonda (Hannah). It emerges in Becoming the Storm when he responds to a campus shooting and loses another member of the clan. It drives him forward in his television show and campaign to bring an unethical journalist to account for vandalism and libel. I don’t think I could have written Brian standing up to Rhonda’s abusive boyfriend in The Rock if he hadn’t gone through that experience.

But how do I determine when a character is to die?

It isn’t easy. By the end of LNDtH1, Guardian Angel, I knew this death was going to occur. I developed the character of Denise specifically to facilitate that act when I introduced her in part two, The Agreement. And then I kept delaying the murder because I wrote a character that I truly liked. At the end of part two, I said to myself, “Not yet. She doesn’t deserve this.” I said the same thing at the end of part three, Foolish Wisdom. But when I wrote the title of part four, Deadly Chemistry, I knew I couldn’t delay it any longer.

And when it happened, I HATED myself!

She didn’t deserve to die. She was funny and loving and lovable and dynamic. I loved her! But the story would have ended in the next chapter if she hadn’t died. Her death shaped Brian’s response and his guilt that continued through the next five parts.

I don’t often have detailed outlines. I normally write so fast that I outrun an outline. I do, however, have a developmental arc for a story that tells me where I’m going and I knew there was going to be a campus shooting and one of the clan would die with several others injured in part eight. I once again wrote the character that would be kind and loving and not deserving to die. I developed the character specifically for that purpose. But when it came time, I couldn’t kill her. I chose a different character that was less major to the story.
I still hated myself.

Let me tell you about writing that chapter. I was camped on the Oregon Coast. It was already after ‘the season.’ No one else was in the State Park campground in October. I wrote the chapter while yelling at myself with tears streaming down my face. When I finished the chapter, I kept pounding out 5,000 more words just to get it out of my system. Then I slammed my laptop closed and didn’t open it again for a week. I spent that week wandering the beach, screaming my frustration and anger at the waves.

What’s more, a week after I wrote the scene, just seventy-five miles southeast of where I was camped, a disgruntled student at a community college killed nine and wounded eight more in a shooting rampage. The shooter matched the profile of the shooter I’d described in the story.

So why? Why introduce a horrific incident into a polyamorous erotica story.

There are some things that I write that people accept because they are so over-the-top ridiculous that they laugh and simply go with the rest of the story. Most of the love affairs in my stories are that. They are filled with what we’d love to have happen, rather than what we know reality to be. But the thing that sells that over-the-top romance and sex is the reality of the setting. If the entire rest of the story was a bland backdrop, none of the story would feel plausible.

And violence in our world is such a constant that we refuse to think about it unless it directly affects someone we care about. People offered thoughts and prayers for the blank faces that were killed in the Umpqua Community College incident. It didn’t touch them. But the death of a fictional character in Living Next Door to Heaven enraged them.

Good. It should.

I have often stated that there can be no happily ever after if it has been happily ever before. Or as Queen Elizabeth II (and others) once said, “Grief is the price we pay for love.” I hate to write about it, but I cannot let this issue go unaddressed. Art exposes reality. It doesn’t mimic it or lead it. If you read my stories, you will have to deal with death, depression, anxiety, homelessness, broken hearts, discrimination, and disease. I write over-the-top fantasies in a down-to-earth real world setting.

Next week, if I still have any readers left, I’ll deal with a subject that sounds the same, but in reality is very different: Killing Your Babies.

This is number nine in my weekly blog series about my life as an author of erotica. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

I’VE ALLUDED to some of the things I’m going to write about today in previous posts. Let me start by saying that ‘genre bending’ is not the same as ‘gender bending,’ so if your sensitive little balls just crawled up inside your pelvis, relax. This isn’t a Budweiser commercial.

I want to dig deeper into making a genre—like sci-fi, incest, do-over, mind control, mystery, etc.—a universe—like SWARM, Damsels in Distress, Naked in School, etc.—or a story your own. Let’s take a couple of examples and have some fun.

I was recruited to write a SWARM story by a couple of authors through gentle suggestions saying they thought I should have something to contribute to that universe. I complained that I didn’t know a thing about the military and wasn’t likely to learn much. Zen Master wrote to me and said they had lots of guys who knew military stuff, but they needed more good characters.

I read every story (290+ at the time) in the SWARM Universe twice before I decided to set about writing something in it. It started with a simple premise of “Porn Stars Save the Universe.” I knew a little something about porn stars from hanging out with them at AVN and online. I had gained a lot of respect for several of them. I started highlighting places where other authors had opened the door a crack to things like a rebellious AI, people who refused to take service in the Confederacy, and the development of technology the Confederacy considered ‘outdated.’

When the first book, Pussy Pirates, was finished, the SWARM authors kind of took a collective breath and said, “Okay. We asked for it.” Omachuck, who had been significant in editing, latched onto the ideas and wrote them into his next story. But it was not a pickup and escape to the stars to do battle with the Sa’arm story. It was all earth-centric, with people who were non-military and below the grade that would have made them citizens of the Confederacy. The second book, The Assassin, I specifically released as “non-canon” so other authors would not have to deal with my version of the future of that universe.

I have had a weakness for do-over stories, but got really tired of hearing the same old same old from them. First, I set out to write one that would simply break all the rules. In Not This Time, my hero woke up at 17, not 14, the morning after making the worst mistake of her life. Yep. Her! She didn’t have perfect recall of everything that had happened in her former life. She recalled the things that had been important to her. And she had to make a new life out of the miserable mess of one she’d had, following her unwanted pregnancy.

Then I set out to sort of redeem myself with another do-over that would have an old man thrust back into his almost fifteen-year-old body. I just don’t have the stomach for fourteen-year-olds having great sex. “The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins.”

I couldn’t just go with the genre, though, without putting my own peculiar stamp on it again. Jacob was back in what he could identify as his teenage body, but it was a different timeline in an alternate universe. People were familiar, but often in different roles. The timeline was after his first time on earth, so most of what he remembered could inform him about how to behave, but couldn’t make him rich by knowing the future. And the rules of the society were different, often including things he had advocated in his previous life. Now he had to live with them.

He ended up in a constant struggle between his old man self and his teenage self, so he could enjoy his youth. The old man kept trying to ruin everything.

The point of these illustrations is that somewhere in the story of our lives, there is room for an alternative version. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Fites (the bitch) was determined to break me of the habit of saying that something was “just like this but different” in some way. I raised a hand one day and carefully stated, “I lost a pencil similar to this one, but with a red eraser.” Without ever actually hearing what I said, Mrs. Fites said, “It can’t be just like that if it’s different.” It was the first time I understood that teachers didn’t listen. Still, I often think, ‘Just like this but different.’

Within every story type, every archetype, every myth and scripture, there is room for a, “Yeah, but what about if they did this instead?”

When I wrote in the “Damsels in Distress” universe, my first question was, “Why do all the heroes have to be ex-military. Aren’t there other heroes in the world?” I wrote about Hero Lincoln who was a theatre major, paralyzed from the waist down after he was struck by a car while saving his niece and sister-in-law. That was a hero, and he fully deserved a trip to the healing chamber. He took an earthly caretaker with him and while he was still on crutches was sent off to rescue a damsel who didn’t really want to be rescued. His weapon was his crutch and a deck of cards.

The Hero explored a different part of the continent, once mentioned in another author’s book, faced some of the forbidden animals, dealt with disillusioned damsels, and had to knock one of them out in order to drag her back to Crossroads. There was lots of space to create something new in a well-established universe.

Inserting my own adventure in a history that sounded like it ‘could have’ happened was truly topped off in my Bob’s Memoir series. A 4,000-year-old demon travels throughout the world, inserting himself into different known stories from history and mythology. Frankly, it was one of the most fun books I’ve ever written!

I approached the myth of Pygmalion thinking, ‘If it happened to one artist, surely it has happened to others.’ So, I wrote a whole series of stories based around the relationships of artists and their artworks called Pygmalion Revisited. All had different media and stories, but all had the magical relationship of an artist and his or her artwork.

When people ask me where I get ideas for what I write, I don’t even know how to answer. How can I not have ideas about what to write? Look at any story—even in the newspaper or on Twitter—and then say, “Just like that, but this is different.” You have a whole new look at the genre.

With a little luck and the crick don’t rise, I’ll have a lot more stories to come. Next week, I’m going to deal with a very hard subject: Murder, He Wrote.