aroslav: Blog

This is number 102 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“AS A WRITER, what would you choose as your spirit animal?”

An interesting question, but I’m not sure you get a choice in the matter. I’ve always had the impression that a spirit animal chooses the person, and I have some evidence to that effect.

Let me start by saying, I don’t set much store in any religious belief system. However, I do believe there are things we do not fully comprehend and that we give too little credit to the intelligence and communication afforded by all living things. So, I tend to gently touch trees and thank the dryads who live there. Even if I don’t understand precisely what a dryad is, I believe the tree has some essence that is beyond what I know.

I might even say the same of some (all?) non-living things, like stones. I believe in stones.

I don’t fully comprehend the full nature and impact of a spirit animal, other than to say it seems to appear when we need love, strength, support, inspiration, or guidance. It is up to the animal to make the first move.

The Old English, or perhaps Welsh origin of my birth surname is Eoferheard. Broken down ‘eofer’ means wild boar and ‘heard’ relates to the heart, strength, bravery. BoarHeart. I could have adopted that as a pseudonym! Back in the early 80s, I was exploring a number of mythologies and was into men’s groups where we sat around drumming and telling stories.

You might recall a men’s awakening leader of that era by the name of Robert Bly. I was at a retreat with him back in the early 80s. At one point, my group worked on making masks. It was an involved process that included using plaster of Paris to mold our own faces and then when it was dry, building it up, painting it, and establishing a being.

I really had no idea what I was creating, but an image of a boar appeared beneath my fingers. I added tusks and painted it mostly gray. I referred to it as “Grandfather BoarHeart.”

In 2016, when I was traveling around the world, I came upon the bronze image of a boar in Munich. The snout and tusks are shiny gold where people touching it have worn off the patina. I touched it as well.

I carried the mask until it basically fell apart and then didn’t really think about a spirit animal again.

When I wrote the first volume of my Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures, Redtail, I didn’t have a concept of continuing the story. But I’d never been to Laramie, Wyoming, where the story took place, so I took the opportunity to visit as I went through Wyoming in 2014. I visited the Coe Library on the UWyo campus to see if I could find a place in it where I could see the Green Hill Cemetery, a scene I had written in the book. I ventured into the rare books room and looked out the window. A librarian asked if she could help me, and I told her what I was looking for. She said that until a couple of years previously, I could have seen the cemetery from that window but then they built the new business building.

We talked and I told her about my writing. She asked the name of the book, and I told her. She went to her computer and in a few seconds said, “Yes, we have a copy here in the library.” That might be the only one of my erotica books to make it into a college library! Then she asked a question that changed the course of my next few months: “Do you plan to write a sequel? If you do, please come back and I’ll help you research anything you need.”

The idea took root, and I decided I’d write about the next generation of the Bell family. But I was missing a key ingredient. What animal would be the trigger to get my new main characters to time travel? I thought about calling it Graywolf or perhaps Wapiti (Cheyene for Elk). Enter ‘The Book Doctor,’ Sonja, who said, “Think of the title Redtail as more than a specific type of hawk or name of an animal, but rather as a description as well.” I started thinking of descriptors for different animals.

I went back to Laramie to research the sequel and as soon as I parked my trailer, saw a raven sitting on the picnic table in my campsite. The name Blackfeather came immediately to mind. I would call the book Blackfeather and the raven would be the trigger animal for Kyle and Ramie’s time travel.

As soon as I had the name, I began seeing ravens everywhere. When I’d finished my research in Laramie—with a huge thank you to the librarians there, who provided plat maps of the town, biographies, and even a history assembled just five years after the town was formed—I headed south, trying to beat the early-November weather. Along Interstate 25, I continued to see ravens, usually standing beside the highway about every five miles or so, as if they were sentinels guarding my path. I saw them at my campsites and outside my window.

Ravens continue to be a presence in my life and I have accepted them as my spirit animal.

The Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures, including Redtail, Blackfeather, and Yelloweye, are available as eBooks from Bookapy.

When a Raven has flown into your life, it signifies that magic is at play. Raven ignites the energies of magic allowing it to become one with our intentions and will. The Raven will show you how to walk into the dark corners of your inner conflicts buried deep within, opening the doors to the deepest power of healing to be within our grasp.

Raven is assuring you of the impending change. He brings with him the ability to bend time and space for the perfect moment at the right time. He signifies rebirth, renewal, reflection, creativity, and healing.

When the Raven enters into your life, human and animal spirits intermingle. It is in the blackness that the Raven symbolizes that everything mingles until it is brought forth into the light.

Do you need some inspiration in these trying times? Hmm. Did I mention that “I Believe in Stones?” Next week.

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

SOME OF THE BIGGEST CHANGES in life go unnoticed. I am not even including in that a spouse’s new haircut, glasses, or weight. There are just things that people don’t notice, no matter how modest or life-changing they might be.

Take this blog, for example. This is the eighth posting of 2025. Yet no one noticed that the date of the previous seven was listed on my site as 2024! Not even my very careful editor, even though it was at the top of every draft I sent him! It was simple to re-upload all the posts this morning with the corrected date, but if I hadn’t just called attention to it, no one would have noticed that, either.

In fact, several of my books, both by Devon Layne and Nathan Everett, have had characters who swore they would pay more attention. Tony Ames in the Model Student series constantly fought to be more aware of what was going on around him. Brian Frost of Living Next Door to Heaven constantly struggled to even remember what day it was or the names of all his girlfriends. Wayne Hamel in The Props Master had a constantly muddled mind, kept that way by the witches who were ‘training’ him.

I think the most obvious of these was probably Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits and Wild Woods. Gee Evars, suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, stumbles into Rosebud Falls just in time to dive in a rushing river and save the life of a drowning toddler. And to lose his memory.

In this duology, I had to consider what memory loss meant. I didn’t deal with a deterioration like dementia or Alzheimer’s, but rather with the instant erasure of his past. And one of the things I think no one who read the book noticed was that he lost his memory when he crossed the city limits into town, not when he dove in the river.

So, what did he actually lose? He still had good language skills. He had good math skills. He could work in a variety of settings. He was a natural philosopher whose question was always whether a decision or an action would make him a better person.

After saving his nemesis, a preacher who attempted to have the town rally to drive Gee out, Gee is asked why he didn’t just let the man drown in the river that attempted to claim him. He asks, “If I had left him… had let him drown, would that have made me a better person?”

When children who had been drugged, brainwashed, and sold into slavery in the Wild Woods began showing up in the town, it was only a man with no memory of his own who could reach them and could understand the pain they were going through.

City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks on Bookapy, and in paperback at other online bookstores.

I forget things, too. And I fail to notice things. So, I was a little taken aback when I was asked, “Has writing and publishing a book changed the way you see yourself?”

In a mirror?

Like several characters I’ve written about in the past—notably Art in Art Critic and Trayce in Soulmates—I avoid looking at myself in a mirror as much as possible. What I see in a mirror does not at all match what I see in my head.

I don’t think there is anyone of my generation who hasn’t met a high school classmate or walked into a class reunion and stopped to wonder where all those old people came from.

So, when you ask how writing has changed my life, I struggle to remember what life was like before publishing and what it is like now. The obvious answer is that I am older now.

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

“WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?” asked the interviewer. I didn’t expect that one!

“I suppose because I haven’t died yet. I had a close call not that long ago, but I have a pacemaker now and it seems to be keeping me alive,” I said.

“No. Not why are you still alive, why are you still here writing this blog? This is the 100th posting. Haven’t you said it all yet?”

“Oh. I guess because two or three hundred people a week are still reading it. I kind of thrive on interaction with people and I use the blog as a means of hopefully sharing something worthwhile with readers.”

Last week, I had to learn how to use Zoom, so Mark Sawyer of “Twisted Vet USA” could interview me for his YouTube series. Normally, I sit in a relaxed gaming chair with a keyboard in my lap and a 32" monitor on the table in front of me. My computer generally stays closed and stuck a few feet away from me. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are all I ever see.

Learning to use Zoom involved detaching the laptop from my peripherals so I could open it and make use of the camera. That was a catastrophe. Behind me was my kitchen sink and stove—not an interesting background even if it was clean. I ended up getting a small camp table from my storeroom and setting the computer on it, facing the sofa and the blinds drawn across my front window.

But the interview was successful and the forty-two minutes are available at Twisted Vet USA.

There were a few things, though, Mark didn’t ask and a lot more I thought of later.

I mentioned the Model Student series last week as an example of my first erotica books made available in paperback. But I never mentioned the seventh volume, the Triptych Interviews. In fact, I’d pretty much forgotten about them. So much so, that even though they are found both on SOL and on my Devon Layne website, the book never showed up in my list of titles on my own site! I corrected that this week and all my patrons and the public will now find Triptych Interviews listed as part of the Model Student series.

I created the Triptych Interviews as a supplement to the fourth book in the series, Triptych, but it also parallels Odalisque. There are eighteen interviews, and they are each dated and noted with what chapter in the books they should be read after. It was a technique I used to get a better understanding of the characters I was writing about. It let me ask about things that wouldn’t appear in the story, but influenced how the character acted. I seldom conduct such detailed interviews, but in one way or another, I interview nearly every character I write about.

The Triptych Interviews can be found on SOL and on my Devon Layne website.

Questions no one asked of me yet.

I use the convention of having my alter ego Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) ask my alter ego Devon Layne (aroslav) questions. They are below as NE and DL.

NE: At what point do you think someone should call themselves a writer?

DL: Whenever they damn well please. The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits his butt in a chair and starts writing. I think it was Anne Lamott who said that if you wake up thinking about writing, go through your day making time to write, and go to sleep thinking about what you are writing, you are a writer.

NE: When did you start calling yourself a writer.

DL: That’s kind of a funny story. It was the first time I quit everything in my life and decided to start over—my job, my schooling, my marriage. I had to earn a living, though, and I could type 110 words per minute, so I applied to a temp agency and went to work as a secretary at a local home-building company. I’d been at my desk a week or two when one of the company execs passed. He turned around and stood in front of my desk.

“You aren’t really a secretary,” he said. “What are you really?”

I looked up rather surprised, and with all the courage I could muster, said, “I’m a writer.”

He nodded once and said, “See me in my office. I have a job for you.”

And just by declaring myself to be what I believed I was, I gained a very lucrative contract to write a programmed instruction course for new home sales people.

NE: You don’t think it was just because you were a man filling a typical woman’s role that he singled you out?

DL: No, I do think so. It was terribly chauvinistic. I took advantage of the opportunity, though. I was a convenient shortcut for management to avoid actually searching for a qualified training developer.

NE: That was back in…

DL: 1979.

NE: But it wasn’t fiction, right?

DL: No, I spent several years writing and publishing training and marketing materials, trade journals, software specifications, and articles. Most of that time, at least on and off, I was squeezing out time to write fiction but wasn’t focused on selling it.

NE: What advice would you give to a writer working on their first book?

DL: Think. Many writers don’t have a plan for what they write. They just write down an interesting plot point or character and then wait to see where it takes them. That’s okay to begin with, but you need to ask yourself, “Why am I writing this book? What do I want readers to get out of it?” Jot down where you think the story begins and what you want the outcome to be. Then write out the major steps to getting there. That’s all you need to start writing a reasonable draft.

You can follow the age-old advice: Write with your heart. Just let the words flow and check periodically to be sure the words are still flowing toward those steps you said had to be accomplished to get there.

Then, the second half of that advice is: Rewrite with your head. Never believe that your first draft is the best you can possibly do. Think. Think about the characters. Think about the story line. Think about the timeline and the crises, the obstacles that need to be overcome to get to where you want to go. Make pages filled with notes on how this is going to be different and how that book will change the world.

Then you’ll be ready to rewrite with your audience in mind. Be considerate of them. If you want readers, you need to provide something worth reading.

Finally, you’re ready for editors.

Don’t forget to watch the "Twisted Vet USA" interview on YouTube! Mark’s questions are all different than the ones I answered here. He did a good job as an interviewer. Next week, I’ll look at some of the questions that have been submitted and choose a topic to focus on!

A chapter of Soulmates posted this morning that wasn't supposed to post until 3/21 instead of 2/21. I have requested the webmaster to remove the chapter (which is actually chapter 23, not 14).
My apologies to readers who were rightly confused by having ten chapters missing between the previous and what was posted today. The correct chapter 14 is slated to post tomorrow.

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

SEVENTY-FOUR BOOKS. I recently compiled a folder of all the covers of my books and discovered there were a total of sixty Devon Layne titles and fourteen Nathan Everett titles. I only need one more to average a book a year over my life so far.

I was a pioneer in the world of eBooks, traveling to writer conferences and book conventions in 2000-2005 to convince writers, readers, and publishers that the future of books was digital. I’d already spent twenty-five years working in one way or another in the publishing industry. I was an early adopter of desktop computing technology for publishing.

I traveled around the United States training publishers and would-be publishers on the new and revolutionary desktop publishing technology, starting in 1986. My client list included major retailers, like Nordstrom, technology firms like Xerox, Intel, and Aldus, huge publishing operations like Hallmark Cards and USAA.

What a heady time!

And after fourteen years of that, I found myself working for a high tech giant promoting eBooks and eBook technology. I worked on the ePUB specification and was asked to finalize the spelling of eBook, with a lower case e and a capital B.

But through all that time and more, I’d considered myself primarily a writer. I wrote my first novel in 1979, but had hundreds of pages of other stories, plays, and non-fiction instructional books even before that.

Finally, in 2007, two partners and I created a boutique hybrid publishing company called Long Tale Press. As part of our launch, to show we were for real, we each contributed one of our own novels for editing and correction by the other two partners and published that book. So, my first paperback book, For Blood or Money by Nathan Everett, was released to the public. And it sold a few hundred copies!

All of my Nathan Everett novels since have been produced in paperback. No matter how much I promoted eBooks, people still considered real books to be printed on paper.

But people weren’t as willing to purchase paper versions of Devon Layne’s erotica. In fact, eBooks opened up a huge market for erotica (even among men) because readers no longer needed to hold a book with a bodice-ripper cover and let everyone know what they were reading! So most, though not all, of my Devon Layne books were produced only as eBooks. And all seventy-four titles are all still available as eBooks at Bookapy—both the Devon Layne and the Nathan Everett books.

After noting that the last couple of paperback erotica I created sold only the five or so that I ordered and gave to friends, I quit producing erotica in paper. But I’m seventy-five years old, and it bothers me that I don’t have a shelf that holds a copy of each of my books.

Yes, vanity, thy name is Author.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, the big business of vanity press became popular in the publishing industry. It had been around for some time with Vantage Press, Exposition Press, Dorrance Publishing, and Pageant Press making their mark as early as the mid-fifties. You might know I wrote my first full-length novel in 1979, and I was subscribing to everything I could get my hands on that would help me get published. The Writer’s Digest, Publisher’s Weekly, The Writer’s Market, and others as they crossed my path. Every issue had huge advertisements from vanity publishers.

“We can publish your 200-page manuscript for just $2,500! Become a published author today!”

The entire process was looked down upon by the ‘reputable publishing industry.’ It was considered the last resort of those whose work was not good enough to attract a ‘real’ publisher. But the process had been well-known for centuries! It might surprise you to discover Charles Dickens paid to have A Christmas Carol published in 1843. Walt Whitman paid to have Leaves of Grass published in 1855. Even the great patriot Thomas Paine paid to have Common Sense published in 1776.

The list goes on and on: The Joy of Cooking, Swan ‘s Way, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, To the Lighthouse, Gadsby. All proof that vanity press was used for more than the author’s vanity.

Of course, there is far less stigma attached to ‘self-publishing’ these days. In fact, the commercial publishing industry with names like Macmillan, Scholastic, Penguin, and Random House, has not grown significantly in the past twenty years, when compared to the number of books published in the US, topping two million a year. The vast majority of those books are self-published, usually in eBook form.

That brings me to my great vanity project. Over the next several years, I intend to release a “Signature Edition” of each of my books. Each of the paperback books will include a digitally signed photo of the author as well as an exclusive interview, found only in the Signature Edition. In the interview, Devon Layne describes what inspired the particular book, how it was developed, and background about the author’s life.

The first book in this Signature Collection released this week, appropriately on Valentine’s Day. You will be able to purchase the paperback on nearly any online platform for just $25. I’ve already bought my copy. So far, I can confirm the Soulmates paperback is available at Barnes and Noble. Amazon, in its usual obstructive way, released the eBook a day early, but held the paperback until the 14th. Nonetheless, you should be able to acquire Soulmates Signature Edition at most vendors in the world once they catch up with what has been released by Ingram. That means it can also be ordered from most brick and mortar bookstores, too.

Soulmates is a new release. I have a total of 74 Devon Layne and Nathan Everett titles so far and am continuing to write. All new paperback editions will be part of the Signature Collection. I will continue to release new editions of all my books at the rate of about one every other month. Sometimes more frequently if I’m inspired. For those books that have already been published in paperback, I’ll remove the previous version when the signature edition is released.

Is it vanity that leads me to make this new collection?

Absolutely. I invite you to purchase your favorites, but once my copy is on my shelf, I won’t be paying attention to other sales. I thank you for your continued support, whether through your comments and voting on SOL, through this new collection, through purchases from eBook retailers, or through patronage on Patreon.

Speaking of interviews, I was interviewed this past week by Mark Sawyer of "Twisted Vet USA" and that interview is up on YouTube now. Next week I’ll talk a little about the interview process and answer some of the questions Mark never got around to asking. If you have questions you'd like me to answer in an interview, please let me know what they are!