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This is number ninety-four in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
NO, THAT’S NOT the frustrated cry of an author whose fans believe he must be the most oversexed 75-year-old in the world. Nor whose sister believes every time she reads something that sounds familiar that the story must be about our family. Yes, I’ll remind both that it’s fiction, not an autobiography!
But if it’s not that, what is it?
It’s what I constantly remind myself when the details are getting too gritty and real. It’s what I tell myself when I see a person on the street and nearly call out to her because she looks exactly like Whitney in the Model Student series. Or when I finally think of a snappy comeback to what another person said three days ago.
It’s just a story. Characters I made up in my head. A paragraph I can edit later. Something I once saw that would make a great backdrop for a scene I’m writing. It’s fiction, damn it!
If I’m writing fiction, why do I write things that are so based in actual events and issues: Vietnam, AI, writing, dying detectives, violent death, transsexuals, the homeless? It’s a bit of a contradiction in terms, but I’ll include as my next post “The Moral Obligation of Fiction—Even Erotica.”
This is number ninety-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I ALWAYS FIGURED I’d grow old. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon! I’m often mistaken for an adult because of my age.
2024 was the year I lived to celebrate my dodranscentennial, or platinum jubilee! That’s right. This young man is now seventy-five years old. But there was a time I didn’t think I’d make it to the party. Now, my heart is beating strong and I’m looking forward to the next 25 years again.
I guess that means I should start back in December 2023 when I had a routine annual check with my cardiologist while I was on a two-week holiday break in Seattle. The news was that I was back in A-Fib and after two cardioversions and two ablations in the past four years, the next step was a pacemaker. My two-week break extended to four and a half months!
January 4, I was in the hospital to have a Micra pacemaker installed in the right ventricle. On the 26th, I was back in for the ablation that would start the pacemaker actually working. A month later, I was back to have a Watchman (Left Atrial Appendage Closure) installed, but they found a clot and couldn’t proceed. After three weeks of extra strong blood-thinners, I was back in for the Watchman installation and a check to see that all the equipment had been installed correctly and was functioning. And finally, on March 20th, my cardiologist pronounced me good to go and my four month, two-week vacation came to an end.
I would be seriously remiss if I did not mention that my ex-wife and my step-husband hosted and cared for me the entire four months! When you hear me refer to her as Treasure in my travel books (Wonders of my World), I mean exactly that.
Well, I finally returned to Las Vegas and had a nice visit from a younger woman I’d known for a few years. We decided to see if we could tolerate each other long enough to possibly go on a cruise together. Sadly, the answer was negative. I have come to understand that when a woman says she “likes older men,” she doesn’t mean that old. And there was just too much drama for my old heart to take. Nice woman, but ten days was all we needed.
I’d been having a good time walking around without panting and wheezing for a change, so I decided to drive back up to Seattle for a month and just enjoy the trip. I stopped for a few days of theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a few days to visit my friend Angus in Portland (along with his various stripper friends), and then on up to Seattle. I finally decided I was never going to pull my trailer up the long road to Alaska, so I booked an 8-day cruise the last week of July.
It was great! If you’ve considered going on a cruise but didn’t want to travel alone, don’t let that stop you! I found a deal on a solo traveler room and discovered the ship organized dinners and events for solo travelers. I met some great people and we’re even planning a reunion in March. I always had a lovely companion when I wanted one, with no other expectations or drama. Great fun!
Then I had a long and leisurely trip south along the Pacific Coast until it was time to cut east to get to Las Vegas.
I would be remiss not to mention in my year in review the appearance of a delightful young woman named Ashley. I met her in the spring when I returned to Las Vegas and visited my favorite gentlemen’s club. It wasn’t our first encounter. She was enthusiastic about my writing and wanted me to write a story that included her. In order to accomplish that, I needed to know a lot about her—both mentally and physically. While I was gone for the summer, we corresponded a bit.
When I returned in September, she was no longer working at the club, but wanted to continue our relationship independently. Nice! You might recall that in the Wonders of My World series, I talked about a stripper named Alice who became my muse as I traveled around the country and around the world. We parted ways a long time ago. It turned out Ashley has become my new muse.
She needed to move her six cats to her new apartment and my truck was big enough to fit all six cat carriers, the feed and water dispensers, and me in. So, I took them all to the new apartment. Ashley doesn’t have a car, so when I’m headed someplace interesting, like the grocery store, I text and ask if she’d like to go along. Usually, the response is yes. There is an occasional morning conversation that ends with us going out for breakfast as I listen to the sometimes unbelievable life of a young woman ‘in the industry.’ We’ll go together to the AVN Expo in Las Vegas the third weekend of January.
And she continues to be available as my model, which I’ve created into a couple of characters in my new Sisyphus novel. It takes more than one character to fit Ashley into because like many people in the industry (myself included) she has multiple professional identities. I have to make sure who I’m talking to when we meet. I even have her listed under two different names and numbers in my contacts!
But one thing is certain: No matter what kind of mood either of us is in when we get together, we both end up in a better mood by the time we part. I guess at 75, it’s not a bad thing to feel younger for a time.
Next Sunday is the first Sunday of 2025. It’s the dawning of a new age and a new era. Who knows what it will bring? May you all have the holiday everyone deserves, and the New Year you voted for!
This is number ninety-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“YOU MUST BE incredibly organized. I’ll bet there isn’t anything out of place in your entire house!” said a potential girlfriend, before she’d ever seen my house. I’d just told her about the various writing projects I have underway and the work I have to do on each of them.
Ah! What part of the myth to shatter first?
Fact: I only invite guests into my little trailer on the day the cleaners have been there, or the day after.
Typically, I eat off paper plates and ‘cook’ in the microwave. I insist on eating with real stainless flatware, though. So, when I finish a meal, the plate goes in the garbage and the fork or other utensils get dropped through a slot in the sink cover. When I run out of forks in the silverware drawer, I open up the cover on the sink and wash whatever is in it. About once a week.
When I run out of underwear (Just bought eight new pair. Hooray!) I take my laundry to the laundromat. It takes almost two hours to wash, dry and fold the clothes, including the most recent set of sheets from the bed. It takes five to ten business days to get the laundry put away.
My ‘office’ is the dining room table, to which I have added a rolling office chair, a 32" monitor, and a detachable keyboard and mouse. Since that pretty much occupies the surface of the table, I use the bench seats for filing my projects, storing my computer bag, and keeping pantry items there isn’t room for in the pantry. Not the big things. Those I keep in the shower.
Yeah, my home is just super organized.
But my projects have to be organized or I will quickly be overwhelmed and catatonic!
I’ll start with this blog. I sometimes get two or three weeks ahead in writing them, especially when I’m doing a series like I recently did on writing through depression and despair. It seems more often recently I manage to squeeze out an hour in an evening on which there are no basketball games I’m interested in, and start writing so I can get the post to my editor to review before I have to actually put it up on Sunday morning. But my blog posts are only about 1200 words long. I can usually get them drafted in an hour.
Let’s pick up with some of my other projects that I have going at the moment.
I finished the first draft of Soulmates (previously called Head Talkers) at the end of October. Pixel, my editor, took the story for the next few weeks and re-read it to note places where it was and wasn’t working. I added those to the email he sent me when he read it the first time. Now, I’m spending about two to three hours each day on the rewrite. I try to get a chapter rewritten each day, but there are days when I get less or more. Let’s say that I work on Soulmates between about five and bed.
The story I can’t wait to get a new title for, but that has to wait until I finish writing it, is still (at this writing) in first draft, but I think I can see the end coming as I approach 150,000 words. Then it will go into hibernation as my editor Lyndsy finishes reading and commenting on it. I’ll pick it up again for rewriting when I get the rewrite of Soulmates finished. I spend about three hours a day on this project. Let’s say I work on it between noon and dinner.
That brings me to my current editing and design project for a popular airplane thriller author who happens to be a retired pilot and a PhD in airplane safety. I’m currently in the proofreading stage of this book which the author knows takes me a while. I focus intently on what I am reading, not for the content so much as word-by-word checking for spelling, punctuation, and word usage. I spend about two hours a day on this project and when I’m finished with the proofreading, then I have to start designing the actual book, which is a fairly complex layout. I do this between breakfast and lunch.
And that brings me to the project I just finished editing and designing for a client, so I can finally bill for it. Some projects seem to take forever and since I also had to navigate the publishing process for the client and it was a complex editing challenge, this was one of those that dragged out for five months. Let’s say I worked on it in my ‘spare time.’
My day sounds pretty organized as long as I don’t care about having any other life, doesn’t it. But I actually do have a life. I enjoy watching women’s basketball, both NCAA and WNBA. My friends and I go out to a show about every two weeks. I try to see my muse at least once a week for breakfast and we text each other frequently. I try to do chair exercises for at least fifteen minutes a day, intended around noon but more likely to be remembered a few minutes before bed. I meet with a writing group once or twice a week, either live or online. And I’ve started more Netflix series that I never got around to finishing than I can even name at the moment.
Yes, there is organization to my day, but it’s what I refer to as barely organized chaos.
Why? Why do I put my 75-year-old body and spirit through this meat grinder?
That’s simple: I live on Social Security. If I had nothing but my Social Security check and my meagre IRA each month, I would be able to survive, but that’s all. Writing and editing provide a nice supplemental income, in the words of the IRS. And if I don’t continue to take on the editing and design jobs, that is a significant bit of supplemental income I’m missing.
If I don’t release a major new book every quarter, my royalty income drops significantly. I did not release a major book in Q4 of 2024, for example. My royalty income for that quarter will be 20-25% of what it was during the previous four quarters. It’s just supplemental income, but it pays for the repair on my furnace.
And if I’m not writing and posting a section of a new work in progress each week, my Sausage Grinder patrons start disappearing. The same is true of my Sneak Peek patrons if there isn’t a new book posting a chapter a week before it’s released anywhere else. Even my Library patrons get a Special Patrons Edition eBook of one of my backlist books each month! That goes into my supplemental income and helps me hitch up my trailer, put gas in my tank, and travel the country.
I need to carefully plan for my retirement from writing and editing. My supplemental income amounts to about 30% of my total income each month. I watch my few investments closely to determine exactly how many months are left for me to live. It’s not a living. It’s writing to live.
2024 was a frightening year in some respects and a very invigorating year in others. I had a medical crisis and a grand adventure. I have important people in my life. So next week, I’ll write about my 2024 in review.
This is number ninety-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHEN I WRITE, it’s golden. I don’t ever go back to it.”
That’s not a quote from me, but from an author I interviewed several years ago. I won’t even credit it because it is so absurd. Last week, I mentioned some of the steps that come after I’ve written a book. I think it’s time to delve deeper into the process.
First Draft
I usually write very rapidly because the ideas flood my mind and I need to write to get them down before I forget them. I’ve seen articles recently that indicate dementia and memory loss are related to diabetes, but that doesn’t make them less real. Short term memory is often sacrificed as a person gets older.
I was in a casino in Las Vegas when a pit boss came up to the table and told me I couldn’t play there because they don’t allow card counters. I looked at him in disbelief. “I’m seventy-five years old. If I could remember what cards have been played, I’d be able to remember why I walked into the kitchen.”
It’s a joke. I don’t have a kitchen.
But the truth is that if I think of something for a story in the middle of the night, I need to get up and write it down right fucking now! In the morning, it will be gone. Last night I thought of something for each of two stories I’m working on. One was a joke regarding people going on a camping trip. “Isobel’s idea of roughing it is having to share a hotel bathroom with her husband.”
The other was to include a resident of Portland, OR who is known for his nudism, dragon-head cane with a sword concealed, and his frequency at local strip clubs. He’s also an author and the Murder by Angus Vieira mysteries are well worth a read. Furthermore, I know the guy and he won’t object to me making a character out of him in Soulmates.
The important thing is those ideas have been committed to digital paper. I won’t forget them unless I forget where I wrote them down.
Story Edit
I shared an illustration from my story editor’s copy of Sisyphus a couple of weeks ago and I’m getting so much from her comments that I’ll share another as well.
Note that, in general, Lyndsy doesn’t make proofreading corrections unless she actually stumbles over something and can’t help herself. She knows and understands that the whole thing will be rewritten and places where she makes a proofreading correction are likely not to exist in the next draft.
I will mention that Lyndsy is not the only person reading the first draft. I have an alpha reader, Les, who keeps up as I generate each chapter and I can always talk to him about places where I’m trying to say something that isn’t coming along.
Also, though they don’t often comment, my Sausage Grinder Patrons at $10 per month, are reading my daily posts of what I have written that day. That is pretty raw and totally unedited, but is kind of exciting.
Rewrite
I’ve talked about the likelihood of a 90% rewrite of a first draft, so I won’t go into it again. Sometimes, however, the rewrite takes longer than the first draft. In fact, usually.
First and Second Proofreading
I have three final editors. Cie-mel and Old Rotorhead look at the content with differing points of view. Cie-mel is a careful proofreader, but also points out places where I’ve been inconsistent or where he struggles with a sentence structure.
Old Rotorhead is also a careful proofreader, but is a former lawyer, art docent, helicopter pilot, and world traveler. He has often filled in blanks in things I haven’t been clear on. Most memorably, when I was writing The Prodigal, Rotorhead sent me a detailed step-by-step description, list of terms, and YouTube videos about creating a fresco mural and how that differed from a secco mural. I was able to incorporate that into the final material.
The Prodigal and the other five books of the “Model Student” series are available individually or as a collection at Bookapy.
Third Proofreading
My line editor is Pixel the Cat. He is my final proofreader and often corrects things the other two miss. Nor is he afraid to suggest alternative structures for sentences. Even my blog posts go to him for proofing and checking before I post them.
It’s Not Over
There’s an important step between each of these items that I haven’t mentioned yet. After each step listed above, I read the manuscript. Before I send it on to the next editor, I read the manuscript again. I read my manuscript as many as seven or eight times in this process, and I find things in every reading that I want to change. Pixel has finally told me that if I make changes after he’s seen the manuscript, I need to send it to him again because I have been known to introduce errors even then.
But even when it is back from that last read-through, I have more contact with the manuscript. I have to change it from a manuscript to a book. I publish my books in three different formats—paper, eBook, and online serial. The paperback and eBook are done in Adobe InDesign. I have been using the product since it was introduced back in the 90s and am pretty proficient at getting what I want out of both the print version and the eBook version.
The online version is done in HTML. I hand code each chapter. Most people would consider this a completely unnecessary step, especially since some of the publishing engines, like Vixen at SOL, ignore some of my HTML formatting. For example, even when I code the entity for an apostrophe (’) preceding a date or shortened word (like ’24), Vixen often reverses it to an open single quote. But during the process of coding, I often discover missing open or closed quotes, open-ended italics, and other items that I only see when I proofread the HTML code.
For me, the final step is to read the finished work in the online serial as it is posted. It is not unheard of for me to find a proofreading error we have all missed when I read this final version. And believe me, someone who is reading the online version is absolutely sure to find it and tell me about how I need better proofreading!
Once again, I’m barely getting this post written before it has to go up, so I don’t know for sure what next week will bring. Because of the way I’m currently working coming up to the end of the year, I have a feeling it will be something about managing multiple projects at the same time. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by them all right now!
This is number ninety in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
EACH NOVEMBER for twenty-one years, I have written at least one new novel. My records show that I wrote twenty-three books in those twenty-one Novembers. Seventeen of those books have been published and the NaNoWriMo website shows that I have written a total of 2,718,527 words in that time, including their various summer challenges.
I don’t write only in November, though. My records for the past six years show that I’ve dumped 5,508,020 words out of my head onto the page—nearly a million words a year. That’s a lot of typing and a lot of dreaming up new ideas. Some of them have been successful and some have never seen a public release. But I keep writing.
November 2024 saw me tackle a massive new project that I gave the working title of Sisyphus, a modern myth. I ended the month of November with 105,866 words in my draft and it wasn’t nearly finished. I’ve continued writing 2-4,000 words a day in December and think I might possibly finish by the middle of the month. Yes, somewhere over 150,000 words.
The work is very different than I anticipated, though the major story elements are still there. I discovered that many of the characteristics of the legendary Sisyphus from Greek mythology that made him renowned as clever and able to defeat death and the gods, are not particularly attractive characteristics today. In fact, they smack a little too much of the billionaires who run the country for their own benefit. (The country—being just about any country where my books are read.)
The most common criticism I’ve received on the first draft is that Henry, my leading man, is not very likable. He is a man who typically gets his way and other people rush to help him get it. Even though he is generally benevolent, protecting friends and destroying enemies, he’s just not the kind of guy you’d like to have over for dinner on Taco Tuesday.
Well, not to worry. This is the first draft, and I think the story is actually quite good. My story editor, Lyndsy, says I need to decide who is writing the book. The first part sounds like Devon Layne (aroslav), the second part like Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose), and she hasn’t figured out who is writing the third part!
When I am writing a new story, I tend to write very rapidly—as I indicated, 2-4,000 words a day, non-stop. That’s the speed the story enters my mind, and I have to get it down or I’ll lose the flow. In the process there are various sub-plots that emerge, some of which are never resolved. There are characters that don’t seem to have a great purpose. There are skips in time and missing transitions.
That is what a first draft is all about. Thanks to Lyndsy’s and Les’s notes on the first draft, sometime around mid-January, when I’ve managed to release my current more advanced work in progress, I’ll pick up the five hundred or so pages of Sisyphus and start again from page one with a new draft. When I go through this process, I can usually predict somewhere near an 80% or 90% rewrite. Part of that will be choosing a new and appropriate title and unifying the voice so it is all written by just one of my personalities.
But I can’t start that process until I finish getting the story out. And since this story covers several years, I’ll have to work on transitions and timelines especially hard. It’s scarcely a daily diary type of story.
It seems a shame to talk so much about a book and not leave a link to a place to buy it, but Sisyphus is not yet for sale. My $10 per month Sausage Grinder Patrons on Patreon have access to reading the first draft as I write it and make daily posts to the story. They see both what goes into the sausage grinder and the casing I try to pack it all into. It isn’t always pretty, but it can be very enjoyable in its own way.
An early example from my collected works that I completely rewrote was Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric. I researched this book for nearly twenty years, having taught print history during a good part of that. I collected legends and stories. And I had questions.
On January 1, 2009, I started work in earnest on the book, beginning with my concept statement and progressing with a compilation of all my years of research and speculation. I wrote it by hand in a lined book in pencil. 143 pages of notes covering everything from my proposed migration of the Library of Alexandria to the construction of Nemrud Dagi to the atomic weights of the known elements at the time of Gutenberg, to the composition of ink and its evolution over the past 40,000 years.
Before I was finished making notes, I started typing the first draft of the manuscript. I’d written a five-page prologue in July of 2008, but hadn’t progressed far. I realized it wasn’t very exciting, and things needed to start with a bang, so to speak.
I started over on January 4, 2009. I worked steadily for six months and was so disappointed in what I had written that I closed the book and sent it off to my friend The Book Doctor. He wrote comments on every page of the 40,000-word manuscript and added ten pages of notes at the end on what he saw that I needed to clarify, get rid of, and change. It was incredibly valuable information.
I studied, made notes, and changed the title of the book from "Gutenberg’s Other Book" to The Gutenberg Rubric, banking on the kind of names that were selling at the time, like The DaVinci Code. It became my November novel for 2009, and I wrote the entire 89,000-word draft that month.
It wasn’t finished.
I wrote several more drafts, completing the third in time to enter it into the 2010 PNWA literary competition. The draft won second prize in the mystery and thriller category. But that draft only included the first twenty-five pages. I launched into a full draft in March and completed the fifth draft in January of 2011. In all that time, I had worked on only one other story, the 2010 November novel, Steven George and The Dragon.
Finally, in July of 2011, the book went live, and I did my first ever book signing tour around the country in September. It was incredible.
But the book that was released was 90% different than the book I’d begun drafting January 1, 2009, even though the basic story was the same.
The Gutenberg Rubric eBook is available on Bookapy. The paperback is available from other online vendors.
We are getting perilously close to the end of 2024, along with its accompanying travel, family celebrations, and scramble to cook a perfect prime rib. As a result, I’m not sure what I’m going to write for next week yet. I’ll be as surprised as you!
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