aroslav: Blog

This is number 117 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“YOU ARE REMEMBERED for the rules you break,” supposedly said General Douglas MacArthur, according to a quote in a 1996 issue of Press of Atlantic City newspaper. Unfortunately, there’s no concrete evidence that he said that, but with his nature and character, it certainly seems reasonable that he might have. The same is true of the more recently popularized quote, “Rules are made to be broken.”

My editors often point out things that are incorrect in my books. Of course, readers are always happy to point them out, as well, but I generally listen to my editors. Generally. I often get comments from them that are along the lines of “This isn’t technically correct, but it’s in dialog, so if that’s consistent with the way the person would talk, it would be okay.” We hedge around on it a lot.

Of course, many rule infractions are of the sort that do drive people crazy. Words that sound similar, are spelled similarly, or are simply easily confused. We all have pet-peeves, I’m sure. Mine is the confusion of ‘then’ and ‘than’ in other’s writing. It drives me crazy. I wish they’d just learn to follow the rules!

And that’s the big problem. When people break the rules because it’s a play on words or a character trait or a significant plot point, I have no problem with it. But I find most infractions are simply because people don’t know the rules in the first place. Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

That’s why editors are so important to me. I know and understand most of the rules of grammar and spelling, but I make mistakes. Editors correct me. I try to provide a few mistakes in each chapter so they will feel useful.

There is absolutely no purpose in breaking the rules if one is ignorant of them.

Let me go back to MacArthur again. In the 1962 book MacArthur Close-Up author William Addleman Ganoe retells an anecdote regarding MacArthur having to discipline a sergeant for a rule infraction. At one point, MacArthur gets frustrated and states, “Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind…. Instead of mending the situation on the spot, we make a rule.”

MacArthur is sometimes praised and sometimes vilified, but I have to agree with this point. The reason we have thousands of pages—perhaps millions of pages—of laws in this country is because we couldn’t actually deal with a situation in the first place. The same is true of hundreds of executive orders, pages of court opinions, and countless books of religious doctrine. We hide behind the rules. If the rule says I can’t go beyond the fence, I can safely close my eyes to the horrors that are on the other side.

Most English speakers know the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition.

“Where y’all from?” asked the belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” answered the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?” asked the belle.

She sure got around that one. And followed the rules while doing it! Grammatical rules are not supposed to be a barrier to communication. Winston Churchill once famously responded to an editor of his speech, “This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put!”

It was so witty! But it had nothing to do with the rule. Yes, when on its own, ‘with’ is a preposition. But ‘put up with’ is a compound verb. In that instance, ‘with’ doesn’t stand alone as a preposition. Now, did Churchill not know the proper grammar. Or his editor?

Regardless, it was funny!

My daughter came up with a witticism when she was in high school. We’d started reading the Harry Potter stories when she was just four years old. The whole family loved them. Then a series of stories about vampires and werewolves called the Twilight Saga came out. My daughter read it.

When I asked how she liked the series, she said, “The difference between JK Rowling (HP) and Stephenie Meyer (TS) is that Rowling learned how to write before she published a book.”

Ouch! Nothing like getting criticized by an eighteen-year-old English major. Of course, in the past fifteen years, she’s found much to criticize in her idol’s politics and humanity, just as she’s found much to criticize in my writing.

In summary, it is important to know the rules if you are going to break them. Take the time to learn to write. Everyone will enjoy it more.

Ah. The first of August already. Happy Lugnasad, everyone! For me, it means I’m preparing to return home to Las Vegas, even though the temperatures there have not really started down yet. It will still be about 110 degrees when I get there, but I’ll survive. And, with luck, I’ll start making regular blog posts again. Next week, I’ll talk about establishing a rhythm to your writing: “In the Groove.”

This is number 116 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

…UNLESS YOU’RE SHAKESPEARE.

I’ve just returned from a refreshing and inspiring theatre tour to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. I saw six shows while I was there. Three were among the Shakespearean greats, including one I’d never seen in production before. The latter was The Winter’s Tale, the most famous was Macbeth, and the funniest was As You Like It.

It is a Shakespeare Festival, but the other three shows I saw were by other playwrights: Sense and Sensibility, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Forgiveness. In addition to being good theatre, there was something to be learned from each of the shows.

I was impressed first of all by The Winter’s Tale, a play that vacillated between being a horrendous tragedy and a ridiculous comedy. I’d read the script a couple of years ago when writing the Photo Finish series of books, but all I remembered was the most famous stage direction of all time: Exit pursued by a bear.

In this series of books, Nate Hart and his girlfriends acquire property in Stratford where he becomes a popular photographer among the actresses there. I did a lot of research on the plays produced at the Festival during the years 1969-1976, keeping the season the same, but putting in my own staging and inventing the actors, directors, and technical people. Suffice it to say that I read a lot of plays and play synopses during the writing of those books.

For three acts in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicily, proceeds to destroy his family, his friendships, and his kingdom through petty and foundless jealousy, causing his closest advisor to flee, causing the deaths of his son and his wife, and ordering his infant daughter abandoned to wild animals on a distant hillside. At the peak of the action with all things set in motion, he receives a message from the Oracle of Delphi declaring his wife innocent and Leontes a tyrant. He repents, but it is too late. All is lost.

The final two acts are a pastoral comedy in which the infant daughter, rescued by a shepherd, has grown to a beautiful young woman and falls in love with a young man who just happens to be the son of Polixenes, the king Leontes accused of adultery with his wife.

Through comic trials, the Prince and Princess are revealed and their wedding is celebrated. But none of that is shown. Instead, three soldiers appear with the play’s clown to tell about how the princess was revealed to be Leontes’ daughter, how Polixenes arrived and was reunited with his former friend, how the couple was married, and how the shepherd and his son were rewarded.
A clear case of telling, not showing!

I showed considerably more in the books of the Photo Finish series! They are available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a similar situation occurs. Just before the denouement, the mysteriously transformed elder brother who has been hunting his youngest brother (to kill him) arrives to tell the disguised Rosalind that as he was sleeping, a lion attacked him. His younger brother—who had every right to hate his older brother—could have left him to die, but instead attacked and subdued the lion, rescuing the older brother, but being severely injured. Now the older brother is in the younger brother’s debt and is carrying out his errand, during which he also falls in love with the disguised Duke’s daughter, Celia.

To simplify matters further, the middle brother, heretofore absent, shows up in the Forest of Arden to tell that the evil Duke, bent on hunting down the exiled Duchess, encountered a monk in the forest and was converted from his evil ways, abdicating his throne to his sister and forgiving all those who had been exiled.

Clearly, there was just too much to wrap up for Shakespeare to handle it in the last act.

I’m reminded of an old movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald—I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Last of the Belles.’ In the scene I am thinking of, Fitzgerald is going over his movie script with a movie mogul (again, I think it was Sam Goldwyn), when Goldwyn asks him, pointing at the script,

“What are they doing?”
“They are talking,” Fitzgerald responds.
“But what are they doing?”
“Talking.”
“Doing! What are they doing?” Goldwyn says in frustration.

The obvious intent was to point out that two talking heads on the movie screen were boring, no matter what they were saying. In the movie business there needed to be movement. They needed to be doing something. In Fitzgerald’s lexicon, ‘talking’ was ‘doing.’ His books have a lot of dialog.

The only movie I ever saw that successfully portrayed people talking without doing something else was Woody Allen’s Interiors. The movie was a critical success, but sadly was not popular. By its successful use of dialog, though, it truly highlights the problem many authors have with telling instead of showing.

In many works, authors take the shortcut of having a character tell the story on behalf of the author. Sometimes that works and sometimes it is simply putting narrative in the mouth of a character.

What the author might narrate with a simple sentence like, “A three-car pile-up on I-5 delayed Sylvia by half an hour,” is turned into an ‘exciting’ scene:

Sylvia burst through the door and fell into Ryan’s arms, sobbing.
“It was terrible!” she gasped. “Right ahead of me, a car cut into the left lane right ahead of a truck carrying cement blocks. The truck driver lost control and the truck rolled to the right, dumping his load of blocks onto a car next to him!”
“How terrible!” Ryan said. “Are you okay?”
“Shaken. Just seeing those poor people lying beside the road. I barely managed to squeak by when the dust settled. Traffic was stopped before and after the roll-over. I just gave my name to the driver and took the next exit.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“I need a drink!”

Did this particularly add anything to the narration? As far as the story goes, did it make a difference? She was half an hour late. But this does expose more of the character of the two main actors. We get a glimpse of Ryan’s care, and of Sylvia’s self-absorption as she left the scene of the accident.

It is up to the author now to make this meaningful rather than just a substitute for a fourteen-word narrative.

This may not have been an exciting discussion and you might still not know the difference between showing and telling, but it was a realization that occurred to me as I was watching Shakespeare navigate between the two. Now it is time to get back to writing.

I didn't prepare a blog post for today, but thought I'd jot off a couple of notes.

I'm headed out to Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival this week. I'll get to see six shows!

Unfortunately, that means my productivity will be a little low for a bit as I'm not carrying a computer with me and will have limited internet access. But I'll still get some writing done.

My general blog post on Facebook and Patreon was all about why July was a good month to become a Devon Layne (aroslav) patron. Even though I'm not posting pre-release content in July, I'm offering all seven of the Special Patrons Edition eBooks I've released this year. They are available for all my paid patrons. I'm also pausing collections for August, so new annual subscribers this month will get thirteen months for the price of eleven instead of twelve.

But the bottom line is that I'm not going to be pre-releasing Forever Yours until August. It should be available here on SOL before the end of that month. I'm still very enthused about the book, even though it is nearly twice as long as I thought it would be. Editors and alpha readers have been enthusiastic.

I'm also looking to release Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain by the end of September if all goes well. October if it's slow. First drafts are available for my Sausage Grinder patrons.

So, I'll be offline for the next couple of weeks. Hope to be back refreshed, inspired, and ready to work soon.

This is number 115 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I GET UP AT 5:00 AM. I’m usually down for my first nap by 8:00.

Naps are usually only an hour, but occasionally, I crash at 11:00 and don’t wake up until 1:00. And, of course, then I can’t get to sleep at night because there is so much going on in my head.

What’s more, I’m seeing this all around me—and not only in the septuagenarians and up. Young people look exhausted. Baristas look exhausted. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and policemen look exhausted. The grocery store clerk even looks tired.

Oh. I used self-checkout. Maybe that isn’t a fair observation.

But wherever I look, I see people drained of the will to carry on. I took the title of this from a post regarding the WNBA and everyone’s concern that Caitlin Clark has only made one of her last twenty-three 3-point attempts! What’s wrong with her.

The list of women's basketball greats who are usually 3-point sharpshooters but are currently hitting less than 30% is extensive: Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Marina Mabry, Kelsey Plum, Arika Ogunbowale... The poster of the list on WNBA Threads says, "All the WNBA is in a slump!"

It was Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks that summed it up: “’Cause we’re tired.”

I had lunch this week with my alpha reader Les and his wife, Marianne. We had a great and lengthy conversation inspired by an artificial intelligence character in my next novel, Forever Yours. Pythia engages in a conversation regarding the meaning of life. Les thinks I’m brilliant for thinking up the artificial intelligence and her answers to questions, by the way.

Marianne said she always wanted to write, but her life is made up of lists of things she needs to do. Empty the dishwasher, grocery shopping, laundry, answering a letter, visiting a son and grandson and great grandson. She felt the meaning of life was just her lists, and every time she scratches something off, she adds three more things to the list.

She expressed a moderate amount of envy that I ‘have time’ to write.

I’m not married. I have no pets. I have no debts and no job. I don’t have a collection of knickknacks I need to dust or display. While I’m in the Pacific Northwest for most of the summer, my routines are interrupted by visits with my friends and family, buying groceries and taking my turn cooking meals, walking the dogs, eating out, preparing dinner parties. I’m cooking Greek pastitsio for seven Monday, partly because I don’t have the opportunity to cook that often back in Vegas.

Otherwise, my life continues to be: wake up, write, nap, repeat.

I don't write for a living. I write to live.

The life can be exhausting, but I don’t think that is what has cut my productivity from a new chapter or more a day to about two new chapters a week. Something else is tiring us out.

I think one of the things writers—especially of thrillers—fail to take into consideration when they are writing about their heroes who are constantly on the go, is the effect of exhaustion on how a person thinks and how well he or she can perform. It’s as if all spies, detectives, agents, and politicians don’t need restful sleep.

Oh, but heroes are supposed to be perfect. No! They are supposed to be flawed.

What is more heroic than a newborn’s mother who has not slept in three weeks, is depressed, thinks her husband doesn’t love her, regrets ever having had a child, but who gets up in the middle of the night because the baby needs to be fed and changed? When the hero is too tired to climb to the top of the stairs, but does so anyway, that is working through exhaustion in a way that exhausts the reader as well.

El Rancho del Corazón, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven collection are available at ZBookStore. It is also the first part of LNDtH2 on SOL.

This is number 114 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

One of the biggest dangers of using slang, even when a character would normally use it, is misusing a term. I’m reminded of the woman who received notice that an acquaintance had died and sent her condolences via text to all the friends, ending the text with ‘LOL.’ She thought the text slang meant Lots Of Love instead of Laughing Out Loud.

Another problem is overusing the terms. In a draft of one book I wrote—Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose) Jackie the Beanstalk—two girls camping had received a couple of marijuana cigarettes from another camper. My first editor asked if I’d intentionally tried to use every term for cannabis I could find. I had used nearly all of them: joint, blunt, MaryJane, 420, doobie, ganja, weed, roach, and grass, among others. One problem was that most of those weren’t commonly in use by the generation of my characters. Not only had I overused slang in describing cannabis, it wasn’t even the right slang!

I corrected it, by the way.

Trying to make things proper when they should be eliminated altogether is another problem. According to a popular meme:

Quick question: Is it "for fuck sake" or "for fucks sake"? It's for a work email, so it has to sound professional.

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over two years now. It might be time to take a break, or at least not pretend to post weekly. I’ve missed posts in January, May, and June this year. It's also become difficult to estimate readership on SOL since the server move. This past week, with no post, I had a record number of blog views recorded. I’m guessing we’re subject to a robot invasion.

So, I’ll say the posts will be irregular this summer. I have no idea what will catch my eye as I’m traveling, but when something does, I’ll tell you all about it.

In the meantime, I’m working hard at finishing a couple of books and plotting my Halloween story for this year. I’d like to get those under control as my writing priority instead of procrastinating by writing clever blogs.