aroslav: Blog

If you're familiar with Las Vegas, you'll know summer has arrived and with it, fire warnings all over. I've got a couple more weeks down here, wrapping up medical appointments and getting myself ready to travel before I start my northward migration. I plan to head up to Reno from here and then hit US395 north from there. Plan to be in the Seattle area by June 1.

In the meantime, I'm just typing my little fingers to the bone! The rewrite of Team Manager CHAMP! is half done and is being sent out to initial editors. As soon as I'm done rewriting that, I'll start rewriting Volume 3 of Bob's Memoir. I expect that to hit the editing channel before I reach Seattle. Bob's Memoir Volume 2 is already edited and will hit SOL on May 27. I expect Team Manager CHAMP! to be ready to continue the story of Dennis and crew when COACH! ends starting June 16.

The Team Manager saga will end for now the first of October and I'll start posting my new favorite work, Full Frame. If writing on this project continues to go at the pace it currently is, posting of Full Frame will continue at least until March 2023. Of course, my Sausage Grinder patrons are already reading the eighth chapter since they get it as I'm writing instead of waiting for the finished work. It's running through its first editing cycle as I write and so far, comments have been very positive.

Someplace along the line, I should probably put away the laundry I washed two weeks ago!

To all those of you who are mothers, are with mothers, or have mothers of your own, Happy Mothers' Day.

Enjoy!

Puff puff pant pant.

You can probably hear me a block away as I chase after my story for the month of April. I’ve been posting around 3,000 words a day for my Sausage Grinder patrons on Volume 3 of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. This story (Volume 1 chapter 16 posted on SOL today) hasn’t been as popular as many—certainly not like Team Manager—but I have a soft spot for the demon and I want to finish telling his story. I’ll get it finished yet this week.

Then I’m on to my next project, Full Frame. I’ll tell you about that in a bit (this is a long blog post). First, let’s talk about why I punish myself with self-imposed deadlines, occasional writer’s block, inane comments on the stories that have nothing to do with the story, and carpal tunnel syndrome. In other words: Why do I write?

I buy a lot of stock photography for covers, illustrations, and web content. I license most of this content from Shutterstock, and they send me tips and tricks and promotions in my email. This week they sent a note that was so inspirational, I want to share it with everyone.

Today I heard an unusual term applied to content: the gift economy. The idea was to try thinking of whatever you’re making not as operating in service of the commodity economy, but rather as a gift extended to the world without expectation. I love that concept because it requires an immediate mindset of generosity, and a conviction that we live in a world of creative abundance. This is not to say that art should be free; of course, creators need to make money, and I would never devalue the energy, skill, and talent that goes into making something. Rather, I see the gift economy as it relates to content as a recognition of value beyond simple exchange, reaching into what makes something special—worth beyond measure, as it were. My favorite marketing concept is that a rising tide lifts all boats, which to me is the opposite of a zero-sum situation; more makes more. By putting our creative output into the world in a spirit of generosity, we lift the boat for everyone.
—Jennifer Braunschweiger, Senior Director of Content Marketing, Shutterstock

Seldom has a vendor so closely matched my philosophy in life and writing. I have often told people I don’t write for a living; I write to live.

Some years ago, I became aware that I would soon be a person living on a fixed income who still enjoys reading and loves books and stories. But the budget for acquiring those books and stories was going to be significantly reduced. I couldn’t buy everything I wanted to read. And that realization brought with it the understanding that my books were in that category for many many people.

So, I decided I would make all my books and stories available for free online reading, through both StoriesOnline and my own websites. Currently, over fifty books from my two pen names are now available and I’m happy they are being viewed and read by thousands of people. I still sell my books through several channels, including Bookapy, and since launching the free reading sites for my books, I’m happy to say my book sales have also increased. This effort to provide free reading material is supported by the generous contributions of my patrons. Through their gifts and subscriptions, I am able to maintain the websites and provide my books for free online reading.

My top tier patrons get to read the raw and unedited content that I produce each week—complete with typos, homonyms, incomplete sentences, and content that will get cut during rewrites. During special times of the year, I focus on a single story and post a section a day (November and April) as part of NaNoWriMo. But I’m constantly writing and getting new and fresh ideas out every week.

Beginning on May 1, my top tier patrons will have access to my newest creative project, Full Frame.

Let me know if you’d like a sneak peek at what’s coming in the fall. I'll send you an excerpt link.

Nate Hart, class of 1968, has just been uprooted from his lifelong home in Chicago by his mother’s new career: Methodist minister. Moving to a small town in Northwestern Illinois just before his junior year in high school, is going to mean starting over in life. But Nate has a passion for photography and that passion will lead him to others as he becomes his new school’s official photographer. What he sees in the full frame of his photographs, however, will change the town.

This story will have a slow burn. As a junior in high school, Nate won’t get much opportunity to part the legs of his cute classmates, but as a photographer, there will be lots of opportunities to see them through the camera lens. Chapters will be 6,000-7,000 words in length and will post twice a week when they start here on SOL in the fall. (After Team Manager is finished.) Before then, only my top tier patrons will have access to the new work as it is written.

My alpha reader, Les, had this to say about what I’ve managed to get written on Full Frame between chapters of Bob’s Memoir.

I can see why you’re excited about this one. Based on the first few chapters, this has Team Manager already beat, hands down!!!

Why do I write? How could I not tell these stories when they are overflowing my creative cup? I love these characters and need to tell their stories.

Enjoy!

Yeah, well I had mental surgery on Thursday, which meant two days off the blood thinner, a day and a half of getting uptight about the coming operation, forty-five minutes in the chair, a day of starving, a sleepless night of heaving because of a bad reaction to the antibiotics, and two days trying to regain some semblance of order in my daily life. That brings us to today.

Oh, yeah. I meant to say dental surgery, but I'm pretty sure I lost half my mind.

Nonetheless, I managed to get some writing done during my hazy awake times. The spreadsheet says 16000 words this week, which brings my April Camp NaNoWriMo project (Bob volume 3) to just over 26,000 words. If you end up liking it, I'll consider taking drugs before I write the next thing on my list.

Which reminds me: In order to devote April to Bob, I finished the first draft of Team Manager CHAMP! on March 31. This volume will bring the current series to a conclusion with the crew ready to start college the next day. When I get around to writing the college years, I'm pretty sure I'll start a new series. It will be a while.

In the meantime, the bug for another project has hit me. This time it will be a sixteen-year-old boy transferred out of Chicago when his father loses his job and his mother gets one. He ends up in the small town of Eby Mill, about 150 miles west of Chicago—just before you fall off the edge of the world into Iowa.

I'm spending 'non-working' time plotting and outlining for this story. I expect I'll start writing sometime this summer. I'm planning the story to be one that follows the kid into the world after school and shows what life was really like in the late 60s through the 80s. And yes, there is an actual plot to each volume in the series. We should have some fun with this one.

What else?

Well, I spent ten days up north, helping my daughter get her new house ready to move into. When I got home last Sunday, I had to put my right wrist in a brace from all the painting I'd done. The house is lovely, though, and I'll be spending at least a little time camped in their back yard this summer. I'm considering a run across the US to New England in the mid-summer, depending on whether or not I can afford the gas. Haven't seen my 86-year-old sister in Ohio in about six or seven years. Haven't made it to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont since I started full timing. Might even head back west across Canada if there isn't another resurgence of the plague.

I think it would be a great time to visit Iowa and Illinois to research the places I'm writing about. That's always fun to do after the fact.

I plan to be back here in Vegas for next winter so I can finish getting my health fixed with a new implant, sleep therapy, and hearing review. Whoopee!

So, it's time to work on a pesky client project (yes, I still do odd jobs), and then see if I can add another 2,000 words to Bob3. Hope you all have a great week!

About a third of my normal readers are engaged in reading Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, Volume 1. That’s great! Not everyone is interested in following the adventures of a 4,000-year-old demon who is trying to make his way through the world the best he can. After all, it’s not a fifteen-year-old shrimp geek accumulating a harem!

Only it sort of is. Bob’s adventures are mounting and at the moment he’s negotiating building a temple for a Mesopotamian god. My guess is he wanted it air conditioned.

Back last summer when I was working through Team Manager SPRINT!, I decided I needed to take a drive and just listen to the characters for a while. I do that a lot. One of the things I’ve loved about my life on the road is that while I’m driving is when characters talk. Ignoring me. I figured Dennis was going to reveal big stuff on this drive.

Instead, he kept getting interrupted by Bob.

“You know what would be funny? Write a memoir about a demon.”

I distinctly heard snickers.

“What demon?” I asked.

“Oh, let’s call me Bob. You know. It’s like a drunk mage was trying to summon Beelzebub and got Beetlebob instead.”

More snickers.

“Call you?”

“Well, it’s my adventure.”

“And who are you that I should care?”

“I’m Bob and I’ll be your demon today.”

Oh, great. I drove for two hours and still didn’t know where SPRINT! was going, but I had a new story that I was supposed to work on.

I told my story consultant, Doug, about it and we sat around camp brainstorming what would be in the book.

“Spells always come out a little unexpectedly,” Doug said. “Like the one that brought him here.”

“Like the time he cast a transformation spell on himself and used the feminine form of the verb instead of the masculine and turned himself into a woman!”

“Exactly. Only it seems things always work out right for him because he’s just a happy-go-lucky—mostly lucky—demon.”

Doug and I had a few fireside chats before I took off for the winter. I made several months’ worth of notes as I finished SPRINT! and launched into COACH! If I was going to work on Bob, it was going to require all my effort, because 4,000 years is a fucking long story.

I didn’t know how long until I started writing for NaNoWriMo in November. By then I was in Las Vegas and settled in my winter campsite. And the words started flowing. By the end of the month I had more than exceeded my goals.

My official NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.

My secondary NaNoWriMo goal of topping 2 million words in my 17 years of NaNo participation.

My tertiary personal goal of writing a complete novel of 150,000 words in a month.

Then, of course, I needed to start rewriting Bob because I just flew past a lot of places that needed more development. Doug read the first draft, as did Les, and both had all kinds of comments on how it needed more in certain places and “Why didn’t you
mention his time in Australia?” (Just one example.) By the time I’d rewritten it, it was two volumes, totaling 206,000 words, and I had a drawer full of ideas for volume three.

Well, now I’m pressing toward the conclusion of the first draft of Team Manager CHAMP! so I can spend April’s Camp NaNoWriMo writing volume three of Bob’s Memoir.

A demon with his own view of history, mythology, religion, magic, and famous people (who collects a harem and manages to keep them alive and young for 4,000 years) just won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m having a blast.

And people have compared the writing to Lubrican, who always has a lead character named Bob, and to Christopher Moore whose books have included comic fantasy best-sellers like Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. If you are ever lacking something to read, just look up some of the seventeen books by Christopher Moore. Or read Bob’s Memoir.

And now, Bob keeps telling me he wants to go into outer space and get away from earth. Hmm. We’ll see how that works out for you, Bob.

I'm traveling this week. Came up to Western Washington to surprise my daughter for her birthday and help her move into the new house she and her husband just bought.

In other words, I'm doing more work now than I have in years. Yesterday, I sanded the inside of all the kitchen cabinets to get them ready to paint. I'm still shaking the dust off. Caulking cracks seemed to be another big job. I think there will be painting. (My least favorite task. Even ranks below doing dishes.) Possibly packing and getting ready for Tuesday's move. It will be a busy couple of days.

I'm still managing to get a little writing done, though. I'm closing in on the end of Team Manager CHAMP! Making some big decisions about the future of that project. This book gets them to the end of high school and brings the final harem group together at last.

I'm preparing to start writing the third volume of Bob's Memoir next Friday. I hope to have it completed by the end of April's Camp NaNoWriMo. We'll see!

And I got a new client project in hand yesterday, so there is that to look forward to. I'll probably start it tonight.

If you are in the UK, Happy Mother's Sunday. Tell her you love her.

I just won’t admit it. I’ve been reminded of the story of the old Yankee sitting outside the grocery store in a small town in Vermont. A young New Yorker, up to visit the area, asked, “You lived here all your life?”

The Yankee kept whittling away at the stick of wood he was working on and without looking up said, “Not yit.”

And what brought me into this frame of mind?

I finally followed the link in the yellow banner at the top of your SOL screen. I always check out as many of the nominees for Clitorides Awards as I can and then vote for my favorites. (No, not always my own. There are some fine authors at SOL.) I thank you for the nominations of Team Manager SWISH!, Pussy Pirates, and The Assassin.

What caught my attention was my nomination for the Lifetime Achievement Award. I look at that list and see some of the finest authors SOL has produced.

And me.

I’ve been posting on SOL for ten plus years now. I have 52 stories up for 28,305KB of stuff to read. According to the site, I’ve been downloaded 7,318,913 times. If I had a penny for every download… Well, I didn’t come here to get rich. I came here to share my stories with people I thought would appreciate them.

But “Lifetime Achievement”?

Not yit.

My next story is already edited and ready to start posting when the current Bob’s Memoir finishes. I’m working on the fourth book in the Team Manager series and am about three-quarters of the way through that one. I have two stories begun that have been set aside while I finished others, and a drawer full of ideas for more stories. If I have anything to say about it, the lifetime ain’t over yet.

Still, I suppose it would be nice to have an award like that now rather than posthumously.

Happy Spring!