aroslav: Blog

This is the third blog installment about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. 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. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

BY THE TIME I’d put nine stories up at Stories Online, where readers could read them for free (two years), I decided I should start releasing them as books for sale. That required an author name somewhat longer and more serious than ‘aroslav.’ After cruising the erotica and romantica aisles at the bookstore and online, just looking at the names of authors, I chose to call myself Devon Layne. It was suitably androgenous, which I’d heard was an advantage for males writing in the genre. And it rhymed with my given name that I was still using to publish mainstream fiction.

I had limited success. eBook sales didn’t seem to be a real money-maker for me—paperbacks not at all. I’m very poor at networking and at social media. At the very bottom of my list of things I like to do, social media ranked at number 938, just one slot higher than making an actual phone call. That was tied with pulling my fingernails out by the root. I learned the harsh reality of something I’d been teaching my publishing clients for years: The day you don’t actively sell your book is the day your book will not be sold.

I had to stop and evaluate why I was writing this stuff and whether I should continue. No one else was going to sell my books for me because I wasn’t going to call anyone or try to get someone else to publish them. So, with no sales, was it worthwhile to keep writing in this genre—or, in fact, at all?

Mentally and emotionally my life had improved, despite my recently concluded divorce and my nomadic lifestyle. I enjoyed creating covers and laying out books both for paper and eBook. I’d been doing that for several years. I guess I could have said that I write and publish books for my own enjoyment and don’t care about anyone else. But then, why post them online or create books? All I needed was the manuscript for personal enjoyment.

On SOL, my stories were incredibly popular. I received dozens of emails from fans each week. I still receive anywhere from 20 to 100 emails per week. I had over 200,000 downloads my first year on the site.

Most of all, I liked the interaction with my fans and I felt I was doing some good, as well. I received this response to the second half of the Model Student book Triptych, which I later renamed Odalisque.

"I had to share that last chapter with a few of my friends. We met together to discuss it and then went out and bought food to take to the local food shelf. Thank you for inspiring us."

Wait! People met together to discuss a chapter of erotica? And were inspired to donate to a food shelf? My erotica must be doing something good.

In that volume of the “Model Student” series, I’d explored a polyamorous quintet in every combination I could put them in. I’d dealt with issues of homelessness, abuse, depression, submission, murder, art, and racquetball—stories of real life my characters wanted to tell about themselves. I decided what I really wanted out of my writing career was that connection to readers that changed things—that, as Tony Ames put it, “made the world a better place.” I wasn’t interested in making a mint with my books. I was used to living on a shoestring. I wanted to touch people and to connect.

Oddly, I discovered at the same time that nearly all my book sales had been to people who had already read or were in the process of reading the story online for free. That was a phenomenon that continued and grew for the next ten years. People paid me for free stuff! I’d never experienced anything like that before. I’d always heard that people wanted things artists sell given to them for free. I decided I should focus on giving my books away.

Perhaps the most important thing to me as a writer was that I was writing—not only erotica, but mainstream mystery, thriller, and literary fiction as well. It became my full-time passion and I’d seldom been happier.

Oh. How did it become full-time if I wasn’t getting paid for it?

At the age of sixty, I was laid off from a high-tech position and struggled to provide for my family for the next four years. At sixty-four, I was divorced and wandering. I filed for Social Security and lived on that and a couple hundred a month from my IRA. I traveled around the country in a pickup truck and sixteen-foot travel trailer. Money was limited, but I could live cheaper on the road than I could if I settled down anyplace.

I could truly tell people, “I don’t write for a living. I write to live.”

Thus began my career as a peripatetic (traveling from place to place) author, and my decision to always make my stories available for free. I was committed to writing erotica.

I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? 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. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.

2011 was an enlightening year. E.L. James released Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel featuring explicit erotic scenes including BDSM practices. It was a phenomenal success, the trilogy of books selling over 150 million copies in five years.
But, my erotic writing (not the works, but the act itself) was looked down upon. Relatives did not want to know that I was writing ‘that kind’ of book. Serious writers who had enjoyed James’ novel shrank from admitting they knew me. One sanctimonious mainstream critic said, “I suppose there are some people who would like this.” Ouch.

The email and comments I received were completely contradictory to that opinion. Readers reaffirmed how wonderful my writing was, how they cared about the characters, and how they wanted more stories from me. I just had to not tell anyone I was writing it. But in many ways, it was the same thing I’d been writing for thirty years!

Lesson learned: I have come to believe that people change as they get older, and men and women change differently. Tastes change. Desires change. Social conventions change. I read the first full-length novel I’d written to my then fiancé, nearly forty years ago at a chapter a night. She loved it. She asked me each evening to read the chapter again. Perhaps she was just using my voice to put her to sleep, but she still said she loved the story, an occult fantasy that included some sexually charged pagan rituals. Even my mother, a minister, read the story and enjoyed it.

I didn’t get around to cleaning up the story and publishing it until twenty-five years later. At that time, my wife considered it vulgar and obscene. She definitely didn’t want our family name associated with such a thing. I published it under my erotica pseudonym and The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality proved to be a 4-star novel, both in eBook sales and as a serial. A review said:

Delightfully Different
Devon has created a good world for a modern paranormal story. This story takes place in both America and England. It is about an old Wiccan circle and the power struggle within it. The young man is the props master for his college’s theater program. He has a triangle with an English professor, a fellow theater student, and a late-night coffee house waitress. As tensions and rivalries build, the scene changes to England where things get more sinister. Enjoy this change of pace novel.

But the difference between it being a romantic adventure and it being erotica was measured in years, not in content. The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality by Devon Layne placed third in the 2013 Clitorides Awards for Best Erotic Fantasy, judged primarily by older men and not by older women.

My male readers had changed in a different way than my wife. They largely yearned for that day gone by when they were youthful and vigorous and sexually potent. They weren’t thankful that it was finally past. This was true, even of people I thought of as physically liberated.

I caught a conversation in a nudist park between a man and a woman in their sixties or seventies-both single, either widowed or divorced. I didn’t detect any attempt to start a relationship between them. The man had just started dating a woman he was besotted with. But he suggested that the woman he was talking to needed to get back into a relationship with a good man. He was obviously enthused about his own new relationship. Her response was, “I did my time. I don’t need to do that again!”

I don’t present those as universal truths, but as representative of what I found in my readership during my first year or two of writing erotica. Men liked erotica. Women liked erotica. But they didn’t like the same erotica. I’ll go into that in a future installment.

I guessed I was writing men’s erotica.

Most people know that I write erotica under the pen name Devon Layne. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting a weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books or subscribe to my Patreon for free access.

I’ve been reading Rachel Kramer Bussel’s new book, How to Write Erotica. I figured that after ten years and fifty-some books, I should maybe check to see if I was doing it right. Turns out, I’ve been doing okay, but still had plenty to learn.

For example: I appreciated her simple definition of ‘erotica.’ She called it simply, ‘writing that is intended to arouse.’ That is a sufficiently broad enough definition to cover a wide range of descriptive literature that includes sex as a core component. Note, I say component, not totality. There is a lot of writing that, as Regina Kammer described it, “… is merely describing physical acts of sex and the choreography of body parts performing sex.”

A reader (orblover), reviewing Model Student: Triptych, expressed it in these words:

Not the typical “insert tab A into slot B” nor the bizarre “masturbatory fantasy played out with wooden models.”

I believe sex is a component, but not all there is to it.

I wrote my first piece of erotica—at least that I considered erotic—back almost thirty years ago. I shocked myself. I was trying to be a serious literary writer. This piece had sprung from the dark recesses of my mind as a motivation for someone in my work-in-progress being blackmailed. I read it over and then put a password lock on it. I hid it, because “I don’t write stuff like that.” But I didn’t delete it.

Then in 2011, I wrote my fourth mainstream book that would be published as a literary mystery, and the ending of it was so devastating to me personally that I cried as I wrote it. I’m a pretty emotional person. I’d written a dozen other books that I would ‘get back to someday,’ but this one would be released in just a few months as a prequel to another of my early works. The detective solves the case but loses the girl. What could be worse?

News that I got later that evening was even more devastating. I won’t go into details, but I began to slip into a dark chasm of self-induced depression and anger.

Suffice it to say that I needed to write something with a happy ending. What better to write for a happy ending than romance, and the steamier the plot, the happier the ending.

I surprised myself by remembering the password to the locked file from some twenty years before. Using that story as a stepping off point, I wrote my first short erotic novel, called The Art and Science of Love. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I certainly couldn’t publish it under my real name, or even through my company. People would know.

So, I adopted the short moniker, ‘aroslav,’ at StoriesOnline, and released the story here, not expecting all that much. It was a raw first draft and I released it a chapter at a time over six weeks. I was overwhelmed with the response from the story site. Praise that I had never heard from the readers of my ‘serious fiction.’ Over 10,000 downloads in the six weeks it took to post the story. Email pleading for me to please write more. My depression eased a little and I decided being an author of erotica wasn't so bad.

I’ll continue this series next week. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. Feel free to visit my website or join my Patreon.

This morning, the first two chapters and cast list of Shutter Speed posted on SOL this morning. That means the full eBook has also now released on the big three eBook platforms. Bookapy, of course, is the only one that has all three formats to choose from: ePUB, MOBI, and PDF.

Shutter Speed is book two in what is shaping up to become the six-volume Photo Finish Trilogy that began with Full Frame in October. I just couldn't stop writing. What I thought would be just the second book had to be split in two because it got so long! Same thing happened with what I thought would be book three. And then I knew there would be one more after that! So, let's say the whole Photo Finish Trilogy or Sextology--whatever--is expected to post twice weekly until approximately April 2024. (Posting Thursdays and Sundays.)

Of course, each book will be released in eBook form starting the day of its serialization on SOL.

That doesn't mean I'm doing nothing else! Expect a new book from Wayzgoose around the end of this month. And I'm filling up notepads (virtual) with ideas for the next thing I want to write. This will be fun! I hope.

Just another quick note. My daughter is going to visit me next week for a few days. I love to see her and since her golden birthday is approaching, I've used this as an opportunity to spend $150 a ticket to see the Cirque du Soleil show "O" at the Belagio. I've been waiting for an excuse to splurge on this for fifteen years! So, except for dinner that night, I'm living on noodles this week. Fortunately, I like noodles.

And I've started seeing a chiropractor for my aching back. I figured it was better to do that than to stop sitting at my computer writing stories. What's more, I've been measured and impressioned for the new crown on the dental implant that had to be redone by a competent periodontist. I'm staying healthy and writing for your enjoyment.

And to think, I'm only 49 years old (in hexidecimal).

Enjoy!

I've heard from all three major eBook sites this morning and Photo Finish Book Two, Shutter Speed is now available for pre-order. On Bookapy, this includes the ePUB, MOBI, and PDF versions. The book will release on Thursday February 2, 2023.

Of course, I realize that means Full Frame will complete its posting on SOL tomorrow (Sunday) and I'm kind of sad to see that chapter in my life close. I'm glad, though, that We'll pick up without a break on Thursday with the first two chapters of Shutter Speed.

I have seen fit to post a trigger warning on Shutter Speed, something I rarely do. No one of my generation was unaffected by the war in Vietnam and this story may hold triggers for veterans of that era with PTSD. The action is reported after the fact and not shown live, but the aftereffects are definitely a part of the story. Here's the blurb.

1966-67 was a pivotal year for Nate Hart. His family was uprooted from an unspectacular life in Chicago so his mother could begin her new career as a Methodist Minister in Tenbrook, a small northwestern Illinois town at the edge of the world. But Nate found his place in this new town, upsetting a few community standards where racism and veteran care were at issue. Now, ready to start his second year in the town and senior year in high school, Nate has a girlfriend or two, a studio for his photography, and a blossoming business. And the responsibilities that come with turning eighteen in 1967, as the Vietnam War ramps up under Secretary McNamara.

ALERT: This story contains content of an adult nature, including explicit sexual content and characters with opinions that may be contrary to your religious, political, or world view. If you aren't adult enough to handle that, don't read it!