aroslav: Blog

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

“BLESSED ARE THOSE who expecteth nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.” –Hezekiah 3:15.

I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental health worker of any sort. In fact, I find it is all I can do to maintain my own mental health. I care about yours, but I can’t do anything about it. So, please do not take anything I say in this post as more than my personal outlook on life and my way of surviving in this absurd world we live in.

I’ll come back to that word, ‘absurd,’ in a bit.

I asked last week what else Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and David Foster Wallace had in common. If you have not looked up the reference, you may still know that these are among the many authors who have committed suicide.

Was that because they were depressed? I don’t believe so. You see, I think depression is a normal state for human beings. Oh, it comes in various degrees and certainly some people are far more depressed than others, but everyone has it to some degree or another. I believe what distinguishes that from the motivation to kill oneself is despair. And despair is a different matter altogether.

Despair, in my limited intellectual grasp, evolves from the loss of hope.

We have been given to believe in this mystical thing called hope. The sun will come out tomorrow! A better day is coming. If all else fails, God will still take you to heaven. And the hope of a future reward—especially one we don’t actually have to do anything to receive but believe—is what I think ultimately causes people to despair.

So, what did all the famous authors despair of?

I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know, but I guess they reached a point where their writing no longer sustained their hope for a better day. Remember, I’ve said several times that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. So, what happens if I no longer have any words to give? For myself, I think that is just one of the absurdities of life.

When I sat down to write City Limits in 2017, I had a very distinct question I wanted to explore in the character of Gee Evars: Are we as individual humans nothing more than the collected memories and experiences of our lives, or is there something inside us that makes us who we are?

Please understand that I recognize people go through extreme trauma that affects how they respond to life, but does it change who the person is inside? I don’t know for sure. I explored the question with Gee Evars by stripping him of his memory and identity. He remembered his name. He could read and write and do math. Occasionally, he found talents for crafts or nature. But he couldn’t remember who he was. So, in trying to settle into a new and unknown place, he has to discover who he really is inside.

And stripped of all he could remember about himself, he still did not despair. He recognized that he was still wholly himself. He went through every day with a sense of the absurdity of life. That he should be here with absolutely nothing, and still be able to be satisfied and happy.

City Limits and the sequel Wild Woods ebooks are available on Bookapy. Paperbacks are at many online vendors.

As we have already seen that there are many depressed writers who have lost hope and slipped into despair and killed themselves, I am not going to suggest that all you need to do is write to get through the despair. What I am suggesting is if there is no hope to lose then there is no despair.
I consider life to be a kind of absurdity. According to Albert Camus, the Absurd results from the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. But Camus also holds up humanism as a fundamental character of humanity. He does not fall back onto the response of suicide because there is no despair. Suicide is the renunciation of human values and freedom.

In my own words, there is no hope to look forward to. If something comes up after you die, be delightfully surprised. People are born and they die. Between is all the reward and punishment we can possibly handle. Even when I am crying in pain with a failed heart, I am laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

I live alone and I know what loneliness and isolation are like. I take little things and make large stories out of them, and that is how I entertain myself. It is how I deal with the absurdity of life. Is every day a gift? No. Some days are a pain in the ass. But not every day.

Some time ago, I met a young woman who was very interested in my erotic writings. She wanted to know how I developed them and what I used for reference. All I could profess to was my sometimes rather weak memories of what those feelings of newness and discovery that propel the sex scenes of a story forward are like.

She surprised me by telling me she would be my subject for ‘primary research.’ We have become very good friends, and I have spent many pleasant hours exploring her physically and mentally, discovering her likes and dislikes, finding out about her life and her loves and her challenges. She has opened many doors in my mind.

I have not had sex with her and I have no hope of ever succeeding in that endeavor. If one day it should happen—like life after death—I shall be pleasantly surprised. But I don’t hope for it. I am happy with the absurdity of our relationship.

Writing is my go-to for adding meaning to my life. Yours may be reading. Or it may be gardening or volunteering with children or painting or music or cooking casseroles for the church supper. They are all part of the great absurdity of life.

And hence my opening quote that was made up as part of a pseudo-Bible that has no official publication and to which you might add your own adages as verses. “Blessed are those who expecteth nothing for they shall not be disappointed.”

Truly, what better than a life without disappointment?

I promise to find a lighter subject for next week. I will be looking back on November Noveling and seeing how my new work progressed.

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

I CAN’T TELL YOU how many people have spoken to me after reading one of my books or stories and have said some variation of, “I can see this was a very autobiographical book. It’s really about you.”

Really? Let me just run down a list of characters people have thought were really me.

G2 in The Volunteer. My older sister actually accused me of lying about our father. I had to explain carefully that the character was not our father, nor was the story about me. I’m not homeless. I live in a trailer. I just don’t have an address!

Dag Hamar in For Blood or Money. Several friends and readers asked me if I was okay and if I was taking care of my heart. This was ten years before I had heart problems.

Brian Frost in Living Next Door to Heaven. “But you lived in northern Indiana and you had a paper route.” I wish I had the harem, too! Or even a few friends like those in that series.

Nate Hart in Full Frame and the “Picture Perfect” series. Well, I might have patterned Nate after what I wished my life was like growing up. There’s certainly more of me in the early volumes than in the later ones.

Dennis Enders in Team Manager SWISH! Nearly blind undersized geek with a great talent for basketball and coaching. Me? Really?

Keith Drucker in The Gutenberg Rubric. “I knew as soon as I read it, you were the only person in the world who could have written this. I could just see you examining manuscripts,” said a former work associate.

Wayne Hamel in The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality. Events bear a striking resemblance to some of the things I witnessed in college, but Wayne and me? Worlds apart.

And many others.

In fact, my writing is probably more a reflection of my mental state than my actual life. And I find I am most productive in my writing when I am most profoundly depressed.

When I wrote Mural in 2012, originally just called “Model Student” because I had no idea it would grow into several books, I was incredibly depressed. Though depression doesn’t need a ‘because,’ I had several good reasons to be depressed. I was laid off a few months before my 60th birthday and for the first time in my life I was unemployed and couldn’t find a job. In fact, my success in previous jobs was a detriment to finding a new one, especially one that would pay less than half what I had been earning.

Coupled with that, I heard those crushing words from my wife: “I know you try hard, but I’m just not interested.” Not interested in sex? I could understand, sort of. Not interested in me, in our relationship, in our home… That was what drew me deeper into depression.

I started writing about an art student who was chronically depressed. His symptoms included being unable to focus long enough to get assignments done and being so focused on an art project that he forgot about everything else until it was too late. And, above all, his feelings of isolation.

No. It wasn’t about me. I was depressed, but I was functioning. On the other hand, my daughter started attending a prestigious art school and became so depressed she was physically incapacitated. I literally picked her up off her dorm room floor and carried her to an emergency room! If anything, Tony Ames was based on her, not on me.

But I found I could truly relate to Tony’s recurring depression, even when things seemed to be going right. I refused to take the easy route out that many authors (especially of erotica) use: Tony has sex and suddenly his depression is cured. It just doesn’t fucking work that way!

In exploring Tony’s depression, I came to understand my own much better. It wasn’t because I lost my job and my marriage. It was truly a part of who I am.

Mural and the entire “Model Student” series are available as individual eBooks or a collection on Bookapy. Paperbacks are still available online.

Everyone does it. Perhaps it will help you in your own writing to know some of the famous writers who were chronically depressed.

Papa Hemingway, who wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Or as Nietzsche famously put it: “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” Sadly, it killed Hemingway.

Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy and nearly every other Russian author in history. They all wrote through depression.

And so did/do I.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I appreciate the good intentions of some readers who will excuse a mistake I’ve made by saying “He’s not a professional writer.” I wonder sometimes what it takes if 70 books and several thousand sales doesn’t make me a professional writer! Thanks anyway.

The thing is that writing allows the author to vent. Without writing a true confession, the author can put the words of his own frustration in the mouths of his characters. They don’t even need to be characters he likes! They are just a vehicle for his own frustration.

Writing also allows the author to explore various alternatives. If I wasn’t depressed, how would I feel? Oh! Manic! That’s good. After an author has explored sadness, devotion, anger, frustration, lethargy, and ennui, he might eventually get around to exploring happiness. What would it be like to be happy? The hypothetical author, however, will quickly find that happiness and depression are not mutually exclusive. Let that sink in.

Writing lets the author try on different personalities—even different economic and social classes, genders, orientations, levels of intelligence and wit, athletic ability, and artistic temperament. In writing characters with those characteristics, the author might actually stumble on the one that truly fits him.

Writing challenges the author to actually do something. Anything. I started doing November Noveling back in 2004 because it was an opportunity to explore what being a writer was really like while I was briefly unemployed. I only had to commit to it for 30 days. I could do that. My family could live with that. It was only 30 days. In fact, it was broken down even further. All I was committed to was 1,666 words per day. And if I only got one word written, it was a victory. It was more than I started with.

I don’t hold up writing as being a cure for depression. I believe writing is a use you can put your depression to. Turn the tables on it and embrace the creative stimulus it provides.

And yes, everything in this post applies to writing erotica as well as anything else. What a great escape it is to write a sex scene in which you don’t actually need to be concerned about your partner’s experience. He is by default happy. She comes when you do. Always wet, always hard, always ready. Until you finish the scene.

Just as I wouldn’t let Tony simply have sex and be cured of his depression in Mural, I’m not going to leave this post with a happy ending that shows everything is all better now that I’m writing.

But there’s a lot more to this subject and I’ll be writing more about it soon.

What else do Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath, and Abbie Hoffman have in common? I’ll leave that answer till next week: “Writing Through Despair.”

When The Strongman ended last week, I kind of lied and said there wouldn't be another story until after New Year's. Rules dictate that we don't talk about contest entries.

But I'm happy to say that in a blind taste test, my story The Key to Eve was voted in third place, behind two great stories by fine SOL authors. So, thank you for reading and voting!

The story is appropriately 13 chapters. It has 26,000 words. Witches, vampires, ghosts, shape shifters, and an animal talker. This is a fantasy you won't want to miss!

As a contest winner, the story can be accessed only by premier members of SOL for the next six months.

If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

Yes, The Strongman comes to an end this morning. Some of you are applauding the story and some of you are applauding that it's over. That's life.

I this story, I tried to paint a picture of what it is genuinely like to be an elite level athlete struggling to reach the top of his sport. We seem to have the impression that all a person needs is talent and hard work to succeed. But that is not the case. No matter what a person sacrifices, there is no guarantee he will rise to the top.

But those people do succeed, often in ways they least expected or even rejected. Perhaps they will become wildly popular on Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent. They might become "Rookie of the Year" even without a national championship. They might be loved in "Gold Over America."

Or they might become an accountant.

Success in their field, even for the dedicated and talented, is not assured. Not unlike authors. Paul sacrificed relationships, family, and even love to pursue his dream. In the end, he found success where he tried most to avoid it.

He just isn't the superstar charismatic champion we expect our novel heroes to be or become. It seemed important, somehow, to tell that story.

What's next? I have two new stories, but they are not yet ready for release. One is in the hands of my frontline editor to get it ready for rewriting. The other is in the writing process during November Noveling. I don't expect either story to be ready for release on SOL until 2025, though my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon have access to first drafts as they are written.

I wish I could say I'm taking a long winter's nap, but I'm working my tush off, trying to get the next book finished. See you later.

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

DIDN’T I JUST SAY sitting down to an empty page was the hardest thing a writer does?

Well, sort of. It’s the hardest part of writing. A first draft. Any published author will tell you that between the first draft and a published book, there are many very hard stages.

For the most part, first drafts are garbage. Even if an author starts with a detailed outline or beat sheet, the product that results is far from ready to publish. I have said in jest on occasion that many things I have read on SOL look like the author spewed out the words and never went back to actually read what he’d written. Thankfully those stories are fewer and further between these days. Nonetheless, you may have read a book purchased in a bookstore or for an eReader that made you think this as well.

Over the past years, the role of an editor has changed, both professionally and in popular view. At one time, an editor guided the author in the creation of his work, all the way from concept to market. If there were areas of expertise the editor did not have, he hired people who had those skills. But the editor was the manager of the book from start to finish.

In a conference I attended fifteen years ago, though, it was obvious that the roles had changed. An editor (at a major publishing house) I spoke to said she didn’t want to see a manuscript that hadn’t already been looked at by “the book doctor” and had been cleaned and proofread. Her role was taking in a manuscript at the publishing house and ‘selling’ it to the rest of the staff. She had to show that it was marketable, there was sufficient demand, and that the author was dependable for a second and third book when this one was successful. Then she guided the book through the publishing company, including layout, reviews, design of covers and marketing materials, and budgeting for release.

When I wrote The Strongman, just last winter, I had a detailed beat sheet that showed exactly how the story would progress and how the characters would develop. But the first draft was still a disaster. So was the second.

The story still didn’t develop well. But I rewrote and carefully followed my beat sheet. I frequently stumbled with what should happen in the next beat and how to get to it.

Then in the third draft, I still found I was losing character development for the sake of the plot. When I finished that draft, I needed to send it to my editors for comment and proofreading. Sometimes editors disagree with each other regarding how things develop. Getting a final draft ready involved looking at and comparing all their notes. Some spellings for words and punctuation even differed.

Of course, having a ‘polished and finished’ manuscript still wasn’t the end of the path. I recently guided another author through the process of getting her book in the market. At one point she exclaimed, I thought writing was supposed to be the hard part. That’s when I responded, “No, writing was the easy part.”

The Strongman has just completed pre-release serialization and is now available as an eBook at Bookapy, and in paperback from most online retailers.

Ah for the days when a perceptive story editor could delve into a new manuscript and give the author a piece of her mind. What would that look like?

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, I’m currently writing my November Novel, temporarily titled “Sisyphus, a modern myth.” Temporarily, because though the story is inspired by the Myth of Sisyphus, it is not a retelling, and using the name in the title of the actual book would be misleading.

I’m now some 32,000 words and eleven chapters into the new story, being read as we speak by my Sausage Grinder Patrons on Patreon. But what is happening in the background is a treasure that is difficult to share. I have a story editor who was willing to take on this project.

There are fifteen pages annotated in detail as she asks me what I'm trying to accomplish at every step of the way!

She points out contradictions, inconsistencies, questionable actions, lack of detail, lacking transitions, unclear timelines, character questions, and sex positions that were impossible to get into.

I’d finished nine chapters when I received and read her notes on the first chapter. How do I proceed? It’s necessary to continue the story from where I am, but having her early guidance will help me straighten out and clarify things as I progress.

At the same time, I’ll start cleaning up the first chapter and rewriting the scenes, taking into consideration what she has said in her notes.

Yes, “taking into consideration.” Even though I have a terrific story editor in Lyndsy, the story is still mine. I can’t just blindly do whatever she suggests. She is seeing the story one chapter at a time. I am seeing the whole story in my head at once. Some of her suggestions might lead me astray for what I want to accomplish further down the road. But they will still enlighten me regarding what a reader will see when he opens the book for the first time.

Rewriting and editing can be a major challenge. Sometimes, the editor will point out the inappropriateness of a line or phrase that just doesn’t fit. And it might be a line or phrase that I am particularly fond of. At that point, I need to decide if the line is so important to my ego that I’ll sacrifice that part of the story for it.

I’ve had some incredible story editors over my years as an author. Sadly, even when I’ve rewritten 90% of a story, as I did with popular books like A Place at the Table, City Limits, and The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality, there are miles to go before I sleep.

I have been a book designer for many years and still offer that service to select clients, in addition to myself. Making the book, whether paper or electronic, look good when it is opened is a skill most authors don’t have. Then there is the process of creating accounts for distribution, creating cover art, looking at the best distribution models, and setting up pricing, marketing, and even royalties. Perhaps these tasks do not carry the same fulfillment as writing chapters and concluding with “The End,” but they are necessary in the long run.

I’m barely getting blog posts ready by the weekend as I’m so single-mindedly focused on my new creative work, but I’ll come up with something new for next week. It may have to do with writing through depression. We’ll see.