aroslav: Blog

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!

First, how'd you cope with the time change (if you are in one of the primitive areas that thinks the time on the clock actually controls how people behave)? Me? I got up at 8:00 instead of 7:00. What earthly difference does it make?

And then I chose to spend most of the day in bed. Working, but still in bed. And the work is to upload the first few chapters of Bob's Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. The story will begin on Wednesday, March 16 here on SOL. It will release on Bookapy on Tuesday.

The total work is divided into three volumes, "Before Caesar (Mostly)", "After Caesar (Mostly)", and "Escape from Planet of the Humans" or some alternate title I have not yet devised. So Wednesday starts Volume One. I say "Before Caesar (Mostly)" because Bob has a tendency to jump around, like many memoirs do. He talks about things as he remembers them and while he starts out with a flow of history, he gets more and more carried away with other things that he's reminded of. So, of course his voyage with Columbus is in the BC volume. Live with it.

For a first posting, I've uploaded the Prologue (Don't miss it. It's part of the story.) And the first two chapters of Part I: In the Beginning. I had to divide this into parts in order to keep some semblance of order to Bob's meanderings. I'll post Part I in two chunks of two chapters each, because they are shorter chapters than the rest of the book. After all, Bob is trying to remember things from 4,000 years ago. Try that before you criticize him.

Thereafter, I'll post a chapter every three days like most of my stories. Volume 1 is 21 chapters (divided into five parts) and three days after it finishes, I'll post the prologue and first chapter of Volume 2. There won't be a break in the story overall.

I discovered that authors are no longer allowed turn off voting. Not real happy with that, but it's part of the site that we live with. It's not really run for the author's benefit, but for the readers'.

rant--Which brings me to an issue I've had with the supposed giant of eBook distribution in trying to get Bob released. I distribute through several channels but the giant objected to my content because it had been previously published by someone else. They were singularly unhelpful in specifying exactly what content or where it had been published.

I finally played a guessing game, and since the eBook version has illustrations for each Part, I contacted my stock photo supplier, got a copy of their terms and conditions, got a screenshot of all my downloads under that license, and a copy of my monthly receipts for the past six months. Then I got a note saying it would be published. No other explanation.

That's an item that I object to. Not the lack of explanation--they can choose to carry my book or not. But this behemoth has adopted the title of "Publisher." They aren't my publisher! They're a fricking online bookstore. My books are published by Elder Road Books, the exclusive publisher who grants a license to sell my books or otherwise distribute them. I own the copyright, the ISBN, and all the associated creative files. In addition to being the author.

I'm just thankful that they dropped the demand that I prove that I am me. Excuse the rant, but I wasted six days trying to get this straightened out for a company that accounts for less than 10% of my eBook sales. I nearly pulled all my books from it.--end rant

Well, I hope you are all staying well and that spring is alleviating some of the seasonal affective disorder as it is doing for me. Now, I just contend with allergies. I'll be making another trip to Seattle in the next few days, but I'm continuing to write and produce pages of words for your reading pleasure.

Enjoy!

I've gotten a couple of questions recently that were interesting enough that I thought I'd share them with whoever was interested.

The first was a comment from a reader of Adams' Apples, a book that is a spoof or lampoon of just about everything. If there is someone I did not make fun of, I apologize. The story was conceived about forty years ago and begun in February of 2019, just before we found out we'd be locked down with some new pandemic that was going to kill us all. I was going at it for the most ridiculous scenarios I could come up with and every morning I woke up to see something even more ridiculous in the news.

The criticism was two-fold. 1) The cure was released to the world for free, but suddenly there's talk of government approval and $500 a dose. That's a punchy hole in the plot there. 2) How is it that it was okay for Elisabeth to poison Ramsey, deliberately going against his will to not be a lab rat? How is that acceptable behavior?

Okay. 1) 100 years ago this year, a doctor and grad student in Toronto made a lifesaving discovery and patented the drug. They considered this to be so important to the world that they sold the patent to the university for $1 to put it in public domain. Yet today, Insulin costs between $120-$400 a month and there is no generic alternative. All drug companies had to do was build on the public domain patent with one added feature to make the drug private and jack up the prices. Generics of any medication can only be made after the patent has expired and by simply changing the formula slightly every few years as an improvement on the basic formula, the big pharma companies have kept insulin away from the public which should receive it for free.

2) Whoever said Elizabeth's actions were 'okay?' Really, if that's the only red flag in this story about how absurd the situation was, I was too subtle. And still, people would rather give their families a horse tranquilizer for Covid than get vaccinated. The Covid vaccine should have been offered at about $300 per shot so only the rich could afford it and then everyone would be clamoring to get it for free. And no one would care what was in it.

Well, if that didn't get half my readership up in arms over one thing or another, I've lost my touch. Maybe I should misidentify a firearm and really touch off a controversy. Or I could make a mistake in the baling process for hay. That could keep us talking for a few days.

But my second question was less controversial. I've received this question several times over the past year regarding the Team Manager series, but here it is in a nutshell: "In your mind who’s the girl on the cover?"

I guess I've never talked about my cover selection process. I don't set out looking for a match to a particular character for my covers. I look on a stock photo site for a selection of keywords and review the presented images to see which I think most appropriately represents the story. That being said, however, the covers do end up representing a character in my mind over time. In the Team Manager series, they are easy:

SWISH! is Natalie Armor, Dennis's Number One.
SPRINT! is Brenda Grant, Dennis's Number Four.
COACH! is Amy Unger, Dennis's Number Two.
CHAMP! (not yet fully developed and subject to change) is Lana Brown, Dennis's Number Ten.

If you check out either my Patreon blog today (members only) or my Discord, you'll find a montage of the four cover girls as well as proper photo credits and licensing info. I license nearly all my art from Shutterstock.

And yes, I will be getting the paperback version of COACH! out soon for the two of you who want to buy it.

Another surprised reader went back in the archives and read "Welded Together", the second story I posted on SOL. His comment was: "While this was an enjoyable story, it was not your best as you have demonstrated in so many others." He was specific regarding flat characters and lack of character development.

My response was that this was most certainly not only not my best, but it is without question my second worst story I've posted here. The worst one was so bad and out of character that I had it removed.

"Welded Together" was a concept I had that I didn't execute very well. I was still learning my way around this genre, and it was supposed to be a place holder to keep people aware of me while I was developing the Model Student series. It did, but not in a good way. I even edited the ending to make it less of a downer! But I still thought the concept was sound and deserved a better treatment.

So, I gave it one. In my series of stories titled Pygmalion Revisited, the story "Iron Alchemy" is generally the same basic story, but with much better treatment, more interesting characters, and overall better writing. Pygmalion Revisited is a series of stories based loosely on the Pygmalion myth as told by Ovid. Each story explores a different aspect of the relationship between an artist and his or her artwork or models. Each is in a different medium. I really liked that series and think more people would like it as well. Don't skip the introduction which has the text of the myth as recited by Ovid (translated).

That's it from warm and sunny Las Vegas. I hope those of you who have been impacted by the snowstorms this week stay safe and warm.

The third volume of the Team Manager series has begun serialization today with the posting of the cast list and the first chapter of COACH!. This one is 45 chapters long and I've uploaded all of them to post every three days through June 13, 2022. By that time, I hope to have volume four ready to post.

In the meantime, I'm in the rewriting/editing stage of the last part of Bob's Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. As is often the case, I've discovered the first draft ending was too abrupt and left the story in a bad place, so there is a lot of new material being added. The first draft, written during NaNoWriMo in November, was 150,000 words. This draft with at least two chapters left to go is 190,000 words. The story concept has almost limitless possibilities.

I follow two sports teams in Iowa while I'm writing the Team Manager series. They've practically written the next volume for me with the way they are playing basketball. Last night, my college team scored an 85-49 victory and one player went over 1500 career points when she sank six three-pointers. Four of them were in the first four minutes of the game! The high school team plays tonight, defending its 17-1 season record. Go Angelines and Crusaders!

Enjoy!