aroslav: Blog

Sort of. I still have another month at my campsite in Port Townsend before I can hit the road again. Still have another doctor appointment and jury duty to attend to first. But a new adventure has begun in my headspace.

First, let me assure you that I am continuing to make progress on Wayzgoose's A Place Among Peers and on my new story, Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain 2. It's not unusual for me to have multiple projects going at the same time, which is probably why it seems so slow with only one story currently posting.

And let me tell you, I'm overwhelmed by the reader response to The Assassin. The comments here on SOL have been stellar. It's getting over 5,000 downloads per chapter. And it's currently my all-time best-seller on bookapy! Can't indulge myself with alcohol anymore, according to my cardiologist, but I'm raising an extra glass of sparkling water to the success. I'll also toss out the suggestion that you don't need to be familiar with "The Swarm Cycle" universe to enjoy this character-driven sci fi. Take a gander.

Now, where was I. Oh, yes. New adventure.

Like most old men, I wake up three to seven times a night. Either my mouth is all dried out, I need to pee, or I've worked my way into an uncomfortable position. But Monday morning, I woke up with a vivid dream that simply demanded that I start putting things down on paper. So, I got up at 4:00 in the morning Monday and started making notes. After I made a page of notes so I wouldn't forget it, I put it in my 'idea file' and went to work on new chapters of APAP and Dark Side. I felt very accomplished with both, so I saw no problem with pulling the idea file out and toying with an intro to see if I could manage a decent voice for telling the story. That worked okay, so I started a first chapter. And a second. Right now, I've got six chapters finished and another in the hopper!

This story follows an underdeveloped, nearsighted boy in small-town Iowa and how he finds acceptance among the members of the girls' basketball team that he manages.

Of course, this is just a first draft. GMBusman has been reading the drafts and responding to them, so it seems to be keeping his interest. Otherwise, I'll start posting the first draft for my Sausage Grinder patrons ($10/month) on Patreon next Sunday.

And oh, what I am learning!

I decided on a whim to set the story in a small town in central Iowa. So, of course, I had to start looking up small towns to get a feel for them. Since it's another coming of age story with some of my favorite ingredients, I had to check out the rules and regulations regarding Girls' Basketball in the state. Was that ever an education! Check out the IGHSAU website and look at their history for some fascinating info.

Since there has to be complications in a story like this, I had to look up the laws about moonshine in Iowa and then compare them with the national regulations on distilling, bottling, and selling moonshine. Yes, there actually are some federal regulations on the process. I happen to have part of a bottle of shine my nephew made in West Virginia and I'm pretty sure I could use it to strip the paint off old furniture.

Then there was information I needed from the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). That's pretty interesting. The DEA has a very active branch in Des Moines if you happen to want a job with them. Des Moines sits at the crossroads of Interstate 80, connecting Salt Lake City in the West and Chicago in the East, and Interstate 35, connecting Minneapolis/St. Paul in the North with Dallas/Fort Worth in the South. As such, it is a major distribution point for both the cartels of Mexico and the traffickers of Canada (according to the DEA site). Methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and marijuana seem to be high on their strike list. Plus a resurgence in heroin use as a cheaper high than prescription drugs. What's a small-town dealer to do?

And, of course, I needed some added information to flesh out my main character, the new Team Manager for the Girls' Basketball team. What are the duties and responsibilities of a high school team manager and how can they be stretched into all kinds of compromising situations? And what is the short, near-sighted team manager going to be thinking among all the statuesque girls of the team? Sounds like a recipe for some new hijinks in one of my favorite subjects. Girls.

I'm going to start posting raw chapters for my Patreon subscribers at the $10 level next Sunday. Those are drafts that are unedited and straight from my keyboard, but if you want to see it first, that's the place. I have no idea yet how long it will take before I have it ready to post on SOL in a clean and edited version. I would guess sometime this summer. I foresee the possibility of an epic run for this story.

It's good to be feeling like my old self and to be able to pump out 40,000 words in a good week. It's been a while coming.

Woohoo!

Did you miss me? Or did you not notice I was gone? Well, either way, I'm happy to have a new story start today. The Assassin is up and running.

The Assassin is a story in the Swarm Cycle Universe but I've listed it as "non-canon." This story will push into the future further than anything else in the cycle and when I do that, I necessarily create a history in its wake. It's non-canon so other Swarm authors won't feel bound to my view of what comes after Year 20. And my view is a little darker than that of most other authors. I don't think the future is quite the paradise that most seem to expect.

The story has, however, been reviewed and approved by the Swarm Authors Group and Thinking Horndog. Anything it says about the first 20 years is consistent with what has been written in the cycle so far. It's what happens next that has me intrigued.

While this story is posting, I'm busy writing two others and hope to have one finished and ready by the time this one concludes at the end of May. It's a sequel to Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain and is coming along fine. I'm not sure yet if I'll get a new title for it or if it will just be Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain 2. In this book, Jett and his harem face the hardships of typical sophomores in college, but it is complicated by things like job loss, money running out, a stalker, and the usual problems with interpersonal relationships. And a pandemic that closes the school. Yes, this is the 2020 year for our heroes.

I'm also moving along with the sequel to Wayzgoose's A Place at the Table. I think A Place Among Peers will heighten the tension between Meredith and Liam while they deal with a confab of Leaders at the University, all leading different directions. Because this has a much longer editing cycle than my aroslav stories, I don't expect it to begin posting until late fall or early winter. By that time, one of my other ideas will have taken hold and I should have something else to post for you.

So, here we go. Enjoy The Assassin!

I'm working again! No, not a job. I mean I'm getting some real writing done after feeling under par for for a couple of months. Got two chapters each of two different stories written this week and for the first time in a while, I'm pleased with the results.

The work brings me to a total of six chapters of Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain 2, and five chapters for Wayzgoose's A Place Among Peers. I feel like I'm back on an even keel again at last.

And I'm ready to begin releasing my new Swarm Cycle story, The Assassin, on Saturday this week. I've gotten pretty excited about that one because it's just character-driven sci fi. I don't think a person would need to be familiar with the rest of the cycle to enjoy the story. But of course, a familiarity with the universe is better. 27 chapters posting one every three days.

On a different note, I have five nominations in five different categories of the Clitorides Awards for the Best in Written Erotica. And a couple of them are a real surprise to me. Like Wayzgoose's American Royalty 1, Coming of Age nominated for Best Romance. That kind of blew me away. And aroslav has been nominated for both Author of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Award. I'm thrilled to have been nominated in these categories. And thank you for nominating Double Team (representing "The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins" series) for Best Do-Over Sex Story.

Perhaps the nomination I'm most excited about is seeing Living Next Door to Heaven nominated for the Classic Clitoride Award. Back when LNDtH was first completed in 2015, the Clitorides were still getting rolling again after a six year hiatus from 2006-2013. And that year saw some of SOL's heaviest hitters nominated in the same category for truly outstanding stories: G Younger, Dual Writer, Jay Cantrell, Oyster50, and Argon. I was honored to even be in the same competition.

There's been a resurgence in readership for LNDtH over the past year and LNDtH1 is now up to 1.15 million downloads. Maybe people were looking for something really long to last them through the pandemic. I don't know. I'm just honored that this story has been nominated in the category of Classic Clitoride.

I've scanned through the list of stories nominated in the various categories and they include some of my favorites. I'm ready to start reading some that I haven't gotten to yet. That's one of the best things about the Clitorides. Just reading the stories that have been nominated provides a list of great reading material. It was just a year ago next week that I checked into an RV park in Texas, not knowing that I'd be sitting there for two months before I could travel again and get back up north to my summer campground. I've read a lot this year!

Stay safe and stay well. And go vote for your favorites!

I've put the finishing touches on my new Swarm Cycle story, The Assassin, and have uploaded the first chapter for posting on March 13. I'm very excited about this story as it takes a very different (and non-canon) look at the Confederacy and its AIs.

I read a comment recently that said fan fiction comes in three varieties: "Sometimes fanfic is a love letter to canon; sometimes it's a polite disagreement; sometimes it's 95 things canon did wrong nailed to a door." I think the same can be said about a shared universe like Thinking Horndog's Swarm Cycle. The Assassin doesn't really fit any of those three categories exclusively. It's more like a nudge in the direction I think it should or is likely to go.

Several Swarm authors have engaged me on everything from the shape and origin of planetary militias to the division between Darjee and Tuull AIs to the deterioration of the sponsor/concubine/dependent society. When I looked at the process, for example, of female concubines having a child every two years or so, I thought immediately that a household with four concubines could have 28 dependents (or more with multiple births) under the age of fourteen at a time. All the time! At what point does the population of a planet go from 10,000 to 80,000 to 640,000 to 5.4 million? That geometric progression suggests only fourteen years until there is roughly a 7:1 ratio of children to adults. And at what point do concubines simply get tired of always being pregnant or suckling and just lie down and die? Given potential lifespans of 200 years and fertility for over a hundred, how is any mother going to keep track of who her fifty children are or where? Or the 350 grandchildren?

So, having ranted about my dystopian view of the future, I wrote a story that included the concubines simply overwhelming the sponsors. Roughly the first half of the book is completely consistent with the current Swarm canon. The rest of the book isn't contrary to the canon, but is beyond where the 300 or so stories in the current canon stop. So, it projects fifty years into the future of the cycle.

When I write something 'in the future,' it creates, of necessity, a history in its wake. I didn't want to tie the future of the Swarm Cycle to my view of what happens next, so I've voluntarily listed the story as non-canon. That means I'm not tying all other authors to my view of the future. I'm consistent with the canon up to the point where it peters out at the moment. Then, it's no holds barred as I paint a bleaker (but not hopeless) version of the future of the Confederacy in the next fifty years.

Am I writing anything else? Thank you for asking!

I struggled in the first couple of months of 2021 as I had heart problems again and underwent an ablation and cardioversion two weeks ago. The difference has been remarkable! I've been able to focus again. I spent a good bit of the first two months of this year re-reading the entire Florida Friends series by Dual Writer. Try it. You'll like it. Now I'm writing again.

I'm working on a sequel to Wayzgoose's A Place at the Table, currently titled A Place Among Peers. Not terribly far along yet, but I'm happy to be making progress. And I'm working on a sequel to aroslav's Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain. I'm happy to finally be making progress on both of these. My Tier 3 patrons on Patreon are reading these two stories as they develop. They pay the big bucks to read my mistakes. I'm sure both books will go through a massive rewrite before I release them here on SOL. http://www.patreon.com/aroslav

I started and abandoned two other books near the end of last year as the effects of being in atrial fibrillation disrupted my ability to concentrate. Perhaps when I get these two finished, I'll go back and look at the others to see if they can be resurrected.

During this period, I've also edited/proofread four manuscripts for other authors! I have seriously benefited from the volunteer time of other editors on SOL, so in addition to my professional editing, I've tried to give back a bit to the community.

So, there you have the life and times of aroslav. Still alive and kicking!

I do a lot of updating of websites, Patreon, and blogs on Sundays. It just seems like the right time to get everything up to date. So that's why you always hear from me on Sundays.

What's that? You haven't heard from me? Oh. I must have been dreaming.

In my dream, I told you all about the progress I haven't been making on stories I'm trying to write. I did finish my new Swarm Cycle story and it is now in the hands of editors and proofreaders who are having a good time polishing it up. The story is titled The Assassin and I hope to start posting it as soon as the final comments and corrections come in.

The other three stories I've started since November have all been stalled for one reason or another. Mostly a vague-headedness resulting from being back in A-fib and planning on another ablation later this week. Weather has not been kind, either as I've stayed in the Pacific Northwest this winter and aside from the six inches of snow the past few days, it has been mostly just cold, rainy, and windy. I seldom get out of my trailer. And finally... I got hooked re-reading Dual Writer's entire "Florida Friends" series. It was still too good to put down and I spent a lot of writing time reading.

I'm hoping to get my self focused this week once my heart stops running away from me. I've managed a few words on the sequel to Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain. I have a couple of chapters written on the sequel to Wayzgoose's A Place at the Table. With luck, this week I'll start making more progress.

In the meantime, it's Fat Tuesday. If I'm not mistaken, that means we get double tacos. Have a great Mardi Gras celebration!