aroslav: Blog

I suppose I could have left the post at that. But no, I'm a writer. I'll get to the point eventually.

First of all, I'm happy to see readers leave the queue for reading Double Take. No, I'm not happy but I'm glad. In a way. The thing is that if a story isn't doing it for you, you should find something else. There are 43,774 stories on SOL according to the little counter in the upper left corner of the home page. And time is short. We should spend our time reading things that give us pleasure, inspiration, and purpose. If a story doesn't do it for you, choose a different story. I am happy for you.

Second, it's tax time. In January, I thought this year will be different. This year I'll file my taxes early instead of getting yet another extension. Gotta do it. Gotta do it. All my working life I paid the government. Now they pay me. And I pay them for paying me. What was mine in the first place. Nonetheless, I have to say I'm glad for the socialist policies that established social security for old farts like me. I would have to die sooner if not for that. I'll spend this afternoon figuring the stuff out and rendering unto IRS what belongs to IRS.

Third, coincidental with the IRS deadline is the day that I pick up stakes and head north from Quartzsite, AZ. I expect to take about two weeks and plan to pass through Laughlin, Las Vegas, The Great Basin, Ely, and Jackpot, Nevada. Through Idaho, I'll pass through Twin Falls, Boise, Nampa, Lewiston, Moscow, and home to Worley. Of course, if I'm feeling adventurous, I might just strike up US 93 through Idaho and wander around in the mountains a while and through a corner of Montana, but that remains to be seen. Time is short and snow is deep.

Finally, time is also short for Wayzgoose to start posting his next two novels. The first will be Wild Woods, the sequel to City Limits, posted last year. Expect it about the third week of April. All things holding together well, you can expect Municipal Blondes to start posting about the end of the month or first of May. That's the sequel to For Blood or Money. If you want a story with a nice happy ending, tied up in a bow, with plenty of sex, give Wayzgoose a pass. That's why the alter ego aroslav exists. Not every Wayzgoose story ends with a downer, death, or divorce, but the idea of happily ever after isn't in his vocabulary. Don't read his stories. Time is short.

If you are a literary critic, I encourage you to buy the book and review it on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Goodreads, LibraryThing, or in your blog. Your reviews are valuable! That includes reviews left here on SOL. When I see a story has a review, that is what I read first rather than the story itself. Help other readers!

I want to thank all those who are continuing to join my Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/join/aroslav. These folks see everything I write under both names at least a week and sometimes months before it is released anywhere else. Hint: my Sausage Grinder community ($10/mo) received the last chapters of Double Take Book 2 this morning! My editors haven't even finished looking at that yet!

Okay. Accounting beckons! have a great Feast of Fools and I'll be around.

For being retired and having no set schedule, the week was exhausting. I'm writing this on Sunday morning while trying to decide if it's worth it to go to California for groceries or if I should just make do with what's at our little local grocery. Or if I can put it off another day or two. Probably.

I wrote 43,000 words this week. That's five chapters of Double Take and ten chapters (they're a little shorter) of Wayzgoose's Municipal Blondes. I got into rewriting Municipal Blondes a couple of weeks ago when For Blood or Money closed on my Advance Readers' site. Very few people knew that I wrote a sequel to For Blood or Money back in 2006, right after I finished FBOM. Even fewer people know there's a sequel to Municipal Blondes called Stocks and Bondage. BTW, the original title of FBOM was supposed to be Security and Exchange but people kept thinking it was a book about Microsoft email servers.

So, when I dug out the old first draft of Municipal Blondes, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was pretty damned good. My writing style has improved significantly in the past fifteen years. I think that showed in FBOM as well. But I should have finished this book and published it back in 2008 when FBOM originally came out.

Especially, now that the comments have been coming in on the end of FBOM here on SOL. And they're running about even between people who love it and people who hate it. Here's a selection of comments and email I've (Wayzgoose) received.

"What an extraordinary story! Thanks."
"Well, fuck!"
"Wow! Best ending--ever."
"AAAhhhhhhh I do hate unhappy endings. Oh well a very good story just the same."
"Magnificent story. The ending suits the tale."
"Too bad you seem to prefer unhappy endings to your stories."
"A great ending. More please."
"The ending was very disappointing. I'm not just talking about the unhappy ending, but all the loose ends. 1) The unsolved code 2) No letter to Riley explaining his decision 3) Nothing for Billie 4) Maizie will eat his dead face when he's not alive to feed her. After the Gutenberg Rubric, this story was a major disappointment. But thanks for writing."

Of course, of all the comments and email, the one I fixated on was the last one, not because it was negative but because it itemized the problems. That really spoke to me. It got me thinking about the nature of death and what it does to us. Well, it kills us, I guess. But I don't know of anyone who was truly prepared to die. No one has all the loose ends of life tied up in a neat package with every string resolved. Every time I think about this, I think of all the things I need to get put in order in my life before I go traipsing around the world next fall.

Does someone have the password for my computer? Does anyone know who to contact? Will I disappear from my story sites and leave a hole that goes unfilled like an Indiana pothole? What happens to royalties and patronage? Heck! I should clean my refrigerator!

Dag's life is not tidily wrapped up. It simply ends. It is no longer his concern. It leaves unanswered questions. It is left to those who survive to write the next chapter. One more comment I received:

"Thank you for the great story ending, it took me a bit and I had to re-read the last chapter to understand it… Any story that makes you pause and do some own self thinking about one's life choices is a good story. Your story is a great story! It made me just sit and think, as I'm dating a girl right now. Have I made my feelings toward her as known as I want them to be? So, I had a sit down and chat with her."

And the next chapter is what I wrote back in 2006, with a few updates and some improved storytelling and grammar. I plan to release it here on SOL next month, probably in parallel with Wild Woods, the sequel to City Limits. In fact, I'm planning a coincidental commercial release in June.

I've been slow in responding to email and comments this week because of the amount of time I'm writing but I'll try to get answers out this week. If I miss you, my sincere apologies. Your comments, email, and votes are greatly appreciated.

Let me reaffirm to you that I write stories with happy endings. Under the name of aroslav/Devon Layne. I write serious commercial fiction under the name of Wayzgoose/Nathan Everett. If it's happy endings you want, stick with aroslav.

I continue to write at a pace exceeding 35,000 words a week. That sentence includes both the old (I) and the new (35,000 words). I have very little life other than that. I went to a pizza lunch meeting for the resort on Wednesday, did a 100-mile tour to the Blythe Intaglios Friday, had a birthday breakfast with folks from the resort on Saturday. And I napped. Other than that, I wrote.

But I thought I'd update you as to where those words were going. You can read about the mundane things and my deep philosophy on my First Exit Blog at http://firstexit0.blogspot.com/2019/03/happy-st-patricks-day.html if you are interested in that.

1) Wild Woods (Wayzgoose) went to proofreaders last week and one has already returned over 100 typos. I can't say enough how much I appreciate volunteer editors and proofreaders! We are still on track to begin posting Wild Woods on SOL April 26 with general release to the public on June 23. My next task is to design a cover.

2) Double Take is running fast in all venues. Chapter 23, the beginning of Part III: Perambulation, posted this week and we are well underway. There is a total of 47 chapters in Book 1. Since Amazon banned it, the Kindle eBook is available only by dropping $3.50 to me at www.paypal.me/aroslav with your email address for delivery. In the meantime, I've begun funneling the completed chapters of Part VIII: Transliteration (the last part of book 2) to my editors and I've begun outlining Part IX. That will begin Book 3. I expect no delay between posting Book 1 and Book 2 with Book 2 beginning here on SOL June 1. We're tracking.

3) I just started rewriting an old manuscript for Wayzgoose, the sequel to For Blood or Money, titled Municipal Blondes. I'm excited about this story. I wrote it right after the first draft of FBOM back in 2006. The story holds together pretty well with only minor storyline edits required. The writing, I'm improving significantly. I won't be waiting for Wild Woods to end before I start posting Municipal Blondes. It is a shorter novel (60,000 words) and will likely start posting around the first of May. It's never been released before and may be available at the same time as Wild Woods in June.

4) Sitting outside having a martini and a cigar (someone has to do the hard work) as I contemplate what story to begin working on next. I usually have two in writing at a time and want to be working on a new story by June. Possibilities include rewriting The Props Master 2: A Touch of Magic and getting it ready to read or finally launching into the Swarm story I've been promising myself and others for a couple of years. Of course, any of half a dozen other stories that I have on the back burner (huge stove) could suddenly demand my attention.

So, there you have what I'm working on as I look at maps and plot my vagabond journey around the world in in October. If you're a fan from New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, India, Southern Europe, or the UK and would like me to include a visit on my schedule, let me know. At the moment those are merely the proposed destinations. Convince me I should include someplace else. I'm easy.

And don't forget to vote! The Clitorides Awards are now being decided. For the first time in several years, I don't have a story nominated, but several of my favorites are. Get out there and vote for your favorites. Authors depend on you!

I should have posted a long time ago but I've been busy writing. Yeah. I'm about through the first draft of Double Take book 2 (51 chapters). I'm sending stuff to my editors now and that means no break between Book 1 (Ending May 26) and Book 2 (beginning June 1 and ending October 29). Between that and writing/editing Wayzgoose's Wild Woods, I've been kind of busy. That will start posting here in mid-April.

So far, I've written over 300,000 words this year. And in the midst of that, Mike wrote to me to ask how my Swarm story was coming! Um… Slowly.

Well, I guess that's all the real news. Time to make shit up.

I can't believe it's already March 13. I have a month to get my income taxes filed. They should be simple, but deferred income from retirement savings (IRA) is all taxable and I have to come up with money to pay all the corporate bigwigs in the country for their tax breaks. Thanks for the tax relief.

I suppose I'll take a couple of days off writing as soon as Double Take 2 is finished and do my taxes. Then I should clean my trailer and get ready to move again since April 15 is also my departure date from Quartzsite, AZ. I've been cranking out so many words on my current works in progress that general maintenance has taken a back seat. I suppose one day I'll even have to wash dishes!

I should be celebrating! This week, Double Take captured and has maintained the number 1 slot in the Top 50 Ongoing Serials by Weekly Downloads. I'm thinking that means I should drink wine from a bottle one night instead of wine from a box.

My patrons, of course, are reading about ten chapters ahead of the posting schedule here on SOL ($5/mo tier) assuming they haven't downloaded the eBook and finished Book 1 already. The patrons who are willing to endure my unedited copy ($10/mo tier) are almost through Book 2 at this point. I'm working on the calendar of events for Book 3 so they'll have new material every week. They, after all, are the ones who make it possible for me to post all my stories for free, including those by Wayzgoose.

Because I know what living on fixed income is like, I stay committed to posting everything I write here on SOL so it can be read for free. If you want to support that effort, you can do so by becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/aroslav, or by making a direct donation at www.paypal.me/aroslav. I know some people have said they can't find me by searching, so copy the address and paste it in your browser. Amazon, Patreon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and just about any other major site you can think of suppress search results for sites containing adult material-even if you don't ask for safe search. You have to know what you want in order to get it.

That reflects on my decisions about how I publish books for a broader market. I don't see myself uploading any more books from Devon Layne (erotica) to Amazon. They will continue to be available to those who want them on my website at reasonable prices. My mainstream fiction (Nathan Everett) will be released on Amazon unless they arbitrarily decide my writing is too radical and thus a 'violation of Amazon's Content Guidelines' and ban those as well. Barnes & Noble now offers both eBook and print services for independent authors and have not (as yet) set themselves up as content censors like Amazon has. I'll continue to publish on the B&N site.

It will take a while for me to get my website (www.devonlayne.com) as robust as I want it to be, but I'm making more on sales there than I did on Amazon anyway, so I'll continue to release books through my site.

All that to say, all my stories will continue to be available on SOL for free, but those who are committed to supporting the author will still be able to buy the eBooks (and occasional paperbacks).

I should learn not to write blog posts after I've already had my quota of wine for the evening (a buttload) and so I hope you continue to enjoy my stories as much as I enjoy writing them! As long as I am able, there will be a steady stream of aroslav and Wayzgoose stories here on SOL.

It might surprise you to know I read what I've written. Sometimes when I'm reading a story on SOL, I sit up straight at something I've read and say, "Does this author have any idea what he just said?" Oh, in a different mood, I'd read right over it and, assuming the story was the least bit engaging, just pass it off as a mistake and no big deal.

But when I find something like that in one of my own stories, I go ballistic.

"How could I have missed something so stupid?" "How did I misspell that?" "When did I say she had a sister?" "Oh, shit! What am I going to do now?" Etc.

Not that it's usual to find real weenies in things I've posted. Old Rotorhead and Pixel the Cat clean up uncounted errors before I start putting the stories on line. Michele, Lyndsy, and Jason all do a fabulous job of critiquing and improving my mainstream storylines and character arcs (Wayzgoose) and Colleen and Margaret are phenomenally sharp proofreaders.

But it irritates me no end when I have to go back 30 chapters or so to correct something that I've just made impossible with where I've taken the story. Take this little tidbit posted earlier this week in Double Take: "I've got an older sister, too. She's in service this year so I don't get to see her much." Wait! Rebeca has an older sister? A little tidbit that I have totally ignored for the next seventy chapters!

That's not unreasonable for the development of the story arc. Rebeca is revealed through her relationship with Jacob. Her sister is away in Service. But suddenly I have a plot point that needs to get developed in the next book (3). And in seventeen months since Jacob's transmogrification, Beca's sister is only mentioned once.

And how did I even discover that?

It's part of my writing process.

I write very fast. Typically, between 3,000 and 10,000 words a day. This week, I totaled 37,000 words. But writing them isn't all I do. Here's the step by step process:

1. First draft. When I'm thinking smoothly, it is not unusual for me to write a chapter of Double Take in a day. Not every day, but the 3,500-word average length of those chapters is a day's work.

2. I immediately post the chapter on my website for my $10/month patrons to read. (patreon.com/aroslav) They want to see the material as it flows from my pen, as it were, and will overlook typos and story inconsistencies just so they can be reading Chapter 76 today while SOL fans are reading Chapter 14. Yeah. They're that far ahead. I call them my Sausage Grinders.

3. I re-read the chapter, usually over the course of writing the next one or two. I focus on story things and often go back to correct things that I spot later. What color is Beca's hair? Light brown? Why is she referred to as a blonde in this chapter? Inquiring minds want to know.

4. When I've accumulated an entire 'Part' of chapters (usually 10-12 chapters) I gather them all together and send them off to Rotorhead and Pixel. The list of these two guys' clients is a Who's Who of SOL authors. Some of the best and cleanest stories on the site have been through their watchful hands. Which I know is a mixed metaphor, but they didn't edit this.

5. When the chapters are returned, I compare and consolidate the notes.

6. I hand-code every individual chapter in html. I do that for a couple of reasons, even though Vixen sometimes ignores my careful coding. First, I think it gives me better output on SOL, but more importantly, it helps facilitate the quick conversion to my own website and to eBook. So I code the correct quotation marks, the character entities, the bold, italic and line breaks that are needed. Many times during this process, I discover formatting corrections. A quotation wasn't italicized. The poetry all ran into one line.

7. I read the chapter in a browser. Everything up to this point has been done in Word or in my html editor. Believe me when I say that you see the story differently in a browser. That means that I make corrections to this draft. It's typical to see a missing quotation mark, for example. And I hate when the same word is used too frequently within a paragraph. Half the time I need a different word and the other half it should be cut completely. Sometimes, I still see sentences that are so poorly constructed I have to completely rewrite them. But I do, correcting the html before I upload the chapters in the queue for posting (three or four months from now).

8. The Doctype on SOL is simple html. My website is coded in xhtml. That requires some amount of conversion, however, my having converted all entities when I originally converted to html and saved them as UTF8 characters makes the conversion process go pretty smoothly. My website has a different look and feel than SOL, so I open the page in the browser to take a look once more. I've added contents and navigation to the page and I check to make sure it all works and that all the graphics I use between scenes have all appeared. I scan through the document again and occasionally still see a stray typo or missing format. At this stage, when I correct it, I go back and correct the SOL version, too.

9. I upload the new pages in my own queue for posting to my Advance Release ($5/mo) patrons. They want delivery of the story faster than it comes out on SOL but aren't willing to put up with the raw text of the Sausage Grinder. For example, today they are reading the end of Part II: Inculcation (chapter 22) while SOL readers are reading chapter 14. (patreon.com/aroslav)

10. Three to five months down the road, the chapter posts on SOL. I read it. After it's posted. Sometimes I still find an error or a reader sends me a message about one. I correct it if it seems important. Other times, I'll simply say, well that's what's in this version. I'll correct the eBook.

So, that's my easy ten-step process for writing the stories that appear here on SOL and on my own website. There are another half-dozen steps involved before I release a commercial eBook and paperback. It's not perfect but I'd put any of my books up against a Dan Brown commercially published best seller and come out with fewer errors. One of my own story editors was so appalled by Brown's latest work that she marked up the entire first chapter and sent it to him asking why his editors let this go out!

Well, this was all interesting-to me. I suppose I lost most of you before #1 above. If you made it this far, please take away this understanding. I'm not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But I care about what I write and I want you to enjoy it without obstacles.