aroslav: Blog

I'm a little late posting my season's greetings. I'm hoping that whatever winter holiday you celebrate, it is a joyous occasion, and that if you don't celebrate a winter holiday, you have a joyful winter season anyway. I certainly am. Sitting out beside my fire in Quartzsite, AZ and enjoying a PDR 1878 Capa Oscura cigar to cap off the day.

And here is some other good news. I've received all 47 chapters of Double Take Book 1 back from my fine editors, Pixel the Cat and Old Rotorhead. Without them, my works would not be as clean as they are and I thank them loudly. Having all the chapters in hand and having finished formatting them this morning, I've scheduled the first two chapters to post here on SOL on January 11. From then on, the chapters will post every three days, concluding Memorial Day weekend. If all continues to go well, by the time this one finishes, I'll have Book 2 ready to post without an interruption. Here's the blurb:

Life was good. It just wasn't long enough. Eighty-year-old Jacob Hopkins is dying and wishes to return to his fourteen-year-old body. He has no burning desire to change the world. He just isn't ready to die. And someone has decided that's okay. But Jacob is in for a major surprise. His new life is within a new reality. Things just aren't exactly the way he remembered.

There will be a new story from Wayzgoose in the New Year, as well, but I'll let my alter ego tell about that in his New Year's Day post.

[edit] And just so you know, Living Next Door to Heaven 3: What Were They Thinking will conclude on Friday, December 28. Hope you've enjoyed this tale.

My daughter visited for six days over Solstice and we spent our holiday exploring Cabeza Prieta Wilderness. If you look that up on a map, you'll see that you can't get there from here. After watching the 15-minute required video about all the ways you can die in the Wilderness, we were granted back-country passes to cross the Barry M. Goldwater Military Range to get to the Wildlife Preserve and spent the day 4-wheeling in my very scratched up truck.

If you'd like to read more of the story and see some pictures of the adventure, you can find them on my First Exit blog at http://firstexit0.blogspot.com/2018/12/into-wilderness.html. Not satisfied with trying to kill me in my truck, my daughter led me on a hike two days later to a mountain canyon where the only native California Palms in Arizona grow. And after the hike, we had to take pictures from about half or three-quarters of a mile away.

All told, we had a great time and she did not succeed in receiving her meagre inheritance.

In a few days, my friend Mark will be joining me here in Quartzsite and January 23 will find us in Las Vegas for the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. I'll open a private section on my website to post pictures from the Expo for your prurient entertainment. Mark and his girlfriend will be two of the six friends that accompany me as my entourage to the show. Maybe this will be the year I find a distributor for my books in the adult industry. Or maybe I'll land a deal to write a movie script. I'm sure I can come up with some dialog that is better than "Uh. Uhh! Harder! Faster!"

Aside from that, I'll be showing (and hopefully selling) my books during January at the Readers' Oasis Bookstore in Quartzsite, famous for its "naked owner". Yes, this guy runs around the store and outdoor area wearing nothing but a cock sock. Seems like the right market for my books!

So, that's the news from my winter haven in Southern Arizona. Happy Jollydaze!

I'm a little late posting my season's greetings. I'm hoping that whatever winter holiday you celebrate, it is a joyous occasion, and that if you don't celebrate a winter holiday, you have a joyful winter season anyway. I certainly am. Sitting out beside my fire in Quartzsite, AZ and enjoying a PDR 1878 Capa Oscura cigar to cap off the day.

And here is some other good news. I've received all 47 chapters of Double Take Book 1 back from my fine editors, Pixel the Cat and Old Rotorhead. Without them, my works would not be as clean as they are and I thank them loudly. Having all the chapters in hand and having finished formatting them this morning, I've scheduled the first two chapters to post here on SOL on January 11. From then on, the chapters will post every three days, concluding Memorial Day weekend. If all continues to go well, by the time this one finishes, I'll have Book 2 ready to post without an interruption. Here's the blurb:

Life was good. It just wasn't long enough. Eighty-year-old Jacob Hopkins is dying and wishes to return to his fourteen-year-old body. He has no burning desire to change the world. He just isn't ready to die. And someone has decided that's okay. But Jacob is in for a major surprise. His new life is within a new reality. Things just aren't exactly the way he remembered.

There will be a new story from Wayzgoose in the New Year, as well, but I'll let my alter ego tell about that in his New Year's Day post.

My daughter visited for six days over Solstice and we spent our holiday exploring Cabeza Prieta Wilderness. If you look that up on a map, you'll see that you can't get there from here. After watching the 15-minute required video about all the ways you can die in the Wilderness, we were granted back-country passes to cross the Barry M. Goldwater Military Range to get to the Wildlife Preserve and spent the day 4-wheeling in my very scratched up truck.

If you'd like to read more of the story and see some pictures of the adventure, you can find them on my First Exit blog at http://firstexit0.blogspot.com/2018/12/into-wilderness.html. Not satisfied with trying to kill me in my truck, my daughter led me on a hike two days later to a mountain canyon where the only native California Palms in Arizona grow. And after the hike, we had to take pictures from about half or three-quarters of a mile away.

All told, we had a great time and she did not succeed in receiving her meagre inheritance.

In a few days, my friend Mark will be joining me here in Quartzsite and January 23 will find us in Las Vegas for the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. I'll open a private section on my website to post pictures from the Expo for your prurient entertainment. Mark and his girlfriend will be two of the six friends that accompany me as my entourage to the show. Maybe this will be the year I find a distributor for my books in the adult industry. Or maybe I'll land a deal to write a movie script. I'm sure I can come up with some dialog that is better than "Uh. Uhh! Harder! Faster!"

Aside from that, I'll be showing (and hopefully selling) my books during January at the Readers' Oasis Bookstore in Quartzsite, famous for its "naked owner". Yes, this guy runs around the store and outdoor area wearing nothing but a cock sock. Seems like the right market for my books!

So, that's the news from my winter haven in Southern Arizona. Happy Jollydaze!

That's one of the things that just happens when you live alone with a few dozen fictional characters running around loose in your skull. Sorry about that. Hope everyone who celebrates had a good day!

I wrote. Just like the day before and the day after. I'm writing my little fingers off. So far, 131,000 words this NaNoWriMo month. And today isn't over.

I've been busy on two projects, as you might be aware. The first is a Wayzgoose project that will appear here probably about May. Wild Woods is the sequel to the previously posted City Limits. I expect there will be only two books in this series, so all the open plot lines left in City Limits should get closed as I write the last three chapters of the Wild Woods this week. Then it will sit on my editors' desks fermenting during December and I'll start rewriting in January.

The second project is now being funneled to Pixel the Cat and Old Rotorhead for editing and I'm getting chapters back. Rotorhead has been on vacation in Europe but I expect he'll be getting his two cents in before I'm ready to start posting Part I here in January.

Double-Take is the story of an eighty-year-old man cast back into his fourteen-year-old body, only to find there are significant differences between the reality he knew as a kid and the reality he now faces. All his reasonable memories are intact, but it is his experience rather than his memory that he will need to get him through high school.

I'm having fun with it and comments from advance readers seem to indicate they are enjoying the story as it's being written. It's great to get that kind of feedback from my patrons.

Well, I just thought I needed to give you a little update.

One more thing I'll touch on and bury down here at the bottom so no one actually sees it. I try to leave comments open on my stories so readers can respond and discuss them. I don't participate in the comments section unless I'm asked a direct question. It's not a place for me to try to explain things or justify them. I pop in and answer. I read the comments every day, though.

I will cut off comments on a story if they degenerate into people trying to argue about things that aren't relevant to the story. C'mon, guys. I write plenty of shit you can complain about or argue about. Don't drag in irrelevant political arguments. Exchange Facebook addresses if you want to engage in that senseless shit.

I also greatly appreciate your corrections sent through email and I try to get them corrected as quickly as possible (which means after November). These come in as anything from someone spotting an incorrect pronoun or extra quotation mark to language experts who take the time to correct my German or Spanish or Latin or whatever else I'm pretending to speak. I really appreciate this as it improves the story for a wide range of readers. Keep sending those cards and letters!

Thanks.

Today, the final two chapters of Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain are in the posting queue. I didn't realize it until I checked my posting schedule this morning (at 5:00 a.m.). I've been so incredibly busy this month that I wasn't paying attention to my currently posting stories except to respond to emails.
Dark Side was something I conceived of a couple of years ago and just stewed in my brain until I finally came up with a story. I remember clearly driving through some little town in Oregon or maybe Arkansas and seeing a sign on top of a converted gas station for Jett Blackburn, Attorney. My first thought was 'What a great name for a character!' But I had no idea who the character was or did. He sure wasn't going to be an attorney!

And now here he is, finishing his first year of college, living with half a dozen girls who have adopted him as their own as he paints and displays their bodies.

I love to write about art and artists. I suppose that's because I always wanted to be one but just couldn't draw worth a damn. So, I started describing what I would paint with words. There's more than a little of me in the Pygmalion Revisited story, "1,000 Words". That story, in fact, was inspired by a review of Triptych by Teloz that began, "'If a picture paints a thousand words...', a phrase from a 70's hit from Bread; aroslav turns that on its head, and uses thousands of words to paint a picture."

Whether the artist was Doc Peters, Tony Ames, Art Etrange, or Jett Blackburn, the best I could do is try to make people see the vision of artwork that was in my head.

The challenge has been to give each one something unique in their art. Doc painted canvases. Tony painted murals. Art painted the blackness of his vision. Jerome Z sculpted in bronze. Grant Smith welded sheet metal. And now, Jett Blackburn does performance art in his underwear as he paints on the bodies of his girlfriends and models. Just another medium.

I certainly left room to continue Jett's story at the end of this. He and his girlfriends are just completing their freshman year in college. I have several courses of action for him to follow as he looks at a future where he creates great art but can't sell any of it. Well, thank goodness he's a meat cutter! I am so deeply involved in other projects right now that it will likely be at least a year before I get back to Jett.

Two major "other projects" are underway right now during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Under my penname Wayzgoose, I'm writing Wild Woods, the sequel to City Limits. I'm five chapters and 43,000 words into the story and feeling pretty good. Of course, it's rough draft material and like its big sister will probably require an 80% rewrite before I even start posting it here on SOL in May or June. Those who have subscribed to read it as it is written (daily drafts of new material) get to wade through the parts where I'm trying to prime the pump and get the words to flow. They are ahead of even my story editors.

So far this month, I've written 23,000 words of my new do-over, Double-Take. My subscribers are getting a first look at that story, too, as the total draft is now over 100,000 words and 30 chapters. First look from Pixel the Cat as my editor shows that this story needs a lot less work than Wild Woods. I'm planning to begin releasing the first book of that serial in January. I'm really enjoying writing it as my character is sent back sixty-six years in age but into a timeline where nothing he knows about 'the future' helps. But his past experiences do.

Back in 1967, I had a heated exchange with UAW president Walter Reuther in Detroit. As a smartass teen, I said that I regretted not having his years of fast-talking experience. He responded, "I wish I had my experience and your years." Well, that's this story.

Since the first book (four parts and somewhere near forty or forty-five chapters and 150,000 words) will only get him through freshman year in high school, I expect I'll just keep writing this one from that point without a break. Expect an epic.

This also means that all my other stories will be concluding before the end of the year. Dark Side concludes today. Living Next Door to Heaven 3: What Were They Thinking? will conclude on December 28. Wayzgoose's The Gutenberg Rubric will wrap up on December 11. We'll start the New Year with a fresh clean slate and new stories. I'll post in the Wayzgoose blog about what to expect next there.

I don't expect to have a chapter posting every day in 2019 like I have had the past few months. If Double-Take progresses the way I think it will, it will be my primary focus for the next year or so. It's currently consuming me the way Living Next Door to Heaven did four years ago. That means I might have no stories concluding in 2019! Amazing.

The same is not true of Wayzgoose. There is another Dag Hamar book, For Blood or Money, that I will start posting after the first of the year and two more unpublished works in that series that I'm thinking I'll post as serials without going to print or eBook. Why not have new Wayzgoose stuff as well as new aroslav stuff. Yes, I'm sorry to say that none of the computer forensics stories have a particularly happy ending. Maybe For Money or Mayhem was the most depressing, but that's also the reason I started writing under the name aroslav. That's where happy endings are found.

And sex.

People are already asking if there will be another sequel to Living Next Door to Heaven. That's a definite maybe. Volume three has been all about the parents of Brian's clan. I have been making notes for three years about the children. Too early to tell if the muse is going to grab me by the balls on this story yet, but just think of all the kids that were born on the ranch and the stories they could tell. Don't know yet if this will be a single POV story or bounce around. We'll see.

I've written over 700,000 words so far this year. At least half of them are worthy of reading. I just need to decide which half. I doubt I'll be quite as productive in 2019, but one never can tell. I've kind of gotten in the habit.

Well, time to get back to what I do most. Writing.

Enjoy!

I am unclear as to what happens in Vixen's little mind sometimes. For some reason, all indication that we have begun a new part of Living Next Door to Heaven 3: What Were They Thinking? and the fact that we changed POV was eliminated from my post. Today's chapter 25 is a one-chapter Part IV to the story, narrated by Rose's mother, Maria Davis. Without that information you will be completely lost when reading the chapter. As I was.