aroslav: Blog

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

“THIS WOULD BE BETTER if it had some ‘real’ sex in it.”

“We’d never let our daughters behave like that! What I want to know is, as parents, What Were They Thinking?”

“There’s way too much sex in this.”

“I can’t wait to see the coach get involved with Dennis.”

“What’s the message in this story?”

“It’s a bad title. It should be something like “Becoming the Assassin” instead of just The Assassin.”

“This story shouldn’t have a murder in it! You betray the author reader contract!”

“Brian should keep growing until he has about nine or ten inches.”

One old saying is “Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one and they all stink.”

But sometimes we get really valuable advice—even when it’s unsolicited. How do you manage to sort through all the advice you get about writing erotica (or anything else) and separate the good from the bad? In my world, that has meant learning to listen—and then learning to ignore.

2016 had been an incredible year for me. I went around the world—in a literal rather than sexual way. My major opus, Living Next Door to Heaven was finished, as well as the Hero Lincoln stories in the Damsels in Distress universe. I was writing my travel memoir series Wonders of My World. I was looking through my lists of ideas of what to write next and none were exciting me. I decided to conduct a survey.

I didn’t have great expectations for the results of the survey, but I wanted to know my audience a little better. I used Survey Monkey to post a survey for free and announced it on SOL, where the majority of my readers were located. The free survey offer was for up to 100 responses. I had to purchase a subscription when I received 424 responses to my survey!

I was blown away. It was far more than I ever expected. It took all of September and October to begin to make sense of them all. But what I discovered brought me much closer to my readers. I found out how old they were, what gender they were, what they preferred to read, where they got reading material, and what kind of other erotica they liked.
An idea began to gel in my mind. Whatever I wrote next had to get me back to my roots on SOL. It had to be art something.

I put those words at the top of a page and let my mind run free. The narrator would be Art the artist whose last name was so strange that no one ever remembered it. In fact, it was French for ‘strange:’ Étrange.

I started writing.

The Strange Art series was only three short books starting with Art Something, but I felt I had really gotten back to what I loved about writing. And my readers seemed to think so, too.

I loved the whole concept - pictures rather than words but the words came. You painted Art’s surreal canvas with such flair and imagination. Morgan Le Fay, Arthur Pendragon and Annette as Lady of the Lake were bold characters but they had such a positive support structure around them. Parents and teachers – that’s how it’s supposed to work! –Cyssternius

Why?

I’d taken time to listen to my readers and discovered they liked what I wrote when I was writing what I really enjoyed.

Art Something and the entire Strange Art series is available on Bookapy and in paperback elsewhere.

I’d like to say all I have to do as an author is listen to what my readers want. I can’t. I have received some really poor advice from readers that I’ve followed—much to my detriment. The vast majority of my survey respondents (306) said they preferred stories rated as “Some Sex.” That’s what I felt I wrote. Typically, there was a long lead-up to getting to any “real sex” at all. In Living Next Door to Heaven, it was near the end of the fourth book, The Rock, before Brian and Whitney had intercourse. There had been an incredible amount of sex play before that, but according to some readers, it just wasn’t enough.

“This would be a lot better if it had some real sex in it,” was a common message I received, not only on that book, but on several that came after.

I listened—when I shouldn’t have.

Both the Team Manager series and the Photo Finish series have more sex in them than was needed. One of my editors, who I usually trust to be aware of when I stray, told me that Shutter Speed was approaching a stroke story! But did I listen? I lost a lot of readers because of the amount of sex in the series. Some of those now remaining might be disappointed that there is nowhere near the amount of sex in the last volume, Follow Focus.

So, how do you balance what advice to take with what not to take?

I return to Shakespeare’s sage advice. “This above all: to thine own self be true And it must follow, as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man.”—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3. And yes, he put those sage words in the mouth of a pompous fool, showing good advice might come from any source.

First of all, listen to those you have asked for advice. Typically, they have nothing at stake in the advice they give. Nonetheless, weigh their advice against your intent. If they advise a different path than the story you want to write, think about what is leading them to that path. You may still need to clarify your ideas. You can’t really get good advice on topic A if you ask about topic B.

Second, identify your advisor’s triggers. I use the term much more loosely than popular culture does. Triggers can be both positive and negative. I’m reminded of the preacher who was asked about pills. He immediately jumped to the gos-pills and how the gospels talked about baptism. There was no subject that could have been addressed to him that didn’t end up being a conversation about baptism. This is just as important as a person who reading the word “abuse” assumes the entire story is about abuse and has specific issues already in mind when they first encounter the word.

Third, decide what’s in it for the person giving advice. On Thursday this week, the scores on six of my sixty-two stories went down by.01. Nothing improved. This is typically the sign of a reader who is upset about something I’ve written or implied. Therefore, without reading any further, assumes everything I write is similarly flawed and deserves his scorn—expressed by a low vote. You have to admire the person’s fortitude to open every story and vote it down, but you don’t need to pay attention to it. His vote, whether it changes the score or not, doesn’t matter. It is not a valid bit of advice for my writing.

You might assume from the above that I’m obsessed with scores, but part of my centering ritual each day is assessing all my statistics. I track the number of downloads, scores, and comments of each story, sales of each book, amount of money in each bank account and charges on each credit card. It’s a massive spreadsheet! But it doesn’t track “What I Did for Love.” Next week.

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

“I HATED THAT MOVIE so much I didn’t bother to see it,” said Grandma Sarah, to the consternation of the industry crowd around her.
Grandma Sarah worked as support staff in the industry in Hollywood for years. She typed scripts, wrote contracts, and generally ran errands for all the “important people.” Her sister, also in the industry, was the personal assistant to one of the top studio executives. Between the two of them, they saw a lot of movies.

It was the most quotable review of the year and drove many people to go see the movie in question to see if they agreed with her. And that shows the importance of reviews. It also shows that absolutely anyone can be a valid reviewer. It was not lost on any of her listeners that, even though she had not seen the movie, she had typed three drafts of the script. She knew what she was talking about.

Many people don’t review books or movies or TV shows or restaurants because they don’t believe anyone would be interested in what they have to say. That’s just not true. If a person has a reasonably intelligent means of expressing herself, people will read her review. They might not make a decision based on that one review, but it will go into the hopper as they determine whether or not to buy that product.

When I released my second long story on SOL, Mural, book one of the Model Student series, I was more than fortunate to have attracted some great reviewers who helped get me started on SOL. These people were known authors on SOL to start with, so just having their names associated with the story helped, but it doesn’t require a known personality to write a good review.

plus plus
A three-part longer story, the characters feel like real people even though they are in a pretty rare type of arrangement. They each struggle and fail and try again. Great long read with fantastic sex scenes throughout.

Let’s look at the elements of the review because it’s a good example of a short review that really means something. What is the story? A three-part longer story. What sets it apart? The characters feel like real people. What stands out? They each struggle and fail and try again. What’s my assessment? Great long read with fantastic sex scenes throughout.

If you followed that general outline when you reviewed a story, you could become a great reviewer.

awnlee jawking
An engaging and well-written story. But some of the writing, when describing Tony producing his masterpieces, is absolutely sublime.

This is a superb review that is even shorter, showing that you don’t need to write a whole novel in your review. This is the type of “blurb” I’d like to put on the back cover of the paperback—a well-known author giving his endorsement.

Of course, it’s great when a review goes a little more in depth and the reader gets the feeling the reviewer actually spent some time with this book.

Aaron Stone
Aroslav’s “Model Student” series is simply amazing. I selected “Mural” because it is the first story, but once you have read this amazing story, you should read the other five novels and novellas… Regardless, the adventures of Tony, Lissa, Melody, Kate, et al, are a wonderful marriage of art and racquetball and the story is a wonderful coming of age tale. There are good times and bad, but Aroslav has crafted a wonderful tale populated by compelling characters that are fun to root for and enjoyable relationships between these characters. High recommended.

Aaron digs a little deeper into the story by citing the entire six book series. He names characters who were important to him, the main features of art and racquetball, and the genre of a coming of age story. Any author would love to have a review like this.

Mural and the entire Model Student series is available on Bookapy and as a paperback elsewhere.

Why authors want reviews
If a book gets 10 reviews, the author receives a cryptic fragment of a treasure map.
If a book gets 30 reviews, the Bank of England will then accept copies of the book as legal tender.
If a book gets 50 reviews, Bookapy sends the author a free unicorn.
Why not help an author you love get a free unicorn by reviewing their book today!

Reviews have a direct impact on readership, sales, and reception. There is no question that one review affects another. Sometimes people want to jump on the wagon, and sometimes they want to show how different they are from others. Either way, the review is important.

An author can easily succumb to the feeling that he is just shouting into a void. There isn’t even an echo that returns to him. This is especially true on story sites like SOL where the author is not being paid. But even if the author is getting a royalty check every month, it’s difficult to know what people think of the book.

That’s not to say an author should obsess over reviews. Finding out what people think is one thing, but feeling defensive or as if he needs to change everything is not healthy. The opinion is that reviewer’s opinion, not universal, and not a judgment of the character of the author.

Which brings me to the next point about reviewing. In general, I think reviews should be positive, or at least positively phrased. And try not to be passive aggressive about it. I had a contest reviewer comment on The Art and Science of Love: “I suppose SOME people might like this kind of vulgarity.” That sounded like a comment from my ex-wife!

Having a review that is generally positive or positively phrased is not the same as lying about what you like and don’t like. You have to be honest in your review, but a short review along the lines of “This work did not fall within the range of topics I prefer to read. I’m simply not into bestiality and prefer a straightforward storyline,” is all that is needed. The reviewer doesn’t need to attack the character of the author, his parentage, his ignorance of fundamental biology, or his inability to spell. It makes it clear that this review is based on the reviewer’s preferences, not on some imagined objective standard.

By the same token, writing a review that just says, “This was great,” is uninformative, but still counts toward the author’s unicorn.

In your review, say what you are reviewing, whether you liked it or didn’t, what the outstanding items were that brought you to this decision, and whether you recommend the book to others or not. Keep politics, the ancestry of the author, race, religion, and random pet peeves out of it.

Write a review. You may become a reviewer on SOL by contacting the webmaster. You can review on Bookapy, Amazon, Goodreads, B&N, and other bookstores by simply writing your review and posting it. You can review on your social media outlets. You can even review in the comments section of a story, but those seldom get beyond the next person who is already reading the story. If you’ve got a review, consider putting it where people who aren’t already reading the story can see it.

Telling an author you like his work makes the author feel good. Telling the world you like his work will make a difference. Authors will silently or publicly thank you for taking the time and thought necessary to tell others about their work.

I mentioned briefly that authors shouldn’t obsess over reviews and feel that they should change something or that their work is of no value. I want to look at that aspect further next week: “Learning to Listen—and to Ignore.”

I'm aware that chapter 13 of Follow Focus has not posted yet. It is in the queue, but hasn't moved all morning. Might be a posting engine glitch, or it could be something else. As Rev. Mother Superior would say: "Possess your soul with patience."

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

“I READ YOUR BOOK and I could tell it was about you,” said one of the nice church ladies that Sunday morning. I was shocked. Not that she’d read the book—it was Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money, not erotica—but rather that she thought I was Dag Hamar!

I was in my fifties and worked at the tech giant, but I had no real experience with computer security, was happily (at the time) married, and was healthy as a horse! My heart problems, which were reminiscent of Dag’s, didn’t manifest until I was seventy! I didn’t consider myself anything like my unlucky computer forensics detective.

But that was not the only time I was accused of writing about myself.

Wrote a Book. Please Help!

Several times, I’ve sat down to write my autobiography—or at least a memoir. Even this blog is supposed to be about “My Life in Erotica.” It seems I always reach a point where I’m thinking, “Oh, I should have…” or “If only she’d…” or “This is boring. I’ll add…” I end up writing Life as I Would Have Lived It.

In writing erotica, we have a commonly used term for it: Wish fulfillment. It’s the foundation of virtually all the “Do Over” stories, of which I’ve written a few. But it’s also fundamental when writing fiction based on actual life events. We write something that is “Just like when I was going steady with Bonnie in high school, except we have sex and don’t break up.”

Other than aroslav’s Wonders of My World series, the closest I’ve come to writing about my own life is my currently running Photo Finish series. The name of the leading male, Nate Hart, is the name I used as a pen name in high school to keep teachers from knowing the poetry I read in speech contests was my own. The little town of Tenbrook, Illinois is about the same size and shape as the little town in Indiana where my mother moved the family so she could begin her career as a Methodist minister. My dad worked at a filling station, in construction, building speaker systems, wiring travel trailers, and about anything else he could do in order to follow Mom to the various places she was assigned.

I have four sisters. It was too complicated to get a fourth sister into the mix in the story, so I consolidated the older three into two. And that, I might think, was the beginning of divergence from my autobiography. I’ve always been a writer—and though I won a photography contest in 4H, I did not pursue it as a career. I had multiple girlfriends, but they were in different cities. I even went so far once as to make carbon copies of a letter I wrote them.

Though there was a fair amount of petting and dry humping, none of my girlfriends slept with me. I was technically a virgin when I married the first time. All of the things that actually made my autobiography interesting were wish fulfillment. They were Life as I Would Have Lived It.

And somewhere, buried among ancient manuscripts that I’ve lost track of and didn’t scan, there is a manuscript I titled Life as I Would Have Lived It, a Pseudo Autobiography. I’m pretty sure that most of what was in that manuscript forty years ago has already been included in my literary and erotic writings.

If one was truly a literary forensic investigator, perhaps one could reconstruct my actual life from the pieces found among the lies in my books!

The average income from books of a professional author in the US in 2023 was less than $5,000. Even when we sell our work, we’re making little from it. Consider that twenty authors in 2023 made well over two billion dollars combined! How do the ‘less than minimum wage’ authors make any money at all? Next week: “Reviews.”

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

“…THERE’S NO SKIN between them and the words you write.” I’ve treasured that review of Model Student: Mural since the day it was written in 2012. The author of this comment questioned whether the characters were real or not, but surmised, “They for sure exist inside you.”

I used to tell people that my stories were mostly true in that they were certainly true, but mostly only in my head.

Still, for nearly every character you find in one of my stories, you could find a real-life inspiration. Only the names, descriptions, and events have been changed to protect me. I mean the innocent.

In fact, aroslav’s "Wonders of My World" series has more real characters in it than any of my other books and I’ll tell you a little about why. When I started this series, I intended it to be about my world travels—the amazing nine months I spent traveling around the world. But if I was telling that story, why not tell the story of my other travels, as I went solo around the country in my truck and travel trailer for a few years?

The first book of the series, US Highways, was set when I began my big adventure in August of 2013 and extended to the end of my first full circuit around the United States, in the winter of 2014. American Backroads was set from 2015 through February 2016. Then there’s the book I actually wrote first, Border Crossings. It was first released on SOL as "Seven Wonders of the World." I’ve released a couple of short stories in the series since then, but soon, I hope to release a fourth book in the series I’m working on under the title Lay of the Land.

The pattern of the stories is that I have an adventure in the present in each chapter, but I keep jumping back to an adventure sometime in the past. What most people don’t think about is the names of the characters of the past nearly all happen to coincide with names of characters in my other books. In fact, I’ve written a little about the person who inspired the character in that other book. You’ll read about Cassie, Samantha, Hannah, Dee, Shannon, Carly, Whitney, Kate, Paula, and Belle. Each was at one time or another a real person in my life with whom I’d either had an interesting erotic adventure, or a favorite fantasy.

The entire "Wonders of My World" series is available as a collection at Bookapy. The series is richly illustrated with photos from my travels.

How does one manage writing about sex with a real woman when one never actually had sex with that woman?

Very carefully. I’ve made mistakes before. I try to avoid them now.

The first rule, of course, is not to use their real name. Either first or last. This gets a little tricky because the older you get, the fewer names you haven’t heard. You have to have names for your characters, but you have to be careful what the name is. If you don’t associate the name with the original person and mix and match first and last names, you can get away pretty cleanly. If a character is based on Susan Lancaster, though—even if in a fantasy—you can’t use either Susan or Lancaster in her name. Much better to call her Beth Williams, because Susan won’t recognize herself in that.

You might keep in mind, that all those really nice people you had fantasies about, who are now stalwart members of the church, and serve on the city council, are not likely to be reading your erotica stories. If they are, they are really unlikely to complain about recognizing themselves or admitting they were there in the first place.

Still, even my sister was convinced that she knew who everyone in one of my stories was and disagreed emphatically with how things were related—and that wasn’t even erotica. And she was wrong. I had to explain that characters might sound familiar because I borrowed characteristics from people, but the story was fiction! It seems people often forget that.

The second rule is to change something besides the name. Make your blonde a redhead. Change her eye color. Make her short and fat or tall and fat. Give her a southern accent. Change her race, religion, or politics. No matter if you are basing a character on a real person, you are writing fiction! You don’t have to be faithful to every detail in her description.

Third, remember that no matter what part of your story was based on a real person, you are writing fiction. Have I mentioned that? It’s important! You don’t need the whole character. Think about what attracted you so much to this person that you want to write about her. Maybe it was just a favorite expression. Perhaps it was just the size of her nipples. Do you associate a specific smell with her? Cardamom? Was there a memorable event? That time when you rode the log flume and discovered when you were both drenched that she wasn’t wearing a bra? Extract that detail and apply it to someone else.

In my initial version of Living Next Door to Heaven, I modeled a lot of characters after kids I knew when I was growing up. When I finished the story and decided to publish it in eBooks, I realized how much I’d duplicated their names and characteristics. The names were so close to the actual names of kids I knew that before I published the books, I changed all the names! That was not appreciated by people who read the first version and had become quite attached to some of those characters. And when, years later, I wrote a sequel and used all the new names, I still had people writing to me to complain about the names being different.

I was successful, though. One of my neighbors from that era got hold of the series and read it enthusiastically. But when I mentioned who some of the characters were, he looked at me blankly. “That was our Jessica?” He didn’t even recognize the description of his own house where the action took place. He recognized the names of the horses.

When I’m asked, as I am in many instances, whether these characters are real, I still respond “Mostly real.” They are real, but mostly only in my head. They are an amalgamation of memories of different people pressed together to create wholly unique individuals.

If you think you recognize someone in my books, remember:

“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and probably mildly insulting. Please don’t tell them.”

Basing fiction on reality is a pretty common theme in both literature and politics. Don’t like the way something happened? Rewrite it. It gets a lot more complicated, though, if you are basing your fiction on your autobiography. Next week: “Life as I Would Have Lived It.”