aroslav: Blog

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

EACH NOVEMBER for twenty-one years, I have written at least one new novel. My records show that I wrote twenty-three books in those twenty-one Novembers. Seventeen of those books have been published and the NaNoWriMo website shows that I have written a total of 2,718,527 words in that time, including their various summer challenges.

I don’t write only in November, though. My records for the past six years show that I’ve dumped 5,508,020 words out of my head onto the page—nearly a million words a year. That’s a lot of typing and a lot of dreaming up new ideas. Some of them have been successful and some have never seen a public release. But I keep writing.

November 2024 saw me tackle a massive new project that I gave the working title of Sisyphus, a modern myth. I ended the month of November with 105,866 words in my draft and it wasn’t nearly finished. I’ve continued writing 2-4,000 words a day in December and think I might possibly finish by the middle of the month. Yes, somewhere over 150,000 words.

The work is very different than I anticipated, though the major story elements are still there. I discovered that many of the characteristics of the legendary Sisyphus from Greek mythology that made him renowned as clever and able to defeat death and the gods, are not particularly attractive characteristics today. In fact, they smack a little too much of the billionaires who run the country for their own benefit. (The country—being just about any country where my books are read.)

The most common criticism I’ve received on the first draft is that Henry, my leading man, is not very likable. He is a man who typically gets his way and other people rush to help him get it. Even though he is generally benevolent, protecting friends and destroying enemies, he’s just not the kind of guy you’d like to have over for dinner on Taco Tuesday.

Well, not to worry. This is the first draft, and I think the story is actually quite good. My story editor, Lyndsy, says I need to decide who is writing the book. The first part sounds like Devon Layne (aroslav), the second part like Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose), and she hasn’t figured out who is writing the third part!

When I am writing a new story, I tend to write very rapidly—as I indicated, 2-4,000 words a day, non-stop. That’s the speed the story enters my mind, and I have to get it down or I’ll lose the flow. In the process there are various sub-plots that emerge, some of which are never resolved. There are characters that don’t seem to have a great purpose. There are skips in time and missing transitions.

That is what a first draft is all about. Thanks to Lyndsy’s and Les’s notes on the first draft, sometime around mid-January, when I’ve managed to release my current more advanced work in progress, I’ll pick up the five hundred or so pages of Sisyphus and start again from page one with a new draft. When I go through this process, I can usually predict somewhere near an 80% or 90% rewrite. Part of that will be choosing a new and appropriate title and unifying the voice so it is all written by just one of my personalities.

But I can’t start that process until I finish getting the story out. And since this story covers several years, I’ll have to work on transitions and timelines especially hard. It’s scarcely a daily diary type of story.

It seems a shame to talk so much about a book and not leave a link to a place to buy it, but Sisyphus is not yet for sale. My $10 per month Sausage Grinder Patrons on Patreon have access to reading the first draft as I write it and make daily posts to the story. They see both what goes into the sausage grinder and the casing I try to pack it all into. It isn’t always pretty, but it can be very enjoyable in its own way.

An early example from my collected works that I completely rewrote was Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric. I researched this book for nearly twenty years, having taught print history during a good part of that. I collected legends and stories. And I had questions.

On January 1, 2009, I started work in earnest on the book, beginning with my concept statement and progressing with a compilation of all my years of research and speculation. I wrote it by hand in a lined book in pencil. 143 pages of notes covering everything from my proposed migration of the Library of Alexandria to the construction of Nemrud Dagi to the atomic weights of the known elements at the time of Gutenberg, to the composition of ink and its evolution over the past 40,000 years.

Before I was finished making notes, I started typing the first draft of the manuscript. I’d written a five-page prologue in July of 2008, but hadn’t progressed far. I realized it wasn’t very exciting, and things needed to start with a bang, so to speak.

I started over on January 4, 2009. I worked steadily for six months and was so disappointed in what I had written that I closed the book and sent it off to my friend The Book Doctor. He wrote comments on every page of the 40,000-word manuscript and added ten pages of notes at the end on what he saw that I needed to clarify, get rid of, and change. It was incredibly valuable information.

I studied, made notes, and changed the title of the book from "Gutenberg’s Other Book" to The Gutenberg Rubric, banking on the kind of names that were selling at the time, like The DaVinci Code. It became my November novel for 2009, and I wrote the entire 89,000-word draft that month.

It wasn’t finished.

I wrote several more drafts, completing the third in time to enter it into the 2010 PNWA literary competition. The draft won second prize in the mystery and thriller category. But that draft only included the first twenty-five pages. I launched into a full draft in March and completed the fifth draft in January of 2011. In all that time, I had worked on only one other story, the 2010 November novel, Steven George and The Dragon.

Finally, in July of 2011, the book went live, and I did my first ever book signing tour around the country in September. It was incredible.
But the book that was released was 90% different than the book I’d begun drafting January 1, 2009, even though the basic story was the same.

The Gutenberg Rubric eBook is available on Bookapy. The paperback is available from other online vendors.

We are getting perilously close to the end of 2024, along with its accompanying travel, family celebrations, and scramble to cook a perfect prime rib. As a result, I’m not sure what I’m going to write for next week yet. I’ll be as surprised as you!

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

“BLESSED ARE THOSE who expecteth nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.” –Hezekiah 3:15.

I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or mental health worker of any sort. In fact, I find it is all I can do to maintain my own mental health. I care about yours, but I can’t do anything about it. So, please do not take anything I say in this post as more than my personal outlook on life and my way of surviving in this absurd world we live in.

I’ll come back to that word, ‘absurd,’ in a bit.

I asked last week what else Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and David Foster Wallace had in common. If you have not looked up the reference, you may still know that these are among the many authors who have committed suicide.

Was that because they were depressed? I don’t believe so. You see, I think depression is a normal state for human beings. Oh, it comes in various degrees and certainly some people are far more depressed than others, but everyone has it to some degree or another. I believe what distinguishes that from the motivation to kill oneself is despair. And despair is a different matter altogether.

Despair, in my limited intellectual grasp, evolves from the loss of hope.

We have been given to believe in this mystical thing called hope. The sun will come out tomorrow! A better day is coming. If all else fails, God will still take you to heaven. And the hope of a future reward—especially one we don’t actually have to do anything to receive but believe—is what I think ultimately causes people to despair.

So, what did all the famous authors despair of?

I wasn’t there, so I don’t really know, but I guess they reached a point where their writing no longer sustained their hope for a better day. Remember, I’ve said several times that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. So, what happens if I no longer have any words to give? For myself, I think that is just one of the absurdities of life.

When I sat down to write City Limits in 2017, I had a very distinct question I wanted to explore in the character of Gee Evars: Are we as individual humans nothing more than the collected memories and experiences of our lives, or is there something inside us that makes us who we are?

Please understand that I recognize people go through extreme trauma that affects how they respond to life, but does it change who the person is inside? I don’t know for sure. I explored the question with Gee Evars by stripping him of his memory and identity. He remembered his name. He could read and write and do math. Occasionally, he found talents for crafts or nature. But he couldn’t remember who he was. So, in trying to settle into a new and unknown place, he has to discover who he really is inside.

And stripped of all he could remember about himself, he still did not despair. He recognized that he was still wholly himself. He went through every day with a sense of the absurdity of life. That he should be here with absolutely nothing, and still be able to be satisfied and happy.

City Limits and the sequel Wild Woods ebooks are available on Bookapy. Paperbacks are at many online vendors.

As we have already seen that there are many depressed writers who have lost hope and slipped into despair and killed themselves, I am not going to suggest that all you need to do is write to get through the despair. What I am suggesting is if there is no hope to lose then there is no despair.
I consider life to be a kind of absurdity. According to Albert Camus, the Absurd results from the confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. But Camus also holds up humanism as a fundamental character of humanity. He does not fall back onto the response of suicide because there is no despair. Suicide is the renunciation of human values and freedom.

In my own words, there is no hope to look forward to. If something comes up after you die, be delightfully surprised. People are born and they die. Between is all the reward and punishment we can possibly handle. Even when I am crying in pain with a failed heart, I am laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

I live alone and I know what loneliness and isolation are like. I take little things and make large stories out of them, and that is how I entertain myself. It is how I deal with the absurdity of life. Is every day a gift? No. Some days are a pain in the ass. But not every day.

Some time ago, I met a young woman who was very interested in my erotic writings. She wanted to know how I developed them and what I used for reference. All I could profess to was my sometimes rather weak memories of what those feelings of newness and discovery that propel the sex scenes of a story forward are like.

She surprised me by telling me she would be my subject for ‘primary research.’ We have become very good friends, and I have spent many pleasant hours exploring her physically and mentally, discovering her likes and dislikes, finding out about her life and her loves and her challenges. She has opened many doors in my mind.

I have not had sex with her and I have no hope of ever succeeding in that endeavor. If one day it should happen—like life after death—I shall be pleasantly surprised. But I don’t hope for it. I am happy with the absurdity of our relationship.

Writing is my go-to for adding meaning to my life. Yours may be reading. Or it may be gardening or volunteering with children or painting or music or cooking casseroles for the church supper. They are all part of the great absurdity of life.

And hence my opening quote that was made up as part of a pseudo-Bible that has no official publication and to which you might add your own adages as verses. “Blessed are those who expecteth nothing for they shall not be disappointed.”

Truly, what better than a life without disappointment?

I promise to find a lighter subject for next week. I will be looking back on November Noveling and seeing how my new work progressed.

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

I CAN’T TELL YOU how many people have spoken to me after reading one of my books or stories and have said some variation of, “I can see this was a very autobiographical book. It’s really about you.”

Really? Let me just run down a list of characters people have thought were really me.

G2 in The Volunteer. My older sister actually accused me of lying about our father. I had to explain carefully that the character was not our father, nor was the story about me. I’m not homeless. I live in a trailer. I just don’t have an address!

Dag Hamar in For Blood or Money. Several friends and readers asked me if I was okay and if I was taking care of my heart. This was ten years before I had heart problems.

Brian Frost in Living Next Door to Heaven. “But you lived in northern Indiana and you had a paper route.” I wish I had the harem, too! Or even a few friends like those in that series.

Nate Hart in Full Frame and the “Picture Perfect” series. Well, I might have patterned Nate after what I wished my life was like growing up. There’s certainly more of me in the early volumes than in the later ones.

Dennis Enders in Team Manager SWISH! Nearly blind undersized geek with a great talent for basketball and coaching. Me? Really?

Keith Drucker in The Gutenberg Rubric. “I knew as soon as I read it, you were the only person in the world who could have written this. I could just see you examining manuscripts,” said a former work associate.

Wayne Hamel in The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality. Events bear a striking resemblance to some of the things I witnessed in college, but Wayne and me? Worlds apart.

And many others.

In fact, my writing is probably more a reflection of my mental state than my actual life. And I find I am most productive in my writing when I am most profoundly depressed.

When I wrote Mural in 2012, originally just called “Model Student” because I had no idea it would grow into several books, I was incredibly depressed. Though depression doesn’t need a ‘because,’ I had several good reasons to be depressed. I was laid off a few months before my 60th birthday and for the first time in my life I was unemployed and couldn’t find a job. In fact, my success in previous jobs was a detriment to finding a new one, especially one that would pay less than half what I had been earning.

Coupled with that, I heard those crushing words from my wife: “I know you try hard, but I’m just not interested.” Not interested in sex? I could understand, sort of. Not interested in me, in our relationship, in our home… That was what drew me deeper into depression.

I started writing about an art student who was chronically depressed. His symptoms included being unable to focus long enough to get assignments done and being so focused on an art project that he forgot about everything else until it was too late. And, above all, his feelings of isolation.

No. It wasn’t about me. I was depressed, but I was functioning. On the other hand, my daughter started attending a prestigious art school and became so depressed she was physically incapacitated. I literally picked her up off her dorm room floor and carried her to an emergency room! If anything, Tony Ames was based on her, not on me.

But I found I could truly relate to Tony’s recurring depression, even when things seemed to be going right. I refused to take the easy route out that many authors (especially of erotica) use: Tony has sex and suddenly his depression is cured. It just doesn’t fucking work that way!

In exploring Tony’s depression, I came to understand my own much better. It wasn’t because I lost my job and my marriage. It was truly a part of who I am.

Mural and the entire “Model Student” series are available as individual eBooks or a collection on Bookapy. Paperbacks are still available online.

Everyone does it. Perhaps it will help you in your own writing to know some of the famous writers who were chronically depressed.

Papa Hemingway, who wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Or as Nietzsche famously put it: “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” Sadly, it killed Hemingway.

Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy and nearly every other Russian author in history. They all wrote through depression.

And so did/do I.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I appreciate the good intentions of some readers who will excuse a mistake I’ve made by saying “He’s not a professional writer.” I wonder sometimes what it takes if 70 books and several thousand sales doesn’t make me a professional writer! Thanks anyway.

The thing is that writing allows the author to vent. Without writing a true confession, the author can put the words of his own frustration in the mouths of his characters. They don’t even need to be characters he likes! They are just a vehicle for his own frustration.

Writing also allows the author to explore various alternatives. If I wasn’t depressed, how would I feel? Oh! Manic! That’s good. After an author has explored sadness, devotion, anger, frustration, lethargy, and ennui, he might eventually get around to exploring happiness. What would it be like to be happy? The hypothetical author, however, will quickly find that happiness and depression are not mutually exclusive. Let that sink in.

Writing lets the author try on different personalities—even different economic and social classes, genders, orientations, levels of intelligence and wit, athletic ability, and artistic temperament. In writing characters with those characteristics, the author might actually stumble on the one that truly fits him.

Writing challenges the author to actually do something. Anything. I started doing November Noveling back in 2004 because it was an opportunity to explore what being a writer was really like while I was briefly unemployed. I only had to commit to it for 30 days. I could do that. My family could live with that. It was only 30 days. In fact, it was broken down even further. All I was committed to was 1,666 words per day. And if I only got one word written, it was a victory. It was more than I started with.

I don’t hold up writing as being a cure for depression. I believe writing is a use you can put your depression to. Turn the tables on it and embrace the creative stimulus it provides.

And yes, everything in this post applies to writing erotica as well as anything else. What a great escape it is to write a sex scene in which you don’t actually need to be concerned about your partner’s experience. He is by default happy. She comes when you do. Always wet, always hard, always ready. Until you finish the scene.

Just as I wouldn’t let Tony simply have sex and be cured of his depression in Mural, I’m not going to leave this post with a happy ending that shows everything is all better now that I’m writing.

But there’s a lot more to this subject and I’ll be writing more about it soon.

What else do Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath, and Abbie Hoffman have in common? I’ll leave that answer till next week: “Writing Through Despair.”

When The Strongman ended last week, I kind of lied and said there wouldn't be another story until after New Year's. Rules dictate that we don't talk about contest entries.

But I'm happy to say that in a blind taste test, my story The Key to Eve was voted in third place, behind two great stories by fine SOL authors. So, thank you for reading and voting!

The story is appropriately 13 chapters. It has 26,000 words. Witches, vampires, ghosts, shape shifters, and an animal talker. This is a fantasy you won't want to miss!

As a contest winner, the story can be accessed only by premier members of SOL for the next six months.

If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

Yes, The Strongman comes to an end this morning. Some of you are applauding the story and some of you are applauding that it's over. That's life.

I this story, I tried to paint a picture of what it is genuinely like to be an elite level athlete struggling to reach the top of his sport. We seem to have the impression that all a person needs is talent and hard work to succeed. But that is not the case. No matter what a person sacrifices, there is no guarantee he will rise to the top.

But those people do succeed, often in ways they least expected or even rejected. Perhaps they will become wildly popular on Dancing with the Stars or America's Got Talent. They might become "Rookie of the Year" even without a national championship. They might be loved in "Gold Over America."

Or they might become an accountant.

Success in their field, even for the dedicated and talented, is not assured. Not unlike authors. Paul sacrificed relationships, family, and even love to pursue his dream. In the end, he found success where he tried most to avoid it.

He just isn't the superstar charismatic champion we expect our novel heroes to be or become. It seemed important, somehow, to tell that story.

What's next? I have two new stories, but they are not yet ready for release. One is in the hands of my frontline editor to get it ready for rewriting. The other is in the writing process during November Noveling. I don't expect either story to be ready for release on SOL until 2025, though my Sausage Grinder tier patrons on Patreon have access to first drafts as they are written.

I wish I could say I'm taking a long winter's nap, but I'm working my tush off, trying to get the next book finished. See you later.