aroslav: Blog

Today the final chapter of Follow Focus, which is also the final chapter of the "Photo Finish" series, has posted. Thank you for your comments and email. It's been a good ride.

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

I HAVE BEEN WRITING almost non-stop for the past ten+ years. In that time, I’ve averaged some 800,000 new words per year. Since 2013, I have published fifty-eight erotica novels and ten mainstream novels to join the three I had out prior to that time. Wow! Sixty-eight novels in eleven and a half years. And a variety of short stories and essays!

I have a new novel anticipated in August. But that marks a bit of a slow-down this year. I expect only three new novels to be released this year, rather than my average of six a year. If you are an old fan of the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew and read the massive number of volumes in those series, you know that several different authors wrote under those names over the years. Not so with me. I wrote and published sixty-eight novels under two different names, but the same author.

I’m only seventy-four years old and am not planning to retire anytime soon. But I might need a short vacation to recharge my batteries. Even God rested on the seventh day. So they say.

I believe I’ll take July to think and plan. I’m going to Alaska the last week of July and expect to breathe a lot of fresh sea air on the voyage. I want to see glaciers before they are gone. I want to visit the coastal towns. And I want to inhale inspiration.

I have to say that having heart problems back in 2019 changed my view of travel a bit. I found myself staying longer in one place and nearer to places where there was a good medical infrastructure if needed. Three years ago, I settled in Las Vegas for the winter and spent six, then eight, then nine months there before hitching up to wander for the summer.

This past December, I flew to Seattle for a two week visit over the holidays. I ended up staying four months as the cardiologist installed a pacemaker and followed up with a couple of procedures that would help it keep time.

And this summer, I left the trailer parked in Vegas and just took off driving northward in my truck for the summer, staying in cheap motels (which are nowhere near as cheap as I remembered), and eating cheap meals. I’ve worked my way from Las Vegas, through California, Reno, California, Oregon, and Washington. From here I’ll board a ship bound for Alaska. (That will make forty-seven states.) Then, in August, I’ll drive down the coast from the Olympic Peninsula, through Oregon, and down the coast of California, before cutting across from LA to Las Vegas. The redwoods, the beaches, the beauties.

By that time, I expect I’ll have an idea for the next great book, whether it is a Nathan Everett literary book or a Devon Layne erotic tale.

Lest you become concerned, I want to say that my new pacemaker is working flawlessly, I’m now on fewer drugs of less potency, and I’m feeling great. This is not my farewell message!

I expect to return to writing this fall, stronger, more inspired, and I admit, a little poorer than I am today. As is usual, I have twenty-something half-baked ideas in my files and I’m sure one or more of them will finally jump up and declare it’s time to finish baking.

In the meantime, I want to direct you to the stories I have still running at StoriesOnline (authors aroslav and Wayzgoose), and the library of stories I have available on my personal author sites for Devon Layne and Nathan Everett. I’ll be doing some cleanup on those sites and updating with current information. Stay tuned!

My life story continues to be about appreciating the journey without thought for the destination. At the same time, I support marginalized people of all sorts—whether it be old men, the disabled, the homeless, veterans with PTSD, immigrants, gender queer persons, women, children, the abused, those racially discriminated against, or those threatened by the loss of fundamental rights—which probably includes you.

Though I have long since woken up from my time under religious indoctrination, I still recognize the personal wisdom in the New Testament verse: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The rights of all suffer when the rights of the few are diminished. We cannot ‘give’ rights to one person at the expense of others. We can only give them power to ignore our rights.

I have made it to the Pacific Northwest where the temperature is significantly lower than the 116 expected in Las Vegas this week. I just hope my trailer doesn’t melt while I’m gone. Next week, I’m sure I’ll come up with some new meanderings of my mind to share with you. Until then…

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

I DESIGNED A BOOK for a client and got it online for him. Without going into detail, it was a long and painful process that he will never pay me for—regardless of his good intentions.

Three months later, he received his first royalty statement and contacted me immediately to cry about having made only $17 in the first month his book was on sale. Everyone wanted his book, but no one was buying it!

I looked at my own royalty statement from the same vendor for that month and shared in his disappointment as I had sixty titles offered and only made $60 more than he did!

There are lots of factors that go into book sales. One, which I have taught to my clients for years, is that once the author stops selling the book (like to write another) the book will stop selling. I’ve found this true even of some top-selling authors. They sell books at conferences and shows they attend and speak at. They sell books through social media. They sell books in every format and every outlet they can track down. They hold autographing events to sell books. And when they stop to go on a month’s vacation to finally get started on that sequel, they return to find their sales have dropped dramatically.

The problem is most authors (including me) are poor salespeople. They are not happy selling their books. It feels egotistical and uncomfortable. And it takes time away from the actual business of writing the next book. (As does editing, rewriting, and polishing.) We humbly list our books on sales sites and go hide in the basement writing the next blockbuster while people decided if our latest offering is good enough to invest $2.99, $4.99, $7.89 in acquiring for their personal library.

In 2007, two other authors and tech geeks got together with me to create a new publishing company called LongTale Press. It had a unique mode of operating that invited people to submit a portion of the book and then have readers vote for or against it. If it got enough votes, we would enter a publishing agreement.

In order to get things started and show that we were capable of editing and publishing books, we each agreed to launch a book on the platform, publish it, and put it up for sale. The book I put up was For Blood or Money—the first of my novels to be published in eBook and paperback.

An agent friend of mine pulled me aside at a writer event soon after we started the business and warned me that “You can be an author or a publisher. It’s almost impossible to be both.” I soon found out how true that was.

We did accept a book for publication and it had a modest success. But we each had other projects we were working on. I had a new book I was writing. One of my partners got a new job and a new relationship. The other was pressed with a tight release schedule at work. And I was laid off, struggling to find work for a 60-year-old.

We were all writing our next novels. We weren’t selling books. And the books didn’t sell.

In 2009, I acquired the assets of LongTale Press and started publishing books on a shared cost/shared revenue basis. Once again, I had modest success, but continued to maintain my principal ‘job’ of writing new books. In 2015, I closed the press for new clients and returned authors’ works to them to distribute elsewhere. Now I only edit and design books for hire.

And publish my own. After all, I had all the mechanisms in place to publish. Why not start releasing my own books on a regular basis?

Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money, the first of my books to be published, is available in eBook from Bookapy, and in paperback from most vendors.

Ah yes, the glamorous life of an author.

I like to eat and am fortunate to have Social Security and a modest IRA from my days in the high tech industry. I live in a travel trailer with a total area of 225 sf. Alone. I eat a lot of packaged meals. And I sometimes pull the trailer from place to place to see interesting things.

I spend six to ten hours a day in front of the computer, writing, editing, and publishing my books. And mostly, I’m pretty happy. I’ve had some scary health issues, but they turned out okay. I have a dent in the back bumper of my truck, but it doesn’t affect the way it runs. And my books, still sell.

I started this blog a year and a half ago with the explicit intention of promoting one of my backlist books each week. I’m not much of a salesman, but half the battle is simply keeping books in the awareness of the readership.

The life of an author is not filled with glamour. Artist David Kramer recently shared this about art, and it is as true about writing.

“Artists are not like athletes. We cannot win Gold. We cannot ‘beat’ other creatives. We cannot come first. Sport is objective. Our craft is subjective. Creating to ‘be the best’ is a waste of energy. Instead, create to connect to the people who need you. Because they’re out there. Create in your way, because there is no right way. Take the pressure off, and focus on your unique brand of magic.”

So, why do authors write?

There is no universal answer for this. For most, it isn’t the money. In 2022, a full-time author had a median income of $10,000 per year from books in the US. Not quite enough to live on in most places. Considerably below Federal minimum wage. If coupled with non-book (editing, designing, patronage, articles, blogs) income, that number doubles, but is still not a living wage. And that is for full-time authors. The vast majority of authors of the 2,000,000 books a year published in the US are part-time authors with other employment.

There isn’t a lot of praise that comes from being an author. I have books that have sold nearly a thousand copies and have fewer than twenty reviews. I believe readers simply do not comprehend how valuable their reviews can be.

An author’s work is not respected, and is often considered “not real work.” It is half a step above (or sometimes below) “Would you like fries with that?”

I gave a copy of For Blood or Money to a friend when it first came out in 2007. It wasn’t selling and I had a bunch of them in my office. He read it and the next time we met he exclaimed, “It was just like reading a real book!”

WTF!?? He still didn’t offer to pay for it.

Oh, boohoo. So, if it is such a miserable life, why do it? God loves you and you can sit on your hands.

Many authors will say they do it for themselves and don’t care what other people say or think. It’s an entertaining hobby for them and, like a butterfly collection, some other people will be interested in looking at the specimens. I think the percentage of such authors is fairly low. Lower than their comments would indicate.

There is, however, something in the creative mind that demands release. We’d like AI to do our dishes and laundry so we can focus on writing, rather than doing our writing so we can focus on dishes and laundry. The story doesn’t require AI to be realized. It is inside the author demanding to be told.

I’ve often used the phrase, “I don’t write for a living. I write to live.” And I also strive to make my stories available for people who read to live. That is why all my books are available for free online reading, either at SOL or on my website. Nearly all my book sales are to people who have already read or are in the process of reading the online version for free!

And I want to tell you, whether you buy a book, leave a comment, review the book, pass the book on to someone else, send me an email message, or simply enjoy reading it in your own private silence, thank you.

It is nice to have made the connection.

Wow! We are ready to start the second half of the year. Who knows what strangeness might enter my mind for the next blog post?

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

MY EDITORS LAUGH when I tell them a book is nearly finished.

“One more chapter. Two at the most,” I say.

“Right,” they laugh.

Seven chapters later, I send them the final draft. It is just so hard to get to the end! For lots of reasons:
1) Too many unanswered questions.
2) Too rushed or abrupt to end.
3) Too many people asking, “But what about…?”
4) Too many things I intended to say earlier.
5) Too long a timeframe from the climax to “Happily
ever after” to skip everything between.
6) I don’t want to rush the characters’ relationship. They should have a chance to enjoy this.

That last one is more often the case than not. My characters are real to me and I don’t want to cut down on their enjoyment in order to move the story forward. This care for my characters manifests itself at times when I’m writing the all-important first love scene between the two. I’ll get halfway into it, then just before consummation, I’ll take a break for a day or two so the characters have a chance to enjoy what’s about to happen.

And still, I get comments from readers at the end of every story, no matter how hard I’ve tried to end it satisfactorily.

“That’s all?”
“What about the abuses you alluded to in college?”
“That was abrupt.”
“Finish it already.”
“Can’t wait to hear what happens next.”

I’ve commented about listening to reader feedback in previous blog posts, so I won’t go into that again.

So, when we’ve told the story we want to tell, how do we get to Happily Ever After—or in some cases, Happily For Now. That’s the ultimate goal of erotica, or at least of romantic erotica. The reader paid their money and it's time to feel good.

While the dramatic death of one partner might be a logical conclusion to a story, it is seldom if ever an HEA conclusion. To get to that conclusion, we have more story to tell. It can’t fairly be told in a paragraph.

I make an event log titled GETTING TO HEA. It could be expressed as a PERT chart (Program Evaluation Review Technique, developed by USN in the 1950s.) if one wanted to go deep into the analysis. In my instance, it is simply a list of things that have to happen in the story (including conversations, actions, world situation, etc.) in order to get to my happy ending.

For example: I’m currently writing a new story about an Olympic gymnast. I know the story has to end sometime after the 2032 Summer Olympics. In order to get there from the current point in 2028,

1. Three years have to pass as he travels the world seeking training from great gymnastic coaches.
2. He has to fail to make the team without actually failing as a gymnast.
3. He has to resign his life to the daily tedium of his work as a trainer and massage therapist.
4. He has to run into his old friend. (Sidenote: she has to be the only one left of her acrobatic team, one having left and one retiring.)
5. He has to realize that he’d be a lot happier helping his acrobatic friend than competing as a gymnast in the Olympics.
6. They have to audition for shows with a new act.
7. The director of the new show has to be his former lover.
8. He has to reunite with his former lover and find fulfillment in a favorable opening of his new act with his new partner.
9. HEA.

You would think with this chart of activities that are known, I should be able to sit and write it in an afternoon. In fact, I think 2-9 could be covered without rushing in two or three chapters. The problem is point number one. How do I deal with three more years of his life before he gets to the things he needs?

Fortunately, I’m not writing in a diary style. I don’t have to account for every day. That is a trap of that style of book. You can’t just skip three years and have him resume as if he hadn’t left off. Even in the plotted story, a blank period always leaves the reader wondering what went on during that time. Just starting a paragraph that says:

I decided to go to Japan first. Three years later, I couldn’t believe how time had flown.

How many of you would put down the book at that point? Raise your hand.

No. Without creating a detailed diary, I need to focus on two or three things that were significant in that time and tell their story, perhaps looking back from the point I was trying to get to all along.

The point is the author has to figure out how they are getting to HEA and then plot a strategy for getting there. In writing this blog post, I may have stumbled upon my strategy for resolving my current dilemma. One thing I know, though, I won’t just skip it. I won’t condense the timing and make it three months instead of three years. I won’t simply abruptly say, “They lived Happily Ever After, for now.”

What I will do?

I will spend some time working on the story instead of blog posts!

Ah the trials and tribulations of being an author. Sigh! If I didn’t love what I’m doing, I would no longer do it. And I will continue the blog, even though I’ll be traveling for the rest of the summer. Next week, “About Being an Author.”

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

I SPEND WAY TOO MUCH TIME working sudoku puzzles. It’s a filler when I’m eating a meal (or waiting for one) in a restaurant. When I need to take a break from writing, I work sudoku puzzles. Most importantly, when I go to bed, I turn off all my devices and work a sudoku puzzle. I have learned important life lessons from sudoku.

I mean really! And they affect my erotica.

Let me see if I can pull those two threads together for you.

I have worked my way through the Mensa book of sudoku, Level 2 of Truly Nasty Sudoku, and Brown Belt Sudoku, second degree. I know what a Gordonian Rectangle, an X-wing, and a swordfish are. They are solution techniques for sudoku puzzles. And the puzzles are getting harder as I progress. They require more logic maps to solve them.

As a brief side-track (as if this whole section isn’t a side-track), I have a friend who is a brilliant mind. He is an electrical engineer and if I named some of the systems he invented while working for two of the largest tech giants in the world, you would just say, “Wow!” He also works sudoku puzzles. But his approach is very different than mine. He thinks sudoku is a game! He works the puzzles in ink. His daughter once asked, “What if you make a mistake?” His answer was, “Then I lose the game.”

NO! Please. To me, sudoku is not a game. It is a puzzle to be solved. If I make a mistake and ‘lose a game’—often the case when I’m working a puzzle late at night and falling asleep in the process—I erase the puzzle and start over!

Yes, erase. I work sudoku on paper with a pencil. I make marks, small numbers, and erasures.

But success often depends on what order I solve the steps. I can’t approach sudoku randomly. There are methods of identifying the ‘only one choice’ answers. There are methods of examining rows, columns, and boxes, of looking at the possibilities for individual numbers, and ways to separate triples from doubles.

Choosing the right place to start, however, often determines whether I succeed in solving the problem.

That’s just like writing!

Before I started writing Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric in January 2008, I had compiled several hundred pages of esoteric research over a period of thirty years. I knew everything that went into the story. Most impressive amongst the collection was every scrap of information I could dig up on the Library of Alexandria and its destruction or disappearance.

I was excited about that research and started my book with Ptolemy the First making the City of Alexandria the capital of Egypt after Alexander the Great’s death and division of his empire.

You know: Start a story at the beginning. Of the first 40,000 words I wrote, 25,000 were descriptions of how the Library of Alexandria was founded, flourished, spread, was destroyed, was moved in secret to Carthage, then Rome, then Constantinople, and finally to Nemrud Dagi in Anatole.

They were the first words I cut when I began rewriting in November of 2008. The manufactured history of the Library of Alexandria was not the thriller of racing time, biblioterrorists, and homeland security across two continents in an effort to find and preserve a second book supposedly printed by Johannes von Gutenberg.

Instead, I started the book with the first act of biblioterrorism that caught Keith Drucker in the rain of shattered glass from the atrium of the library where he’d been evaluating old manuscripts. It was a much better starting point. The book flowed well from that point on. The history of the Library—as well as the history of ink, the legends surrounding Gutenberg’s legal and business dealings, the exact proportions of lead, tin, and antimony needed to create a dimensionally stable alloy for printer’s type—was revealed in dribbles as Keith and his girlfriend Maddie go from library to library, just one step ahead of the terrorists.

I found the right starting point.

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

Starting at the beginning is a logical step in writing. But when I wrote Devon Layne’s Living Next Door to Heaven series, I had to restrain myself from writing any sexual material involving any of the major characters until the second book because they were all under fourteen. After having the first chapter rejected four times, even after I scrubbed it, SOL’s webmaster approved it for release and explained the automated system had rejected it based on the description, which talked about kids.

I felt the entire story would be lacking if I didn’t start with the kids, though. Still, it didn’t start with birth. I chose a significant moment that would establish Brian’s relationship with Heaven immediately, even though it was not sexual or romantic.

I saw a cartoon recently from Grant Snider that described what he called “The Story Coaster.”

Like much erotica, the illustration shows way too much deep backstory, lengthy prologue, and exposition before finally getting to the climax at only about a quarter of the way through the ride. From there on, the author is trying to figure out a) how to make it longer, or b) how to end it all gracefully.

I have been told—frequently—that I need to get some action right up front while not giving away the whole storyline. I fail at it as often as I succeed. But usually, I manage to find the beginning of the story I want to tell instead of reciting tons of backstory that I need to know in order to write the story, but the reader doesn’t need to be told in order to enjoy the story.

Of course, there is a plethora of authors who take the action-first advice and open with a sex scene. I find it is better in my books to build a lot of sexual tension between the characters, but to make them wait to get to the main event. Typically, my readers have to get through half the book before they are rewarded with sex. Once again, it’s something I strive for but am not always successful at achieving.

If I fail at solving a sudoku puzzle, I erase it and start over, choosing a different starting point based on what I learned the first time. The same is true of my erotica. All of my stories get rewritten, but the second draft is all about finding the right starting point for the story. Based on what I learned in writing the whole book, is the first sentence that I loved so much really the right first sentence to start the book?

Much of the craft of writing erotica is just general writing craft. Next week I’m going to deal with another important aspect: Getting to “The End.”