Dark Paladin: Blog

I will not claim to be a great wordsmith. I enjoy writing,I get laid for it, that's good enough. I read mostly classics these days like Proust or interesting stories like "Blowout" or "The Sparrow" - but sometimes I also just enjoy a good hot sex story.

Sometimes I see some really good writing. Like "The Binding Rings" or this new entry "Enter Veronica" - authors who write some hot scenes. Are they cliche? A bit. So is my writing - "guy finds a way to get sex". But those two tales I really enjoy the layout and care taken.

Now I'm gonna gripe cause I'm an older guy and I can. Some stories I see the categories and think "impregnation? Reluctance? Right up my alley!"

And then my dick wilts because the writing is so bad. Not to name names, but please - don't do this.

"Wow Jimmy your dick is so big!"

"I know Maggie I'm huge."

"I've been married ten years and didn't know a dick could get hard! I totally want to have your baby now!"

"Wow you want to have my baby that's so cool let's sex!"

"Gee willickers sex is so good I want to nut right now!"

If your characters act like their brains are leaking into their shoes, try again. Please, kids. Don't ruin she with bad writing.

I'm still working on Invention 2, but there's been this story rattling around in the back of my mind that I'd like to write. Something a lot more serious than "man fucks a lot of girls and gets them pregnant" (and my readers know I do enjoy that).

This story though would deal with some difficult subjects, like how people perceive race, national origin, class, all the goey icky stuff that makes people upset.

I know this from personal experience, because I once had a character who was pretty awful. They used a racial epithet against another character. Now, I should mention - Character A was a killer, someone who used their power to torture and blackmail people. They were clearly Not A Good Person, and they used a Not Good Word.

But when I had them use this racial epithet, I had several emails that boiled down to "You are a horrible racist person for putting that into your story!"

And I had to think - wait. This character, who was established as Not A Good Person, said a Not Good Thing - and you blame the *author* for being a racist? Is this how Mark Twain felt when he wrote about Huck Finn (not that I'm saying I'm anywhere near Twain's league, it's an example) where Huck uses the n word, reaches the conclusion that "man - this racism stuff is really stupid" but people today get upset because he was using the language of the time which we've (mostly) moved passed.

I've said before I don't write for my readers, or fans, or whatever. I write for myself, and if others enjoy it, glad they did, if they didn't, well - read a story you like.

We'll see how things go. But it's always a consideration when you set out to write something you know will upset some people, and even though you mostly don't care, you'd have to be a sociopath not to care a little about how people feel.

After some useful reader feedback, I was going through the old chapters and realized there were some issues - formatting not there, words messed up, some were clear writer mistakes, others were things like "I think I had a line here but it's not."

So, I redid everything in Markdown, and hopefully once all of the updated files are done working their way through the tubes that make up the Internet, there should be less issues.

We'll see. My goal is to have Invention II finally wrapped up at the end of the year. But the best laid plans of mice and men....

Of all of the things I have ever done - from adding coconut oil to my coffee, using roasted jalapeños in my egg salad sandwiches, writing stories about women being raped, kindly controlled with mind control, impregnated with or without their conscious will -

None of these rival my most evil act yet: Stating I was debating changing chapter names to put them out of order to troll people!

I swear. I've gotten more messages about even hinting that I would change chapter titles than anything else I have done. There's some people with serious OCD out there.

Well. This could be fun. What if I rename the chapters for The Invention II? Like reorder them so someone clicks on 14 and the next chapter says 2 just to mess with them?

Or "Chapter 15: Electric Bugaloo", "Chapter 5: The Return of the Revenge!"

I probably won't do it. But soooo tempted.