This is number 107 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I WRITE OLD MEN’S EROTICA. That means that we have to stop and talk for half an hour about the weather and our latest surgery before we get to any of the fun stuff.
Is that what I mean by TMI (Too Much Information)? It’s a good example, but is far from the only thing. No doubt at any age, you have encountered a person who has to go into every detail of what happened and all the events leading up to it. By the time they get to the point (if they ever do), you’ve forgotten what they were starting to tell you.
Many of those people are called ‘wives.’
“You won’t believe what happened to Maribelle this afternoon!” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, this morning after I dropped the kids off at school… We were running late because that son of yours absolutely refused to put his shirt on right side out… So, I was in a hurry and didn’t notice that awful bully lurking beside the school, but Elmer and Elsie were already inside. I thought I’d make that pot roast you like so much… You remember the one my mother served you and you went ga-ga over? Well, SuperFoods had roasts on sale for just $6.99 a pound, so I headed over there, but Raygun Road was closed because of a fallen tree. You know that storm that came through last night? They were just getting around to clearing the road and instead of waiting in line to take the detour, I turned around and decided to go to Best Grocery to get the meat, even though it chapped my ass to have to pay 9.49 a pound for it when SuperFoods had exactly the same cuts for $6.99…”
Maybe in forty-five minutes or so, you will get the information of what happened to Maribelle this afternoon and maybe you won’t. But you will certainly get too much information!
When I started the Team Manager series early in 2021, I knew nothing about Iowa, basketball, farming, or teens. I researched. Every step of the way, I researched the history of girls’ basketball in Iowa, the top crops, the weather cycles, the high school classes that were typical in that area, the scores of basketball games, the terminology in use, and the operation of the ATF, FBI, and county law enforcement.
The problem with research is that an author wants to use all his new-found knowledge. By the time I reached the fourth book in the series, CHAMP!, I was having to research colleges, application processes, recruitment, college sports, and the effect of COVID on athletes.
By spring of 2022, I was a fan of Iowa basketball at all levels—yes, that included the incredible performances of one Caitlyn Clark at the University of Iowa. I knew the Division III schools of the American Rivers Conference, their mascots, and what each gym looked like from the inside. (I even visited several of them and verified I’d gotten it right the next year.) And I started plotting which of the schools my characters would go to.
And that’s where trouble really started for me.
I talked about characters being recruited and receiving scholarships, only to be informed (after publication) that it wasn’t how recruitment worked in Division III schools, that there were no athletic scholarships for those universities and colleges, that coaches weren’t allowed to talk to high school students, and that my general premise for getting the crew together in college was wrong!
But I’d described it all! The books were released in the market. There was little I could do but endure the comments from those fans who actually knew. And none of that information was really necessary. I’d become so enthused that I wanted to share all my (faulty) knowledge with everyone who read my story.
TMI. But it’s still a good story.
CHAMP! and the entire Team Manager series are available as eBooks on Bookapy.
I find this frequently when reading other people’s works. If something particularly interests the author, he feels it is incumbent upon him to share it with the world reading his novel. I think there is little that exemplifies this more than the description of weapons. For example:
Blaine recognized the Bolt X7 revolver in the assassin’s hand. It was the newest in the venerable line of Bolt handguns, known as the most lethal in the world. It weighed only twenty-eight ounces with a poly grip customized to the hand of the owner. It was a known competition single action pistol with a trigger pull weight of less than three pounds. Some competitors found the light weight resulted in too much kick from the high-caliber shells. He could see the six-inch barrel, equipped with a silencer, didn’t waver in the assassin’s hand. What Blaine didn’t know was the ten grains of powder propelling the flathead carbonite bullet toward Drake in front of him would leave an entry wound just a quarter of an inch across, but the exit wound would be two inches across, leaving enough power behind the deadly bullet to penetrate Blaine as well.
TMI!
And yes, I know much of the information in this that I made up on the fly is faulty. You can’t put a silencer on a revolver. Ten grains of powder could probably blow up the barrel of a lightweight gun. Etc. etc. But most of all, who cares?
I submit to the Congress of the United States that any gun control laws submitted henceforth should have a limit imposed of twenty words used to describe any weapon in fiction literature!
Yes, there is a small and vocal group of gun enthusiasts who want to read all this and contest any inaccuracy they find in the information ad nauseam, even down to whether or not the gun in question would have a kick. But who cares? Not the average reader of even the most intense thriller. In fact, the information creates such a large interruption in the flow of the story that most readers will have forgotten who the characters were and why they were being shot at.
Without going into detail, I will say that the biggest flaw in erotica is sex scenes with too much information. The more information included in a sex scene, the more likely readers are to be distracted by things like whether or not the position is even possible, how many hands are doing what, and the probability that these two or ten characters would ever allow themselves to be in this situation at all.
And all that, after we’ve endured half an hour of talk about the weather and the latest surgery.
It seems there are no end of writing issues to write about. Next week, I’m going to discuss comments, email and criticism: “Room to Respond.”