This is number 121 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
When you're hot you're hot
And when you're not you're not
Put all the money in and let's roll 'em again
When you're hot you're hot
—Jerry Reed
HERE IN LAS VEGAS, it’s the first of September and the temperature is still over 100º. Why did I think living here was a good idea? Well, when you’re hot, you’re hot. The air conditioning bill is over a hundred, too.
I’ve been working hard on several projects and since getting back to Vegas in the middle of August, I’ve been checking them off. I finished Forever Yours and the pre-release eBook is available today to my Sneak Peek Patrons. I finished my Halloween contest entry (rules demand this stay confidential until after judging) and it is in the hands of my final editor.
I’ve completed the Signature Edition paperback of Forever Yours and it will be released September 14. But that’s not the only one. I’m nearly finished compiling the Signature Edition of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. All three volumes will be released in one massive (670-page) hardcover tome. The interview to be included in the new edition is slated for September 25 and I’ll release the book around the first of November. I’ll also do a public re-release Volume 3: Current Era (Mostly), since I’ve done a significant amount of rewriting and adding new material to it. (Yes, my faithful editor, you’ll get it first.)
The Signature Edition of the Strange Art Trilogy, another three-in-one volume, will be released near the end of the year. Editing and layout are finished and I’m awaiting the interview questions for that one.
Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain has become my major creative focus for a while. I expect I’ll get that finished by November or so. I might manage release it in 2025, but I’m not really expecting it until January.
Yeah, when you’re hot, you’re hot.
My records indicate that I began the first draft of Double Twist on the first of May 2019 and completed it at the end of June. 168,000 words in two months. That only told a piece of the story, though.
The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins was a five-volume set that I started in September of 2018 and finished in September of 2019. It was a total of 837,535 words. In one year. When you’re hot, you’re hot. During those years, I also wrote Things I Never Told My Wife and Adams’ Apples. Shorter works, but significant, nonetheless. And I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits and Wild Woods, Stocks & Blondes, and A Place at the Table. It was a busy year.
The thing is, I was hot. I was releasing at least one book every quarter. The words just kept flowing. My Patreon membership quadrupled. The scores on my serials were on a constant rise and book sales were unprecedented. I felt my writing was finally maturing to a point I could have a nice supplemental income from it.
Ah, the sweet smell of success. In the next two years, I wrote and published the Team Manager series as well as a number of other books. They continued to sell well and achieve high scores.
All these books including The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins, are available at ZBookStore.
And when you’re not, you’re not.
I have continued to write successful series for the past three years, but the fire seems to have cooled a bit. Neither Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon nor the Photo Finish hexalogy attracted the readership nor attention of my other books. Imagine my shock when my 2024 Valentine’s Day contest entry, “Carousel,” placed last in the contest! It’s the only story in my collection on SOL that rated less than a 6.0. To redeem myself, my 2024 Halloween contest entry, The Key to Eve, won third prize.
Yikes! as alarmists say.
Maybe I should redesign my logo!
No. I don’t want to draw the president’s attention to my erotica. It’s way too woke! (Meaning disliked by right wing bigots. Not all right-wingers. Just the bigots.)
The truth is that readership changes over the years. I know a portion of my most devoted readers are aging and dying. They are being replaced by younger readers who have a different set of interests and a different standard of rating. I can tell this is true as scores on many of my older stories that were highly rated have dropped a little over the past two years as well.
That is not to say that my stories shouldn’t be improved or that I shouldn’t make adjustments to my style. Overall, I believe my most recent books, The Strongman, Soulmates, and Forever Yours, are much better written than many of my earlier highly-rated stories. That doesn’t make them more popular. It just means that I’m not as hot as I once was.
It shows up in the speed of my writing, as well. I guess that is one of the things I need to face. I’ll be 76 years old this month, and many things don’t work as fast as they used to. In fact, one of the basic realities of aging is that things people used to tell me to slow down, they are now hounding me to speed up: Driving, talking, walking, writing, sex. Just get on with it, would you?
Of that list, I single out writing. I began writing Forever Yours, for example, November 1, 2024. Now this month, I am finally getting it released. The first draft of 151,000 words and 45 chapters was finished before Christmas. 2,960 words per day. The second draft took the next eight months. It ended up 257,000 words and 73 chapters. 1,070 words per day. Part of the problem was a simple slow-down in my thinking and part of it was exhaustion.
In 2024, I wrote an average of 2,011 words per day, all year long! In 2023: 2,247 words per day. 2022: 3,808 words per day. 2021: 3,217. 2020 (you remember that year, right?): 993 words per day. 2019: 3,129.
You get the picture? So far, in 2025 I’ve averaged 1,931 per day. I’ve slowed down. Because I’m not as hot anymore. Discarding the year of the plague, I’m writing about 1,000 words a day fewer than my five-year average!
So, the question is: Will I get hot again? Maybe. Seems I’ve had a lot of jumbled up ideas in my head that haven’t shaken out yet. I want to get some of them out on paper. And I confidently think, you want that, too!
I recently received a comment from a respected novelist who had just finished reading all three volumes of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. She said: “I just finished your series. Quite fun but disturbing read.” Next week, “Looking into the Dark.”