aroslav

Saturday, July 18 (After Chapter 21 of The Prodigal)

Tony: Are you sure you want to do this?

aroslav: Fair is fair, I suppose.

Tony: You usually start out with the basics. Name, age, birthday?

aroslav: My name is aroslav, all lower case. I'm also known as Devon Layne. I celebrate my birthday on August 2 and I'm two years old.

Tony: You have no idea how weird that sounds. So let's start with the name. What ethnic background is "aroslav?"

aroslav: Guinea pig. A number of years ago I adopted a cavy from a friend who was moving out of town. Sadly the cavy died after a couple of years. My friend named him Valsora. He was into RPGs and thought the name sounded noble and vaguely like a Norse hero. Quite a name for a three pound guinea pig. aroslav is the reverse spelling. I kept the lower case "a" but lowered the "v" so it wouldn't be too obvious that it was a word spelled backward.

Tony: Now about your age and birthday...

aroslav: I discovered and registered at Storiesonline on August 2. That's when I adopted the name aroslav. About two years ago.

Tony: Okay, then how old is Devon Layne, really?

aroslav: Even younger. I didn't adopt the name Devon Layne until I started publishing my erotic romances on Kindle and Nook a year later.

Tony: So Devon Layne is a pseudonym for aroslav which is an avatar named after a guinea pig. I'm not going to find anything out about the real you, am I?

aroslav: You're interviewing aroslav, not his alter-ego.

Tony: Okay. Let me just say that for a two-year-old, you're pretty mature-looking. Let's try a safe topic. When did you start writing erotica?

aroslav: About twenty years ago.

Tony:???

aroslav: Writing's not something you can start at the time you create your penname. It predates time. In fact, I have writings in my files that stretch back almost fifty years. They just aren't by aroslav.

Tony: O-kay. You know, those of us in the story sound pretty normal compared to you.

aroslav: I should be so normal.

Tony: Back to writing erotica. How did that all start?

aroslav: My alter-ego who shall not be named was writing a mystery about playing blackjack in Reno.

Tony: Is that the three Bs story?

aroslav: The current draft is called "Blackjack. Blackmail. Blacklist." Not a very thrilling title, though, so it will probably change again. Originally he was going to call it "Double Down," but there are several books by that name and none of them are very good.

Tony: Okay. So?

aroslav: It came in the blackmail part. He was trying to figure out what each character in the book could be blackmailed about. You've got this thirty-ish computer programmer type guy whose real estate agent wife is smoking hot and loves to play sex games. That's fine as far as it goes, but he decides to write about their trysts under an assumed name and post them online. Remember, that was a different era. He figures that if his wife ever found out about what he was writing, she'd divorce him; or worse yet, cut him off. The thing is, the author had to come up with a couple of stories that the character would write to post. That was the conception of aroslav, but not the birth. Writing about sex was a lot of fun but couldn't be done in public, so to speak.

Tony: Did you abandon the stories completely?

aroslav: The characters and the stories kept coming to mind over the years of gestation and began to take on a secret life of their own. In fact, they became separate from the original BBB book.

Tony: Are you going to publish them?

aroslav: I did. When I read stories on SOL, I remembered the early stuff and frankly figured I could do as well as some of what I was reading. I thought the story had potential, so I toyed with it some more and developed it into a short novel. On December 2, 2011, I posted the first chapter and became an "author" on SOL. The story was called "The Art & Science of Love." I didn't know how the whole author/reader thing worked on SOL and was surprised that people just started reading it and rated it highly. Then people started really downloading it and I kept writing the full twelve chapters. I was engaged in some pretty heavy-duty shit in my life at the time and managed to lose myself in the writing. The story will come out in November 2013 on Kindle and Nook, and maybe in paper this time. It's been completely rewritten and both the characters and story-line enhanced. The new working title is "Passion's Disciple" by Devon Layne.

Tony: I'm going to dig, aroslav. You've mentioned "heavy-duty shit" and in several of your blog posts you've talked about dealing with depression or how the Model Student series got you through a dark time in your life. What happened?

aroslav: It was his fault with the damned depressing shit he writes.

Tony: And how was that connected to writing erotic romance?

aroslav: He writes and publishes mysteries and thrillers. They aren't particularly sexy, though they occasionally have a nice love scene in them. The thing is, even though the detective comes out victorious and the mystery gets solved, it's seldom a happy ending. He'd just finished writing a mystery in which the hero brings down a kidnapper and rescues his girlfriend's daughter, but in the process the girlfriend is killed in a fire. Most of the book builds the relationship with the two falling in love and dreaming about a future together and then she's dead. That's when he realized his own life was a lot like that. I became an author of erotic romances so he could write something that ended with "happily ever after."

Tony: You really keep these personalities separate. You refer to your alter-ego—or are you his alter-ego?—in the third person. Do you ever get confused?

aroslav: I'm a very different person than he is. I've tried crossing over, but with limited success.

Tony: What happened?

aroslav: After ASL was finished, I thought I'd continue with the art theme and post a story that was based on real life—his real life. That was "Art School." It was too real. I got a lot of criticism for ending it on a downer, predicting that the artist never amounted to anything and divorce was in the offing. I ended up cutting the last two paragraphs and scores started climbing. It was short, though. Those who had read it had read it and weren't going back to change their scores simply because I had repented. It was a valuable lesson. Not only did I want to write things that ended happily ever after, that was what people wanted to read. And forcing myself to go that direction helped me recover my hope for the future as well.

Tony: So you only write erotic romance now?

aroslav: That's all I've ever written. He still writes mysteries and thrillers. We collaborated on a story here on SOL called A Painful Silence with limited success. I tossed all kinds of warnings up around the story so people would know it wasn't the gentle romance they might expect from me and both readership and reviews reflected that. We still don't know whose name it will appear under if it's published. The first chapter is truly horror-filled. It gives me the creeps. Aside from that one story, I stick with the happy stories and he does the hard-boiled shit.