aroslav: Blog

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Four Seasons

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This is number 120 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

MY MOTHER was a Methodist preacher back in the days when it was truly unusual to have a woman in the pulpit. One of the first things she did when she was assigned to her first church was establish a ‘children’s story time’ in the middle of the Sunday service. She invited the children in the congregation to the chancel steps, sat down with them, and told a story that had a moral, or that tied in with her theme for the day.

Adults in the congregation loved it! The stories never sounded like she was preaching at them.

I remember a series of stories she told that had birds as characters. I can’t remember the names of all the birds who lived in the little bird town, but they each had a story connected to them. One stuck with me about a very talkative bird who just couldn’t stay quiet during church service. The choir was singing a lovely anthem but this bird just tried to talk louder. Finally, she said to her neighbor, “I wish they wouldn’t sing so loud!”

It happened that her wish was granted before it was spoken. The choir reached a point in the song where there was a dramatic pause in the music and everyone in the congregation could clearly hear the churchbird’s comment. My mother said, “She quickly looked around for a hole in the floor she could crawl into but couldn’t find one small enough. And then the choir sang the last line of the anthem, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’”

I often thought of my mother when I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose on SOL) Steven George and the Terror and Steven George and The Dragon. Steven is, by profession, a dragonslayer, but has never actually slain a dragon since he doesn’t know what a dragon looks like, where it lives, or how to kill it. So, he sets off on a quest. On that quest, he exchanges ‘Once upon a time’ stories with the people he meets. Each story leads him closer to his goal: A dragon in the first book and a mysterious terror in the second book.

Many of the stories had dramatic pauses. One, a campfire ghost story concludes when a disembodied hand suddenly lands on Steven’s chest. It doesn’t turn out the way the story teller planned, but there was nowhere to hide.

The Steven George stories are available on ZBookStore and in paperback from online vendors. Not children’s stories. Topics are often mature though not R-rated.

What does any of this have to do with ‘Four Seasons?’

I’ll get there. First, I want to mention that after my mother’s church service one stalwart of the community and self-appointed guardian of the church approached my mother in the greeting line.

“I think in your story you made a mistake. You said she couldn’t find a hole small enough to crawl into. You must have meant a hole large enough.”

“Oh,” said my mother kindly. “She was a big bird, but she had a very small spirit.”

Miscellaneous things cross my feed each day and I am as susceptible to following dozens of links that have nothing to do with what I’m looking for or interested in as anyone else. Among the things that suddenly popped up when I was watching highlights of a women’s basketball game, was a video of a talented pianist who plays in public places and often has people who ‘happen by’ join him, either playing an instrument, singing, or even dancing.

I’ve watched dozens of his videos and I’ll give you his name if you’d like to look him up online. It’s Julien Cohen. Don’t be surprised to find half a dozen other similar flash artists. I’ve spent hours watching and listening in amazement.

He often plays very difficult music and I count Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to be among those. Most notably, I’ve enjoyed his rendition of the ‘Summer’ movement. It has an entire story behind it as a summer day is interrupted by a sudden thunderstorm and everyone runs for shelter. It’s amazing. I’ve seen violinists as young as ten years join him in playing the complex piece.

What I’ve also noticed, however, is that when Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is played (any of the four movements), everyone in the audience—be it a restaurant, an airport, a train station, or a street corner—becomes a conductor. Hands begin waving, fingers tapping, eyes fluttering. It’s a piece that calls out for people to conduct it.

Some are better than others. Some, no matter how much they enjoy the music, just can’t keep the beat, or even keep up. Many have no idea there is a story being played. Some will frown when the pace slows or quickens. Some will simply shake their heads or sit still while the music washes over them.

His work is not without criticism. Some traditionalists have decried his mixing of classical music with viral trends. Some believe he is commercializing the art form. Heaven forfend that a musician should find a way to make money from his art!

All want more when he finishes.

My deep insight: I find that readers are often similar to an audience for a street musician. It helps me understand what happens when I post a story.

First, the audience is attracted by a noise that is out of place for the environment. A piano in a public market? A violin on a rooftop? A voice breaking the silence with Ave Maria? A story description that mentions AI?

Second, they decide how long they will listen. Some simply don’t have time right now. The lunch break is only thirty minutes. Some will ignore the time constraint until it becomes urgent for them to be elsewhere. Some will simply stay until the musician stops playing, will drop folded money in his tip jar, and leave happy.

Third, they judge both the music and the musician in seconds. They don’t like this piece of music, so they don’t like the musician. There was a wrong note, so they judge the musician unworthy of this prestigious stage at the corner of Main and Market.

Finally, as soon as they hear the music, they want to conduct it. They might have no musical ability themselves, but want the musician to follow their random hand waving. They will immediately make a judgment regarding where the music will go and criticize it for not going where they think it should. They will scoff at the jar with its meagre tips.

Yes, these are all things that writers experience at the hands of their readers. And other readers make reading decisions based on a particular reader’s comments. Their own opinion is based on that of others. If that reader didn’t like the first page, it is likely this reader won’t like the book. The die is cast.

The summer in Las Vegas is waning, but the temperature has not yet gotten the message. Temperatures still reach 100º or more each day. It’s inspiring. Next week: ‘When You’re Hot, You’re Hot.’

Tab, You’re it!

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This is number 119 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

OH, WHAT’S THAT THING CALLED? It was right on the tip of my tongue!

Of course, you don’t have to be 75 to forget what things are called, but it helps. That’s why I constantly have a browser open to search for terms.

That’s not the only reason. I write stories. My stories have been set in Indiana, Minnesota, Washington, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, England, Germany, Greece, and various places I don’t recall at the moment. And people call things different names in different places.

My post about Stocks & Blondes (Wayzgoose) last week was what sparked this post. In one of the early chapters of that story, my Seattle-based detective, Deb Riley, is stopped by a policeman because her license tabs had expired.

I received multiple corrections. The date sticker that is attached to a license plate, I was told, is called a ‘tag,’ not a ‘tab.’ Well, that depends on where you are located.

In the State of Washington, the standard term is ‘tabs.’ The same is true in Minnesota. In Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, they are simply referred to as ‘stickers.’ Indiana refers to the plate itself as a tab and tag is used to identify a temporary license.

Who knew?

I did. That’s why there is an open browser window on my desktop.

What do you drink? Pop, soda, soft drink, coke, or seltzer?
What do you sit on? Sofa, couch, davenport, divan, chesterfield, or your ass?
Do you eat a hoagie or a submarine or a torpedo or a hero sandwich?

When I wrote the Team Manager series, I decided to set it in Iowa for no other reason than that I hadn’t written a story set there before. I really didn’t know much about the state before I started writing. I assumed (incorrectly) that it was a midwestern state pretty much like Indiana.

One thing I got right was that basketball is very big in Iowa. But I also discovered that everything I knew about the sport was outdated! The idea that an Iowa high school of any size wouldn’t have a girls’ basketball team when the story was set in or about 2019, was absurd! You’d be better to say girls’ basketball started in Iowa!

And Division III NCAA basketball is huge in Iowa. If you’d suggested a year earlier that I would be able to name all the schools and their team names in the American Rivers Conference, I’d have laughed my head off. And then to discover the Iowa phenomenon, Caitlin Clark! I became an instant fan of the Hawkeyes and now of the WNBA. I confess that the feat I managed in 2019 of being able to name the schools in the American Rivers Conference has now been duplicated with the teams of the WNBA.

But basketball teams and players were not the only thing I had to learn. In Iowa, you sit on a couch. You drink pop, usually from a can. Your girlfriend or boyfriend is your Bae. The number one livestock raised in Iowa is pigs. The number one crop is corn. The state pretty much shuts down for the girls’ high school basketball tournament. And for the State Fair. Being the Pork Queen is a great honor.

If I had decided to set that story in Georgia, everything would have been different.

The Team Manager series is available from ZBookStore.

My most recent work, Forever Yours, is set in Pittsburgh, PA. Why? I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I finished the final draft of that book this week and it has begun public serialization on StoriesOnline today. Like right now! My Sneak Peek and Sausage Grinder patrons are a couple of weeks ahead of that!

I had set Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) City Limits in a fictional town in Northeastern Pennsylvania. I decided to set this one in the Southwestern part of the state.

By the way, in both Iowa and Pennsylvania, the sticker is called a tag, you sit on a couch, and you drink pop, mostly. According to state tax laws, Pennsylvanians also have sparkling water, mineral water, soda water, and similar carbonated and non-carbonated drinks. The distinction the tax law makes is that sales tax is collected on carbonated drinks. However, flavored water (non-carbonated by definition) is not taxed. Sparkling water is usually referred to as seltzer.

There are regional differences within the state. In the western part of the state, they drink pop. In the eastern part, they drink soda. The same regional differences are found between sneakers or tennis shoes, trash can or garbage can, tractor trailer or semi. The state is united on the term hoagie, however.

It is not unlikely that I’ll still have made some errors in terms that I failed to look up. And when my characters travel to Lisa’s home state of Louisiana, all bets are off. Her maternal grandparents are of Cajun lineage, so they are more likely to serve chicory than coffee. Henry could have problems with that! And if they want a soft drink, they’ll just order a coke (generic through the South). If they just order ‘tea,’ it will be roughly fifty percent sugar!

Since it is a release day for Forever Yours, albeit only of the serialization, I’ll spend a few lines promoting it. The book is not yet available in either eBook or print as the final chapters are still being edited.

I’ve been fascinated with the concept of The Singularity for a number of years. In 2006, Bill Gates called Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, one of the most important books of the century. So, I read it. All 650 pages, including 105 pages of footnotes! I’ve begun at least three different stories based on the concept of a technology-biology link-up of some sort. There have been stories like that for many years. I never intended Forever Yours to be a book about The Singularity.

It surprised me.

One of the things I’ve pointed out frequently is that no matter how much of your life—even linking your brain—you upload to a computer, you don’t live forever. When you die, you die. That electronic device may contain all your memories, and also know more than you, think faster than you, and even make moral and ethical decisions better than you. But it isn’t you.

In Forever Yours, computer genius Henry Pascal starts a company based on concepts of a Small Language Model instead of the prevailing chatbot Large Language Models, because individual humans don’t know everything. I’ve always been amused by ‘do-over’ stories in which the hero sent back in time has Wikipedic knowledge of everything that happened during his first life. If he didn’t have the knowledge and skills to invent the personal computer in his first life, it is unlikely that he acquired them in his second.

We are a specialized species. I take my car to a mechanic. I visit a doctor. I call a plumber. I hire an artist. I don’t know how many microns to set my points at, or if my vehicle even has points anymore. I can’t write code other than fundamental html. I could no more create an artificial intelligence program than sprout wings and fly. But as a writer, I can imagine an artificial intelligence that might be indistinguishable from a person in most ways.

And so, as Henry attempts to solve real-world limited problems with his computer programs, the development of a singularity comes somewhat as a surprise, not an intent.

And how he interacts with it is more surprising yet.

Forever Yours by aroslav (Devon Layne) begins serialization today on StoriesOnline. Free.

Next week—I know I had a topic in mind. I’ll have to inquire of my avatar as to what it was!

Quick Update

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Remember when I said I was taking the month of July off? Crap! It's August 10th!

Well, here's the good news. Even though the eBook is not yet ready for release, my newest story, Forever Yours, will start posting here on SOL next Sunday with the first two chapters. Six long months in the making. It will continue to post a chapter every three days until it ends in mid-March. Yeah. It will be running for even longer than it took to write it! So, get ready for a read that tantalizes and captures you from day one.

However, there is one thing I need to warn you about. If you are one of those people who can't wait three days for a cliff hanger to be resolved, wait until March to start reading, or buy the eBook when it comes out in September. Most chapters don't end with a cliff hanger, but some do. It's where the action best pauses and is a natural chapter break. It will be resolved in three days when the next chapter posts.

I can't believe I need to make that announcement, but too many people have had their feelings hurt because they couldn't wait three days for the resolution. I just want you to know it's going to be there, so don't start if you can't stand it.

Here's the summary:

Henry Pascal, a high school senior at the beginning of our tale, started building his own computers when he was eight years old. He was heavily influenced by his mother's complaints that every time a system or application was updated by the manufacturer, they broke something. He set about first manually and then automatically seeking out what was worthless in updates as far as his mother was concerned, so he could block those features without hurting the functionality of the system or app.

That led to Henry exploring the use of AI to manage the process and once he became proficient in developing and using artificial intelligence, a world of opportunities opened up to him. With his three closest friends from high school, Henry starts a company to develop AI-powered applications that served the user rather than attempting to control them. The business attracted investors and customers so quickly that before they were out of college, the business was profitable and nearing its first public offering.

Artificial Intelligence, AI, is a contentious subject, but Henry didn't realize that it would attract so many malicious hackers and even physical attacks on his partners and him. Even the Pentagon attempts to use eminent domain to grab the technology and even the company. When Henry develops a way to upload life data into an AI, creating a singularity, the opposition gets even closer to home.

Minimal sex, mostly in the first half of the story as the teens are exploring and discovering. While there are elements of computer science that are not yet fully developed in our society, they are near enough that it wouldn't be right to call this science fiction. And it's not really coming-of-age either. The characters are young adults determined to make both a personal and a professional success of their lives.

It all starts next Sunday, August 17, 2025.

In the Groove

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This is number 118 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

OF COURSE I need a vacation! We all need a vacation now and then, just to recharge our batteries and refresh our spirits. It’s only—hmm—eleven months until my next vacation.

Yes, I just had a vacation. In addition to spending the summer with family and friends in Seattle, I took a week to go to Stratford, Ontario to watch six plays. And last weekend, I saw two more plays in the Northwest. I had breakfast out with one friend and lunch with another. I celebrated my sister’s birthday and my daughter’s anniversary. It’s been a great summer.

I’m going home to Las Vegas tomorrow. I need a break!

Isn’t that often the way we end a vacation? We get home and need to rest up.

For me, getting rested up means getting back in the groove of my typical and unexciting routines. In other words, getting focused on writing again.

The past few weeks, I’ve been staying up until midnight (mostly watching silly videos I would normally just skip over), getting up sometime after seven or eight o’clock, and spending hours reading, listening to audio books, doomscrolling, and—yes—writing. My writing pace significantly slowed.

I did manage to get three chapters of my newest WIP, Forever Yours, finished this week. But as I look at my statistics sheet for this year, I find I am twenty-four words a day short of my goal for the year. I set my goal as 2,000 words a day on the average. I’m at 1,976 per day. Not bad, right? Except this is day 221 of the year. That means I’m 5,304 words short for the year. That is quite a bit to catch up on!

Please don’t send me missives regarding the quality of the words vs. the quantity, avoiding burnout, pacing myself, and not being too hard on myself. I know. That’s like my dental hygienist lecturing me each time I have my teeth cleaned on the proper way I should be flossing. I’m almost 76 years old. I know. Her condescending lecture is not going to miraculously change my behavior.

When I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) Stocks & Blondes back in 2007, I was challenging myself to write multiple projects at the same time. This required discipline. I was focused on just two projects, but they were very different. In fact, there would be just one brief point at which the two stories crossed.

I arose every morning at five o’clock, made coffee, and retreated to my office for one hour of maintenance. That included checking bank statements, social media, and other miscellany that occupied my mind before the day started. Then I made my wife and daughter breakfast, and returned to the office to write frantically for an hour and a half.

I was employed at the time, so I had to go to work, act professional, and accomplish what I could in the office. At five o’clock, I left work, returned home to participate in family dinner time, including reading to my daughter. Then I would take my glass of wine to the office to write for another hour or two.

I worked on Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) literary piece, The Volunteer for about two hours and at least one more glass of wine. I continued this process for thirty days, at the end of which I had two completed manuscripts. Routine. It was important. I had a rhythm that got me through each day and helped me get two books drafted.

At the time, my creative writing was restricted to November. It was tolerated by my family for that month, but my normal day did not include writing time. In fact, it was six years before I published The Volunteer and twelve years before I published Stocks & Blondes. By that time, I’d begun to understand the rhythm of writing consistently.

By the way, the two main characters in the novels meet by accident on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, neither really knowing or understanding the plight of the other. The encounter is only a page of each book and shows how differently two people see the same encounter.

Both The Volunteer and Stocks & Blondes are available on ZBookstore as eBooks and in paperback online. On SOL, they are available from author Wayzgoose.

The point is that I accomplish a lot when I have an established rhythm in my life. Vacations are specifically intended to disrupt that rhythm—to get one out of the groove. And thus, they require a period of adjustment when they are over as we try to get back in the groove.

In the midst of my final week in Seattle for the time being, I managed to get three new chapters of one work in progress completed and half a chapter of my top secret work written. Can’t talk about or share that project because of contest rules. But there is so much more that I’ve not gotten back to yet. I need to get back in the groove, and getting back to my trailer in Vegas will help.

My typical day in Vegas will begin around 6:30 or 7:00 when I get up. I’ll fix my morning brew and spend half an hour on my statistics and social media. Then I’ll start writing. I’ve always been extremely productive first thing in the morning. I’ll work until about ten and then dress to go out for breakfast. I have six breakfast spots that I rotate among, trying something different at each meal. I don’t go out every morning. I do cook breakfast on many occasions, but sometimes the groove can be oppressive. I only ever make one thing for breakfast when I cook at home.

While I’m out, I’ll run any errands I need to make, like grocery shopping, laundry, buying water, etc. Then I’ll return to my trailer and work on client projects for a couple of hours. I still edit and design books for several clients and the little added supplement to my social security is appreciated. That’s not my full-time job, though, so I strictly limit the number of projects I take on.

Sometime between four and five, I stop for dinner. Occasionally, I go out with friends for a burger. Usually, I’m back in the saddle by six to continue writing for two or three hours. Then I’ll watch a women’s basketball game and go to bed by ten.

In those four to five hours of writing time, I’ll pump out between 2,000 and 3,000 words! That’s the benefit of a rhythm.

When I don’t have a client project in the afternoon, I work on editing, designing, and releasing my own books. That’s part of my ‘job’ as well.

Doesn’t a routine like this get boring?

Of course. That’s why we have vacations!

Part of getting in the groove is writing this blog. I’ll try to keep regular postings now. Next week, “Tab, you’re it!”

Breaking the Rules

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This is number 117 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

“YOU ARE REMEMBERED for the rules you break,” supposedly said General Douglas MacArthur, according to a quote in a 1996 issue of Press of Atlantic City newspaper. Unfortunately, there’s no concrete evidence that he said that, but with his nature and character, it certainly seems reasonable that he might have. The same is true of the more recently popularized quote, “Rules are made to be broken.”

My editors often point out things that are incorrect in my books. Of course, readers are always happy to point them out, as well, but I generally listen to my editors. Generally. I often get comments from them that are along the lines of “This isn’t technically correct, but it’s in dialog, so if that’s consistent with the way the person would talk, it would be okay.” We hedge around on it a lot.

I wrote three short novels in Lazlo Zalezac’s (R.I.P.) “Damsels in Distress” universe as a light and playful distraction. It is a universe in which ‘heroes’ from earth attempt to rescue damsels from the planet Cassandra in distress on the planet Chaos. Of course, they are rewarded with each other.

When I reached the final volume of the Hero Lincoln Trilogy, I was pleased with the circus theme my hero had developed as a theatre person rather than a military wonder. It had worked well in Romancing the Clown, so I used it for Going for the Juggler.

I received a missive on the day the first chapter was released, instructing me regarding the vein in the throat being the jugular, not the juggler, and unable to believe that I’d made such a ridiculous mistake. I should immediately change the title of the book to the correct phrase, “Going for the Jugular.”

Yes. ‘Going for the jugular’ is a common phrase used to mean “to attack or criticize an opponent in a very aggressive way” (according to Merriam-Webster). It seems related to the idea that wild animals when attacking go for the throat as a quick and sure way to defeat their enemies.

I responded to the disbelieving reader that when writing, authors often use a ‘play on words’ to twist a meaning through a close-sounding word that means something different. Such was the case when the circus performer juggling knives was the target of the aggression. The aggressor was going for the juggler.

The response I got was a face-palm.

It was a good reminder to me as I read one of Lazlo’s books sometime later that was titled Thunderbolt and Lightening. Obviously, a misspelling, right? I withheld my judgment. Sure enough, most of the way through the book, the title was revealed as significant to the story and the means of showing the reformation of the main character.

Going for the Juggler and the entire Hero Lincoln Trilogy are available at ZBookStore. The single volume paperback of the trilogy is also available online.

Of course, many rule infractions are of the sort that do drive people crazy. Words that sound similar, are spelled similarly, or are simply easily confused. We all have pet-peeves, I’m sure. Mine is the confusion of ‘then’ and ‘than’ in other’s writing. It drives me crazy. I wish they’d just learn to follow the rules!

And that’s the big problem. When people break the rules because it’s a play on words or a character trait or a significant plot point, I have no problem with it. But I find most infractions are simply because people don’t know the rules in the first place. Ignorantia juris non excusat. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

That’s why editors are so important to me. I know and understand most of the rules of grammar and spelling, but I make mistakes. Editors correct me. I try to provide a few mistakes in each chapter so they will feel useful.

There is absolutely no purpose in breaking the rules if one is ignorant of them.

Let me go back to MacArthur again. In the 1962 book MacArthur Close-Up author William Addleman Ganoe retells an anecdote regarding MacArthur having to discipline a sergeant for a rule infraction. At one point, MacArthur gets frustrated and states, “Rules are mostly made for the lazy to hide behind…. Instead of mending the situation on the spot, we make a rule.”

MacArthur is sometimes praised and sometimes vilified, but I have to agree with this point. The reason we have thousands of pages—perhaps millions of pages—of laws in this country is because we couldn’t actually deal with a situation in the first place. The same is true of hundreds of executive orders, pages of court opinions, and countless books of religious doctrine. We hide behind the rules. If the rule says I can’t go beyond the fence, I can safely close my eyes to the horrors that are on the other side.

Most English speakers know the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition.

“Where y’all from?” asked the belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” answered the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?” asked the belle.

She sure got around that one. And followed the rules while doing it! Grammatical rules are not supposed to be a barrier to communication. Winston Churchill once famously responded to an editor of his speech, “This is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put!”

It was so witty! But it had nothing to do with the rule. Yes, when on its own, ‘with’ is a preposition. But ‘put up with’ is a compound verb. In that instance, ‘with’ doesn’t stand alone as a preposition. Now, did Churchill not know the proper grammar. Or his editor?

Regardless, it was funny!

My daughter came up with a witticism when she was in high school. We’d started reading the Harry Potter stories when she was just four years old. The whole family loved them. Then a series of stories about vampires and werewolves called the Twilight Saga came out. My daughter read it.

When I asked how she liked the series, she said, “The difference between JK Rowling (HP) and Stephenie Meyer (TS) is that Rowling learned how to write before she published a book.”

Ouch! Nothing like getting criticized by an eighteen-year-old English major. Of course, in the past fifteen years, she’s found much to criticize in her idol’s politics and humanity, just as she’s found much to criticize in my writing.

In summary, it is important to know the rules if you are going to break them. Take the time to learn to write. Everyone will enjoy it more.

Ah. The first of August already. Happy Lugnasad, everyone! For me, it means I’m preparing to return home to Las Vegas, even though the temperatures there have not really started down yet. It will still be about 110 degrees when I get there, but I’ll survive. And, with luck, I’ll start making regular blog posts again. Next week, I’ll talk about establishing a rhythm to your writing: “In the Groove.”

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aroslav: Blog

Four Seasons

Tab, You’re it!

Quick Update

In the Groove

Breaking the Rules

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...