aroslav: Blog

This is number 116 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

…UNLESS YOU’RE SHAKESPEARE.

I’ve just returned from a refreshing and inspiring theatre tour to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. I saw six shows while I was there. Three were among the Shakespearean greats, including one I’d never seen in production before. The latter was The Winter’s Tale, the most famous was Macbeth, and the funniest was As You Like It.

It is a Shakespeare Festival, but the other three shows I saw were by other playwrights: Sense and Sensibility, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Forgiveness. In addition to being good theatre, there was something to be learned from each of the shows.

I was impressed first of all by The Winter’s Tale, a play that vacillated between being a horrendous tragedy and a ridiculous comedy. I’d read the script a couple of years ago when writing the Photo Finish series of books, but all I remembered was the most famous stage direction of all time: Exit pursued by a bear.

In this series of books, Nate Hart and his girlfriends acquire property in Stratford where he becomes a popular photographer among the actresses there. I did a lot of research on the plays produced at the Festival during the years 1969-1976, keeping the season the same, but putting in my own staging and inventing the actors, directors, and technical people. Suffice it to say that I read a lot of plays and play synopses during the writing of those books.

For three acts in The Winter’s Tale, Leontes, King of Sicily, proceeds to destroy his family, his friendships, and his kingdom through petty and foundless jealousy, causing his closest advisor to flee, causing the deaths of his son and his wife, and ordering his infant daughter abandoned to wild animals on a distant hillside. At the peak of the action with all things set in motion, he receives a message from the Oracle of Delphi declaring his wife innocent and Leontes a tyrant. He repents, but it is too late. All is lost.

The final two acts are a pastoral comedy in which the infant daughter, rescued by a shepherd, has grown to a beautiful young woman and falls in love with a young man who just happens to be the son of Polixenes, the king Leontes accused of adultery with his wife.

Through comic trials, the Prince and Princess are revealed and their wedding is celebrated. But none of that is shown. Instead, three soldiers appear with the play’s clown to tell about how the princess was revealed to be Leontes’ daughter, how Polixenes arrived and was reunited with his former friend, how the couple was married, and how the shepherd and his son were rewarded.
A clear case of telling, not showing!

I showed considerably more in the books of the Photo Finish series! They are available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a similar situation occurs. Just before the denouement, the mysteriously transformed elder brother who has been hunting his youngest brother (to kill him) arrives to tell the disguised Rosalind that as he was sleeping, a lion attacked him. His younger brother—who had every right to hate his older brother—could have left him to die, but instead attacked and subdued the lion, rescuing the older brother, but being severely injured. Now the older brother is in the younger brother’s debt and is carrying out his errand, during which he also falls in love with the disguised Duke’s daughter, Celia.

To simplify matters further, the middle brother, heretofore absent, shows up in the Forest of Arden to tell that the evil Duke, bent on hunting down the exiled Duchess, encountered a monk in the forest and was converted from his evil ways, abdicating his throne to his sister and forgiving all those who had been exiled.

Clearly, there was just too much to wrap up for Shakespeare to handle it in the last act.

I’m reminded of an old movie about F. Scott Fitzgerald—I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Last of the Belles.’ In the scene I am thinking of, Fitzgerald is going over his movie script with a movie mogul (again, I think it was Sam Goldwyn), when Goldwyn asks him, pointing at the script,

“What are they doing?”
“They are talking,” Fitzgerald responds.
“But what are they doing?”
“Talking.”
“Doing! What are they doing?” Goldwyn says in frustration.

The obvious intent was to point out that two talking heads on the movie screen were boring, no matter what they were saying. In the movie business there needed to be movement. They needed to be doing something. In Fitzgerald’s lexicon, ‘talking’ was ‘doing.’ His books have a lot of dialog.

The only movie I ever saw that successfully portrayed people talking without doing something else was Woody Allen’s Interiors. The movie was a critical success, but sadly was not popular. By its successful use of dialog, though, it truly highlights the problem many authors have with telling instead of showing.

In many works, authors take the shortcut of having a character tell the story on behalf of the author. Sometimes that works and sometimes it is simply putting narrative in the mouth of a character.

What the author might narrate with a simple sentence like, “A three-car pile-up on I-5 delayed Sylvia by half an hour,” is turned into an ‘exciting’ scene:

Sylvia burst through the door and fell into Ryan’s arms, sobbing.
“It was terrible!” she gasped. “Right ahead of me, a car cut into the left lane right ahead of a truck carrying cement blocks. The truck driver lost control and the truck rolled to the right, dumping his load of blocks onto a car next to him!”
“How terrible!” Ryan said. “Are you okay?”
“Shaken. Just seeing those poor people lying beside the road. I barely managed to squeak by when the dust settled. Traffic was stopped before and after the roll-over. I just gave my name to the driver and took the next exit.”
“What can I do to help you?”
“I need a drink!”

Did this particularly add anything to the narration? As far as the story goes, did it make a difference? She was half an hour late. But this does expose more of the character of the two main actors. We get a glimpse of Ryan’s care, and of Sylvia’s self-absorption as she left the scene of the accident.

It is up to the author now to make this meaningful rather than just a substitute for a fourteen-word narrative.

This may not have been an exciting discussion and you might still not know the difference between showing and telling, but it was a realization that occurred to me as I was watching Shakespeare navigate between the two. Now it is time to get back to writing.

I didn't prepare a blog post for today, but thought I'd jot off a couple of notes.

I'm headed out to Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival this week. I'll get to see six shows!

Unfortunately, that means my productivity will be a little low for a bit as I'm not carrying a computer with me and will have limited internet access. But I'll still get some writing done.

My general blog post on Facebook and Patreon was all about why July was a good month to become a Devon Layne (aroslav) patron. Even though I'm not posting pre-release content in July, I'm offering all seven of the Special Patrons Edition eBooks I've released this year. They are available for all my paid patrons. I'm also pausing collections for August, so new annual subscribers this month will get thirteen months for the price of eleven instead of twelve.

But the bottom line is that I'm not going to be pre-releasing Forever Yours until August. It should be available here on SOL before the end of that month. I'm still very enthused about the book, even though it is nearly twice as long as I thought it would be. Editors and alpha readers have been enthusiastic.

I'm also looking to release Drawing on the Bright Side of the Brain by the end of September if all goes well. October if it's slow. First drafts are available for my Sausage Grinder patrons.

So, I'll be offline for the next couple of weeks. Hope to be back refreshed, inspired, and ready to work soon.

This is number 115 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

I GET UP AT 5:00 AM. I’m usually down for my first nap by 8:00.

Naps are usually only an hour, but occasionally, I crash at 11:00 and don’t wake up until 1:00. And, of course, then I can’t get to sleep at night because there is so much going on in my head.

What’s more, I’m seeing this all around me—and not only in the septuagenarians and up. Young people look exhausted. Baristas look exhausted. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and policemen look exhausted. The grocery store clerk even looks tired.

Oh. I used self-checkout. Maybe that isn’t a fair observation.

But wherever I look, I see people drained of the will to carry on. I took the title of this from a post regarding the WNBA and everyone’s concern that Caitlin Clark has only made one of her last twenty-three 3-point attempts! What’s wrong with her.

The list of women's basketball greats who are usually 3-point sharpshooters but are currently hitting less than 30% is extensive: Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Marina Mabry, Kelsey Plum, Arika Ogunbowale... The poster of the list on WNBA Threads says, "All the WNBA is in a slump!"

It was Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks that summed it up: “’Cause we’re tired.”

I had lunch this week with my alpha reader Les and his wife, Marianne. We had a great and lengthy conversation inspired by an artificial intelligence character in my next novel, Forever Yours. Pythia engages in a conversation regarding the meaning of life. Les thinks I’m brilliant for thinking up the artificial intelligence and her answers to questions, by the way.

Marianne said she always wanted to write, but her life is made up of lists of things she needs to do. Empty the dishwasher, grocery shopping, laundry, answering a letter, visiting a son and grandson and great grandson. She felt the meaning of life was just her lists, and every time she scratches something off, she adds three more things to the list.

She expressed a moderate amount of envy that I ‘have time’ to write.

I’m not married. I have no pets. I have no debts and no job. I don’t have a collection of knickknacks I need to dust or display. While I’m in the Pacific Northwest for most of the summer, my routines are interrupted by visits with my friends and family, buying groceries and taking my turn cooking meals, walking the dogs, eating out, preparing dinner parties. I’m cooking Greek pastitsio for seven Monday, partly because I don’t have the opportunity to cook that often back in Vegas.

Otherwise, my life continues to be: wake up, write, nap, repeat.

I don't write for a living. I write to live.

The life can be exhausting, but I don’t think that is what has cut my productivity from a new chapter or more a day to about two new chapters a week. Something else is tiring us out.

I think one of the things writers—especially of thrillers—fail to take into consideration when they are writing about their heroes who are constantly on the go, is the effect of exhaustion on how a person thinks and how well he or she can perform. It’s as if all spies, detectives, agents, and politicians don’t need restful sleep.

Oh, but heroes are supposed to be perfect. No! They are supposed to be flawed.

What is more heroic than a newborn’s mother who has not slept in three weeks, is depressed, thinks her husband doesn’t love her, regrets ever having had a child, but who gets up in the middle of the night because the baby needs to be fed and changed? When the hero is too tired to climb to the top of the stairs, but does so anyway, that is working through exhaustion in a way that exhausts the reader as well.

El Rancho del Corazón, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven collection are available at ZBookStore. It is also the first part of LNDtH2 on SOL.

This is number 114 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

One of the biggest dangers of using slang, even when a character would normally use it, is misusing a term. I’m reminded of the woman who received notice that an acquaintance had died and sent her condolences via text to all the friends, ending the text with ‘LOL.’ She thought the text slang meant Lots Of Love instead of Laughing Out Loud.

Another problem is overusing the terms. In a draft of one book I wrote—Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose) Jackie the Beanstalk—two girls camping had received a couple of marijuana cigarettes from another camper. My first editor asked if I’d intentionally tried to use every term for cannabis I could find. I had used nearly all of them: joint, blunt, MaryJane, 420, doobie, ganja, weed, roach, and grass, among others. One problem was that most of those weren’t commonly in use by the generation of my characters. Not only had I overused slang in describing cannabis, it wasn’t even the right slang!

I corrected it, by the way.

Trying to make things proper when they should be eliminated altogether is another problem. According to a popular meme:

Quick question: Is it "for fuck sake" or "for fucks sake"? It's for a work email, so it has to sound professional.

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over two years now. It might be time to take a break, or at least not pretend to post weekly. I’ve missed posts in January, May, and June this year. It's also become difficult to estimate readership on SOL since the server move. This past week, with no post, I had a record number of blog views recorded. I’m guessing we’re subject to a robot invasion.

So, I’ll say the posts will be irregular this summer. I have no idea what will catch my eye as I’m traveling, but when something does, I’ll tell you all about it.

In the meantime, I’m working hard at finishing a couple of books and plotting my Halloween story for this year. I’d like to get those under control as my writing priority instead of procrastinating by writing clever blogs.

This is number 113 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

IF I’D KNOWN it would end so soon, I’d have started earlier and done it more often with more people. That was the story of my sex life. It’s incredibly difficult to find potential partners at 75 compared to 25. But I waited, was mostly faithful, and didn’t ask much of my partners.

If that sounds like an odd way to start talking about delayed gratification, I guess every coin has two sides.

The problem as I see it wasn’t in delaying fulfillment of a consuming goal, but of being oblivious to my own needs and those of my partners. I was the one who let work, hobbies, projects, and other people take precedence over the relationship I had at home. And so were my partners.

Back 40 or 45 years ago, I read a book called The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. The title comes from a famous poem by the poet laureate of my youth, Robert Frost, titled ‘The Road Not Taken.’ While the poem actually describes two roads that to all appearances are equal, the narrator eventually chooses one and abandons the other.

The book by Peck, however, describes two very different paths, one of immediate gratification and one that delays fulfilling one’s desires. When I read the book—and don’t ask me to quote anything specific from it because it was a long time ago and I don’t presently have a copy—I realized that this had been drilled into me from a very early age.

“You have to finish your homework before you can go out to play.”
“If you want that so badly, you’ll need to earn the money for it.”
“Dessert comes after you eat your vegetables.”

But nowhere in any of those adages did it teach the value of delayed gratification. Homework was not as important to me as playing with my friends. My father took out loans to buy a car. Why suffer through filling my belly with something I didn’t like and then not having room to enjoy what I did like? As an adult, I can place values on each of these things, but the principle was not what was taught as a child.

In Peck’s book, he attempts to teach that anticipation of the goal and putting in the effort to achieve it enhanced the pleasure derived from it.

Of course, in my youth and my adolescent drive for sex, it meant saving it for marriage. That actually transferred the desire from finding a sex partner to finding a marriage partner.
I’m not going to evaluate the choice, only to say that perhaps I’d have taken the ‘road not taken.’

I have mentioned the Living Next Door to Heaven series in several posts. It is my longest series at ten volumes, and 1,572,854 words. For this post, I decided to focus on the second book in the series, The Agreement. In this book, a group of freshmen in high school band together for safety and protection from themselves.

Everyone worried that as they started to date, they would lose control, as a couple already had to some extent. They create an agreement among them that places specific limits on what they can and can’t do until they reach a certain age. Those limits, while protecting them from actually having sex all at once, prove to be a testing ground for how much they can do without breaching the agreement.

There was a lot of sex in that book—just no penetration. They agreed to delay that gratification until later. In fact, there is no ‘actual sex,’ as my critics said, until book four, Deadly Chemistry, discussed in my previous post.

The delay served to enhance the anticipation and to some degree the enjoyment of the act itself for the characters.

The Agreement and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series is available as individual eBooks or a collection at ZBookStore.

I’m aware that one-handed readers might get frustrated by not having a particular sex act depicted in a story, a chapter, or even on the current page. It seems the readers themselves read for more immediate gratification rather than a long build-up, which is a feature of most of my stories.

But a lack of sexual penetration is not the only thing that readers become impatient over. What I really want to talk about is more fundamental to writing compelling stories that keep people wanting more.

Some of you will recall a television series that ran from 1978 to 1991 called Dallas. In the spring of 1980, the most popular and most hated character in the show, J.R. Ewing (played by Larry Hagman) was shot. That’s it. That’s how the episode ended. Viewers had to wait until November to find out “Who Shot J.R.?” It was a major advertising campaign and ended in the second-highest-rated television episode of all time!

The cliffhanger ending was a hallmark of the fourteen seasons of Dallas. Even the final season ended with a cliffhanger, never to be resolved.

Mystery writer Raymond Chandler, who passed away in 1959, is still quoted as saying, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Then start the next chapter.

“I was on edge while they were walking back and forth, waiting for the attack and kidnaping... knowing this was the last chapter and fearing an awful cliffhanger.”
“I hate cliffhangers! I’m not reading any more!”
“At least I know how the story ends. For me it ended today!”
“If you think I’m going to wait to find out…”
“Horrible cliffhanger. I might stop reading cause of this. Certainly not going to buy it now. You don't usually do this.”
“AAAKKKK! A Cliff Hanger! I hope it's not more than three days! Just Kidding. I was weaned on monthly S.F. Pulps so used to waiting a month. I'd detour 6 extra blocks walking the mile home from school hoping the next issue was in.”
“Oh wow, what a cliffhanger!”

If I took the time to sort through the 3,500 public comments I’ve received on my stories and the thousand emails I get every few months, I could come up with dozens of other comments decrying the use of cliffhangers. Even my alpha reader, Les, sent me a message that said, “Wow! Big bang-up chapter ending,” in reference to a cliffhanger in my current work in progress.

The truth is cliffhangers are pretty common. Authors try to keep people interested in turning to the next page or reading the next chapter. I hold that the cliffhanger is simply a facet of delayed gratification. Anticipation heightens the enjoyment when the next chapter comes.

What I have seen, however, is a lot of readers who can’t delay their gratification long enough to wait three days for the next chapter. Yes! Three days! That’s the posting schedule I have for most of my stories. A chapter every three days. And I don’t begin posting the story until it is finished, so the chapter loads in three days until the story has ended.

My advice: If you must have immediate gratification and cannot possibly wait three days for a cliffhanger to be resolved, wait three months until the story has finished posting and then gobble it up in a weekend. You’ll only need to wait another three months for the next story.

Or buy the book.