Eric Ross: Blog

There’s a danger in believing there’s no cost to actions. For eight chapters, the clock has offered Lira and the Clockmaker something close to magic—a clean reset, a silent undoing, a way to feel without consequence. But time has never really been consequence-free. It only pretended to be.

In Chapter 9 of The Clockmaker’s Rewind, that illusion finally snaps. The story, and the characters, press too far. And so does the quiet lie they’ve been telling themselves: that they can touch fire and never burn.

The prose deliberately changes in this chapter as a result. Sentences shorten. Paragraphs break more often. The lyrical cadence of earlier chapters gives way to sharp breath and urgency. It’s not just about speed—it’s about control, and what’s lost when it slips. So as the characters come apart, so does the narrative rhythm. The structure of the writing itself begins to mirror the strain.

When I first started writing this, there was always going to be a moment when the clock gave out. Here the clock breaks, but the moment holds. Not tragic, not redemptive. Just real.

And after this, what will they do when nothing resets again?

– Eric

"I see a red door and I want it painted black…"

There’s a moment in the Stones’ Paint It Black that lingers after the final note fades—a recognition that grief doesn’t just hollow us. It stains. It saturates the world until even beauty feels like an affront. I tried to carry that feeling into The Sitarist’s Requiem, a story born of smoke, memory, and the kind of desire that doesn’t comfort—it cuts.

Set in 1960s Istanbul, this is the story of Emre, a man adrift in mourning, and Leyla, the sitarist whose music doesn’t offer healing, but something far more dangerous: a reckoning. What begins as seduction unfolds into revelation. Leyla is no passive muse. She is the orchestrator of the night, the composer of her own ritual. Her music is a blade, her body an altar, and her grief is as finely tuned as the strings she plays.

I like women who command the terms of their own mythology. Leyla doesn’t wait to be saved. She chooses. She hunts. She dares Emre, saying "Drown in me—it’s the only way you’ll breathe again".

And in that, we reach what I think of as the violence of beauty. Beauty that doesn’t soften or soothe—but wounds. Beauty that demands something from you. That strips you bare. That doesn’t ask permission before it enters and rearranges you. Leyla embodies that kind of beauty. So does grief. So does love, at its most ruinous.

The Sitarist’s Requiem isn’t a romance, although I could have written it that way. It’s a requiem. For the dead, for the past, and for the man who thought he could carry both without consequence.

The story is live now.

-Eric

Chapter 8: Burning Through is where things begin to unravel—just slightly, just enough to feel it. At this point in the story, Lira and the clockmaker have already discovered the key’s power, but neither fully grasps what it’s doing to them. This chapter lives in the friction between desire and caution, between the pull of the past and the cost of reaching back for it.

I wanted this moment—this reset—to feel like a kiss held too long. Not just in the physical sense (though yes, there’s that too), but emotionally: a reach that becomes a grasp, a need that flickers into doubt. The atmosphere hums with oil, smoke, and the kind of heat that doesn’t fully dissipate once it’s been touched.

There’s a shift in Lira here—small, but telling. She’s no longer just curious; she’s invested. And yet, there’s a pause in her body, a catch in her breath that doesn’t resolve. That tension—that ache to trust what can’t be trusted—is the thread I followed through this scene.

If Chapter 7 was ignition, Chapter 8 is the slow burn that follows. What they’ve awakened is beginning to change them, whether they admit it or not.

– Eric

The words were “I have cum dripping out of my pussy right now”.

When she said those words to me, they seemed like the perfect way to start a story. Let me know if you agree. It's a bit of flash fiction called With His Name On My Lips.

- Eric

This chapter draws a quiet breath before the unraveling.

Lira and the clockmaker have pushed the mechanism past minutes, past play, into something heavier—hours rewound, hours rewritten. But in Chapter 7, their intimacy starts to fray. Time isn’t the only thing being stretched thin.

For the first time, the key is turned without invitation. For the first time, someone pulls back.

This chapter was challenging to write. It needed to hold tenderness and misalignment in the same frame—wanting and not quite meeting. The clocks falter. So do they. The line between desire and exhaustion sharpens. And when time snaps back into place, the mark it leaves doesn’t fade.

One of the recurring themes in The Clockmaker’s Rewind is emotional erosion: not grand rupture, but quiet wear. Chapter 7 leans into that—into what gets lost in the turning, and what stubbornly remains.

As always, I’d love to hear from you.

—Eric