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This is number sixty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“IT’S JUST A STORY. Of course, no one would actually do that!”
Oh yeah? What I really want to say about this is that nothing is just a story anymore. I grant you that rational thinking human beings can distinguish between fact and fiction and identify when something is just a story for entertainment purposes only. I am doubting the prevalence of rational thinking human beings in our population.
How many “French Ticklers” were sold in truck stop restrooms, clearly marked “For Entertainment Purposes Only?” The packages went on to state “Not for the prevention of disease or pregnancy.”
“You have to use a condom.”
“Sure, I have one right here. You’ll like this.”
Nine months later…
May I remind you that L. Ron Hubbard’s series of science fiction books beginning with Battlefield Earth and including his pseudo-scientific opinion piece, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, spawned or gave legitimacy to the entire Church of Scientology?
No matter what genre you write in, you are responsible for what you’ve written. If you glorify “non-consensual sex,” you need to call it rape. You can’t hide behind a term that conceals what you mean. An “underage woman” is a child. Call her that. We wouldn’t have the blossoming of laws about depicting teens under the age of sixteen in sexual situations if there was no content that was irresponsible about this in the first place. (Content restriction for eBooks sold on Bookapy: No textual description of sexual acts or nudity of any character under 16 year old (the age of consent in Canada).)
So, I am a stickler about such mundane items as consent in fiction. I downloaded a free book some time ago to broaden my understanding of published erotica—A Time for Will by Libby Campbell. I was infuriated by the main principle that a dominant male can simply walk in and take over the lives of young women, enforcing his control with beatings, and the women will swoon over it. I couldn’t read past the fourth or fifth chapter, but unless one of those women sticks a knife in his back sometime soon, it is simply a false narrative glorifying a primitive man who expects women he encounters to simply obey him because he’s the man.
In the most popular series of my career, Living Next Door to Heaven, with over 2.1 million downloads, I presented a group of precocious teens who band together to form an agreement of what is acceptable and not acceptable behavior with each other. The intent was that signers of the agreement could safely date each other as they desired. In book two, The Agreement, the terms are spelled out.
The Group Dating Agreement
1. I will always treat everyone in the group fairly, equally, and with respect.
2. I will not be jealous of anything that anyone else does or engages in with anyone else in this group (male or female).
3. I will always receive the explicit consent of my partner(s) before engaging in any potentially sexual activity and will respond in compliance with their wishes.
4. I will always have the option of declining any advance of any kind from any partner and it will be honored.
One of the items most feared by the teens was that they would progress too fast and be pressured into behavior they didn’t really want to participate in. The agreement guaranteed every member the right to refuse any act without question, and the guarantee that no one would try something without asking first.
“May I kiss you?”
“On the cheek. It’s too soon for anything else.”
“Okay.”
It was easy! Or who can forget the sexiest words Brian says he ever heard:
“I give you explicit permission to touch me anyplace above my waist, inside or outside my clothing while we’re kissing.”
The Agreement and all ten books in the Living Next Door to Heaven saga are available on Bookapy.
If something as simple to understand as consent can’t be worked into your writing, why not? Is it because you don’t believe consent is necessary? Do you have telepathic powers that let you hold that conversation without speaking it? It is never too late to ask, give, or refuse consent.
Oh, but maybe that worked in my particular story of these particular teens, but it’s too cumbersome and unromantic to actually include explicit consent in a fiction story. We’ll just assume it.
No, you won’t assume consent in a mind-control story. You will explicitly rape the controlled person.
And if you are having trouble with consent—which many of us do because we never practiced it before—then we haven’t adequately explored ways of asking for consent.
I offered my lips to her and she met me with passion. (Silent consent and participation.)
“Let’s go to bed.” “Make me.” (Yes, that latter is explicit consent. There is a definite buy-in to the game.)
“You could pin my hands behind my back and kiss me any way you wanted and I’d just be helpless to resist.” (Not only consent, but explicit instructions on how to exercise it.)
There are thousands of ways to include consent in your erotica and other fiction. We have simply become so used to imposing our will or having another’s will imposed upon us that we forget that consent is mandatory. I return to the initial premise: Non-consensual sex is rape. It is not romantic, even if we think the victim enjoyed it.
In my Team Manager series, Dennis and his girlfriends/teammates establish just three rules: No means no. Never without protection. Never in front of the children (or parents). Easy rules the group could abide by. Coach Ardith was even more explicit.
“Let me be perfectly clear on this,” Ardith said. “‘No’ means no. ‘Stop’ means no. ‘I’m tired’ means no. ‘Not now’ means no. ‘I’m not sure’ means no. ‘I don’t know’ means no. ‘I’m not ready’ means no. ‘I’m not protected’ means no. ‘No’ does not mean ‘convince me.’ If it’s not a yes, it’s not consent. Does every single one of you understand this?”
Well? Do you?
This is probably the least popular rule I follow and promote in writing erotica. It is, however, one of the places in which writers of erotica can influence the shape of society. I’ve done nothing but rant this month. Next week, the rants continue with “Getting to They.”
This is number sixty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I GUESS I just pronounced myself anathema. There is little in the American English language that currently creates such a backlash as the word “woke.” And that is a case of lumping things together so we can dismiss them all instead of dealing with the one thing that makes us uncomfortable.
I hear that “woke” means having men in women’s restrooms. That “woke” means taking away everyone’s guns. That “woke” means rewriting history and denying cultural heritage. That “woke” means political correctness. That “woke” means you can’t compliment a woman on her looks. That “woke” means allowing the country to be overrun by illegal immigrants. That “woke” means increasing taxes to pay for foreign aid instead of helping veterans. That “woke” means giving handouts to people who are too lazy to work. That “woke” means paying millions of dollars to forgive student loans instead of making them work to pay them off like everyone else. (Except large corporations and banks who get their debts forgiven all the time.)
Pseudo-conservatives wrap anything up that they dislike and refer to it as “woke” in order to keep from acknowledging the one simple thing that it is:
To be aware of and concerned about social injustice.
And believe me, neo-liberals contribute to the same load of crap by claiming that whatever their current cause is amounts to being “woke.”
My earliest writings—we’re talking about the 70s and 80s—carried the same themes that my current writings do. Equal rights. Civil rights. Women’s rights. Antiwar. Anti-discrimination. Freedom to control our own bodies, families, money, and thinking. Freedom to be who we are and not who the government or a political party tells us we have to be.
It strikes me as strange that political parties that claim to be in support of no government regulation, and personal rights (like freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom of assembly, etc.) are also the ones voting for regulation of those very things. Please don’t tell me I am anti-Republican or anti-Democrat because I consider both to be equally bad about this.
One of the things that surprises me is how one side will take a position that it ordinarily would be opposed to if it weren’t for the other side being opposed to it. For example, show a picture of a young woman standing on the American flag and the right will want to crucify her. But show a picture of the American flag with a blue or black stripe replacing a white stripe, and the same people will talk about how it patriotically honors policemen or fallen first responders.
No, my friends. It is desecrating the American flag just as much as standing on it or burning it! That is not the flag we pledge allegiance to. It has been defaced! But since the left doesn’t like it, the right must declare themselves in favor of it, ignoring the actual law regarding display of the flag. (While you’re at it, check out what the law says about wearing the flag or using it as decoration on vehicles or clothing. It’s pretty specific about what is allowed.)
Fly a thin blue line flag (blue stripe against a black field) if you wish. Fly a rainbow flag if you wish. Fly an MIA/POW flag if you wish. But this law-abiding patriotic author objects to you flying a desecrated American flag. That’s not “woke.” It’s simply obeying the law.
So, why do some people object so strenuously to the term “woke” and insist they are anti-woke because they are conservative?
It’s really pretty simple.
If I lump together all the things that some people claiming to be “woke” believe (gun control, gay marriage, men in women’s bathrooms, open borders, etc.) then I can be against it and ignore the fundamental item of being aware of and concerned about social injustice.
So, scrap the word “woke” from your vocabulary. It has become burdened with so many extra items, the people who use it on either side of the aisle are using a meaningless term. If you are truly anti-woke, stand in front of a mirror, and declare to yourself, “I am unaware of and don’t care about social injustice.” Then you get a free pass to be whatever kind of asshole you want to be.
As for me, I will continue—as I have for forty-five years as an author—writing stories that bring attention to racism, women’s rights, voter rights, antiwar, gay rights, freedom of religion rights, the entire Bill of Rights, and these unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If you insist on calling that “woke,” then go back to sleep and live in your dreams where real life can’t interfere.
If I have any readers left after that rant, I’ll invite you to join me as I continue to explore the responsibilities of an author of erotica. Next week: “Consent in Fiction.”
This is number sixty-one in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THIS IS PROBABLY not as dire a blog post as the title sounds. No one I know is dealing with an incurable disease at the moment. At least not one you’d recognize readily. That’s because a lot of chronic conditions aren’t easily seen by other people.
I have a friend who deals with chronic pain that would cripple me every single day, but people talking to her or interacting in public don’t have a clue that she is in pain. I have a friend whose depression manifests itself in anger and sleep. People who aren’t aware might call her lazy because she sleeps an entire day or two days or more at a time. Since writing about my heart condition and procedures, several people have written to me to describe similar conditions and how it sapped the energy from them.
The simple truth is we don’t know what is bothering other people. So, when we encounter a person who says she is depressed, a typical response is “What do you have to be depressed about?” As if depression requires a cause and it can be cured by just being happy.
I have heard—even received email—about homeless people just needing to get a job and shape up. A few years in prison would wake them up. But not one person is willing to give a job to a homeless person who has no address, hasn’t had a bath in weeks, has only the clothes on his back, and drinks a little too much wine. That latter, by the way, is something you can get by with if you are clean, have a change of clothes, and have an address. Then you just like to party.
I’ve dealt with homelessness in several of my stories. Model Student book 5, The Odalisque, has scenes in a Tent City in Seattle. It drew horrendous venom from some readers who genuinely felt those people should not have what little they do have. “Throw them all in jail for a year or two. They won’t be living on the streets after that.” Really? How many former convicts are living on the street? For that matter, how many Vietnam veterans?
In my Nathan Everett book, The Volunteer, I wrote about a chronically homeless man, trapped in his own mind as he wanders from handout to handout. The good, forward-thinking Unitarian congregation, who were devoted to a movement to end homelessness in King County in ten years, were appalled when I noted that since they’d started their campaign, homelessness had been on the increase and that there were many people on the street who would never not be homeless.
In Devon Layne’s Not This Time, the main character launches her own campaign to help the homeless. Her first endeavor was to give them an address. It might surprise you to know that without a permanent street address, you cannot get a driver’s license, collect social security, get health insurance, vote, get a passport, or get a job. But we still jump up and down and say the freeloaders should just get a job.
My theory is that we seldom know and understand what is needed in order to improve our own lives, and other people never know how to improve our lives.
Of course, I started this post talking about incurable illness. When I first started writing erotica, my daughter was in severe depression. She had never been fully engaged in school. She hated the college she chose. I picked her up at her dormitory on multiple occasions—literally carrying her—to go to the emergency room because she was in such severe muscle spasms that she could not get up off the floor.
I decided to write a story about a depressed college student at a similar arts college, and thus began the Model Student series. I learned in a most painful and direct way about some of the serious aspects of depression. I passed those on to my readers.
Unlike the premise of other literary works, especially of erotica, I found that you cannot just cure depression. You can treat it. You can mitigate some of the problems. You can control it with drugs to some extent. But it is always lurking in the background, ready to spring forward with the slightest trigger. In some stories, the person suffering from depression has sex for the first time and is suddenly cured! Not so in Model Student.
Oh, sex is great! Don’t get me wrong. It brings with it a kind of euphoria and feeling of well-being with the release of endorphins. That lasts for an hour or two. Then depression may be aggravated by guilt, pressure, expectation, and exhaustion. If that is the only way the depression is being treated, it may eventually seem that sex is just another chore to endure and there is no joy in it.
Authors and readers: You cannot cure depression by ‘making the character happy.’ Your character may have all the appearances of being happy and still be depressed. You may put your homeless character in a shelter and he is still homeless. You may make a strongman out of a 98-pound weakling and still have him weak where it counts.
And when you acknowledge the difficulty, realize there is such a thing as ‘not having enough spoons’ to get out of bed, understand that tears may always be a heartbeat away for what seems to be no reason, then your writing may be not only sensual and erotic, but comforting and encouraging at the same time.
This all sounds terribly ‘woke,’ doesn’t it? Well, good. That’s a start, but it is by no means the end of things. Next week: “What It Means to be a Woke Author.”
This is number sixty in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
LET ME START by saying: I know of no impending deaths, either of people I know or characters I write about. I am in good health and was given the all-clear by my cardiologist this week. Relax. A little.
What I am talking about is the death of a character in a story that so upsets readers that they have to sit back and decide whether they will continue reading the story (or watching the television series or movie). I know many people, for instance, who continued watching Game of Thrones, despite their favorite character having just been killed. I dealt with it in every season finale of NCIS in the first sixteen seasons. (Once they were no longer on Netflix, I quit watching.) At the end of each season, I had to decide whether the show was worth watching with so-and-so dead.
On the other hand, a typical response to a death in one of my stories—which are supposed to be entertaining erotica—is met with a lengthy rant and declaration that they will no longer be reading the story and have just voted it a one.
This has happened more than once. Deaths in my stories seem to happen out of the blue. Everyone is totting along joyfully and then all of a sudden X has been brutally murdered. It affects me as much as losing my closest friend would, because I have invested a part of myself in this character. I am so devastated that I cannot continue.
But we do.
Despite the number of people who write to me to tell me they read my stories to escape from reality, not to have their nose rubbed in it.
“I get enough of this on the daily news!”
“You’ve broken the contract with your readers!”
“At least I know how the story ends because for me, it ended today.”
And yet…
And yet, we are seemingly obsessed with having every mundane detail in a story the way it would be in real life. “That’s not how it would really happen.” I got that even in Devon Layne’s outer space fantasy story, The Assassin. “Actually, the tides would be so severe on such a planet that they would wipe out every living thing on dry ground daily.”
In my currently running serial, Follow Focus, there are many things to criticize. It's a historical novel, set in the early seventies. It cost me about five or six hours of research per hour of writing time. There were so many details about pay scales, cameras and film, open embassies, war, politics, and real estate that I was overwhelmed by the amount of research.
And what bit of the story was considered unbelievable?
“It’s called Toad in the Hole, not Toad in a Hole.”
A mistaken article.
But what no one is expecting in that story is for a character to die. And since the story is available for both online reading and eBook, I’ll give the spoiler: No one does.
Follow Focus and the entire Photo Finish series are available at Bookapy.
So, that all begs the question of why put a tragic death in my entertaining erotica stories at all?
The answer is simple. My characters become living breathing personalities that insinuate themselves into our hearts. I’ve sometimes told people that the characters I write are often more real to me than the people I meet. But as real people, I can’t write them without being real. And life contains those tragic moments just as it contains the first time making love to your one and only. Dealing with tragedy is a necessary step in becoming an adult.
I spend much more time exploring how the remaining characters deal with the death, are changed by it, and survive past it than I do describing the death itself.
It’s not always a death that drives this forward. It can be a loss, a breakup, a tornado, a failure. They all drive the characters forward.
And sometimes, they drive us forward as well.
We relive a similar incident in our lives and experience the emotions again. We gain the opportunity to deal with a life tragedy vicariously, through the experience of these characters.
I seldom set out to kill a character. I knew when I wrote Nathan Everett’s For Money or Mayhem that someone important to Dag was going to die. I didn’t know who or when, but that was the theme of the Seattle Digital Noir mysteries. When I realized who and how that character would die, I was devastated. It was a defining moment in my life. Everything I knew about life changed that day. My relationships changed. My lifestyle changed. My emotions changed. Nothing was ever the same again.
When an eleven-year-old little sister died in one of my Devon Layne series, I didn’t even know she’d died until the next chapter. I thought I’d saved her! And I was crushed when I found out I’d failed. That is as an author. I can only imagine that it also affected my readers, based on the number of emails I received.
Suddenly and unexpectedly.
The death of a fictional character opens both author and reader to forming a deeper relationship with other characters. It sucks us further into the story. We are either severed from it or we become part of it. We are emotionally invested in it.
Understand that I have no “justification” for the death of any character in any of my stories. Even in real life, justification of a death is trite and hollow.
“She was 96. She had a good life.”
No! She had a long life. She was miserable throughout. She was mean and heartless and no one was really that sad to see her go. Saying she had a good life is trite and meaningless. She left the world a better place because she was no longer in it.
There is no reason for a death in a story. It usually surprises me. It comes suddenly and unexpectedly and is a turning point for me as an author because I must give up or turn it into something that changes people. And no matter how entertaining my stories may be, how sexy the love scenes are, how successful the characters become… You do not read one of my stories exempt from being changed.
I’ve often read stories that have a depressed individual suddenly cured by having sex for the first time. Hah! It doesn’t work that way. Next week, “Dealing with the Incurable.”
This is number fifty-nine in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I ADMIT to being older than I was when I started writing erotica. I hate to say it, but if you’ve been reading my works of erotica since I released my first serial, The Art and Science of Love, back in 2011, you’ve gotten older, too. And as you get older, time starts to lose meaning. It might seem to move interminably slowly, or it might be racing past. 2024 is already a third over!
I find that I keep track of what day of the week it is by what is printed on my pill tray. Ah yes! It must be Friday and I’ve taken the morning dose.
I think just this short introduction answers the question, “Why don’t you write about people your own age?”
Monday, my houseguest left after a delightful ten-day visit. I don’t entertain house guests often. I looked at my calendar to try to figure out what all we did during that time. I guess I felt compelled to entertain her and my friends here in Vegas fell in line to help. If my count is correct, we saw six shows, had a champagne brunch, ate out for spaghetti and meatballs, sushi, and burgers, and toured Hoover Dam.
I struggled to get any writing done, even though I was uninterrupted all morning each day because she slept until at least noon. I have reached the undeniable conclusion that there is simply something about the presence of breasts in this bachelor pad that is very distracting to this old bachelor. Even if he is not actively engaged with them at the moment.
All the way back in the early days of my erotica career when I was working on the Model Student series, I recognized the distractibility of artists (including writers). By that time, I’d already published four mainstream novels by Nathan Everett and had discovered that when I was writing, I did not see or hear anything else around me. I was very much like Tony when he had earbuds in and a canvas in front of him.
In Diva, Model Student book three, Tony’s parents recite the story of his having been missing for an entire day back in Nebraska. When he finally came pedaling his bicycle into the yard, it was pastor Larsen who asked him what he’d been doing. Tony showed the preacher a sketchbook that was completely filled with the things he’d drawn that day. The entire concept of time had vanished. This theme recurs frequently in the series.
And it recurs frequently in my life.
The entire Model Student series is available as individual eBooks or as a six-book set from Bookapy. Paperback from other vendors.
It was a relatively new experience to be distracted from writing. In 2019, I wrote 1.14 million words. In 2021, 1.17 million words. In 2022, 1.39 million words! That’s well over 3,000 words a day for 365 days straight! My writing distracted me from all kinds of chaos around me. It was the only thing I could see or focus on.
This year, by the way, I’m averaging only slightly more than 1,700 words a day.
My word count fell off drastically during 2023. Not because I wasn’t distracted by my writing, but because the writing of Follow Focus, the sixth and final volume in the Photo Finish series, required five to six hours of research for every hour of writing I put in. And I know it’s not error-free. There were many things I remembered from my young adult years in the 1970s that I had to revise my understanding of in light of my research. Not everything was the way I remembered it.
It was also the 21-22 season, while I was working on the Team Manager series, that I became a fan of women’s college basketball—first of the American Rivers Conference and Simpson College in Iowa (NCAA Div III), and then of the remarkable Caitlyn Clark of the University of Iowa. (Not Iowa State as so many writers who don’t bother to research their stories have stated.) That made writing from November to March a little more difficult. I’d discovered a new distraction.
I’m determined not to let all the streaming service channels that I had to purchase for this year’s season control my life. I canceled all the subscriptions as soon as the tournament was over. Now I’m investigating which service I will have to subscribe to in order to watch some of the same players now that they are in the WNBA.
Um… Sorry. Got a little distracted there.
My point is… I think… that the older I get the more easily I become distracted. Especially by breasts inhabiting my trailer for a week. It did not require being actively engaged with said breasts to distract me—though that was also a distraction. Their mere presence in their unadorned glory (the typical state in the trailer) was enough to make me forget what I was working on.
Into the breach comes the outline. When I have two or three days in a row during which I am not writing, I have to spend half the next day reading at least the past two chapters or more and reconstructing my thought process regarding where I was going with this masterpiece. That happened with next Sunday’s release of Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. I followed my initial outline last November and had a draft of a little over 60,000 words. When I had to put it aside for a while, it was the outline I created that kept the book on track through an additional 30k.
Then I finished a draft of A Place Among Peers, which is still awaiting my attention to rewrite. A random comment by a reader of A Place at the Table showed me where I think I was still missing something in the current work and I’ll get back to it soon. Distracted. I started the next book in The Props Master Series, but about the time I received word in late December that I needed a few procedures on my heart, I was distracted from finishing it.
I determined to learn more about my craft—I’ve been doing this for forty years now—and become a better writer. So, when I started my current work in progress, I constructed a beat sheet outline that I revised and expanded regularly before I started writing the first draft, and have revised frequently since. I’ve found it extremely valuable, because while I was being distracted by breasts in my trailer, the beat sheet was steadily holding the story in line. Monday when my guest departed, I looked at the beat sheet and immediately wrote the next two chapters of The Strongman. I’m still only about halfway through the story, but I’m right on track with what I outlined as what I wanted the story to look like.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to do such elaborate pre-planning for future stories, but I feel that as I get older and more distractible by little things—well, not that little—a better and more complete outline will start to hold my stories together better than I can currently do when writing by the seat of my pants.
We shall see what comes next in May!
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