Big Ed's Place

Part One of Friday the 13^th came to me in one of those inspired moments that people often attribute to Muses. I wrote the entire first part over lunch, on a Friday the 13^th in February. I just liked the idea of a ‘rewind’ type story (like are common on storiesonline.net) but thought having only a few hours in the rewind would just be amusingly nasty. It all came together when I realized what day it was.

Parts Two and Three came much later. I couldn’t get the idea of the story of Hector of Troy out of my mind, and decided that I need to add two more parts for the other two goddesses involved. Thus, the entire trilogy came into being.

I’ve noticed that any long project, including writing lengthy fiction, is really a matter of endurance. Yeah, it’s fun at the beginning, and it feels great when it’s done, but there are long stretches in the middle where perseverance is key and all that separates finishing from quitting is the ability to keep struggling on. It’s a marathon, pure and simple.

Which means there’s Mile 22.

I picked “Mile 22″ for that point where you’re well over halfway done, but the end is still too far away for a final ‘kick’ to get you there. It hits about the 75-80% point for me and for several people I know. And it’s a bitch to get past.

In writing, I find that Mile 22 is when I’m close enough to the end that the open creativity is largely over. I don’t have any major or even minor plot issues to still work out in my head. The characters are settled and I’m no longer discovering them. The big climax might still be looming or it might have just passed, but there are too many loose ends for a quick denouement. Basically, I can count the remaining scenes I have to write but am struggling with the motivation to actually write them.

Now if this were a less creative enterprise, I would probably force myself to slog through it. Household projects don’t particularly care if I’m not feeling creative as long as I’m still working on them (and yes, I’m still cleaning the basement so we can finish it). The mind can be numb if the back is strong.

But writing… that’s more of a challenge. A couple of times, I just forced myself forward, to later read my wooden words and realize they were crap. There has to be something flowing. And when it’s not… I might as well be doing something else.

Fortunately, that’s going to be one of the benefits of this website. Too burnt to write? I’m sure there will be maintenance to do here. The key thing is–I’ll be doing something related to my writing. It won’t be languishing and I won’t have abandoned it.

Of course, that’s my technique. Others I know of? Withdrawing from the rest of the writer’s world. Starting a side project. Skipping ahead to write scenes down the road in the story. Sometimes even declaring defeat and quitting.

But the mile is still there. I’ve never found a way past it, and I’ve seen too many other writers hit it to ignore it. We’ll see how the next marathon goes.

Well, I forced myself to find some time to untangle Love’s Labor Found. It’s up to 1986 words now, which means 346 new ones in addition to the rewrite of a few hundred. It’s now headed a direction that’s more consistent with the characters. That’s one of the side benefits of rereading all the Holiday Series stories recently (getting them posted to this site). I got back in their heads and realized that the original plotline was just too tangled for these characters.

Which in many ways is refreshing. There’s a point that often occurs in writing where I just ‘get out of the way’ and let the characters tell the story. Whether I’m tapping my subconscious or a muse or something else, I don’t know. I do know that I often end up with stronger stories as a result. Of course, I also sometimes end up in cul-de-sacs that I have to rip out, but that’s why editing passes were invented.

In this case, I realized that one of my initial premises just didn’t fit the characters. They’re too mature, and too good at communication, for certain acts to occur. So I had to wait for them to tell me what the conflict in the story was going to be. Eventually, they did, and the result is a hard right in the overall plot. But I’m also back on it, which is good.

In other writing news, I’m getting the feedback from my team and some others on One-Eyed Dick. I still haven’t found a decent market for it, and so I am strongly leaning toward just releasing it here. I could keep searching, but there’s no point in being a fool about it. So probably in a couple of weeks I’ll throw it up here.

So… for those paying attention, here’s the current writing queue:

In editing/review:
One-Eyed Dick, Nellie the Whore, and the Spring of Perpetual Wood
Bent (a Summer Camp story)
Babe in the Night (submitted for paid publication and awaiting response)

In work:
Love’s Labor Found (Holiday Series #7)

Firmly in queue:
Unmasked (Holiday Series #8)
Giving Thanks (Holiday Series #9)
The Devil in the Details (a Summer Camp story)
Boys of Summer (next Compassionate Courtesan Universe novel)

Potential queue jumpers:
The Size of Their Toys (a Summer Camp story)
Son of a Bitch (reworked short story)
Historical Fiction novel (would be written under my real name)

I also have notes for about a dozen stories, but they’re still at the rough note stage. They won’t be real until they find a title. So they’re not quite at the potential queue jumper stage, but who knows?

One of the realities of writing is that it’s extremely difficult to make a living at it. Yes, there are a few who make it rich, but the threshold’s pretty clear. If your book isn’t one of the 100 titles on sale at Walmart or your local supermarket, you won’t get rich. Less than half of the US population steps foot into a bookstore in a given year and so the megachains are the only ones that really move books. Now those 100 titles include several titles by the same authors, and they get picked up due to megadeals and publicity by publishers. The odds are against any given writer, regardless of genre.

Erotica is actually one of the lowest paying genres. I understood that at one time it may have been different, but with the advent of the internet, it’s just too easy for readers to find free stuff. Even free stuff of relatively good quality. So why plunk down a ten bucks for something when you can get something almost as good for free?

Now my research indicates that there are some things that erotica readers will pay for, and I’ll go into that in future posts, but none of them are the traditional “pay for the story itself.” For example, readers might pay for a quality guarantee or convenience, if a few bucks guarantees they won’t have to waste time sorting through the free story sites. But some random story, titled “Amy and Alex” with a teaser of “Their passion knew no bounds!” How many of y’all would even bother if you found such a story on a free site? Or a story that just had codes after the title?

So, what does sell? Specifically, what publications or websites can actually make a profit, however tiny, in selling erotica?

Well, the answer seems to be “not the stuff I write.” There’s actually a huge print market for erotic romance. Apparently women are willing to shell out for more explicit versions of the romance novels of yesteryear. Gay and Lesbian erotica also seems to have a paying market, but since I’m not in that subculture, I can’t comment. The last major type that seems to sell in print is bdsm. Now that, I believe, is because good quality bdsm is harder to find online. For one, a lot of amateur authors just don’t know how to write it. For two, the bdsm community has always been pretty tight and I think that print books and word of mouth have just worked better.

Now there are equivalents online for these print genres. There are also a few exceptions to the rule. Ruthie’s Club was one such exception before it recently folded. They covered a wide variety of erotica genres, and their illustrations added to the appeal of the site. I loved reading stories there. I loved submitting my work there. The only real problem appears to be that it couldn’t handle the loss of a key person and so was forced to fold. I speculate that they were running a real lean budget to begin with and that’s why they couldn’t handle losing their website expert. But with Ruthie’s demise, there’s now one less general erotica market.

So what does that all mean? Well, I’m not trying to get rich writing, but I am trying to make this a high quality website. That incurs bills and selling a few stories would help offset those costs. So I’ll continue to poke around for markets that will let me post my stories here at some point (i.e., I’m not going to sell stories if I can’t reprint them here after some defined period of time like 6 months). And in the process, maybe I’ll learn a few things that will make interesting future musings.

Eye of the Hurricane, by David Wilcox, is a haunting ballad from the late 80′s, mostly just voice and guitar. It tells the story of a girl who rides a Hurricane motorcycle as a way to forget her pain. I believe it’s beautiful and one of the best “I’m depressed because I got dumped” songs around. Five out of five stars.

This story came to me when Gary Jordan suggested a storm festival in honor of another author who’d been evacuated due to a hurricane. The song by David Wilcox has haunted me since my undergrad days when my then-girlfriend used to listen to it all the time. When she dumped me, it was for much the reason as in this story–because I was second best. It was straight-forward to give the narrator his own ‘second best.’

Well, not much original writing this week.  Love’s Labor Found remains stuck at 1640 words.  I didn’t have a lot of free time at all, and what I did have I spent on editing One-Eyed Dick.  After three passes, I sent it to my reading team.  I’m getting the feedback now, and have already folded in edits based on those comments.

I think the story’s substantially improved with the edits and with some of the suggestions.  There’s only one meaningful plotline change, and in the grand scheme it’s pretty minor (my wife talked me into letting a character live).  The most challenging edits were for vernacular voice.  One reader pointed out inconsistencies and so I basically did a ‘search’ word by word, so that every time I used “thinkin’” instead of “thinking” i was using it the same way.

Even then, I catch problems.  I spotted a stupid typo that slipped through all the edits and it’s like ‘why is this here?’  I am looking at adding a proofreader to my team and following Nick Scipio’s overall strategy and we’ll see if that helps.  For those not familiar, Nick finished a draft, sends it to an alpha reader, revises it, sends it to a reality checking team, revises it, sends it to an editor, revises it, and sends it to proofreaders.  Now I’m confident that scope is bigger than I personally need, but I think it’s still good to have several sets of eyes on a work before it goes out the door.

And ‘going out the door’ may be difficult for this one.  I’d like to submit it for pay somewhere before posting it here.  A few dollars to offset costs of this site would be nice, and most places only insist on exclusive rights for a handful of months.  Which means y’all will see it, the only question is when.  However, being humor and being longer than most (it’s still ~7400 words, even after edits and cuts), there aren’t a lot of good markets.  I’ll rant about this on Wednesday, but if I don’t come up with something within a couple of weeks, I may just release it here near/after all the backlog stories are up.  We’ll see.

I’ve been cleaning the basement the past few days. Not the general sweeping and such, but the type of cleaning that involves opening boxes that have sat undisturbed and undusted for nearly a decade. Of course, that means subjecting myself to waves of nostalgia, both good and the bad.

If I step back, I find my reactions somewhat amusing. Why are the pangs of regret over missed opportunities and bad misdeeds so strong? My life is in a good place, and I seriously doubt that going back in time and ‘doing things over’ would meaningfully improve them. In a couple of cases, mostly around past relationships, I know I’m far better off with my wife than I ever would have been with those women. It’s not that they were bad women, or even necessarily bad fits with me. It’s just that I am a better man now, and a much better husband, than I think I ever would have been with them.

For example, I stumbled across some old letters from the woman who was the basis for “Tina.” Unlike in Friends and Benefits, there was no reconciliation with her, and I have not seen or spoken with her in thirteen years. That said, in the modern era of google and facebook, it wasn’t too hard to discover that she’s alive and married and living halfway across the country from where we had our romance. Sometimes I like to kid myself that we’d have continued having torrid sex if we’d stuck together, even though I know that is usually not a constant in any relationship. But at the same time, I realize I’m glossing over all the things that didn’t work between us, and led to our split. Would I have ‘grown up’ if she hadn’t thrown me out of her life? Somehow I suspect not. Or at least not with the same level of maturity and insight I now have.

Which makes it interesting to consider the subgenre of time travel that pops up at storiesonline and sometimes in mainstream fiction. If you could go back and do it all over again, would you? And if not, would you write about it? Numerous authors have come to varied answers to the first, while indulging in the second.

But me… even in these eddies of remembrance, I don’t feel the urge to rewrite my past. At least not more than I’ve done. Admittedly, I’m mining my past pretty heavily for my fiction, because ‘what if?’ is a great starting point for an idea that turns into a story. But it’s not a close what if, and it’s not personal. It’s more, “this would make a cool story.”

For example, I once had a date with a woman I met at a party. I asked her over dinner what she did for a living and she said, “Well, I’m a phone sex operator. I never graduated college and I found that phone sex was the most money for the hour.” Now I don’t need to write a rehash how the relationship went (good first two dates, bad third date, no fourth date). Nor do I even have to create a story where our relationship took off.

Instead… what if, instead of me sitting across from her, it was a shy, nerdy guy? Or a sexually conservative guy? Or a guy with a fetish for phone sex himself? Or what if, instead of meeting at a party, they were set up by a mutual friend? Or (gasp) a relative? Or they met through a chatroom online? And what if she was doing phone sex for kicks instead of the money? Or she wanted to get out of it, but didn’t know how?

The creative possibilities are far more interesting that simply rewriting what happened. And while this story isn’t in my queue, it’s the type of thing that often occurs to me when these maudlin moments hit. And so writing seems to be one way to help pop me out of the past and start thinking about what I might do (or write) next.

This story was originally written in 2004 and 2005, released serially with new chapters approximately monthly. During that time, the most frequent comment I’ve received in email while writing this story has been “I identify with John.” It seems there are a lot of us “Ugly Ones” around. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be as many Tamara/Lynn’s to help us out.

Tamara/Lynn is based on two real women. The first I knew only briefly. Like the fictional Tamara/Lynn, she worked her way through school while supporting a handicapped family member by being a courtesan in the Nevada brothels. She was beautiful, calm, very giving to her clients, and enjoyed her work. The second woman is a former prostitute who is now a counselor on sexuality issues. She regularly works with men who have problems with self-esteem around women and one of her techniques is the weekly “practice date,” like the Thursday evenings at Tamara/Lynn’s. This woman became a good friend before she relocated to Texas.

Jesse and Frank are based on real bullies that tormented me in seventh grade. My ultimate solution to avoiding the bullies was exactly the one that Billy used: finding friends so that the bullies had to either pick on all of us or none of us. It worked, though we never threw a party to celebrate.

All other characters are purely fictional except John.

John’s emotional journey is based on my own. That said, I’ve taken considerable artistic license in everything from his physical features to the orgy in the brothel. The biggest change is that I compressed eight years of my life into ten months of his. Even though the details are fiction, both the emotional struggles and the happy ending are true.

Well, I finished the Crappy First Draft of “One-Eyed Dick, the Whore Nellie, and the Spring of Perpetual Wood.” First draft word count, 7552. I will try to cut about 10% out in smoothing and editing. I also have one minor discontinuity to fix that I know of.

Aside: no progress on Love’s Labor Found. That’s still at 1640 words.

So the next questions with Dick are–do I try to sell it? And if so, where?

It would have been perfect for Ruthie’s, of course. It wouldn’t be hard to get it to fit. But sexual humor–I’m not sure what the market is for that, and particularly at that length. Most of the pay locales I’ve seen that might fit want substantially shorter works. Which of course is amusing given the bias of readers on storiesonline and asstr who want meganovels.

I figure I’ve got a few weeks to figure that out. It’s going to take some time to edit it, particularly with the other things I’ve got going on (website work). I’ll poke around, both for it and for Babe in the Night, since that’s back from Ruthie’s, unpublished. Maybe something will come up.

Anyway, it feels good to get the first draft done. It always does. And now I can focus more on Love’s Labor Found.