Big Ed's Place

With the Grand Opening now over, it definitely feels like a new chapter in my writing and online life has started. So, catching my breath in the evening, I took some time for reflection.

It’s almost six years ago that I delurked and posted my first story (A Good Christmas). Now that’s not literally true, because I’d posted a story to alt.sex.stories.moderated back in 1992. But I received such negative comments that I basically quit writing for a decade and so doing it again in 2003 felt “new.” At some point, I’ll do a post on how Frank Downey and Girl Friday created an environment I felt safe enough to delurk into, but for now I want to tell the pre-story.

For long before I started writing, I espoused the philosophy that The Meaning of Life was Art. We were each given a canvas called a lifetime and the Divine wanted to see what we would do with it. It made for great philosophical conversations, particularly late at night when we were well into our second or third bottle of wine, but it also had some truth in how I sensed things worked.

So one night I shared this with some other men, and one of the men challenged me to stop spouting it and actually engage in an actual art of some kind. Well, given my general lack of skills in the visual arts, music, or dance, the art form was kind of obvious. Besides, I’d always written a little here or there.

So the men backed it up with a challenge. They challenged me to write a poem a day for three weeks, and then go read one of them at an open mike night at one of the local cafe’s. My penalty for not doing it was $100. I accepted the challenge and wrote the poems.

And then chickened out. There was no way I wanted anyone to hear my stuff. I paid the $100 into our running booze fund.

But the guys weren’t satisfied. They could see how much I was terrified and they were sure I’d be a better man if I could face that fear and push through it. Yeah, they said my poems were fine, but that wasn’t the same as putting them out in front of strangers. They wanted me to put my work in front of people who had no incentive to say “Nice job Ed” so as to not hurt my feelings.

I agreed, but was clearly still nervous. So they upped the penalty. $1000 if I didn’t do the reading. That was too much money for me to easily concede. They’d all show up to support me, but I had to make the arrangements and actually get up at the microphone and do it.

Well, I did it. I read two poems that night, in the Mercury Cafe in Denver (which shows up in Friday the 13th). I even invited my new girlfriend (now wife) and read a love poem I’d written to her (which by the way, I highly recommend, given the way she thanked me later).

And the guys were right. It was good for me. Yeah, I could almost feel my knees knocking as I walked to the microphone, and I almost collapsed in relief when it was over, but later that night and the next day, I was invigorated.

So when Frank sponsored a StoryFest, and I had the idea for A Good Christmas, I was faced with a question: How could posting to a friendly audience in a yahoo newsgroup be worse than an open mike night?

The answer was and is blatantly obvious. So six years ago, I became an erotica author. And now, I have this new sparkling home.

It’s amusing to me to look at my weekly totals and see how low they are. There are of course the usual reasons or excuses and causes. But today I got to thinking–what’s slow? What’s fast?

Back when I wrote The Ugly One and Two Minute Penalties, I could basically produce 5-6kwords in 3-4 weeks. That’s about 1500-2000 words in a week. I considered the pace at the time to be extraordinarily slow. I’d see Nick Scipio or Frank Downey pounding out long stories at extraordinarily faster rates. Of course the irony of the fact that I’m now writing more than both of them combined is not lost on me.

These days, of course, my writing is slower. Except that I’m also doing a lot of webpage work, and does that count? Additionally, this post and the Wednesday Musings post are easily several hundred words. If I throw those into the writing count, am I writing slower or faster than I used to? And what other standards are there?

For this week, I feel like I made reasonable progress on One-Eyed Dick. I’m up to 4221 words, which means 1105 in the last week. No progress on Love’s Labor Found (still at 1640), but it still feels good.

And maybe that’s what matters? Not the speed but the sensation of having progressed?

Anyway, that’s the status this Sunday.

Two Minute Penalties was written in the spring of 2004 during the National Hockey League playoffs. It was inspired by Frank Downey’s Curse of the Bambino and I followed some pretty strict rules in writing it.

Specifically, the rule was that the story had to be written around an actual hockey playoff series as it was happening. Each chapter had to incorporate a game, and had to be posted (to storiesonline) within 24 hours of the completion of the game.

This turned into an interesting challenge. I had to lay out a story and plot, without knowing how each game would turn out, and therefore whether Liz would win or lose a particular bet. I also had no idea how many games the series would run, which is why there’s an overtime chapter. After Game 5, I decided that the odds were that either the Detroit or Colorado series would go to seven games, and so I laid out what would happen in the last two chapters. Then they both lost, leaving me with an extra chapter, that was posted a little later.

That said, it was a lot of fun. I’d write while watching the hockey game and then furiously after it was over. At the time, I was living alone (my now-wife and I were dating but hadn’t moved in together) and there’s no way I could have pulled it off if I’d had obligations in the evenings. It also helped that the games were spaced two days apart, giving me an evening to get a jump start on the next chapter and write up until the game needed to be included.

Unfortunately, the next year, the NHL players got locked out and there was no hockey. When it returned, the salary cap killed the Colorado Avalanche, forcing them to let go of many of their best players. They’ve struggled since, and the rivalry with Detroit just hasn’t been the same. So in many ways, this story is a snapshot of 2004, that is not likely to be repeated in the near future.

Online erotica is a funny field. Most of the writers who release stories are amateurs, not getting paid in any coin other than appreciative emails from readers and internal satisfaction. True, there are some pros around, and a fair number of semi-pros, who release both free material as well as writing for paying markets, but the dominant material is by pure amateurs.

So what’s the appropriate level of criticism?

I think newbie writers really need encouragement more than anything. This is in part based on my own experience. I posted my first erotica to alt.sex.stories back in 1992 and it got savagely criticized. Stung, I withdrew and didn’t publish anything more until I got some serious encouragement from Frank Downey and Girl Friday, starting with praise from Frank’s yahoo group for A Good Christmas.

Does that mean a newbie shouldn’t hear what’s wrong with their work? Not necessarily. But I think the overriding prerogative is to be kind. Weak writers will figure it out eventually, and either get better (like I did) or find other things to do with their time. Silence also speaks wonders. And if there’s a gem underneath the problems? Maybe a bit of encouragement will lead it to flourish.

I kept writing after my alt.sex.stories disaster because a female friend wanted personalized stories (a scenario I stole for Friends and Benefits). I got better. Then, thanks to Frank and Girl Friday, I started sharing my stories online again. And I think I continue to improve.

But back to criticism–if we treat newbies, putting their work online for free with gentle kindness, the other end of the spectrum is the pros. That doesn’t mean walking away from kindness, but fair toughness is much more called for. If an audience has to pay for a work, providing a fair assessment (a decent critique) is a service to the audience. I, for one, pay attention to movie reviews before I plunk down my dollars (and my scarce free time). I believe that part of ‘getting paid’ for something inherently means accepting that critics may evaluate it.

There’s a flip side to criticism for the pros as well. If a reviewer is known for being fair, a positive review can help increase the audience.

But what about the folks in between? The Frank Downeys and Nick Scipios of the online world? And all the popular authors on sites like StoriesOnline? They’re certainly not newbies, but they’re also not true professionals, since they don’t charge for their stories. Are they fair game for a hard review?

I’m leaning toward a qualified yes. The main qualification is permission. The popular authors know that they’re well liked and probably don’t need the encouragement that a newbie does. But at the same time, they didn’t a priori sign up to have some guy publicly pointing out the flaws in their writing, much less anyone commenting in follow ups to that critique. So I’m coming down on the idea that I can ask the authors if they’re willing to let me do a review, and if so, they’re fair game. If not, well, it won’t be public.

A Good Christmas was my first story under this identity. I’d done some writing in the early 90′s and posted two stories to alt.sex.stories. The comments were… unkind. While I continued to write for more personal audiences, I quit publishing my stuff anywhere.

Of course, that didn’t mean I’d been offline. In 2003, I lurked in several yahoogroups devoted to erotica or hosted by erotica authors. Frank Downey decided to throw a storyfest for Halloween that year, inviting anyone who was interested to post a story on Halloween. It looked like fun, but I continued to lurk.

Then Frank announced a storyfest for Christmas. This story showed up in the back of my mind and kept pushing its way forward. At the same time, some friends of mine were pushing me to start releasing my stories again. So I decided to give it a shot and released this story into Frank’s group, and then later into other locales. I’ve kept writing since then.

This story was inspired by a friend of mine who’d gotten asked for a divorce around Thanksgiving the year before. He’d ended up in a memorable relationship with an exhibitionistic redhead just before Christmas, so I swiped the premise and then changed the characters around. Ironically, he actually did recognize himself when he stumbled on my work years later. Fortunately, he was amused rather than pissed.

I had no idea this would turn into an extended series when I wrote it, and it does contain one major regret. I intentionally chose to have the two female leads have similar first names on a whim, not realizing how hard it would make keeping them separate down the line. At the time I’d written the story, I’d dated four Jen’s or Jennifers, including two that were physically similar. I thought it would be cute, then to do the same. Needless to say, nowadays I am wary of anything that seems “cute.”