Big Ed's Place

At last the Holiday Series is done. At least until I write a bonus story for the ebook collection. I’ve enjoyed writing the story of Dave and his friends, and this last story was simply the sweet denouement. I hope you enjoyed the series.

The core of this story evolved pretty directly from the previous Holiday Series stories. I knew our foursome had to get past their tension and challenges so they could get back to having fun. At least if I wanted a happy ending to the series. I’d also known for some time that Halloween had to be a big holiday for exhibitionists. I quickly realized that our foursome needed to go to either an erotic ball or a swingers’ costume party. The latter turned out to be easier to write, simply due to it being easier to research. A friend who’s gotten into swinging was happy to consult. (thanks, A!). Finding people with good stories about erotic balls was a tad more difficult.

I also decided to do something different for this story. I told Tzratzk to create the art before I wrote the story. Of course, I gave him some general guidelines, but then I had to adapt what I’d written to match his work. It was fun and I’m happy with the result.

So, eight down, one more to go.

In my last post, I mentioned I was using an arc outline for Deep Dish. I thought I might explain this little trick.

Now, I should be upfront and say I’m all over the map on outlining. For most stories, I have a very very top-level outline in my head before I begin the story. I will often jot it down, but not always. And I do mean top-level. For example, the outline for Fireworks was:

1. Pre-weekend discussions
2. Flashing games first day
3. Guys’ show. Possibility of touching raised.
4. More exhibitionism games.
5. Girls’ show. Cross-couple touching that Will can’t handle.
6. Dave helps Will get over it.
7. End at lakeside having public sex while fireworks go off overhead.

That turned into 30,000 words without much more outlining.

Now sometimes I don’t outline at all. Those stories can be frustrating and slow to write, because I’m feeling my way forward. It’s write a paragraph, wait. Write a paragraph, wait. Maybe the characters tell me what’s happening next, and maybe I wait a while. Love’s Labor Found evolved that way. I had the opening scene clearly in mind, but the rest had to evolve as I wrote.

But sometimes that’s just not enough, particularly if the story has multiple intersecting subplots. I’ve found then that it helps to do a simple bulleted outline of each subplot or story arc, and then see how they interleave.

For example, here’s part of an arc from Deep Dish:

Sal Takes over the Club (arc 1)

• (Backstory) Harry has been running the club since the burlesque days, seeing it as a ‘theatre’.  Because he’s a favored friend of The Chairman of the Board (modeled on Tony Accardo), he’s had a lot of freedom to do what he wants
• (Backstory) Mob has Big Boss (modeled on Joey Aiuppa) who runs things; Chairman of Board is advisory.  Point is, Big Boss has power to overrule COB.
• (Backstory) Sal is an aggressive mobster working his way up in The Outfit.  He’s at a Crew Capo (Underboss) level.  He know Mob finances are being squeezed due to social changes and is trying to regain profitability.
• Arc begins as Sal leans on Harry to increase the club’s profits
  • Harry responds by raising the cover fee, backroom fee, stage fee (arc 2 crossover)
  • Some of the girls respond by offering “extras”
• Sal leans on Harry to hire one of his guys as the bartender
  • The bartender is a bookie; sports betting primarily
• Sal leans on Harry to increase profits again, suggests touring headliners
  • Harry agrees, brings in a porn star.  She fucks a guy in the audience.  Sal loves it.  Wants more.  Suggests that maybe they do something like those Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco and make blue movies.

The outline goes on, of course, but I wanted to call attention to the arc crossover comment.  Another Arc in Deep Dish is:

Brandy and Delilah flee town (arc 2)

• Brandy and Delilah start discussing getting out of dancing
  • Complain about raised fees (arc 1 crossover)
  • Brandy reveals she’d love to teach little kids
  • Delilah talks of going to college
• Delilah explains to Brandy and Malcolm the practicalities of leaving
  • They need money
  • They don’t want to be followed

Again, this arc outline continues, but I’ve now tagged the other arc crossover point where the two arcs intersect.  The raised fees in arc one trigger action in arc two.  This doesn’t look like much from this example, admittedly, but there are four arcs in Deep Dish (so far).  By looking at them individually and then identifying the crossover points, it’s easier to keep the writing tight.

Now I don’t know of any other authors who use this trick.  Maybe some do, maybe it’s just not a good tool for many.  But I thought y’all might find it interesting nonetheless.

This one (found here) started with the airport scene. Many years ago, the inspiration for “Jennifer” picked me up in the airport, dressed as a sexy chauffeur. I realized I had to fold it into a story someday, appropriately embellished, and it wasn’t too hard to find a business in Denver that actually rents classic cars.

Once I knew the opening scene, I knew that I wanted to focus on the fallout from Fireworks. In my experience, life isn’t like the TV shows, where things wrap up at the end of an episode and everyone’s happy in the next. Issues burble on. They stretch out. People come back and say “yes, but….” I didn’t think there was any way that Will and Jen would be ‘fine’ solely from how Fireworks ended.

That said, I knew they’d talk, so the story that evolved is one that fit the characters well. The only major addition was the character of Austin, who is a shout-out to my logo designer. He and I discussed polyamory a bit, and I realized that his character was the perfect person to introduce the concept to my foursome. What they do with those thoughts will be left to the remaining two stories…

It’s been a decent week for writing; in large part due to being on semi-vacation and having a lot of the holiday stress behind us. I managed 1108 words on Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 8766. I’m most of the way through my penultimate scene, so this one will coast in pretty close to 10kwords. I think.

This is often the stage in writing a story when I’ve cleared Mile 22 and the writing pace picks up. Home stretch writing is always faster and in many ways more fun than a lot of the rest of it, particularly if I’m in the middle of the big payoff scene that I’ve had in my mind all along.

Except this time… the characters have hijacked my story again. It’s slowing me down because I’m spending a lot of time going “huh–so what are they going to do now?”

This happens to me sometimes and I know it happens to other authors and creative types all the time. I caught an Oprah interview with Taylor Swift this week (side effect of being home in the afternoon when Wife has the TV on) and Taylor said that she generally felt like she was transcribing her songs rather than truly writing them. I really do get that. There’s a zone when I’m writing sometimes that feels like I’m just an instrument for my muse or some higher power–and the best thing I can do is get my own ego and ideas out of the way.

And there’s also a zone when I’m writing and the characters themselves seem to have free will and decide to go somewhere different than I’d planned all along. The first time this happened was in Dawn on the Third Day. I was writing what I thought was the final scene and looked down and realized that Jennifer had just suggested inviting the other couple into the bedroom. That wasn’t at all how I intended to end the story, but I couldn’t see any reason not to go with it, so I did. It happened again in The Ugly One when Billy hauled John onto the ice skating rink and it’s happened a dozen other times in other stories as well.

So Jennifer–my quiet one, my ‘go along’ one, my ‘make Dave happy’ one–has once again stepped up with some boldness I hadn’t anticipated. So I find myself, like the other characters, trying not to let my chin drop as I wait to see what she’ll do. Note that it’s not like she doesn’t have that streak of boldness in her–just see what she did in A Good Christmas or A Valentine’s Surprise. It just wasn’t a direction I was expecting the story to take.

So it promises to be an interesting wind up for the story. I look forward to seeing how it plays out myself.

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?

Write what you know, right?

Ah, if only it was so easy. On the one hand, there are things that many authors want to write about, that they just don’t know. Research helps, but only goes so far. My personal example is from Two Minute Penalties. I had to write a blowjob scene from the POV of the person giving the blowjob, when I’ve never given one myself. Fortunately, I was able to get some advice from women who had, and get a scene that I think worked out okay.

On the other hand, I can’t write memoir style stories either. For starters, there’s the risk of libel if someone doesn’t particularly like how I depicted them. For second, do I really want to tell some of these stories to people who know me?

For, while Big Ed Magusson is a pseudonym, there are a number of people who know I write and know both names. My wife. A few friends. A couple of past lovers. Not many but enough to make me think: do I really want them reading a true story about my past?

Because that’s one of the advantages of fiction. No one’s going to say: “You actually did that? What a pervert!” After all, it’s just fiction, right?

Which means that I’m left stealing from my real life, dressing it up and changing it around. That tends to work, but it’s amusing to see the results. In general, I try to keep the emotional tenor true to real life, while letting the characters take on a life of their own. For example, “Dave” from the Holiday Series is based on a real life friend whose wife asked him for a divorce right before Thanksgiving. His next girlfriend was a vivacious redhead, and that formed the beginning of the story. Of course, by now, the characters look and act nothing like their inspirations, having evolved and moved in their own directions.

Overall, I think it’s working. But it does make these musings tougher to write. Part of me wants to say, “yeah, here’s the full story behind the story,” but that would just defeat the point of writing fiction in the first place.

I wonder how many other authors struggle with the same balance?

Fireworks marked the turn in the Holiday Series from light and fun to something with actual conflict. Ironically, by the time I’d written it out, it’s nearly as long as the rest of the series to date combined.

With this story, what I wanted to do was have our foursome hit the limits of exhibitionism. I wanted them to go from it all being fun and games to being something serious, just as Dave has thought it might be all along. I also thought that the transition from looking to touching was the one that would give these characters the most conflict. They’re all rational, mature adults who are good at communication and so most of the standard sources of conflict (which boil down to immature or idiot characters) didn’t exist. Thus, we have a story in which despite everyone’s best efforts, things blow up.

In laying this story out, I identified three key scenes. The men’s striptease just seemed to be fair payback. The women’s show was built around the silhouettes, an idea I got from the book Sex Games by Linda Sonntag. The final scene with the fireworks was stolen from an actual visit to that viewing site in the story many years ago. I didn’t have sex at the site, but I did notice how it would be possible, given a couple of accomplices to serve as lookouts.

The other fun part of this story was the music. ZZ Top’s Greatest Hits has a prominent place in my car’s CD library and just seemed to fit for the guys. The Joe Loss Orchestra classic is, of course, one that just about everyone has heard and summons up images of the old burlesque era. With that as the lead off song, the rest simply had to be Blues, which meant raiding my home music collection and spending a few hours engaged in ‘research’ while listening away.

One of the advantages of not doing a serial is that I can completely scrap the original plotline if so desired. I’m in the process of doing that with Love’s Labor Found. Basically, I’ve spent a lot of my writing time this past week thinking about where I wanted to go. I’ve also been formatting Fireworks for this site (it’ll be up soon–just have to work out an html issue) and it’s impossible to avoid rereading it as I do so. As a result, I realized that there was a much stronger way for the plot to go than what I had planned. Basically, it’ll be more consistent with the characters and do a better job of setting up the next story.

Now that said, I did take a pass at some rewrites of the current text, but I haven’t entered them into the Word file yet (I did them by hand). I know I’ll want to fiddle with them, because it’s going to be important to get them right if the rest of the story is to hold up. That requires uninterrupted concentration while on the computer, and I just haven’t carved out the time. So Love’s Labor Found remains at 1640 words, even with all the mental energy that’s gone into it.

To balance that out, One-Eyed Dick has been cooking. 5994 words, which means I added another 980 this week. It’s pretty clear I’m within a kilo-word of being done with the first draft, which feels good. In this case, I actually skipped ahead and wrote the ending, because it had been rattling around in my head for several days. So now I have to go back in and do the major sex scene, along with a smaller plot scene and the associated transitions. It feels good. Depending on how the week goes, I may even finish the draft this week. Here’s hoping.

Prior to Dawn on the Third Day, I’d pretty much established a ‘standard’ story length (4k to 6k words).  In my longer stories, that also ended up being the standard chapter length.  I pretty much think in chunks that big, which is why it’s a natural length for me  With Dawn on the Third Day, I wanted to emphasize the different times of day, without forcing each of those periods to be a full ‘chunk’ long.  The resulting story was about three times my normal length and I think the structure holds up well.

The holiday itself is subtle in this one.  It’s Easter, of course, but I didn’t want the story to have a strong religious focus.  The only deliberate religious allusion is the sharing of the cup on the morning of the third day.  It’s a bonding symbolism, much like sharing the cup on Good Friday was, but without the ‘this is my blood’ elements of Christianity.  For bonding is what I wanted to show–the friends drawing much closer together.

As for the storyline itself, the Japanese Spa in Santa Fe is really there, and a wonderful place to visit.  I left it unnamed because I wasn’t sure how they’d take a story that involved sexual activity on the premises.  All the other named locales exist as well.

The one major surprise for me in writing this one was the final sex scene.  I hadn’t intended the story to go that far when I’d laid out the plot, but the characters basically told me that that was how it had to end.  It’s not been the last time that a story took a turn I wasn’t expecting, but it was the first.