I’ve started this weekly blog about my life as an erotica author. Why and how did I get started? How is it going? What have I learned? These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story. I’ll post here each week with another short chapter of my life as an author of erotica. Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.
4/16/23
Planning My Thank You Story
I’M OFTEN ASKED where I get the ideas for my stories. About the time I was preparing my survey, I was also working with a team of authors and editors administering a literary competition that had a dozen different categories and over a thousand entries. It seemed that contest entrants were often confused about what genre their story would best fit. Romances that looked like science fiction, mysteries that looked like children’s stories. And genre mashing was a contributing factor. The story was a science fiction romance for children solving a mystery.
I tossed up my hands at one point and said, “Next year, I’m going to write an erotic paranormal romance western mystery.”
No more said than the idea took full shape in my mind and I had to sit and write Redtail, an erotic paranormal romance western mystery. It was written, edited, and posted in a matter of three months and I was looking for my next story.
I now knew what pleased my audience as a result of my surveys and many emails. So, as I drove across the southern states from California to Florida, I started figuring out what to write. This would be the first story I wrote “to spec” for my audience. It would have a smart young hero with a talent. He’d gather a number of girls around him. He would defend them with his life when necessary. There would be sports action. And let us not forget, the story would be a long one, covering years. My readers all liked long stories with regular posting.
But what would the story be?
I was parked on the beach in Mississippi or Alabama or Florida, listening to the 70s station on XM radio as I looked out over the Gulf of Mexico. A song by the British band Smokie came on and it was catchy. A guy lived next door to the love of his life for years, but there was always some insurmountable obstacle for them until she finally moved away. The song was titled “Living Next Door to Alice,” but my hearing was playing tricks on me, as it often does, and I decided to call ‘my thank you story,’ Living Next Door to Heaven. I had the plot and I began writing that night, March 19, 2014.
I used settings from my childhood, mashing together two different schools I went to, different people I’d known, the fantasies I’d had about becoming a basketball or football star, my fondness for cooking, and other bits and pieces that crossed my mind. In fact, I later discovered some of the names and character descriptions were too much like actual people I’d known and I needed to change them. And once I had those tidbits and a framework to hang them on, the writing went very fast. I was churning out 4-5,000 words a day as the story took shape.
By this time, I’d also acquired a couple of editors through SOL who wanted to edit my books for me. The contribution of my first volunteer editors, Old Rotorhead and Pixel the Cat, who still read and correct my manuscripts and edit for dozens of other authors, cannot be overstated. They were fantastic and nearly as enthused about the story as I was. I started posting Living Next Door to Heaven on April 24, 2014, just 36 days after I started writing. The story grew to more than 8,000k (1,680,000 words). It ran for over two years as a serial, posting a chapter every three days, and was later released as a series of eBooks that are still available and selling.
And it hurt. It had as many tears as laughs. It had abuse and death and addiction. It had murder and retribution and heartache. But it had so much love and loving combinations and support and caring and community that even the readers banded together to support each other through the hard parts of the story. I wept through many scenes as I wrote them. But I truly believe there is no such thing as a ‘Happily Ever After’ if it has been ‘Happily Ever Before.’
And when it ended, people still asked for more.
Living Next Door to Heaven 1 has been downloaded 1.2 million times. LNDtH2 has been downloaded another 890,000 times and has been voted my highest scoring story on SOL.
The key erotic element throughout the story was characters readers cared about. Readers adopted them into their families and when a character hurt, they all hurt. When a character was excited and happy and loving, we all joined in those feelings.
Not just the readers, but me as an author, too.
I’ll continue this story next week when I write about “Old Men’s Erotica.” For the past twelve years, I have been on an incredible journey and there is much more to that story.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
