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.
5/21/23
Killing Your Babies
I DON’T MAKE A SECRET of my multiple writing identities. I publish under the name Devon Layne and as Nathan Everett. I consider them divided by the concept that Nathan Everett doesn’t write erotica. Although there are a few steamy scenes, I turn the head before the consummation. So, I’m going to use one of my Nathan Everett books as an illustration for this post.
The writing community often talks about an author needing to “kill his babies.” This has nothing at all to do with abortion, so step down off your soapbox and give a listen. It means that sometimes you have to edit or rewrite something in your story that you really really like, but it just doesn’t work for the story. It could be a scene, a sentence, a concept, a location. But you love it like a little baby. Whatever it is and no matter how much you like it, it deserves to have a red pencil mark drawn through it. You have to kill it.
Back around 2007 or 2008 when I was still getting my boutique publishing company (LongTale Press, now defunct) off the ground, I attended a writers’ conference in Seattle. There was a social time and I chose to sit at a table with a topic marker that said “Thriller.” For a while, I was the only person there, then one of the speakers came to the table to join me. It was my first encounter with spy thriller author Gayle Lynds. For the better part of an hour we discussed what made a thriller and what we were working on.
I’d recently started planning a novel I was calling “Gutenberg’s Other Book.” I said it would revolve around what happened to the Library of Alexandria. Gayle confided that she was also working on a spy thriller that included a secret library. Her book, Library of Gold, was published in 2010, just a little before mine was. Before her book had gotten very far, the title was changed to The Book of Spies. Mine was changed to The Gutenberg Rubric, and won the second prize in the thriller category at the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association Literary Competition. It is now, finally, also available on Bookapy.
Gayle advised me to be very careful with my research because people were hyper-critical about any historic or even mechanical detail that was out of place in a thriller. I’d been researching Gutenberg and the Library of Alexandria for over twenty years, so I set about carefully constructing my story. I began writing on January 1, 2009. By August, I had 45,000 words, and hated most of them. I’d carefully plotted a plausible rescue of the library that moved it from location to location for several hundred years until it came to rest in a secret and mysterious location in Turkey.
I interspersed that tale with the story of a librarian who was drawn into the mystery of the location by a hint he’d found in an old manuscript. Of course, some wanted to find the secret location to preserve it, some to destroy it, and some to profit from it. It should have been exciting. But it wasn’t.
I sent my 45,000 words off to The Book Doctor, Jason Black, and asked him what was wrong with it. His words were disheartening.
“Start over. Cut all the stuff about where the library moved over the centuries. It’s stuff you need to know to write the book, but none of your readers need to know it. Then start with some action and steal their shoes!” I’ll talk about the last part next week. Where I got stuck was “Cut all the stuff about where the library…”
I’d spent years working out those details. I’d researched shipping routes, conquests, legends, and myths. I’d read a history of ink that spanned forty centuries! It was over half of what I’d written so far. It was my baby!
And I killed it.
The book turned out very successful, though every time a native German speaker reads it, I get a different set of corrections for the few German phrases included in the book. But there are only allusions to the long history of movement I’d researched and written. I needed to know all that in order to write the book with a realistic foundation. My readers didn’t need to know it at all.
It’s not the last time I scrapped major portions of something I’d written that I really liked. I was some 40,000 words into Devon Layne’s LNDtH6, El Rancho del Corazón when I scrapped the entire draft and started over. When I wrote Nathan Everett’s City Limits, I rewrote and changed over 80% of the book in the second draft—and believe me, some babies fell on the cutting room floor.
Those things are not all lost and gone forever. When I wrote Devon Layne’s Bob’s Memoir, 4,000 Years as a Free Demon, I resurrected some of the material I’d researched about the Library of Alexandria and made saving libraries a passion of Bob’s. I have one little interchange between two unnamed characters that’s just three sentences. I’ve been saving it for two years, waiting for a place that I could use it. Until I find that place, it stays in the nursery. I can’t force it into a story where it doesn’t fit, just because it’s clever.
Ultimately, the goal is to make the story a better read. It’s one of the reasons I don’t understand people who say they just write for themselves, but then subject readers to what they’ve written. If you are going to offer what you’ve written to people to read and enjoy, then someplace along the line, you’ll have to kill your babies.
I mentioned another bit of advice The Book Doctor gave me when writing The Gutenberg Rubric. Next week, I’ll investigate Stealing Their Shoes.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
