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.
5/28/23
Steal Their Shoes
THE FIRST TIME my editor told me to ‘steal their shoes,’ I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. His comment was, “Everything is too easy for both the hero and the villain. There is no reason for them to fail. It’s a walk in the park. You need to steal their shoes.”
The reference was to that great Christmas movie, Die Hard. While sneaking around the building, trying to get to the hostages, McClane (played by Bruce Willis) is discovered while he’s barefoot and a bunch of windows are shot out. He has to run across the broken glass in his bare feet. That not only means he is injured and it is difficult to walk, but also he’s leaving a trail of blood, so the villains can track him.
In Nathan Everett’s The Gutenberg Rubric, I rewrote the beginning to injure Keith in both his eyes and hands, two things critical to the success of his mission. But I’ve found I need to remember this advice over and over while writing.
Lazlo Zalezac, rest his soul, created a fun universe called “Damsels in Distress” and I decided to write a series of stories in it. They aren’t long stories, but were incredibly fun to write. I checked in with him before making my contribution to be sure my concept was in keeping with his vision for that universe. He said he liked it and to publish it.
I’d read all the stories in that universe and discovered how some authors had gotten around different strictures Lazlo had put on it. They were making firearms out of ceramics, having portals open directly between earth and Chaos, and developing technology that the medieval planet was not supposed to have. And, it seemed, all the heroes were military heroes and engineers. With their superior technology and experience, there was really no reason they shouldn’t succeed.
So, I took away their shoes. I first went back to the initial restrictions on the universe and abided by the rules that had been set up. Second, I started with a hero that was as far from being a military hero as I could make him. He was a theatre major who was paralyzed from the waist down in an auto hit-and-run while saving his sister-in-law and niece. In my book, he’d shown his heroism, but he was crippled. He had no engineering or military background. He had nothing but his wits, acting ability, and his sister-in-law to get him through.
He had every reason to fail and die on his first mission. He didn’t. He succeeded, was healed in the healing chamber, and brought back a damsel as well as his sister-in-law. Working within the increased restrictions of this universe challenged me to think of all kinds of ways that this hero could use the talents he had to accomplish things that were normally relegated to people who were fully able-bodied and had military and engineering backgrounds.
This was obviously not the only time. My heroes are often—maybe usually—underdogs. They don’t have the stature or physical capability of their contemporaries. They have to overcome a disability. And they have to solve problems that they don’t have the usual skillset to solve.
In Living Next Door to Heaven 6, El Rancho del Corazón, the euphoric beginning of the book is shattered by the news that the farmhouse where they were planning to live has burned to the ground—just before they were to move there. I mentioned in a previous post that I was close to 40,000 words into the story (that would eventually be 200,000 words) and I threw it all away to start over. Sometimes I’m slow at realizing things. It took me that long to realize that everything was too easy for the clan. I had to steal their shoes.
In my original draft the parents stepped in with an insurance settlement that rebuilt the house in time for the clan to start classes in the fall and get Brian’s TV show on the air. It was all too easy. The parents took care of everything. Not only was it too easy for the clan, it was boring. They didn’t need to work for their home. And rewriting it made a lot of things clearer in the conflicts that would drive the story later.
I often read stories and think, that main character is a superhero. There’s no reason for him to fail. There’s no real conflict in the story. Take The Da Vinci Code, for example. Robert Langdon, the hero played in the movies by Tom Hanks, was an expert in symbology, had an eidetic memory, could hold his breath as he swam multiple lengths of the pool, and had contacts all over the world. There was no reason for him to ever face failure, and so the conflict felt forced. You knew from the very beginning that he would walk in, solve the mystery, and walk out. By the time Langdon was immersed in a sensory deprivation chamber and presumed dead in The Lost Symbol, I was ready to breathe a sigh of relief that the guy was finally gone. And I simply couldn’t force myself to read Inferno or Origin. Give the guy amnesia and let him become the person who could figure things out instead of already knowing them. Take away his shoes.
There is a common theme in most do-over stories. An old guy gets electrocuted, struck by lightning, caught up in a wormhole, contacted by aliens, shot, or run over by a cement truck and then wakes up in his fourteen-year-old body to live his life over again. He has Wikipedic knowledge of everything that happened during his lifetime so he knows all the best bets, investments, or inventions to make in this lifetime that will make him rich. He understands all the things that went wrong in politics so he can save the world from the current moral collapse. And most of all, he has years of experience with women which he can put into play to seduce all the fourteen-year-old girls he wants and it’s okay because even though his head is 80, his body is only 14.
When I wrote “The Transmogrification of Jacob Hopkins” series, I stole his shoes. Yes, in Double Take, he is sent back to his fourteen-year-old (almost fifteen) body, but he is in an alternate universe. It’s very much like what he grew up in, but he didn’t go back in time. The new timeline picks up at the same time his old body dies. So, all that perfect memory of the past sixty-five years is worthless, not to mention it’s not perfect. “So, I can’t beat the Koch Brothers in cornering silver?” Jacob asks. “That was the Hunts. The Kochs tried to corner the government. No billions for you,” responds the powers-that-be.
Without knowing what got him there, he has to deal with his new self’s history—the nightmares and desires that led him to attempt suicide. And he doesn’t know the history and society that resulted in this new world he’s living in. His old self is as much a stumbling block for him in the new world as he is a help.
There is so much more. Next week, I’ll talk a little about what it means to “Show, Don’t Tell.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
