12/31/23
Resolved
This is number forty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“I DON’T MAKE RESOLUTIONS because I don’t want to suffer through the disappointment of breaking them in a couple of days.”
Sound familiar? In fact, I’ve heard that statement in one form or another from countless friends and acquaintances. Resolutions turn the New Year into a year-long Lenten Season in which the purpose seems to deny ourselves something.
Stop eating sugary things.
Quit smoking.
Lose twenty pounds.
Exercise three times a week.
Those are a few of the things that are common resolutions. They all require a punishment of some sort for having screwed up in the past. That’s the way I’ve always looked at them.
Then I recently ran across an article that suggested we only make fun resolutions. These are not punishment, but rather a reward for living in 2024.
Eat more ice cream.
Order a different dish at your favorite restaurant each time you eat there.
Learn how to swear in multiple languages.
Always ask for a senior discount before paying.
Somehow, all of these sound like fun things that I could accomplish in the coming year. Of course, as fun as those are, they aren’t the focus of what I’d like to accomplish this year.
When I started the Photo Finish Series, I was incredibly excited. In many ways, it was the closest thing I had to an autobiography and it felt good to get some of these feelings and stories on the page. Nate Hart was the pseudonym I used in high school for my writing—mostly poetry. He shows up again in Living Next Door to Heaven as the mysterious author of poems Brian reads in competition—poems that I wrote in high school. And many of Nate’s experiences and most of his philosophy came right out of my life.
I knew the series wouldn’t be as popular as anything that was more neutral, especially as I chose to lay bare the struggles of attempting to be a conscientious objector in 1966-1973. It’s not, in general, a very popular stance—and for that matter it never was.
There is also a lot of wish fulfillment in the story: Nate has multiple girlfriends, and an active sex life. Something I went without. And he has a talent that attracts girls to him—something that being a writer never did for me. I may have been so excited about fulfilling my fantasies that I went a little overboard and lost a good many readers as the series goes on. Now as I’m about to begin posting the final book in the series, Follow Focus, I realize that this is what the story has been leading to, but many readers won’t pick it up because of what has gone before.
Resolved: To become a better writer.
I’m a good writer, even though I sometimes lose my way in a story. Usually, I manage to get it back. But I haven’t really focused on getting any better at my craft. I currently have three books in process and they all three have great potential. I’ve completed the first draft of Nathan Everett’s A Place Among Peers, the sequel to the story of Liam Cyning and Meredith Sauvage. I’ve also completed the first draft of Nathan Everett’s The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. And I am well into writing the next volume of Devon Layne’s The Props Master series, Promethean, Child of Earth.
I would like to turn these three books into the best I’ve ever written, and that’s going to require some work. So, where do I start?
The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is a romance drama. It’s not erotica, though. So, I decided to read some romances to see what I could find out. I’ve only gotten through one so far, and it was not really what I expected. This is from a bestselling author, so she must be doing something right. It’s well written and literate.
The characters are clearly developed with additional information exposed all the way through the book. It is written in a third person limited POV, meaning that each section is from the perspective of a single character featured in that section, but in the next section, it may well switch to a different character’s POV. That’s a stretch for me, but I like the result.
One of the things that surprised me was that the sex scenes that came in the last quarter of the book were as explicit as those that I’ve written in my erotica! At the same time, she did not use any of the common words found in just about any story on SOL. She never said ‘pussy,’ ‘cock,’ ‘cum,’ or ‘fuck.’ Yet the scenes were explicit.
I avoided sexual tension in Staircase and as a result, the draft is rather dry and the love between the two principal characters seems to come out of nowhere.
I’ve been criticized on occasion, including by my alpha readers, for having minor characters who were two-dimensional and didn’t really feel like real people. I noticed that in this book, too, so I guess both the author and I have some work to do in that regard.
I have a couple more romances that I picked up at a half-price outlet for used books. I expect I’ll have some extra reading time this week as I’ll be in the hospital for a procedure on Thursday-Friday. But I am already considering what I should change or enhance in my stories to lift my writing to the next level.
I expect I’ll also take a look at a couple of the major texts on writing by successful writers. I’ve never taken the advice of those writers seriously because it’s always seemed like an afterthought to their success, not as a plan for their writing. I have Steven King’s book, On Writing, and have yet to crack the cover. I plan to re-read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. I’m sure I’ll find some more.
In a movie short, “A Day in the Life of Pablo Casals,” filmed in 1957 when Casals was 81 years old, director Robert Snyder asked the world-famous cellist why he continued to practice four and five hours a day. Casals answered, “Because I think I’m making progress.”
Well, I’m only 74. I write every day. I think I can still make progress.
We shall see what kind of progress I can make, but don’t expect 2024 to start with a phenomenal breakthrough. I’m looking at the difference between a man’s and a woman’s POV in next week’s post: “Mars vs. Venus.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
