3/24/24
Life as I Would Have Lived It
This is number fifty-five in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“I READ YOUR BOOK and I could tell it was about you,” said one of the nice church ladies that Sunday morning. I was shocked. Not that she’d read the book—it was Nathan Everett’s For Blood or Money, not erotica—but rather that she thought I was Dag Hamar!
I was in my fifties and worked at the tech giant, but I had no real experience with computer security, was happily (at the time) married, and was healthy as a horse! My heart problems, which were reminiscent of Dag’s, didn’t manifest until I was seventy! I didn’t consider myself anything like my unlucky computer forensics detective.
But that was not the only time I was accused of writing about myself.
“WE HAVE TO TALK!” my older sister said as soon as I got off the plane in Lubbock. I barely got my seatbelt fastened when I got in her car before she started in. “We obviously had different fathers. My father was nothing like that.”
It took me a minute to catch up to the fact she had read my just-released Nathan Everett novel, The Volunteer. I have to give her credit for having read it. By that time, I considered all ten people likely to ever read the book to have already done so. I wrote it because it needed to be written, not to make a fortune. And if for no other reason than my daughter’s assessment that it was the best thing I’d ever written, I was satisfied.
The Volunteer is about a successful young college grad who, on a dare, volunteers to trade places with a homeless man, believing he will be able to work his way out of the situation in no time. It is written as a journey inside the head of this chronically homeless man, not following any consistent timeline, but jumping to wherever his mind or memories jump.
“Um… That’s not about our dad,” I said. “It’s a character.”
“But I recognized things,” she insisted. “I recognized the house and the car and that time when… And… you’re homeless and living on the road like G2.”
“I’m not homeless,” I protested. “I live in a travel trailer and I… travel.”
I had actually struggled with the concept of being homeless when I discovered I couldn’t get a driver’s license, vote, or get health insurance or social security without a valid street address. Think about that when you are touting the utter fairness of requiring ID in order to vote. There is an annual counting of people living on the street each January, and 2023’s count was 650,000. The actual number without a permanent address may be three times that.
The Unitarian Church I attended had joined a ten-year commitment to end homelessness in King County (WA) and we were over half way through. I carefully prepared a message for the church, which I delivered on Sunday morning, that showed that the $1,000 a month they collected and distributed to various organizations devoted to helping the homeless had not actually reduced the number of homeless on our streets. In fact, the number had grown significantly. I wrote The Volunteer to address homelessness as something we would never put an end to, no matter how well-intentioned we were.
I had to explain all that in detail to my sister. Yes, descriptions and scenes are informed by my experience, but no, that wasn’t our father or our home or me standing on a street corner with a sign.
The Volunteer is available in eBook and paperback. Links at my website.
Several times, I’ve sat down to write my autobiography—or at least a memoir. Even this blog is supposed to be about “My Life in Erotica.” It seems I always reach a point where I’m thinking, “Oh, I should have…” or “If only she’d…” or “This is boring. I’ll add…” I end up writing Life as I Would Have Lived It.
In writing erotica, we have a commonly used term for it: Wish fulfillment. It’s the foundation of virtually all the “Do Over” stories, of which I’ve written a few. But it’s also fundamental when writing fiction based on actual life events. We write something that is “Just like when I was going steady with Bonnie in high school, except we have sex and don’t break up.”
Other than aroslav’s Wonders of My World series, the closest I’ve come to writing about my own life is my currently running Photo Finish series. The name of the leading male, Nate Hart, is the name I used as a pen name in high school to keep teachers from knowing the poetry I read in speech contests was my own. The little town of Tenbrook, Illinois is about the same size and shape as the little town in Indiana where my mother moved the family so she could begin her career as a Methodist minister. My dad worked at a filling station, in construction, building speaker systems, wiring travel trailers, and about anything else he could do in order to follow Mom to the various places she was assigned.
I have four sisters. It was too complicated to get a fourth sister into the mix in the story, so I consolidated the older three into two. And that, I might think, was the beginning of divergence from my autobiography. I’ve always been a writer—and though I won a photography contest in 4H, I did not pursue it as a career. I had multiple girlfriends, but they were in different cities. I even went so far once as to make carbon copies of a letter I wrote them.
Though there was a fair amount of petting and dry humping, none of my girlfriends slept with me. I was technically a virgin when I married the first time. All of the things that actually made my autobiography interesting were wish fulfillment. They were Life as I Would Have Lived It.
And somewhere, buried among ancient manuscripts that I’ve lost track of and didn’t scan, there is a manuscript I titled Life as I Would Have Lived It, a Pseudo Autobiography. I’m pretty sure that most of what was in that manuscript forty years ago has already been included in my literary and erotic writings.
If one was truly a literary forensic investigator, perhaps one could reconstruct my actual life from the pieces found among the lies in my books!
The average income of a professional author in the US in 2023 was less than $5,000. Even when we sell our work, we’re making little from it. Consider that twenty authors in 2023 made well over two billion dollars combined! How do the ‘less than minimum wage’ authors make any money at all? Next week: “Reviews.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
