4/21/24
What I did for Love
This is number fifty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I’VE BEEN MARRIED three times. That might not be the most bizarre thing I did for love, but it’s near.
No, as embarrassing as that fact is, I’m going for even more embarrassing. What could be more idiotic than a child’s imagined love? Let’s start with third grade, shall we? I was a less than popular kid, but I had a very active fantasy life. Playing a pretend game on the playground with my best friend Brian, in which we killed a huge whale, cleaned it out, and made it into a ship is just a sign that back in the fifties, we didn’t have cell phones. Inviting the cute preacher’s daughter to go for a ride in my whale-ship, though might have been taking it a step too far.
She thought I was weird. And she wasn’t the last girl who told me so.
You see, the weird, embarrassing, and totally off-the-wall parts of our lives are where creative writing is born. It is the author’s prerogative to ‘set things right’ in a story. This kid stumbles on an anomaly in the space-time continuum in which the space ships are actually living beings who could fly between worlds. He lives part time in the world of the space beings and part time in his third grade class at Kennedy Elementary and Junior High. That is until one day when he sees his crush, the preacher’s daughter wander into that part of the playground and fall through the anomaly. Our hero jumps to rescue her, rallying his space beings to search for her and save her from an evil alien.
It’s no longer so weird that he could sail in a whale to the rescue of his would-be girlfriend.
Move forward to fourth grade—yes, same preacher’s daughter crush. I wrote my first novel for her. Must have been five or six thousand words. I called it Princes and Princesses. I don’t think it had much plot to it, but we were from different kingdoms attempting to find a way to marry and live happily ever after. Of course, friend Brian and a tall thin girl named Liz were the other prince and princess, so the solution had to work for all of us. I don’t recall there was much of a plot, other than the four of us riding through the forest on our horses.
Thirty years later, I turned that into a simple little fantasy story for my daughter, who loved to hear me tell her stories before bedtime. Oh, and the solution to the problem of how to be together came when they decided to build a castle at the four corners, where their kingdoms met. They could live there together and rule all four kingdoms from there.
The crush came to a slow end when she moved away after sixth grade. Being the naïve and religious boy I was, I said my prayers at night, pleading that my kisses would follow her and she would know I loved her.
Sigh.
Forty years later, she became Brian’s love interest and first girlfriend in Living Next Door to Heaven. The embarrassing crush of grade school was rewritten into a love story that kept the two together happily ever after.
This week, my new Nathan Everett contemporary romance, The Staircase of Dragon Jerico, went on pre-sale at Bookapy and other vendors. It will be available in eBook and paperback on May 5, when the serial will also begin posting at StoriesOnline.
Coworkers are a great source of embarrassing situations that are fodder for later literary endeavors. Of course, after about 1985, we started getting more aware of the perceived pressure of office romances and how we were contributing to a future “Me Too” movement. Office romance was often curtailed. I received a nice note from a website called Office Romance in 2003 that said one of my coworkers was interested in going out and to respond to this message if I was open to the possibility.
Nice. Neither person needed to feel pressured. The contact was completely anonymous. Neither party felt stalked. All I had to do was pay $50 for a membership to the site and they would pass on my message. Right.
I also had the experience of hiring my own boss. Or rather, I hired a co-worker who became my boss. That was a little awkward and I borrowed a great deal from the experience when I wrote The Staircase of Dragon Jerico. In this new book:
Erin is stranded in a new town after a short and bitter divorce and waits tables in a diner where she meets the man of her dreams; but Preston is a socially inept recluse constantly on guard against gold diggers. When Erin inadvertently becomes his personal assistant, a comedy of errors ensues that throws the two together—and threatens to tear them apart.
It’s not really erotica, but it is a nice contemporary romance with a little sex in it eventually. The Staircase of Dragon Jerico is available for pre-order now at Bookapy. Release date is 5 May 2024.
I was foolish enough to fall in love again—this time with an online friend. Now, the problem with me falling in love is that I always seem to attract women with problems. Even my current houseguest is in the midst of a messy divorce. Not ideal circumstances.
Back about the time I started my travels with a truck and trailer, I met a woman online who was a fellow writer and invited me to join her online writing group. I did, and found her to be funny charming. We both wrote erotica and shared bits back and forth. We even got into some role-playing of characters. All in the safety of our online relationship.
But this Missouri backwoods girl’s life was becoming more and more complicated by the day. She had two daughters in high school and one married and pregnant. Her husband was a butcher and money was tight. She stayed home to take care of her ailing mother-in-law. Then there were problems with her teeth, a broken computer, trying to get her daughter a scholarship to a music school, a new granddaughter she couldn’t bear to be apart from, and a few arguments with her ex-husband over the married daughter and her family.
The times we had together online were great, but it became more and more evident that it would be a mistake to try to meet in person. But what fodder for a story. As yet it is unwritten, but I’m guessing there will be a story in which the obstacles are conquered and we get together. That’s what writing is about. Didn’t like the way the story ended? Write your own ending!
Not sure what I’ll write about next week. I’ll be going through my notes to see what pops up. Enjoy!
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
